Deleuze and Lacan, among others, get their guernseys. Again the role of the public intellectual needs questioning here. The expression the 'light on hill' suggests two elements that have to come together. The light itself is the virtual side of politics, the will to minimise human suffering through collective action. The hill that provides the vantage point for communicating this concept is the tactical combination of economic political and cultural circumstances.
Words carry the histories of lives, usages, other times and other places.
It can be a useful strategy to make those histories work in another way. Suburban, Urbane, 'light on a hill'. But sometimes not. Read an extract in Australian Humanities Review . Read also a review of McKenzie Wark's celebrities, culture and cyberspace and Miller and Wark's Planet of Noise by Kominos Zervos in the October 1999 issue of the electronic Journal, TEXT .