ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at how a life in Melbourne influences the subjectivities of international students. It focuses on how international students encounter difference, use technologies to mediate their urban experiences, and engage with Melbourne as a “cultural economy” full of public art. Communication creates a “real” in Lacan’s sense, something that cannot be communicated. This can be understood as any kind of political antagonism that threatens the communicative status quo and its basis in frictionless consumerism. In general, literature on international students focuses on the relationship between social network composition and levels of loneliness and homesickness. A “communicative capitalism” approach reveals how cultural cosmopolitanism is dominated by consumption. Rather than producing a form of cosmopolitanism where culture and politics are alloyed together, consumption empowers culture at the expense of politics. For our participants the right to the communicative city is mostly a partial right, a right to consume and indulge in cultural cosmopolitanism.
