Academic literature on the topic 'C. Artistic Existence And D. Enlightenment Of Music'

The societal glitz is not always even which is to be focused for the entire mankind to conquer this exclusive nicety of this universe. On the other hand, the catena of human life is really very uncertain due to multifarious societal, cultural, financial, mental, physical, psychological difficulties which may snatch the spontaneous human spirits at every now and then. But it is quite evident that each one of us shall have to sustain in this high-end competitive planet with a plenty of unstoppable commitments which are not only stimulating all of us to grow with various conditions but to contribute according to our respective responsibilities at all. We the rational human being do expect some rhythms to proceed further where we do fix our all the accomplished goals. Now the fact is how it shall be really possible for us to ensure these accomplishing heights to reach without any extravagant relaxation. It is of a massive support for those diligent people, who really do work hard along with all the situational hazards like, bankrupt, insolvency, natural calamities and so on. In this regard, the relaxation of mind is definitely very imperative in the end. That is why the concept of “Music” may satisfy our best communal glory where the amicable movements of people in enriching their needful profession will undoubtedly be highlighted. Because music brings out the alarming core to perform along with enormous energy and perfection. Most importantly it shall be absolutely worthwhile not only to refine our collective lives but to enhance the volume of perceptual productive outcome through music and its seductive impact

Background. The aim of the article is examination and presentation of Valentyn Borysov’s creative life, who was a celebrated Ukrainian composer (1901–1988), a classic of Kharkiv composition school, author of vivid and profound works in such spheres as symphonic, choral, chamber, vocal and piano music; his 120th anniversary in 2021 will be a big milestone for artistic community of Ukraine. Valentyn Borysov’s creativity is an indispensable part of national music, one of its treasures. He belonged to artists who had defined ways of development of Ukrainian professional music in XX century. In his creative outcome we can see influences of numerous artistic tendencies, characteristic for extremely controversial, but also prolific epoch. Composer being a part of quite ambivalent period of Ukraine’s cultural history conditioned usage of diverse research approaches; his works are regarded both in the light of existing musical traditions and on the background of his contemporary cultural environment. This is the novelty of the study. Integrity of presentation of Valentyn Borysov’s creative life is supported by the fact that this article considers his pedagogical activity in his alma mater, nowadays Kharkiv I. P. Kotlyarevsky National University of Arts, which resulted in bringing up a constellation of well-known Ukrainian composers, as well as his public and aimed at cultural enlightenment work. Results and conclusions. For V. Borysov, stage of accumulation of professional and personal experience coincided in time with a turning point in development of Ukrainian musical art. In these years composer attended classes of S. S. Bogatyrov, forefather of Kharkiv composition school; he studied alongside with M. Koliada, H. Tumeneva, D. Klebanov, V. Barabashov, M. Tits, who constituted a brilliant generation of Ukrainian composers several decades later. Symphonic and chamber works of this time showed such features of V. Borysov’s creative method as large-scale thought, leaning towards epic and heroic images, skilful usage of advanced composition techniques. At the same time, under the influence of external factors V. Borysov turned to relevant genre of his time, such as mass song and choral music. As early as on the primary stage of his development as a composer, V. Borysov defined Ukrainian folklore as one of the main sources for his inspiration. Folklore component of musical language became one of the prominent features of his style, its presence is conspicuous on each stages of his evolution. Submission of individual to collective, national conditioned V. Borysov’s interest to monumental forms of symphony, oratorio, cantata, poem, defined their leading role through late style of composer’s creativity. Unique combination of already existing aesthetic premises, high level of moral imperative, relevance of musical language created phenomenon of “V. Borysov’s late style”. The article regards the most original works, which were received very well by the contemporaries: “Divertissement” for symphonic orchestra, “Music for strings”, concert compositions for piano, violin, viola, sets of piano miniatures, composed on late period (70s–80s). Singularity of musical language in these works is created by the fact that V. Borysov succeeded to create a unique mixture of folklore tradition with “sonic field” of avantgarde musical art; with this musical language incredibly relevant, “eternal” problems of existence are embodied. This article was inspired by a desire to draw attention to V. Borysov’s legacy, to revive profound and immensely talented works of the composer, to enrich culture of modernity with them, to remind people of XXI century about such a treasure, that his works are.

The present study examines the prose texts written by Jean Rhys (1890–1979), a British woman writer of modernist literature. It is based on the perusal of several short stories, among others: “In the Rue de l’Arrivée”, “A Night”, “La Grosse Fifi ”; “Outside the Machine”, “The Lotus”, “Till September, Petronella”, and “Let Them Call It Jazz” which were included in two collections of her fi ction – “The Left Bank and Other Stories” (1927) and “Tigers are Better-Looking” (1968). The purpose of the paper is to analyze the author’s concept of lonely, alienated, vulnerable and defenseless female individuals which forms the core of her artistic imagination. The scientifi c research uses gynocritics as its methodological background. According to the theory of its critic E. Showalter, it was possible to identify four models of woman writing having been realized in Jean Rhys’s short prose: a) psychoanalytic; b) biological; c) linguistic and d) cultural. The psychoanalytic model of Rhys’s fi ction is viewed in the context of both the emotional and conscious worlds of an alienated female identity. The woman protagonist being rejected by a hostile society, becomes a stranger and outcast. The feelings of deep loneliness, pain, fear, and loss, intertwined with the death wish and with resistance, determine the constants of female existence. An important aspect of woman personality is the dimension of female friendship and solidarity. The biological model of short prose by J. Rhys is explored through the concept of female corporeality. The corporeal vulnerability of women protagonists is shown as a form of the fragility of their inner world. An unattractive woman image created by the author manifests the psychological uncertainty and brittleness of female characters. And a metaphor of the looking glass as a refl ection of their appearance reveals the concept of the female Self as a loss which varies from the loss of a woman’s youth to the loss of feminine identity or its splitting. The linguistic model of Rhys’s short stories testifi es to the bipolar artistic world of the writer, which is demonstrated at the confrontation between French and British cultures with the signs of laconism, subtext, and silence as the main features of her writing manner. Meanwhile, the cultural model of J. Rhys’s prose is read through the prism of the intertextual discourse of literature, music and painting. Key words: loneliness, fear, suff ering, alienation, hostility, corporeality, vulnerability.

Background. In the time of Ukraine’s state independence, the interest of scholars in reproduction of a coherent historically formed image of regional cultures arose. The thing is, that almost throughout the twentieth century the priority issue was that the term «international» was considered as «assimilated». However, in the second half of the 20th century signifi cant processes took place in Transcarpathia, which manifested the formation of a professional Transcarpathian composer’s school – a movement led by Dezyderiy Zador and picked up by other composers, in particular Ishtvan Marton. In particular, the interest of Transcarpathian composers in piano compositions is of considerable interest as one of the segments of the European professional tradition: on the one hand, it is a testimony to the higher level of professional training and the practice of possession of classical experience; on the other hand, a geographically designated vector of stylistic modelling in the context of the intonational fund and the semantic fi eld of the European academic piano music in its inextricable connection with historically contemporary European-style stylistic phenomena. In its turn, the style shaping initiatives of the Transcarpathian composers of the second half of the 20th century caused signifi cant changes in their theoretical understanding – in accordance with the change of the mental paradigm of artistic creativity from the classical to the post-classical, when the method of tracing “style features” (the initial model of the formation of the method of style analysis) can no longer clarify the essence of the author’s concepts and requires orientation to methodologically predetermined transformations in the basis of the theory of style (for example, the human-dimensional nature of style). The problem, therefore, is that, on the example of selectively taken piano compositions of Transcarpathian composers of the period of the second half of the 20th century to present methodologically updated position of their stylistic analysis and executable interpretation – in view of the achievements of musicological thought at the border of the 20th – 21st centuries concerning the interpretation of stylistic phenomena of the modern age as a certain innovation project and its development in the conditions of post-traditional professionalism. Thus, today the task is to expand the perceptions of the piano creativity of the composers of Transcarpathia in the context of the whole 20th century, which includes the phases of modernism, modernism and avant-garde, united by the idea of the ultimate autonomy of the style. The scientifi c novelty of the conducted research is the broadening of the ideas of the pianoforte art of the Transcarpathian composers in the context of the intonation fund and the semantic fi eld of the European academic piano music of the whole 20th century, which contains the phases of modern, modernism and avant-garde, united by the intention of extreme style autonomy. Objectives. The purpose of the work is to comprehend the specifi cs of the analytical elaboration and performer’s interpretation of the «Etude» by D. Zador and «Impromptu » by I. Marton as such that, given the characteristic of the Transcarpathian region, the priority of choral compositions in the fi rst half of the 20th century testifi es to the formation of the original style initiatives, namely instrumental, in particular piano music in the middle of the twentieth century. Methods. The comparative, phenomenological and functional methods of research are used, which in aggregate gav e an opportunity to relate to the realities of the development of the national (Ukrainian) musicology, to reveal the world-view specifi cs and the vectors of individual stylistic modeling in the pianoforte art of Transcarpathian composers of the middle of the twentieth century, to provide knowledge of the semantic structure of the studied musical works. Results. It has been found out that on the background of changes in the mental paradigm of musical creativity from classical to post-classical, the analysis and interpretation of real musical text requires its semantic decoding in the intention of an accurate explanation of the idea and the intention of a particular musical work. However, as it has been established, there is an urgent need to focus on the immanent property of the semantic structure of innovative musical «projects», which exactly in the second half of the 20th century mostly show heterogeneity of style modelling – in the version of the active associative of correspondence range in the space of historical styles. This will provide an opportunity to eliminate the disadvantages of the formal-logical analysis method, which usually provokes the establishment and description of purely stylistic values of the real musical text without attempts at their fi gurative and semantic interpretation, and even provides an approximate summary of the analysis data at the level of the creative idea and the composer’s plan. It is proved that «Etude» с-moll of Dezyderiy Zador is a brightly modern (secessionist) stylistic model based on the characteristic of post-romanticism author’s stylization of historically known stylistic systems, and at the same time it has a distinctly individual, characteristic image concept, whose dynamic structure is determined by dramatic (semantic) perspective of the inclusion of various sorts of allusions and reminiscences concerning the manner of piano music; in turn, «Impromptu» by I. Marton is an example of mastering modernist trends with their expressionist (pathologized) expression of their perception of themselves in a spiritually declined world, when the declamative articulation of sound forms and their crystalline fragility, which are intended to recreate the ratio of the vulnerability of the alienated subject and inexorably terrible destructive power from the outside. Instead, it has been observed that not always the performers of the mentioned works read their idea and decode the image system. In general, this indicates an inability to adequately respond to styling in the version of the neo-stylistic formation (neo-romanticism, neoclassicism, etc.) – when the attachment of auditory experience to a historically known style (like manners – romantic, classical, etc.) tends to subconsciously ignore the transition to a hierarchical level of renewal (neo – renewed) by introducing innovations (sonorism, abstractly tuned block model of themes etc.) and the search for a stylistic centre of gravity using the allusion way of style development (allusion as the kind of indirect quoting) that ensures the existence of the concept of the so-called mixed style. Conclusions. The comprehension of the stylistic character of the creative ideas and intentions of piano art of Transcarpathian composers of the second half of the 20th century based on methods of semantic decoding of the real notations is heuristically productive for their hermeneutic reception – in order to maximize the probable approximation to the essence and concept of a musical composition and its adequate (meaningful) reproduction by the performers.

The purpose of the article is to analyse modern creative practices in interaction with cultural values. The research methodology includes scientific methods: analytical, structural-functional, generalising; comparative analysis techniques to reveal the specifics of modern creative practices from the perspective of the formation of cultural values. The scientific novelty of the work is based on the analysis of modern artistic practices. Conclusions. It is noted that creative practices influence the educational process with the preservation, reproduction, and formation of cultural values. Artistic practices are a complex communicative process, a connection between a person’s worldview and the environment, means of expressiveness of the arts and everyday life and customs. The versatility of modern creativity is noted with the involvement of synthesised projects, which have more opportunities to attract recipients. The complexity in the relationships between personality education and the formation of cultural values is noted. It is supported by the facts of a change in ideals in modern creativity, reaching the dialectical level of the art of negation, art showing different sides of human existence. Project of the Czech National Ballet with the organisation «Consent» – the ballet “A Streetcar Named Desires” with the problem of violence, changing approaches to education according to the dominance of ethical norms and values of certain groups of youth: respect for oneself, the world around us, loved ones, partners and friends; treating another person as oneself. Ballet by D. Neumeier based on the psychological drama by W. Tennessee “A Streetcar Named Desire” as an example of modern creativity in understanding violence and trauma from it. The modern discourse of art about norms and rules, socio-political relations and cultural values is examined using the examples of the original sculpture by D. Czerny “ Sycophancy” (2003, Prague); artistic project of the Italian theatre troupe “Malatheatre” on the occasion of the celebration of the 452nd anniversary of the birth of the Italian artist Caravaggio in the Church of San Michele Arcangelo. All examples are paralleled by memory studies by psychologists: J. Miller, J. Santa, C. Jung. It is noted that art practices help young people understand cultural values with the accents of the present.
 Keywords: artistic practices in modern culture, cultural values, art history, musicology, baroque music, ballet, psychology of perception.


 
 
 The condition that marks the post-digital age may be the condition for error. In the condition where machinic systems seek the unforeseen and the emergent, there is also a possibility for the unforeseen error to slip into existence. This condition can be seen in the emerging tradition of artists using error as a creative tool. In his paper “The Aesthetics of Failure: ‘Post-Digital’ Tendencies in Contemporary Music,” Kim Cascone points to the way in which composers, using digital means, exploit the inadequacies of a particular compositional or performative technology (Cascone 13). Cascone cites composers such as Ryoji Ikeda who create minimalist electronic compositions using media as both their form and theme. In these compositions, the errors, imperfections, and limitations of the particular compositional media are the central constituting elements of the piece. In addition to music, this glitch aesthetic is also exploited in the visual arts. Artists such as Tony Scott set up situations in which errors are able to emerge and be exploited in the art making process. In these types of work the artist’s role is to allow a glitch or an error to arise in a specific system, then to reconfigure and exploit the generative qualities of the unforeseen error. 
 Tony Scott, Glitch No. 13, 2001-2005 The generative capabilities of error can be understood through Lev Manovich’s cultural communication model developed in his paper “Post-Media Aesthetics.” Traditionally, a pre-media cultural communication model represents the transmission of a signal as SENDER—MESSAGE—RECEIVER (Manovich, “Post-Media Aesthetics” 18). In this original model the sender encodes and transmits a message over a communication channel; as Manovich indicates, in the course of transmission the message is affected by any noise that exists along the communication channel. The receiver then decodes the message. Here the message is susceptible to error in two ways. First, the noise that originates from the communication channel may alter the message. Second, there may be discrepancies between the sender and receiver’s code (Manovich, “Post-Media Aesthetics” 18). Manovich, in order to propose a post-digital consideration of transmission, has developed this model by including the sender and receiver’s software. Post-digital cultural communication can now be considered as SENDER—SOFTWARE—MESSAGE—SOFTWARE—RECEIVER (Manovich, “Post-Media Aesthetics” 17-18). In this model the cultural significance of software is emphasised. The software, much more than the noise introduced by the communication channel, may change the message. Significantly, the software may introduce an error into the message. Following Gilles Deleuze, we may say that the software may articulate a link to the field of potential in order to generate unforeseen, and perhaps unwanted, information. The cultural role that Manovich ascribes to software becomes elucidated in Dimitre Lima, Iman Morandi, and Ant Scott’s Glitchbrowser. Glitchbrowser is an alternative to the traditional model of a web browser. This browser, rather than attempting to assist user navigation of the internet, creates errors when displaying the pages that it accesses. The images of any page accessed by Glitchbrowser are distorted or glitched through colour saturation and abstraction from their original composition. In this work, following Manovich’s cultural communication model, the software that intervenes between sender and receiver alters the content of the message. Thus in Glitchbrowser, the artists remind us that the information we receive is largely reconstituted by the system it travels through. In a sense the machine reveals itself, rather than creating the illusion of a transparent interface to information. In the application of Glitchbrowser the user witnesses the way that messages are transmitted and altered by the interface. Here, the machine reminds the user of its existence (Manovich, The Language of New Media 206). Any system that seeks the actualisation of unforeseen potential is also a system that has the capacity to become errant. Rather than thinking of the error as something to fear or avoid, we can think of an error as something that brings with it the capacity for the new and the unforeseen (perhaps it is this link to the unforeseen that is precisely the reason that we fear the errant). We can think of any system that is open to the unforeseen as surrounded by a cloud of potential errors, or, as Deleuze would put it, a cloud of the virtual (Deleuze and Parnet 148). At any point in its process, a system is traversing potential errors—and at any point, one may become actualised. We can picture a potential for error at every point that a system is opened to unformed information. As a system attempts to actualise this unformed information, to form the unformed from the cloud of the virtual, the system may also give form to an unformed error. Deleuze’s virtual can be understood as the field of pure potentiality. In this field there exists all those things that could potentially become actualised in the course of a system, but for some reason, do not. We can think of the virtual, from the present moment, as containing all the potential events that could take place in the future. Only one of these events will become actualised, becoming the actual present, and the other events will remain virtual. As Brian Massumi describes, the virtual that Deleuze theorises is a mode of reality that is articulated in the emergence of new potentials—the virtual is implicated in the reality of change. A system, in the event of change, moves through and connects to the virtual, actualising some information and leaving other information as un-actualised virtuality. This system is surrounded by a cloud of the virtual, surrounded by potential errors. At any moment, as the system moves into the virtual it may actualise an error. Rather than thinking of an event as the process by which preformed or preconceived possible information becomes realised, we can only think of an error as coming into being as the unformed and the unforeseen potential is actualised. This potential emerges from unique activities that occur in the process of a system. These unique activities open the system so that unforeseen information may emerge (DeLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy 36-37). If a system runs through its process without the potential for error it is essentially closed. It does not allow the potentiality of the emergent or the unforeseen. It is only through allowing the capacity for potential errors that we may provide the opportunity to think the unthought, to become-other, and to hence initiate further unforeseen becomings in the virtual (Rodowick 201). In a sense, when there is potential for an error to emerge in a system, the system cannot be regarded as a pre-formed linear progress; rather, it can only be thought as a divergent process that actualises elements of the virtual. Images from Yann Le Guennec Le Catalogue Yann Le Guennec’s Le Catalogue is an example of artist designed software causing unforeseen errors. This online work allows public access to a catalogue of images and installations created between 1990 and 1996. Every time a page is accessed from the archive, an intended error is activated in the form of an intersecting horizontal and vertical line, generated at random points over the image. The more that the page is viewed, the greater its deterioration by the obscuring intersecting line and the closer the image comes to abstraction. As Eduardo Navas states, “the archive is similar to analogue vinyl records losing their fidelity and being slightly deteriorated every time the needle passes through the groove.” In Le Guennec’s catalogue the act of accessing and consulting an object of the archive, in essence, causes an internal error to the object. This is an error that is inbuilt; it is an error that we cause by the act of looking or accessing any of the images. As we access the image we allow a virtual error to become actual. Eventually the error will take over the original image, and the image will be more about error than it ever was about its referent. Images from Yann Le Guennec Le Catalogue Just as in Cascone’s glitch music, the form and the theme of Le Catalogue is error. In Le Catalogue we see the potential for error whenever information is mediated; the work becomes a reflection on the act of looking, but looking through a particular paradigm, looking through the interface. The work’s archive can only be preserved by allowing the images to exist, un-accessed, behind the interface. But this work is not about preservation. It is ultimately about the ephemeral and its uniqueness. Each error caused by the user, which becomes actual from the virtual, is unique—and each time the archive is accessed it is differentiated from its past. Every time an image is accessed, it becomes its own original; every time an error from the field of the virtual is actualised, the unforeseen emerges. In these types of works the error can be understood through a Deleuzian ontology as a generative and creative force. As mentioned above, in order to position the condition for error as the condition for the unforeseen, we can think of the errant system as involved in a process of making actual potential from the virtual. In contrast, the system that holds no potential for error is involved in the process of realising possibilities. The possible follows a line toward an already established attractor; in this instance the future is closed as it is already given in the present. If we could access information in Le Catalogue without causing the unforeseen error, the information is possible. If this were the case, any selection from the archive’s menu would return a preformed image. In opposition to this, the potential moves through processes of bifurcation and divergence toward chaotic attractors; in this case the future is open (DeLanda, “Deleuze and the Open-Ended Becoming of the World”). Actualisation is separate from realisation in that realisation suggests a passage from the possible to the static. Actualisation implies the production of something new and unforeseen, a becoming virtual that results in new possibilities and transformations (Lévy). The possible exists in a state of limbo as an already constituted thing; the only thing separating the real from the possible is existence. The possible is thus thought of as a latent phantom reality (Lévy 24). If we were only ever interested in realising the possible then errors would not be a concern. The system only becomes errant when we seek the unformed. This occurs whenever we actualise information from the field of the virtual. The virtual error is to be thought of as the potential that may or may not come into being through a process of actualisation. As Lévy states, “the virtual is that which has potential rather than actual existence … The tree is virtually present in the seed” (23). The seed does not know what shape the tree will take, as it would in a possible-real model. Rather the seed must actualise the tree as it enacts a process of negotiation between its internal limitations and the environmental circumstances that it encounters through this process. We can thus see potential errors as virtual in that the system does not know the errors that it may actualise. The system actualises these errors as it explores its degrees of freedom and the circumstances that may allow the emergence of error. As the potential for error marks the potential for the new and the unforeseen, we can see that an error in itself may be creative. An error may be utilised. It may be sought out and used to create the unforeseen within traditional systems, such as our routine computer use. In these instances, as the unique generative qualities of error are actualised, the artist can no longer be thought of as the sole creative force. Rather it is now the artist’s role to provide the circumstances for an error to emerge. The error fills the potentiality of a system with meaning, whether intended or unintended by the designer. It is the participant’s interrelationship with this error that may be thought to proliferate artistic meaning. The aesthetics of the digital encounter occur as an interactive event between participant and machine, with the artist, in a sense, hidden behind the machine. When an error occurs, unforeseen to the artist, the work is affected and possibilities are created for new meanings to emerge. Participant in Blast Theory’s Desert Rain Desert Rain, a complex mixed reality environment, by the group Blast Theory, actualises errors and exposes its software limitations in ways unintended by the artists. The work involves six participants that are asked to navigate a digitally generated landscape of the Gulf War in order to locate a target. This digitally generated space is projected upon a curtain of water spray. Once all the participants have found their targets they are lead through the rain curtain, over a sand dune and to a representation of a hotel room. In this room there is a television screen that displays one of the targets narrating their real life experience of the Gulf War. The digital target is now made actual as a physically real, yet still mediated, person. This work presents a space in which the real and the digital mutually affect one another; the participant’s experience in the digital landscape directs the meaning that they take from the target’s real life narrative, and the experience of this narrative affects the participant’s memories of the digital landscape. The overall experience of Desert Rain is constituted by the coming together of the material and the digital spaces so that they may produce a mixed reality space. However, the actual functioning of Desert Rain does not always provide the means for the theoretical tessellated space that Blast Theory seeks. This is due to certain errors and limitations in the machinic system. But these are not necessarily aesthetic bugs; in fact they may enhance the aesthetics of the form of the work. For instance, the digitally generated graphics are rather clumsy and hard edged, with a slow frame rate and low definition. Also, some participants found it difficult to use the footplate effectively (Benford et al. 54). For these reasons, the space of the digital and the space of the real remain separate, with the participant struggling to manipulate the interface in order to access the digital; the sometimes errant functionality of the interface acts as a barrier between the digital and the material. However, this technical bug may enable the participant to grapple with the machinic in ways which would not occur had the machine been perfect. As Blast Theory and the Communications Research Group point out, ethnographic research into interaction has found that this technical bug was generally only seen as a detriment to the work by those participants with a technical background (Benford et al. 53-55). Those participants, in contrast, with an artistic background tended to see the limitations of the form as a conscious aesthetic gesture. That is, the slowness and clumsiness of the media became directly connected to the larger purpose of the work, which is to criticise the media’s coverage of the Gulf War and the general place of media in our daily lives. Here, for the artistically inclined audience, form and content come inextricably linked. Thus the error in the form is inextricable from the meaning of the work. The imprecise navigation, due to the nature of the footplate, through the obvious and imprecise mediated imaging of the world, directly links to the experience of receiving information through television broadcasts. In a sense the limitations of the media and the interface device are embodied, quite unintentionally, in the content of the work. If the participant of interactive digital media is to be thought of as coupled to the machine, when the machine becomes errant, the participant shares in this condition. The interactive participant experiences limitations, glitches, or bugs first hand; they are, in some respects, party to the glitches and bugs and a part of the system’s limitations. New media theorists and artists such as Valie Export, have already pointed out that the subjective space of the viewer co-exists with the objective space of the machine. As a result the user is tied to the machine and thus connected to its glitches. This is because the work is not just constituted by the machine and its substrate but also by the way the human responds to the immersive environment. The work no longer takes place in a time and space that is separate from the spectator. Rather the time and space of the spectator and the time and space of the machine are both implicit in the realisation of the work. Thus, the spectator’s time and space has become filled with the potential for error. The participant and the machine are mutually engaged in a process of becoming virtual; they deliberate together, as one system that moves into the field of potential. References Benford, Steve, et al. Pushing Mixed Reality Boundaries. eRENA, 1999. Cascone, Kim. “The Aesthetics of Failure: ‘Post-Digital’ Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music.” Computer Music Journal 24.4 (Winter 2000). DeLanda, Manuel. “Deleuze and the Open-Ended Becoming of the World”. New York, 1998. 23 Mar. 2006 http://www.diss.sense.uni-konstanz.de/virtualitaet/delanda.htm>. ———. Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. Transversals: New Directions in Philosophy. Ed. Keith Pearson. London: Continuum, 2002. Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. “The Actual and the Virtual.” Dialogues 2. Ed. Eliot Ross Albert. London and New York: Continuum, 1987. Export, Valie. “Expanded Cinema as Expanded Reality”. 2003. 17 Mar. 2006 http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/28/expanded_cinema.html>. Lévy, Pierre. Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age. New York: Plenum Trade, 1998. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001. ———. “Post-Media Aesthetics.” Locations. Ed. Astrid Sommer. Karlsruhe: ZKM: Centre for Art and Media, 2001. Massumi, Brian. “Sensing the Virtual, Building the Insensible.” Architectural Design 68.5/6 (1998): 16-24. Navas, Eduardo. “Net Art Review November 30 – December 6, 2003”. 2003. 20 Jul. 2007 http://www.netartreview.net/featarchv/11_30_03.html>. Rodowick, D. N. Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine. Post-Contemporary Interventions. Eds. Stanley Fish and Fredric Jameson. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997. 
 
 
 
 Citation reference for this article
 
 MLA Style
 Barker, Tim. "Error, the Unforeseen, and the Emergent: The Error and Interactive Media Art." M/C Journal 10.5 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/03-barker.php>. APA Style
 Barker, T. (Oct. 2007) "Error, the Unforeseen, and the Emergent: The Error and Interactive Media Art," M/C Journal, 10(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/03-barker.php>. 


 
 
 As Earth heats up and water vapourises, “Adapt” is a word that is frequently invoked right now, in a world seething with change and challenge. Its Oxford English Dictionary definitions—“to fit, to make suitable; to alter so as to fit for a new use”—give little hint of the strangely divergent moral values associated with its use. There is, of course, the word’s unavoidable Darwinian connotations which, in spite of creationist controversy, communicate a cluster of positive values linked with progress. By contrast, the literary use of adapt is frequently linked with negative moral values. Even in our current “hyper-adaptive environment” (Rizzo)—in which a novel can become a theme park ride can become a film can become a computer game can become a novelisation—an adaptation is seen as a debasement of an original, inauthentic, inferior, parasitic (Hutcheon, 2-3). A starting point from which to explore the word’s “positive”—that is, evolutionary—use is the recently released Stern Review: The Economics of Climate Change, which argues the necessity of adapting in order to survive. Indeed, an entire section is titled “Policy responses for adaptation,” outlining—among other things—“an economic framework for adaptation”; “barriers and constraints to adaptation”; and “how developing countries can adapt to climate change” (403). Although evolution is not directly mentioned, it is evoked through the review’s analysis of a dire situation which compels humans to change in response to their changing environment. Yet the mere existence of the review, and its enumeration of problems and solutions, suggests that human adaptive abilities are up to the task, drawing on positive traits such as resilience, flexibility, agility, innovation, creativity, progressiveness, appropriateness, and so on. These values, and their connection to the evolutionary use of “adapt”, infuse 21st-century life. “Adapt,” “evolution”, and that cluster of values are entwined so closely that recalling effort is required to remind oneself that “adapt” existed before evolutionary theory. And whether or not one accepts the premise of evolution—or even understands it beyond the level of reductive popular science—it provides an irresistible metaphor that underlies areas as diverse as education, business, organisational culture, politics, and law. For example, Judith Robinson’s article “Education as the Foundation of the New Economy” quotes Canada’s former deputy prime minister John Manley: “The future holds nothing but change. … Charles Darwin said, ‘It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the most responsive to change.’” Robinson adds: “Education is how we equip our people with the ability to adapt to change.” Further examples show “adapt” as a positive metaphor for government. A study into towns in rural Queensland discovered that while some towns “have reinvented themselves and are thriving,” others “that are not innovative or adaptable” are in decline (Plowman, Ashkanasy, Gardner and Letts, 8). The Queensland Government’s Smart State Strategy also refers to the desirability of adapting: “The pace of change in the world is now so rapid—and sometimes so unpredictable—that our best prospects for maintaining our lead lie in our agility, flexibility and adaptability.” The Australian Government Department of Education, Science and Training, in setting national research priorities, identifies “An Environmentally Sustainable Australia” and in that context specifically mentions the need to adapt: “there needs to be an increased understanding of the contributions of human behaviour to environmental and climate change, and on [sic] appropriate adaptive responses and strategies.” In the corporate world, the Darwinian allusion is explicit in book titles such as Geoffrey Moore’s 2005 Dealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of their Evolution: “Moore’s theme is innovation, which he sees as being necessary to the survival of business as a plant or animal adapting to changes in habitat” (Johnson). Within organisations, the metaphor is also useful, for instance in D. Keith Denton’s article, “What Darwin Can Teach Us about Success:” “In order to understand how to create and manage adaptability, we need to look first at how nature uses it. … Species that fail to adapt have only one option left.” That option is extinction, which is the fate of “over 99% of all species that have ever existed.” However, any understanding of “adapt” as wholly positive and forward-moving is too simplistic. It ignores, for example, aspects of adaptation that are dangerous to people (such as the way the avian influenza virus or simian AIDS can adapt so that humans can become their hosts). Bacteria rapidly adapt to antibiotics; insects rapidly adapt to pesticides. Furthermore, an organism that is exquisitely adapted to a specific niche becomes vulnerable with even a small disturbance in its environment. The high attrition rate of species is breathtakingly “wasteful” and points to the limitations of the evolutionary metaphor. Although corporations and education have embraced the image, it is unthinkable that any corporation or educational system would countenance either evolution’s tiny adaptive adjustments over a long period of time, or the high “failure” rate. Furthermore, evolution can only be considered “progress” if there is an ultimate goal towards which evolution is progressing: the anthropocentric viewpoint that holds that “the logical and inevitable endpoint of the evolutionary process is the human individual,” as Rizzo puts it. This suggests that the “positive” values connected with this notion of “adapt” are a form of self-congratulation among those who consider themselves the “survivors”. A hierarchy of evolution-thought places “agile,” “flexible” “adaptors” at the top, while at the bottom of the hierarchy are “stagnant,” “atrophied” “non-adaptors”. The “positive” values then form the basis for exclusionary prejudices directed at those human and non-human beings seen as being “lower” on the evolutionary scale. Here we have arrived at Social Darwinism, the Great-Chain-of-Being perspective, Manifest Destiny—all of which still justify many kinds of unjust treatment of humans, animals, and ecosystems. Literary or artistic meanings of “adapt”—although similarly based on hierarchical thinking (Shiloh)—are, as mentioned earlier, frequently laden with negative moral values. Directly contrasting with the evolutionary adaptation we have just discussed, value in literary adaptation is attached to “being first” rather than to the success of successors. Invidious dichotomies that actually reverse the moral polarity of Darwinian adaptation come into play: “authentic” versus “fake”, “original” versus “copy”, “strong” versus “weak”, “superior” versus “inferior”. But, as the authors collected in this issue demonstrate, the assignment of a moral value to evolutionary “adapt”, and another to literary “adapt”, is too simplistic. The film Adaptation (Spike Jonze, 2002)—discussed in three articles in this issue—deals with both these uses of the word, and provides the impetus to these authors’ explorations of possible connections and contrasts between them. Evidence of the pervasiveness of the concept is seen in the work of other writers, who explore the same issues in a range of cultural phenomena, such as graffiti, music sampling, a range of activities in and around the film industry, and several forms of identity formation. A common theme is the utter inadequacy of a single moral value being assigned to “adapt”. For example, McMerrin quotes Ghandi in her paper: “Adaptability is not imitation. It means power of resistance and assimilation.” Shiloh argues: “If all texts quote or embed fragments of earlier texts, the notion of an authoritative literary source, which the cinematic version should faithfully reproduce, is no longer valid.” Furnica, citing Rudolf Arnheim, points out that an adaptation “increases our understanding of the adapted work.” All of which suggests that the application of “adapt” to circumstances of culture and nature suggests an “infinite onion” both of adaptations and of the “core samples of difference” that are the inevitable corollary of this issue’s theme. To drill down into the products of culture, to peel back the “facts” of nature, is only ever to encounter additional and increasingly minute variations of the activity of “adapt”. One never hits the bottom of difference and adaptation. Still, why would you want to, when the stakes of “adapt” might be little different from the stakes of life itself? At least, this is the insight that the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze—in all its rhizomatic variations—seems constantly to be leading us towards: “Life” (capitalised) is a continual germination that feeds on a thousand tiny adaptations of open-ended desire and of a ceaselessly productive mode of difference. Besides everything else that they do, all of the articles in this issue participate—in one way or another—in this notion of “adapt” as a constant impetus towards new configurations of culture and of nature. They are the proof (if such proof were to be requested or required) that the “infinite onion” of adaptation and difference, while certainly a mise en abyme, is much more a positive “placing into infinity” than a negative “placing into the abyss.” Adaptation is nothing to be feared; stasis alone spells death. What this suggests, furthermore, is that a contemporary ethics of difference and alterity might not go far wrong if it were to adopt “adapt” as its signature experience. To be ever more sensitive to the subtle nuances, to the evanescences on the cusp of nothingness … of adaptation … is perhaps to place oneself at the leading edge of cultural activity, where the boundaries of self and other have, arguably, never been more fraught. Again, all of the contributors to this issue dive—“Alice-like”—down their own particular rabbit holes, in order to bring back to the surface something previously unthought or unrecognised. However, two recent trends in the sciences and humanities—or rather at the complex intersection of these disciplines—might serve as useful, generalised frameworks for the work on “adapt” that this issue pursues. The first of these is the upwelling of interest (contra Darwinism) in the theories of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829). For Lamarck, adaptation takes a deviation from the Darwinian view of Natural Selection. Lamarckism holds, in distinction from Darwin, that the characteristics acquired by individuals in the course of their (culturally produced) lifetimes can be transmitted down the generations. If your bandy-legged great-grandfather learnt to bend it like Beckham, for example, then Manchester United would do well to sign you up in the cradle. Lamarck’s ideas are an encouragement to gather up, for cultural purposes, ever more refined understandings of “adapt”. What this pro-Lamarckian movement also implies is a new “crossing-over point” of the natural/biological with the cultural/acquired. The second trend to be highlighted here, however, does more than merely imply such a refreshed configuration of nature and culture. Elizabeth Grosz’s recent work directly calls the bluff of the traditional Darwinian (not to mention Freudian) understanding of “biology as destiny”. In outline form, we propose that she does this by running together notions of biological difference (the male/female split) with the “ungrounded” difference of Deleuzean thinking and its derivatives. Adaptation thus shakes free, on Grosz’s reading, from the (Darwinian and Freudian) vestiges of biological determinism and becomes, rather, a productive mode of (cultural) difference. Grosz makes the further move of transporting such a “shaken and stirred” version of biological difference into the domains of artistic “excess”, on the basis that “excessive” display (as in the courting rituals of the male peacock) is fundamentally crucial to those Darwinian axioms centred on the survival of the species. By a long route, therefore, we are returned, through Grosz, to the interest in art and adaptation that has, for better or for worse, tended to dominate studies of “adapt”, and which this issue also touches upon. But Grosz returns us to art very differently, which points the way, perhaps, to as yet barely recognised new directions in the field of adaptation studies. We ask, then, where to from here? Responding to this question, we—the editors of this issue—are keen to build upon the groundswell of interest in 21st-century adaptation studies with an international conference, entitled “Adaptation & Application”, to be held on the Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia in early 2009. The “Application” part of this title reflects, among other things, the fact that our conference will be, perhaps uniquely, itself an example of “adapt”, to the extent that it will have two parallel but also interlocking strands: adaptation; application. Forward-thinking architects Arakawa and Gins have expressed an interest in being part of this event. (We also observe, in passing, that “application”, or “apply”, may be an excellent theme for a future issue of M/C Journal…) Those interested in knowing more about the “Adaptation and Application” conference may contact either of us on the email addresses given in our biographical notes. There are several groups and individuals that deserve public acknowledgement here. Of course, we thank the authors of these fourteen articles for their stimulating and reflective contributions to the various debates around “adapt”. We would also like to acknowledge the hugely supportive efforts of our hard-pressed referees. Equally, our gratitude goes out to those respondents to our call for papers whose submissions could not be fitted into this already overflowing issue. What they sent us kept the standard high, and many of the articles rejected for publication on this occasion will, we feel sure, soon find a wider audience in another venue (the excellent advice provided by our referees has an influence, in this way, beyond the life of this issue). We also wish to offer a very special note of thanks to Linda Hutcheon, who took time out from her exceptionally busy schedule to contribute the feature article for this issue. Her recent monograph A Theory of Adaptation is essential reading for all serious scholars of “adapt”, as is her contribution here. We are honoured to have Professor Hutcheon’s input into our project. Special thanks are also due to Gold-Coast based visual artist Judy Anderson for her “adaptation of adaptation” into a visual motif for our cover image. This inspiring piece is entitled “Between Two” (2005; digital image on cotton paper). Accessing experiences perhaps not accessible through words alone, Anderson’s image nevertheless “speaks adaptation”, as her Artist’s Statement suggests: The surface for me is a sensual encounter; an event, shifting form. As an eroticised site, it evokes memories of touch. … Body, object, place are woven together with memory; forgetting and remembering. The tactility and materiality of touching the surface is offered back to the viewer. These images are transitions themselves. As places of slippage and adaptation, they embody intervals on many levels; between the material and the immaterial, the familiar and the strange. Their source remains obscure so that they might represent spaces in-between—overlooked places that open up unexpectedly. If we have learned just one thing from the experience of editing the M/C Journal ‘adapt’ issue, it is that our theme richly rewards the sort of intellectual and creative activity demonstrated by our contributors. Much has been done here; much remains to be done. Some of this work will take place, no doubt, at the “Adaptation and Application” conference, and we hope to see many of you on the Gold Coast in 2009. But for now, it’s over to you, to engage with what you might encounter here, and to work new “adaptations” upon it. References Australian Government Department of Education, Science and Training. Environmentally Sustainable Australia. 2005. 28 Apr. 2007 http://www.dest.gov.au/sectors/research_sector/policies_issues_reviews /key_issues/national_research_priorities/priority_goals /environmentally_sustainable_australia.htm>. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaux. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Denton, D Keith. “What Darwin Can Teach Us about Success.” Development and Learning in Organizations 20.1 (2006): 7ff. Furnica, Ioana. “Subverting the ‘Good, Old Tune’: Carlos Saura’s Carmen Adaptation.” M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). 28 Apr. 2007 . Grosz, Elizabeth. In the Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. Grosz, Elizabeth. “Sensation”. Plenary III Session. 9th Annual Comparative Literature Conference. Gilles Deleuze: Texts and Images: An International Conference. University of South Carolina, Columbia. 7 April 2007. Grosz, Elizabeth. Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. New York and London: Routledge, 2006. Johnson, Cecil. “Darwinian Notions of Corporate Innovation,” Boston Globe, 15 Jan. 2006: L.2. McMerrin, Michelle. “Agency in Adaptation.” M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). 28 Apr. 2007 http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/03 mcmerrin.php mcmerrin.php>. Neimanis, Astrida. “A Feminist Deleuzian Politics? It’s About Time.” TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 16 (2006): 154-8. Plowman, Ian, Neal M. Ashkanasy, John Gardner, and Malcolm Letts. Innovation in Rural Queensland: Why Some Towns Thrive while Others Languish: Main Report. University of Queensland/Department of Primary Industries. Queensland, Dec. 2003. 28 Apr. 2007 http://www2.dpi.qld.gov.au/business/14778.html>. Queensland Government. Smart State Strategy 2005-2015 Timeframe. 2007. 28 Apr. 2007 http://www.smartstate.qld.gov.au/strategy/strategy05_15/timeframes.shtm>. Rizzo, Sergio. “Adaptation and the Art of Survival.” M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). 28 Apr. 2007 http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/02-rizzo.php>. Shiloh, Ilana. “Adaptation, Intertextuality, and the Endless Deferral of Meaning: Memento.” M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). 28 Apr. 2007 http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/08-shiloh.php>. Stern Review: The Economics of Climate Change. 2006. 28 Apr. 2007 http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/independent_reviews/stern_review_ economics_climate_change/stern_review_report.cfm>. 
 
 
 
 Citation reference for this article
 
 MLA Style
 Delamoir, Jeannette, and Patrick West. "Editorial." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/00-editorial.php>. APA Style
 Delamoir, J., and P. West. (May 2007) "Editorial," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/00-editorial.php>. 


 
 
 Literary history can be viewed alternately in a perspective of continuities or discontinuities. In the former perspective, what I perversely call postmodernism is simply an extension of modernism [which is], as everyone knows, a development of symbolism, which … is itself a specialisation of romanticismand who is there to say that the romantic concept of man does not find its origin in the great European Enlightenment? Etc. In the latter perspective, however, continuities [which are] maintained on a certain level of narrative abstraction (i.e., history [or aesthetic description]) are resisted in the interests of the quiddity and discreteness of art, the space that each work or action creates around itself. – Ihab Hassan
 
 
 Ihab Hassan’s words, published in 1975, continue to resonate today. How should we approach art? Can an artwork ever really fully be described by its critical review, or does its description only lead to an ever multiplying succession of terms? Michel Foucault spoke of the construction of modern sexuality as being seen as the hidden, irresolvable “truth” of our subjectivity, as that secret which we must constantly speak about, and hence as an “incitement to discourse” (Foucault, History of Sexuality). Since the Romantic period, the appreciation of aesthetics has been tied to the subjectivity of the individual and to the degree an art work appeals to the individual’s sense of self: to one’s personal refinement, emotions and so on. Art might be considered part of the truth of our subjectivity which we seem to be endlessly talking about – without, however, actually ever resolving the issue of what a great art work really is (anymore than we have resolved the issue of what natural sexuality is). It is not my aim to explicate the relationship between art and sex but to re-inject a strategic understanding of discourse, as Foucault understood it, back into commonplace, contemporary aesthetic criticism.
 
 The problems in rendering into words subjective, emotional experiences and formal aesthetic criteria continue to dog criticism today. The chief hindrances to contemporary criticism remain such institutional factors as the economic function of newspapers. Given their primary function as tools for the selling of advertising space, newspapers are inherently unsuited to sustaining detailed, informed dialogue on any topic – be it international politics or aesthetics. As it is, reviews remain short, quickly written pieces squeezed into already overloaded arts pages. This does not prevent skilled, caring writers and their editorial supporters from ensuring that fine reviews are published. In the meantime, we muddle through as best we can.
 
 I argue that criticism, like art, should operate self-consciously as an incitement to discourse, to engagement, and so to further discussion, poetry, et cetera. The possibility of an endless recession of theoretical terms and subjective responses should not dissuade us. Rather, one should provisionally accept the instrumentality of aesthetic discourse provided one is able always to bear in mind the nominalism which is required to prevent the description of art from becoming an instrument of repression. This is to say, aesthetic criticism is clearly authored in order to demonstrate something: to argue a point, to make a fruitful comparison, and so on. This does not mean that criticism should be composed so as to dictate aesthetic taste to the reader. Instead, it should act as an invitation to further responses – much as the art work itself does.
 
 Foucault has described discourse – language, terminologies, metaphorical conceits and those logical and poetic structures which underpin them – as a form of technology (Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge and History of Sexuality). Different discursive forces arise in response to different cultural needs and contexts, including, indeed, those formulated not only by artists, but also by reviewers. As Hassan intimates, what is or is not “postmodernism”, for example, depends less on the art work itself – it is less a matter of an art work’s specific “quiddity” and its internal qualities – but is, rather, fundamentally dependent upon what one is trying to say about the piece. If one is trying to describe something novel in a work, something which relates it to a series of new or unusual forms which have become dominant within society since World War Two, then the term “postmodernism” most usefully applies. This, then, would entail breaking down the “the space that each work … creates around itself” in order to emphasise horizontal “continuities”. If, on the other hand, the critic wishes to describe the work from the perspective of historical developments, so as to trace the common features of various art works across a genealogical pattern running from Romanticism to the present day, one must de-emphasise the quiddity of the work in favour of vertical continuities. In both cases, however, the identification of common themes across various art works so as to aid in the description of wider historical or aesthetic conditions requires a certain “abstraction” of the qualities of the aesthetic works in question. The “postmodernism”, or any other quality, of a single art work thus remains in the eye of the beholder. No art work is definitively “postmodern” as such. It is only “postmodern” inasmuch as this description aids one in understanding a certain aspect of the piece and its relationship to other objects of analysis. In short, the more either an art work or its critical review elides full descriptive explication, the more useful reflections which might be voiced in its wake. 
 
 What then is the instrumental purpose of the arts review as a genre of writing? For liberal humanist critics such as Matthew Arnold, F.R. Leavis and Harold Bloom, the role of the critic is straight forward and authoritative. Great art is said to be imbued with the spirit of humanity; with the very essence of our common subjectivity itself. Critics in this mode seek the truth of art and once it has been found, they generally construct it as unified, cohesive and of great value to all of humanity. The authors of the various avant-garde manifestoes which arose in Europe from the fin de siècle period onwards significantly complicated this ideal of universal value by arguing that such aesthetic values were necessarily abstract and so were not immediately visible within the content of the work per se. Such values were rather often present in the art work’s form and expression. Surrealism, Futurism, Supremacism, the Bauhaus and the other movements were founded upon the contention that these avant-garde art works revealed fundamental truths about the essence of human subjectivity: the imperious power of the dream at the heart of our emotional and psychic life, the geometric principles of colour and shape which provide the language for all experience of the sublime, and so on.
 
 The critic was still obliged to identify greatness and to isolate and disseminate those pieces of art which revealed the hidden truth of our shared human experience. Few influential art movements did not, in fact, have a chief theoretician to promote their ideals to the world, be it Ezra Pound and Leavis as the explicators of the works of T.S. Eliot, Martin Esslin for Beckett, or the artist her or himself, such as choreographers Martha Graham or Merce Cunningham, both of whom described in considerable detail their own methodologies to various scribes.
 
 The great challenge presented in the writings of Foucault, Derrida, Hassan and others, however, is to abandon such a sense of universal aesthetic and philosophical value. Like their fellow travellers within the New Left and soixante huit-ièmes (the agitators and cultural critics of 1968 Paris), these critics contend that the idea of a universal human subjectivity is problematic at best, if not a discursive fiction, which has been used to justify repression, colonialism, the unequal institutional hierarchies of bourgeois democratic systems, and so on. Art does not therefore speak of universal human truths. It is rather – like aesthetic criticism itself – a discursive product whose value should be considered instrumentally.
 
 The kind of a critical relationship which I am proposing here might provisionally be classified as discursive or archaeological criticism (in the Foucauldian sense of tracing discursive relationships and their distribution within any given cross-section or strata of cultural life). The role of the critic in such a situation is not one of acknowledging great art. Rather, the critic’s function becomes highly strategic, with interpretations and opinions regarding art works acting as invitations to engagement, consideration and, hence, also to rejection. From the point of view of the audience, too, the critic’s role is one of utility. If a critical description prompts useful, interesting or pleasurable reflections in the reader, then the review has been effective. If it has not, it has no role to play. The response to criticism thus becomes as subjective as the response to the art work itself. Similarly, just as Marcel Duchamp’s act of inverting a urinal and calling it art showed that anyone could be an artist provided they adopted a suitably creative vision of the objects which surrounded them, so anyone and everyone is a legitimate critic of any art work addressed to him or her as an audience. The institutional power accorded to critics by merit of the publications to which they are attached should not obfuscate the fact that anyone has the moral right to venture a critical judgement. It is not actually logically possible to be “right” or “wrong” in attributing qualities to an art work (although I have had artists assert the contrary to me). I like noise art, for example, and find much to stimulate my intellect and my affect in the chaotic feedback characteristic of the work of Merzbow and others. Many others however simply find such sounds to constitute unpleasant noise. Neither commentator is “right”. Both views co-exist. What is important is how these ideas are expressed, what propositions are marshalled to support either position, and how internally cohesive are the arguments supplied by supporters of either proposition. The merit of any particular critical intervention is therefore strictly formal or expressive, lying in its rhetorical construction, rather than in the subjective content of the criticism itself, per se.
 
 Clearly, such discursive criticism is of little value in describing works devised according to either an unequivocally liberal humanist or modernist avant-garde perspective. Aesthetic criticism authored in this spirit will not identify the universal, timeless truths of the work, nor will it act as an authoritative barometer of aesthetic value. By the same token though, a recognition of pluralism and instrumentality does not necessarily entail the rejection of categories of value altogether. Such a technique of aesthetic analysis functions primarily in the realm of superficial discursive qualities and formal features, rather than subterranean essences. It is in this sense both anti-Romantic and anti-Platonic. Discursive analysis has its own categories of truth and evaluation. Similarities between works, influences amongst artists and generic or affective precedents become the primary objects of analysis. Such a form of criticism is, in this sense, directly in accord with a similarly self-reflexive, historicised approach to art making itself. Where artists are consciously seeking to engage with their predecessors or peers, to find ways of situating their own work through the development of ideas visible in other cultural objects and historic aesthetic works, then the creation of art becomes itself a form of practical criticism or praxis. The distinction between criticism and its object is, therefore, one of formal expression, not one of nature or essence. Both practices engage with similar materials through a process of reflection (Marshall, “Vertigo”).
 
 Having described in philosophical and critical terms what constitutes an unfettered, democratic and strategic model of discursive criticism, it is perhaps useful to close with a more pragmatic description of how I myself attempt to proceed in authoring such criticism and, so, offer at least one possible (and, by definition, subjective) model for discursive criticism.
 
 Given that discursive analysis itself developed out of linguistic theory and Saussure’s discussion of the structural nature of signification, it is no surprise that the primary methodology underlying discursive analysis remains that of semiotics: namely how systems of representation and meaning mutually reinforce and support each other, and how they fail to do so.
 
 As a critic viewing an art work, it is, therefore, always my first goal to attempt to identify what it is that the artist appears to be trying to do in mounting a production. Is the art work intended as a cultural critique, a political protest, an avant-garde statement, a work of pure escapism, or some other kind of project – and hence one which can be judged according to the generic forms and values associated with such a style in comparison with those by other artists who work in this field? Having determined or intuited this, several related but nominally distinct critical reflections follow. Firstly, how effectively is this intent underpinning the art work achieved, how internally consistent are the tools, forms and themes utilised within the production, and do the affective and historic resonances evoked by the materials employed therein cohere into a logical (or a deliberately fragmented) whole? Secondly, how valid or aesthetically interesting is such a project in the first place, irrespective of whether it was successfully achieved or not? In short, how does the artist’s work compare with its own apparent generic rules, precedents and peers, and is the idea behind the work a contextually valid one or not?
 
 The questions of value which inevitably come into these judgements must be weighed according to explicit arguments regarding context, history and genre. It is the discursive transparency of the critique which enables readers to mentally contest the author. Implicitly transcendental models of universal emotional or aesthetic responses should not be invoked. Works of art should, therefore, be judged according to their own manifest terms, and, so, according to the values which appear to govern the relationships which organise materials within the art work. They should also, however, be viewed from a position definitively outside the work, placing the overall concept and its implicit, underlying theses within the context of other precedents, cultural values, political considerations and so on. In other words, one should attempt to heed Hassan’s caution that all art works may be seen both from the perspective of historico-genealogical continuities, as well as according to their own unique, self-defining characteristics and intentions. At the same time, the critical framework of the review itself – while remaining potentially dense and complex – should be as apparent to the reader as possible.
 
 The kind of criticism which I author is, therefore, based on a combination of art-historical, generic and socio-cultural comparisons. Critics are clearly able to elaborate more parallels between various artistic and cultural activities than many of their peers in the audience simply because it is the profession of the former to be as familiar with as wide a range of art-historical, cultural and political materials as is possible. This does not, however, make the opinions of the critic “correct”, it merely makes them more potentially dense. Other audiences nevertheless make their own connections, while spectators remain free to state that the particular parallels identified by the critic were not, to their minds, as significant as the critic would contend. The quantity of knowledge from which the critic can select does not verify the accuracy of his or her observations. It rather enables the potential richness of the description.
 
 In short, it is high time critics gave up all pretensions to closing off discourse by describing aesthetic works. On the contrary, arts reviewing, like arts production itself, should be seen as an invitation to further discourse, as a gift offered to those who might want it, rather than a Leavisite or Bloom-esque bludgeon to instruct the insensitive masses as to what is supposed to subjectively enlighten and uplift them. It is this sense of engagement – between critic, artist and audience – which provides the truly poetic quality to arts criticism, allowing readers to think creatively in their own right through their own interaction with a collaborative process of rumination on aesthetics and culture. In this way, artists, audiences and critics come to occupy the same terrain, exchanging views and constructing a community of shared ideas, debate and ever-multiplying discursive forms. Ideally, written criticism would come to occupy the same level of authority as an argument between an audience member and a critic at the bar following the staging of a production. I admit myself that even my best written compositions rarely achieve the level of playful interaction which such an environment often provokes. I nevertheless continue to strive for such a form of discursive exchange and bibulous poetry.
 
 References
 
 Apollonio, Umbro, ed. Futurist Manifestos. London: Thames and Hudson, 1973. Arnold, Matthew. Essays in Criticism. London: Macmillan, 1903-27, published as 2 series. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. by Annette Lavers. London: Vintage, 1993. Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead, 1998. Benjamin, Walter. Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. Trans. by Edmund Jephcott. New York: Harcourt, 1978. Breton, André. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Trans. by Richard Seaver and Helen Lane. Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 1972. Eliot, T.S. Collected Poems 1909-1962. London: Faber, 1963. Esslin, Martin. Theatre of the Absurd. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. by A.M. Sheridan Smith. London: Tavistock, 1972. ———. The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction. Trans. by Robert Hurley. London: Penguin, 1990. Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. London: Penguin, 1992. Graham, Martha. Blood Memory. New York: Doubleday, 1991. Hassan, Ihab. “Joyce, Beckett and the Postmodern Imagination.” Triquarterly 32.4 (1975): 192ff. Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Dominant of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (1984): 53-92. Leavis, F.R. F.R. Leavis: Essays and Documents. Eds. Ian MacKillop and Richard Storer. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995. Malevich, Kazimir. In Penny Guggenheim, ed. Art of This Century – Drawings – Photographs – Sculpture – Collages. New York: Art Aid, 1942. Marshall, Jonathan. “Documents in Australian Postmodern Dance: Two Interviews with Lucy Guerin,” in Adrian Kiernander, ed. Dance and Physical Theatre, special edition of Australasian Drama Studies 41 (October 2002): 102-33. ———. “Operatic Tradition and Ambivalence in Chamber Made Opera’s Recital (Chesworth, Horton, Noonan),” in Keith Gallasch and Laura Ginters, eds. Music Theatre in Australia, special edition of Australasian Drama Studies 45 (October 2004): 72-96. ———. “Vertigo: Between the Word and the Act,” Independent Performance Forums, series of essays commissioned by Not Yet It’s Difficult theatre company and published in RealTime Australia 35 (2000): 10. Merzbow. Venereology. Audio recording. USA: Relapse, 1994. Richards, Alison, Geoffrey Milne, et al., eds. Pearls before Swine: Australian Theatre Criticism, special edition of Meajin 53.3 (Spring 1994). Tzara, Tristan. Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries. Trans. by Barbara Wright. London: Calder, 1992. Vaughan, David. Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years. Ed. Melissa Harris. New York: Aperture, 1997.
 
 
 
 
 Citation reference for this article
 
 MLA Style
 Marshall, Jonathan. "Inciting Reflection: A Short Manifesto for and Introduction to the Discursive Reviewing of the Arts." M/C Journal 8.5 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0510/08-marshall.php>. APA Style
 Marshall, J. (Oct. 2005) "Inciting Reflection: A Short Manifesto for and Introduction to the Discursive Reviewing of the Arts," M/C Journal, 8(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0510/08-marshall.php>. 


 
 
 Film adaptation is an ambiguous term, both semantically and conceptually. Among its multiple connotations, the word “adaptation” may signify an artistic composition that has been recast in a new form, an alteration in the structure or function of an organism to make it better fitted for survival, or a modification in individual or social activity in adjustment to social surroundings. What all these definitions have in common is a tacitly implied hierarchy and valorisation: they presume the existence of an origin to which the recast work of art is indebted, or of biological or societal constraints to which the individual should conform in order to survive. The bias implied in the very connotations of the word has affected the theory and study of film adaptation. This bias is most noticeably reflected in the criterion of fidelity, which has been the major standard for evaluating film adaptations ever since George Bluestone’s 1957 pivotal Novels into Films. “Fidelity criticism,” observes McFarlane, “depends on a notion of the text as having and rendering up to the (intelligent) reader a single, correct ‘meaning’ which the film-maker has either adhered to or in some sense violated or tampered with” (7). But such an approach, Leitch argues, is rooted in several unacknowledged but entrenched misconceptions. It privileges literature over film, casts a false aura of originality on the precursor text, and ignores the fact that all texts, whether literary or cinematic, are essentially intertexts. As Kristeva, along with other poststructuralist theorists, has taught us, any text is an amalgam of others, a part of a larger fabric of cultural discourse (64-91). “A text is a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash”, writes Barthes in 1977 (146), and 15 years later film theoretician Robert Stam elaborates: “The text feeds on and is fed into an infinitely permutating intertext, which is seen through evershifting grids of interpretation” (57). The poststructuralists’ view of texts draws on the structuralists’ view of language, which is conceived as a system that pre-exists the individual speaker and determines subjectivity. These assumptions counter the Romantic ideology of individualism, with its associated concepts of authorial originality and a text’s single, unified meaning, based on the author’s intention. “It is language which speaks, not the author,” declares Barthes, “to write is to reach the point where only language acts, ‘performs’, and not me” (143). In consequence, the fidelity criterion of film adaptation may be regarded as an outdated vestige of the Romantic world-view. If all texts quote or embed fragments of earlier texts, the notion of an authoritative literary source, which the cinematic version should faithfully reproduce, is no longer valid. Film adaptation should rather be perceived as an intertextual practice, contributing to a dynamic interpretive exchange between the literary and cinematic texts, an exchange in which each text can be enriched, modified or subverted. The relationship between Jonathan Nolan’s short story “Memento Mori” and Christopher Nolan’s film Memento (2001) is a case in point. Here there was no source text, as the writing of the story did not precede the making of the film. The two processes were concurrent, and were triggered by the same basic idea, which Jonathan discussed with his brother during a road trip from Chicago to LA. Christopher developed the idea into a film and Jonathan turned it into a short story; he also collaborated in the film script. Moreover, Jonathan designed otnemem> (memento in reverse), the official Website, which contextualises the film’s fictional world, while increasing its ambiguity. What was adapted here was an idea, and each text explores in different ways the narrative, ontological and epistemological implications of that idea. The story, the film and the Website produce a multi-layered intertextual fabric, in which each thread potentially unravels the narrative possibilities suggested by the other threads. Intertextuality functions to increase ambiguity, and is therefore thematically relevant, for “Memento Mori”, Memento and otnemem> are three fragmented texts in search of a coherent narrative. The concept of narrative may arguably be one of the most overused and under-defined terms in academic discourse. In the context of the present paper, the most productive approach is that of Wilkens, Hughes, Wildemuth and Marchionini, who define narrative as a chain of events related by cause and effect, occurring in time and space, and involving agency and intention. In fiction or in film, intention is usually associated with human agents, who can be either the characters or the narrator. It is these agents who move along the chain of causes and effects, so that cause-effect and agency work together to make the narrative. This narrative paradigm underpins mainstream Hollywood cinema in the years 1917-1960. In Narration in the Fiction Film, David Bordwell writes: The classical Hollywood film presents psychologically defined individuals who struggle to solve a clear-cut problem or to attain specific goals. … The story ends with a decisive victory or defeat, a resolution of the problem, and a clear achievement, or non achievement, of the goals. The principal causal agency is thus the character … . In classical fabula construction, causality is the prime unifying principle. (157) The large body of films flourishing in America between the years 1941 and 1958 collectively dubbed film noir subvert this narrative formula, but only partially. As accurately observed by Telotte, the devices of flashback and voice-over associated with the genre implicitly challenge conventionally linear narratives, while the use of the subjective camera shatters the illusion of objective truth and foregrounds the rift between reality and perception (3, 20). Yet in spite of the narrative experimentation that characterises the genre, the viewer of a classical film noir film can still figure out what happened in the fictional world and why, and can still reconstruct the story line according to sequential and causal schemata. This does not hold true for the intertextual composite consisting of Memento, “Memento Mori” and otnemem>. The basic idea that generated the project was that of a self-appointed detective who obsessively investigates and seeks to revenge his wife’s rape and murder, while suffering from a total loss of short term memory. The loss of memory precludes learning and the acquisition of knowledge, so the protagonist uses scribbled notes, Polaroid photos and information tattooed onto his skin, in an effort to reconstruct his fragmented reality into a coherent and meaningful narrative. Narrativity is visually foregrounded: the protagonist reads his body to make sense of his predicament. To recap, the narrative paradigm relies on a triad of terms: connectedness (a chain of events), causality, and intentionality. The basic situation in Memento and “Memento Mori”, which involves a rupture in the protagonist’s/narrator’s psychological time, entails a breakdown of all three pre-requisites of narrativity. Since the protagonists of both story and film are condemned, by their memory deficiency, to living in an eternal present, they are unable to experience the continuity of time and the connectedness of events. The disruption of temporality inevitably entails the breakdown of causality: the central character’s inability to determine the proper sequence of events prevents him from being able to distinguish between cause and effect. Finally, the notion of agency is also problematised, because agency implies the existence of a stable, identifiable subject, and identity is contingent on the subject’s uninterrupted continuity across time and change. The subversive potential of the basic narrative situation is heightened by the fact that both Memento and “Memento Mori” are focalised through the consciousness and perception of the main character. This means that the story, as well as the film, is conveyed from the point of view of a narrator who is constitutionally unable to experience his life as a narrative. This conundrum is addressed differently in the story and in the film, both thematically and formally. “Memento Mori” presents, in a way, the backdrop to Memento. It focuses on the figure of Earl, a brain damaged protagonist suffering from anterograde amnesia, who is staying in a blank, anonymous room, that we assume to be a part of a mental institution. We also assume that Earl’s brain damage results from a blow to the head that he received while witnessing the rape and murder of his wife. Earl is bent on avenging his wife’s death. To remind himself to do so, he writes messages to himself, which he affixes on the walls of his room. Leonard Shelby is Memento’s cinematic version of Earl. By Leonard’s own account, he has an inability to form memories. This, he claims, is the result of neurological damage sustained during an attack on him and his wife, an attack in which his wife was raped and killed. To be able to pursue his wife’s killers, he has recourse to various complex and bizarre devices—Polaroid photos, a quasi-police file, a wall chart, and inscriptions tattooed onto his skin—in order to replace his memory. Hampered by his affliction, Leonard trawls the motels and bars of Southern California in an effort to gather evidence against the killer he believes to be named “John G.” Leonard’s faulty memory is deviously manipulated by various people he encounters, of whom the most crucial are a bartender called Natalie and an undercover cop named Teddy, both involved in a lucrative drug deal. So far for a straightforward account of the short story and the film. But there is nothing straightforward about either Memento or “Memento Mori”. The basic narrative premise, consisting of a protagonist/narrator suffering from a severe memory deficit, is a condition entailing far-reaching psychological and philosophical implications. In the following discussion, I would like to focus on these two implications and to tie them in to the notions of narrativity, intertextuality, and eventually, adaptation. The first implication of memory loss is the dissolution of identity. Our sense of identity is contingent on our ability to construct an uninterrupted personal narrative, a narrative in which the present self is continuous with the past self. In Oneself as Another, his philosophical treatise on the concept of selfhood, Paul Ricoeur queries: “do we not consider human lives to be more readable when they have been interpreted in terms of the stories that people tell about them?” He concludes by observing that “interpretation of the self … finds in narrative, among others signs and symbols, a privileged form of mediation” (ft. 114). Ricoeur further suggests that the sense of selfhood is contingent on four attributes: numerical identity, qualitative identity, uninterrupted continuity across time and change, and finally, permanence in time that defines sameness. The loss of memory subverts the last two attributes of personal identity, the sense of continuity and permanence over time, and thereby also ruptures the first two. In “Memento Mori” and Memento, the disintegration of identity is formally rendered through the fragmentation of the literary and cinematic narratives, respectively. In Jonathan Nolan’s short story, traditional linear narrative is disrupted by shifts in point of view and by graphic differences in the shape of the print on the page. “Memento Mori” is alternately narrated in the first and in the third person. The first person segments, which constitute the present of the story, are written by Earl to himself. As his memory span is ten-minute long, his existence consists of “just the same ten minutes, over and over again” (Nolan, 187). Fully aware of the impending fading away of memory, Earl’s present-version self leaves notes to his future-version self, in an effort to situate him in time and space and to motivate him to the final action of revenge. The literary device of alternating points of view formally subverts the notion of identity as a stable unity. Paradoxically, rather than setting him apart from the rest of us, Earl’s brain damage foregrounds his similarity. “Every man is broken into twenty-four-hour fractions,” observes Earl, comforting his future self by affirming his basic humanity, “Your problem is a little more acute, maybe, but fundamentally the same thing” (Nolan, 189). His observation echoes Beckett’s description of the individual as “the seat of a constant process of decantation … to the vessel containing the fluid of past time” (Beckett, 4-5). Identity, suggests Jonathan Nolan, following Beckett, among other things, is a theoretical construct. Human beings are works in progress, existing in a state of constant flux. We are all fragmented beings—the ten-minute man is only more so. A second strategy employed by Jonathan to convey the discontinuity of the self is the creation of visual graphic disunity. As noted by Yellowlees Douglas, among others, the static, fixed nature of the printed page and its austere linearity make it ideal for the representation of our mental construct of narrative. The text of “Memento Mori” appears on the page in three different font types: the first person segments, Earl’s admonitions to himself, appear in italics; the third person segments are written in regular type; and the notes and signs are capitalised. Christopher Nolan obviously has recourse to different strategies to reach the same ends. His principal technique, and the film’s most striking aspect, is its reversed time sequence. The film begins with a crude Polaroid flash photograph of a man’s body lying on a decaying wooden floor. The image in the photo gradually fades, until the camera sucks the picture up. The photograph presents the last chronological event; the film then skips backwards in ten-minute increments, mirroring the protagonist’s memory span. But the film’s time sequence is not simply a reversed linear structure. It is a triple-decker narrative, mirroring the three-part organisation of the story. In the opening scene, one comes to realise that the film-spool is running backwards. After several minutes the film suddenly reverses and runs forward for a few seconds. Then there is a sudden cut to a different scene, in black and white, where the protagonist (who we have just learned is called Leonard) begins to talk, out of the blue, about his confusion. Soon the film switches to a color scene, again unconnected, in which the “action” of the film begins. In the black and white scenes, which from then on are interspersed with the main action, Leonard attempts to understand what is happening to him and to explain (to an unseen listener) the nature of his condition. The “main action” of the film follows a double temporal structure: while each scene, as a unit of action, runs normally forward, each scene is triggered by the following, rather than by the preceding scene, so that we are witnessing a story whose main action goes back in time as the film progresses (Hutchinson and Read, 79). A third narrative thread, interspersed with the other two, is a story that functions as a foil to the film’s main action. It is the story of Sammy Jankis: one of the cases that Leonard worked on in his past career as an insurance investigator. Sammy was apparently suffering from anterograde amnesia, the same condition that Leonard is suffering from now. Sammy’s wife filed an insurance claim on his behalf, a claim that Leonard rejected on the grounds that Sammy’s condition was merely psychosomatic. Hoping to confirm Leonard’s diagnosis, Sammy’s diabetic wife puts her husband to the test. He fails the test as he tenderly administers multiple insulin injections to her, thereby causing her death. As Leonard’s beloved wife also suffered from diabetes, and as Teddy (the undercover cop) eventually tells Leonard that Sammy never had a wife, the Sammy Jankis parable functions as a mise en abyme, which can either corroborate or subvert the narrative that Leonard is attempting to construct of his own life. Sammy may be seen as Leonard’s symbolic double in that his form of amnesia foreshadows the condition with which Leonard will eventually be afflicted. This interpretation corroborates Leonard’s personal narrative of his memory loss, while tainting him with the blame for the death of Sammy’s wife. But the camera also suggests a more unsettling possibility—Leonard may ultimately be responsible for the death of his own wife. The scene in which Sammy, condemned by his amnesia, administers to his wife a repeated and fatal shot of insulin, is briefly followed by a scene of Leonard pinching his own wife’s thigh before her insulin shot, a scene recurring in the film like a leitmotif. The juxtaposition of the two scenes suggests that it is Leonard who, mistakenly or deliberately, has killed his wife, and that ever since he has been projecting his guilt onto others: the innocent victims of his trail of revenge. In this ironic interpretive twist, it is Leonard, rather than Sammy, who has been faking his amnesia. The parable of Sammy Jankis highlights another central concern of Memento and “Memento Mori”: the precarious nature of truth. This is the second psychological and philosophical implication of what Leonard persistently calls his “condition”, namely his loss of memory. The question explicitly raised in the film is whether memory records or creates, if it retains the lived life or reshapes it into a narrative that will confer on it unity and meaning. The answer is metaphorically suggested by the recurring shots of a mirror, which Leonard must use to read his body inscriptions. The mirror, as Lacan describes it, offers the infant his first recognition as a coherent, unique self. But this recognition is a mis-recognition, for the reflection has a coherence and unity that the subject both lacks and desires. The body inscriptions that Leonard can read only in the mirror do not necessarily testify to the truth. But they do enable him to create a narrative that makes his life worth living. A Lacanian reading of the mirror image has two profoundly unsettling implications. It establishes Leonard as a morally deficient, rather than neurologically deficient, human being, and it suggests that we are not fundamentally different from him. Leonard’s intricate system of notes and body inscriptions builds up an inventory of set representations to which he can refer in all his future experiences. Thus when he wakes up naked in bed with a woman lying beside him, he looks among his Polaroid photographs for a picture which he can match with her, which will tell him what the woman’s name is and what he can expect from her on the basis of past experience. But this, suggest Hutchinson and Read, is an external representation of operations that all of us perform mentally (89). We all respond to sensory input by constructing internal representations that form the foundations of our psyche. This view underpins current theories of language and of the mind. Semioticians tell us that the word, the signifier, refers to a mental representation of an object rather than to the object itself. Cognitivists assume that cognition consists in the operation of mental items which are symbols for real entities. Leonard’s apparently bizarre method of apprehending reality is thus essentially an externalisation of memory. But if, cognitively and epistemologically speaking, Lennie is less different from us than we would like to think, this implication may also extend to our moral nature. Our complicity with Leonard is mainly established through the film’s complex temporal structure, which makes us viscerally share the protagonist’s/narrator’s confusion and disorientation. We become as unable as he is to construct a single, coherent and meaningful narrative: the film’s obscurity is built in. Memento’s ambiguity is enhanced by the film’s Website, which presents a newspaper clipping about the attack on Leonard and his wife, torn pages from police and psychiatric reports, and a number of notes from Leonard to himself. While blurring the boundaries between story and film by suggesting that Leonard, like Earl, may have escaped from a mental institution, otnemem> also provides evidence that can either confirm or confound our interpretive efforts, such as a doctor’s report suggesting that “John G.” may be a figment of Leonard’s imagination. The precarious nature of truth is foregrounded by the fact that the narrative Leonard is trying to construct, as well as the narrative in which Christopher Nolan has embedded him, is a detective story. The traditional detective story proceeds from a two-fold assumption: truth exists, and it can be known. But Memento and “Memento Mori” undermine this epistemological confidence. They suggest that truth, like identity, is a fictional construct, derived from the tales we tell ourselves and recount to others. These tales do not coincide with objective reality; they are the prisms we create in order to understand reality, to make our lives bearable and worth living. Narratives are cognitive patterns that we construct to make sense of the world. They convey our yearning for coherence, closure, and a single unified meaning. The overlapping and conflicting threads interweaving Memento, “Memento Mori” and the Website otnemem> simultaneously expose and resist our nostalgia for unity, by evoking a multiplicity of meanings and creating an intertextual web that is the essence of all adaptation. References Barthes, Roland. Image-Music-Text. London: Fontana, 1977. Beckett, Samuel. Proust. London: Chatto and Windus, 1931. Bluestone, George. Novels into Film. Berkley and Los Angeles: California UP, 1957. Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: Wisconsin UP, 1985. Hutchinson, Phil, and Rupert Read. “Memento: A Philosophical Investigation.” Film as Philosophy: Essays in Cinema after Wittgenstein and Cavell. Ed. Rupert Read and Jerry Goodenough. Hampshire: Palgrave, 2005. 72-93. Kristeva, Julia. “World, Dialogue and Novel.” Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Ed. Leon S. Rudiez. Trans. Thomas Gora. New York: Columbia UP, 1980. 64-91. Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience.” Ēcrits: A Selection. New York: Norton 1977. 1-7. Leitch, Thomas. “Twelve Fallacies in Contemporary Adaptation Theory.” Criticism 45.2 (2003): 149-71. McFarlane, Brian. Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Nolan, Jonathan. “Memento Mori.” The Making of Memento. Ed. James Mottram. London: Faber and Faber, 2002. 183-95. Nolan, Jonathan. otnemem. 24 April 2007 http://otnemem.com>. Ricoeur, Paul. Oneself as Another. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1992. Stam, Robert. “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation.” Film Adaptation. Ed. James Naremore. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2000. 54-76. Telotte, J.P. Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir. Urbana and Chicago: Illinois UP, 1989. Wilkens, T., A. Hughes, B.M. Wildemuth, and G. Marchionini. “The Role of Narrative in Understanding Digital Video.” 24 April 2007 http://www.open-video.org/papers/Wilkens_Asist_2003.pdf>. Yellowlees Douglass, J. “Gaps, Maps and Perception: What Hypertext Readers (Don’t) Do.” 24 April 2007 http://www.pd.org/topos/perforations/perf3/douglas_p3.html>. 
 
 
 
 Citation reference for this article
 
 MLA Style
 Shiloh, Ilana. "Adaptation, Intertextuality, and the Endless Deferral of Meaning: Memento." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/08-shiloh.php>. APA Style
 Shiloh, I. (May 2007) "Adaptation, Intertextuality, and the Endless Deferral of Meaning: Memento," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/08-shiloh.php>. 

Introduction Despite the expansive and multimodal realm of Chinese Boys’ Love (BL) culture (also known as danmei in Chinese), audio works have been notably absent from scholarly discussions, with the focus predominantly being on novels (e.g. Bai; Zhang). This article aims to fill this gap by delving into the transformative impact of sound on narrative engagement within the Chinese BL culture. Focussing on the audio drama adaptations of Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation (modao zushi, hereafter Grandmaster), originally a serialised Chinese BL novel, this analysis aims to unravel the meticulously crafted BL fantasy in these auditory renditions. The audio drama format delivers an intimate storytelling experience directly to the listener’s ears. Unlike textual media, audio dramas allow listeners to immerse themselves in narratives during various daily activities, deepening their connection with the content. The audio drama Grandmaster, produced by the renowned Chinese platform MissEvan, has garnered a vast fan base and over 640 million plays across three seasons (the episodes and numbers of plays can be found on MissEvan: Season 1, Season 2, and Season 3). Unlike the serialised Web-drama adaption diluted by censorship regulations, the audio drama retains the utmost BL fidelity to the original novel, highlighting the significant potential of this medium in the Chinese BL culture. BL culture has surged in popularity within China, partly due to the export of Japanese culture and the burgeoning Chinese Internet accessibility (Feng). The BL genre encompasses diverse media forms such as novels, fanfiction, comics, animation, and audio/Web dramas, rooted in shared fantasies of romantic love between men. The growing interest in BL culture reflects a response to societal structures like Confucianism and the oppressive education system, which, due to their restrictedness, inadvertently foster the exploration of alternative narratives and identities within the genre (Kwon). While initially inspired by Japanese subculture, Chinese BL has evolved under diverse global influences, including American and other Asian subcultures (Lavin et al.). Chinese BL narratives delve into themes of identity, sexuality, power dynamics, and societal norms, reflecting a rich blend of modern and traditional Chinese culture (Madill and Zhao). Moreover, the rise of BL fandom has empowered female readers to engage in questions about gendered politics, questions that enable them to turn a voyeuristic gaze upon men (Zhang). The versatility of Chinese BL media reflects not only the evolving nature of the genre but also its enduring appeal and cultural significance within contemporary Chinese society. This article initiates a concise review of audio drama in China and the transformative impact of earphone technology, shifting listening experiences from public to intimate settings. It subsequently explores the intricate interplay between Chinese BL novels and audio dramas, elucidating the unique dynamics involved. The analysis then examines specific scenes from Grandmaster, providing insights into its role in facilitating a mesmerising BL audio fantasy. Grandmaster, originating as an Internet novel, has gained a dedicated following. MissEvan, recognising its potential, secured copyrights and commissioned Triones Penguin Studio for a radio drama adaptation in Mandarin. This full-cast dramatisation involves skilled editors, playwrights, and composers, thereby enriching character portrayals and interactions. The professional teamwork and meticulous oversight at each production stage guaranteed regular updates and high audio quality (Shao). Despite the collaborative nature of teamwork, I argue that the power of sound technology personalises the auditory journey as it creates an immersive experience for individual listeners. My analyses mainly rely on research involving actual listeners, along with examinations of specific content within Grandmaster with an idealised listener in consideration, to elucidate the factors contributing to its auditory allure. This examination contributes to a nuanced understanding of Chinese BL culture and its constitutive relationship to audio. From Public Broadcasting to Intimate Voicing: Audio Drama in China Radio broadcasting in China, with roots dating back to the early twentieth century, initially served as a propaganda instrument for mass mobilisation and communication. Chinese storytelling, rooted in acoustics, emphasises the sensory appeal of sound (Chan). It intertwines oral and written traditions in classical literature, particularly fiction and drama (Børdahl). Local vernaculars commonly feature in oral storytelling traditions, whereas Chinese radio programs adopt Mandarin to foster a cohesive national identity via linguistic uniformity. The Communist Party tactically expanded its audience through a radio reception network, establishing a wired broadcasting infrastructure with over 100 million loudspeakers by the 1970s. This revolutionised politics, everyday life, and perceptions of time and space (Li). The interplay between radio and social change reflected China’s pursuit of modernity, as the Communist Party utilised radio to institute a national communication system and monopolise news production. Radio thus served as a crucial tool for constructing and sustaining revolutionary fervor (Lei; He). Radio dramas, often cross-media adaptations from edited films in the 1970s, contributed to everyday sensory pleasure amidst a totalising revolutionary soundscape (Huang). The growth of radio and loudspeaker infrastructure played diverse roles in the revolution, fostering political communication, labour mobilisation, propaganda, surveillance, and even nurturing the Mao cult, turning radio drama into a potent tool for mass mobilisation and communication (Li). As a result, before the widespread availability of televisions in the 1990s, radio structured Chinese people’s daily activities and served as the primary information medium. Technological advancements in earphones, transitioning from larger wired headphones to smaller wireless earbuds like AirPods, have shifted auditory experiences in China from a collective identity tool used in political propaganda to a medium for individualistic entertainment. This change is marked by the personal nature of headphone usage, which can extend social interactions in and beyond physical dimensions (Grusin). The transition from wired headphones to wireless earbuds implements the interiorisation of one person’s body/voice within another, initiating a profound connection that transcends physical limitations (Stankievech). Since 2018, wireless earbuds have exceeded wired headphones in output value in China (Insight and Info), with the online audio market surging to 22 billion yuan in 2021, a 67.9% increase year-on-year. Audiobooks and audio dramas are the most popular genres, with a predominantly female audience under forty who prefer listening at night after work (iimedia). Among audio dramas, BL works generate the most traffic and revenue in China (Y. Wang). Along with such content, putting wireless earbuds inside the ear intensifies the intimacy of listening, transmitting voices directly into the listener’s head and sitting alongside their thoughts (Weldon). This physical closeness underscores the exclusive bond between the listener and the audio content, redefining oral narratives and transforming public and political audio content into a more personal and intimate medium. The use of wireless earbuds even extends listening beyond mere auditory experience, empowering haptic sensations that create an intimate bond. The acousmatic voice envelops the listener’s ears, establishing a connection even before the message’s content is considered (Madsen and Potts). The ear’s sensitivity prompts consciousness and memory, unlocking the imaginative world (C. Wang 91-94). This sensory engagement surpasses traditional auditory limits, resembling a physical encounter where listeners feel like their body has joined with the body of sound. Dermot Rattigan, discussing radio drama, notes how listeners fill the void with mental visualisations and imagination, entering a state of individual ‘virtual reality’ through aural stimulation (Rattigan 118). Drawing from visual psychology, Shaffer likens the soundscape to a dynamic landscape painting, emphasising the fluidity of auditory experiences (Schafer). Listening becomes a multi-dimensional journey involving the entire body and mind, a compelling tool for reception and connection that transcends reality’s boundaries. The advent of MP3 technologies and the podcasting boom also extends the former spatial and temporal limitations of listening. In contrast to traditional real-time broadcasting, MP3 technologies enable voices to persist indefinitely into the future (Madsen and Potts). This temporal flexibility further builds a private sound sphere for listeners (Euritt). Listeners no longer need to share time and space with others around loudspeakers or radios, so they can freely indulge in their subcultural preferences, such as BL stories, without concern for societal judgment. Many listeners strategically incorporate audio dramas into their daily schedule, choosing moments of solitude such as before sleep or upon waking, where they can detach from the expectations of their physical space and identity roles. This is particularly evident among devoted fans of Chinese BL audio dramas, who carve out personal time for these works and seek a quiet space for focussed engagement (Wang 55). This intentional, focussed engagement differs from the typical mode of everyday radio listening as it serves an expanded, widespread dissemination environment that is also highly intimate (Madsen and Potts). Thus, the convergence of temporal flexibility and immersive technology shapes listener engagement and interaction dynamics. The fusion of intimacy, physical closeness, and temporal flexibility heightens the allure of the voice in programs with erotic undertones, such as BL audio dramas. Euritt introduces the concept of ‘breathing out into you’ to explain queer eroticism in podcasts, emphasising shared breaths and potential haptic exchanges that enhance the sensual dimensions of sound (Euritt 27-53). This wireless, intimately riveting auditory experience transforms the soundscape and reshapes contemporary social interactions. This shift is particularly noteworthy for popular Chinese radio and audio content as they began as a public, propaganda-oriented tool and transitioned into forms as novel as the intimate domain of BL audio dramas. This change underscores the transformative power of sound in shaping interactions, surpassing conventional storytelling boundaries, and ushering in a new era of engaging narratives. The 2.5-Dimensional: Auralising Chinese Boys’ Love Fiction The BL genre emerges as a cultural and social force that can potentially challenge traditional Chinese values. Its focus on male-male love inherently questions societal expectations around gender and sexuality in ways that disrupt Confucian ideology’s emphasis on heterosexual marriage and lineage (Welker). Furthermore, the genre’s similarity to the melodramatic ‘soap opera’ storytelling style resonates with Western ideals of individualism and aligns more with a feminist viewpoint that contrasts with the male-dominant heterosexism often found in traditional Chinese narratives (Mumford). This emphasis on individual desires also implicitly disputes the collectivist and socialist values, as well as the importance of the extended family, traditionally embraced in Chinese cultures. In short, the love, sex, and romance depicted in BL represent a departure from traditional Chinese values, positioning the BL genre as a vehicle for cultural exchange and societal transformation in terms of gender norms. The surge of Internet radio and social media in the 2010s has substantially contributed to the professionalisation and commercialisation of Chinese BL audio dramas. MissEvan, a prominent barrage-audio and live-broadcasting Website, has been crucial to this proliferation (Hu et al.). Before the advent of commercial dubbing, enthusiasts of BL novels voluntarily recorded non-profit Chinese audio dramas and disseminated them online. The popularity of BL novels subsequently prompted their adaptation into animation and television dramas, creating a demand for dubbing services. This demand inaugurated a niche for professional voice actors to hone and showcase their skills. The integration of technology and capital by commercial production teams has markedly elevated the quality of Chinese BL audio dramas. Amidst tightening censorship in 2021, Chinese BL online novels and their television/Web-drama adaptations faced restrictions. Audio drama emerged as a less restrictive medium, which can relatively directly present explicit gay relationships (Hu et al.). Listeners of Chinese BL audio dramas typically read the online novel beforehand, engaging in dual consumption for pleasure in both reading and listening (Wang 58). Their engagement transcends plot comprehension, focussing instead on appreciating sophisticated voice performances. Exploring how audio dramas derived from novels can transcend textual narratives and captivate audiences has become a central focus in the production process, highlighting the flourishing landscape of audio drama. The listening process provides informed listeners with a re-experience, offering multiple sensory and emotional pleasures by translating words into voice and sounds. Unlike film and television dubbing, which requires synchronisation with actors’ lip movements and speech rhythms, dubbing for animation, audio dramas, and games gives greater creative autonomy to voice actors. The thriving market for audio dramas has shaped the Chinese dubbing industry, cultivating a devoted fan base for previously overlooked voice actors. The character voices (CVs, also known as voice actors, or VAs) have emerged as central figures, attracting fans and driving media traffic. In the late 2010s, collaborations between MissEvan and renowned CVs resulted in the adaptation of popular online fiction into paid audio dramas, exemplified by Grandmaster, which aired in 2017 and 2018 (Hu et al.). Fans’ motivation for engaging with BL audio dramas extends beyond intertextual and trans-media entertainment but incorporates an appreciation for their beloved CVs, thereby fostering a culture of support within the burgeoning Chinese BL audio drama market. In the storytelling of aural media, CVs are crucial in bridging the auditor’s BL imagination between the text and the characters as their performances breathe life into characters. CVs fill a gap between two-dimensional works (fiction, comic, and animation) and the three-dimensional real world, forging ‘2.5-dimensional’ content. This term originated in the 1970s-80s to describe anime voice actors, who imbue two-dimensional characters with a sense of existence and generate interrelations between the real, fictional, and cyber worlds (Sugawa-Shimada and Annett). In BL audio dramas, CVs commonly stimulate listeners’ sensations through male moans that facilitate an erotic flow between sound and body, arousing desire through the auditory channel. The incorporation of scenes with sexual innuendo between the male protagonists creates a space for listeners to indulge in these moments with earphones on, enveloped in their own private, eroticised sphere of engagement between fiction and reality. The deliberate pauses, gasps, and panting become the silent dialogue that intertwines inner voices with external narratives, enhancing comprehensive sensory engagement for listeners. Audio Fantasy in Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation Grandmaster is a seminal Chinese BL novel that blends martial arts, supernatural fantasies, and emotional depth. Set in a richly imagined world where immortal cultivation techniques bestow individuals with extraordinary powers, the story follows protagonists Wei Wuxian’s and Lan Wangji’s intertwined fates. Its captivating narrative and nuanced characters have garnered a global fanbase, solidifying its place as a cornerstone of Chinese BL literature and media. The audio drama Grandmaster faithfully mirrors the novel’s narrative structure, unfolding from the protagonist Wei’s perspective after his reincarnation, weaving memories of his past and present life, including his romantic involvement with Lan. Wei’s establishment of the forbidden Demonic Path leads to his death, but he is reincarnated thirteen years later and reunites with Lan. After his reincarnation, Wei gradually realises Lan’s concealed profound affection and scarification for him. Diverging from the television/Web-drama adaptation, which replaces the romance with platonic ‘bromance’ due to censorship (Lei), the audio drama accentuates the impassioned soundscapes of their relationship. The three-season series, comprising episodes of 30-40 minutes, offers the first three episodes for free, with subsequent content requiring payment (approximately four to six dollars per season). Impressively, the series has driven earnings exceeding $1.5 million (Asia Business Leaders). This success highlights the captivating and profitable potential of audio dramas as a BL storytelling medium. Unlike the original novel, which uses an omniscient narrator, the audio drama advances the plot solely through character dialogue. Consequently, listeners navigate the storyline guided by the rhythm of the CVs’ delivery and the accompanying music. Different from Japanese BL audio dramas that feature as ‘voice porn’ for women (Ishida), Grandmaster subtly implies the romance between Lan and Wei, with the most intimate interactions limited to kisses. Rather than sexually explicit content, the drama focusses on the characters’ affective fulfillment after a prolonged thirteen-year anticipation. For instance, in Season 1, Episode 4, Wei attempts to hide his identity and flee from Lan. When Wei creeps back towards Lan’s bed to steal the pass for exiting Lan’s residence, Lan catches him. Rather than simply saying ‘Get off’ as in the novel, Lan instructs Wei in the audio drama to ‘Get off from my body,’ offering listeners additional physical contact cues (the quotes from the novel and audio drama in this article are translations from Chinese to English). Following Wei’s intentional refusal, the CV Wei Chao, portraying Lan, strategically breathes before his next line, ‘then stay like this for the whole night’. The breath conveys Lan’s deep, restrained affection and evokes the listener’s nuanced emotional resonance. To represent Lan’s affection within his minimal and often monosyllabic lines requires the CV to convey emotions through breaths and intonations, which commonly elicit an autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) in listeners. ASMR is a tingling sensation often triggered by soft low-tone spoken or whispered voices (Barratt and Davis). Wei Chao intentionally lowers his voice to interpret how Lan’s sighs encapsulate unspoken sentiments (Wei). In contrast, the CV Lu Zhixing employs a playful and sweet tone in his portrayal of Wei Wuxian. When Lu delivers flirtatious lines, online real-time comments frequently express listeners’ admiration, suggesting that his voice is even more captivating than women’s. The contrasting restraint and playfulness intensify the listener’s empathy for Lan’s unspeakable passion. Thus, Lan’s subtle expressions of his restrained love become the primary attraction for listeners (KikuHonda). The high-quality sound further amplifies the breath sounds, making each of Lan’s ‘hmm’ responses—indifferent, melancholy, or indulgent—a nuanced emotional trigger. Listeners, through their wireless earbuds, engage in the meticulously crafted expressions of Lan within a profoundly personal soundscape. This listening mode is a crucial component of the overall enthralling auditory voyage, augmenting the appreciation of the characters’ subdued emotions. The layered integration of music and sound in Grandmaster constructs a three-dimensional sonic storytelling landscape. Effective soundscapes for storytelling are crafted by multiple dimensions: sound source, temporal progression, simultaneous layers, and spatialisation. Sound editing allows for source selection, with listeners experiencing these dimensions as integrated, not separate or sequential (Stedman et al.). The audio drama Grandmaster distinguishes itself from the novel by using voice flashbacks for narrative enhancement. In Season Three, Episode 12, when Lan’s brother recounts Lan’s sacrifice for Wei, particularly the moment when Lan endured severe punishment to save Wei thirteen years ago, the soundscape instantly transports listeners to that intense scene. Listeners vividly hear the swishing force of the whip and its impact, immersing them in the sounds of Lan’s anguish and unwavering love. This direct auditory impact allows listeners to feel as if they are experiencing the events firsthand, physically sensing the hardships encountered by the protagonists in understanding each other’s affection, intensifying their hard-won love. The musical orchestration and vocal interplay are also pivotal to conveying the story. In the storyline, Wei and Lan showcase proficiency in their respective instruments: Wei with the flute and Lan with the guqin (a seven-string Chinese zither). The tonal features of these instruments—the flute’s melodious brightness and the guqin’s deep lingering resonance—symbolise the protagonists’ distinct personalities, adding ingenious layers to their relationship. In the Guanyin Temple scene (Season Three, Episode 13), as Wei confesses to Lan, the initial background music features the flute, guqin, and rain sounds, foreshadowing the confessional moment with Wei’s worries that Lan will not believe his words. As Wei promises to remember Lan’s every word from now on, the music incorporates the guzheng, a Chinese string instrument with a brighter timbre than guqin. The tremolo technique of guzheng is reminiscent of the characters’ heartstring vibrations. Through auditory cues, the narrative climaxes with Wei’s heartfelt confession of love for Lan. When Wei straightforwardly confesses, ‘I fancy you, I love you, I want you, I cannot leave you. … I do not want anyone but you—it cannot be anyone but you’ (Season Three, Episode 13), his heartfelt words are accompanied by layered sounds, including the duet of the flute and guqin, and the sound of thunder and rain, accelerating the affective climax. Lan echoes Wei’s words, underscored by erhu, thereby showing how this string instrument resembles humans’ sobbing voices through its sliding technique, rendering the touching melody. The heartbeat and rain sound with Lan’s panting highlight the painful loneliness of Lan’s thirteen-year wait. The intricate fusion of musical and vocal elements enables listeners to not only hear but also to feel the mutual affection between the characters, culminating in a sense of delight upon the disclosure of their reciprocal love following numerous adventures. Using earbuds amplifies listeners’ capacity to fully receive auditory details and stereo effects, thereby contributing to the popularity of BL audio dramas that skillfully convey unspoken love through detailed soundscapes. Epilogue The Grandmaster audio dramas provide crafted episodes that fulfill fans’ passionate needs that exceed the novel’s scope. In addition to adapting the novel, the team has conceived original mini-dramas that enrich the character images. Listeners can access additional content such as iconic quotes, ringtones, and ‘lullaby’ episodes recorded by the leading CVs, maximising the captivating power of sound and justifying listeners’ investment. The multi-layered use of sounds and instrumental arrangements effectively constructs a three-dimensional soundscape, reinforcing the audience’s understanding of the story and characters. Unlike television/Web-drama adaptations, the audio drama fully amplifies the tragic elements of the novel, pushing the immersed listener’s imagination past textual limitations. While casting choices and modelling in visual adaptions may disappoint viewers’ expectations at times, the audio drama leverages the power of sound to stimulate listeners’ imaginations, encouraging them to visualise their own specific character images. Skillful orchestration, along with sound effects, breaths, and dialogues in Grandmaster intensifies emotional expression, forming a rich and dimensional soundscape and unlocking new possibilities for audio drama artistic expression for Chinese BL fantasy. Reference Asia Business Leaders. “魔道祖師收益驚人, 中國廣播劇市場逾百億 [The Astonishing Earnings of Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, China’s Radio Drama Market Exceeds 10 Billion].” 19 Jan. 2022. <https://www.asiabusinessleaders.com/posts/%E4%B8%AD%E5%9C%8B%E7%B7%9A%E4%B8%8A%E9%9F%B3%E8%A8%8A %E5%B8%82%E5%A0%B4%E9%80%BE%E7%99%BE%E5%84%84>. Bai, Meijiadai. “Regulation of Pornography and Criminalization of BL Readers and Authors in Contemporary China (2010–2019).” Cultural Studies 36.2 (Mar. 2022): 279–301. Barratt, Emma L., and Nick J. Davis. “Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR): A Flow-Like Mental State.” PeerJ 3 (Mar. 2015). <https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.851>. Børdahl, Vibeke. Wu Song Fights the Tiger: The Interaction of Oral and Written Traditions in the Chinese Novel, Drama and Storytelling. NIAS Press, 2013. Chan, Leo Tak-hung. “Text and Talk: Classical Literary Tales in Traditional China and the Context of Casual Oral Storytelling.” Asian Folklore Studies 56.1 (1997): 33–63. Euritt, Alyn. Podcasting as an Intimate Medium. Routledge, 2022. Feng, Jin. “‘Addicted to Beauty’: Consuming and Producing Web-Based Chinese ‘Danmei’ Fiction at Jinjiang.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 21.2 (2009): 1–41. Grusin, Richard A. Premediation: Affect and Mediality after 9/11. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. He, Bixiao. “ ‘Yelling at the Masses’: Making Propaganda Audible in the Communist Revolution.” China Report 58.1 (2022): 28–40. Hu, Tingting, Jing Jin, and Lin Liao. “A Transmedia ‘Third’ Space: The Counterculture of Chinese Boys” Love Audio Dramas.” Asian Studies Review 47.4 (2023): 836–54. Huang, Nicole. “Listening to Films: Politics of the Auditory in 1970s China.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 7.3 (2013): 187–206. Hunn, Nick. “The Market for Hearable Devices 2016-2020.” Wearable Technologies. 7 Dec. 2016. <https://wt-obk.wearable-technologies.com/2016/12/the-market-for-hearable-devices-2016-2020-and-then-there-were-airpods/>. iimedia. “2021年中国在线音频行业发展及用户行为研究报告 [2021 China Online Audio Industry Development and User Behaviour Research Report].” 21 Nov. 2021. <https://www.iimedia.cn/c400/82048.html>. Insight and Info. “中国无线耳机行业发展现状分析与投资前景研究报告 (2022-2029 年) [Analysis and Investment Prospect Research Report on the Development of China's Wireless Earphone Industry (2022-2029)].” 2022. <https://www.chinabaogao.com/detail/607742.html>. Ishida, Minori. “Sounds and Sighs: 'Voice Porn' for Women.” In Shōjo across Media: Exploring “Girl” Practices in Contemporary Japan, eds. Jaqueline Berndt et al. Springer International, 2019. 283–99. KikuHonda. “[閒聊] 廣播劇魔道祖師 [[Chat] The Audio Drama Grandmaster].” 18 Jan. 2020. <https://www.ptt.cc/bbs/YuanChuang/M.1579362798.A.49D.html>. Kwon, Jungmin. “The Past, Present, and Future of Boys Love (BL) Cultures in East Asia.” In Transnational Convergence of East Asian Pop Culture. Routledge, 2021. Lavin, Maud, et al. Boys’ Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols: Queer Fan Cultures in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Hong Kong UP, 2017. Lei, Jun. “Taming the Untamed Politics and Gender in BL-Adapted Web Dramas.” In Queer TV China: Televisual and Fannish Imaginaries of Gender, Sexuality, and Chineseness, ed. Jamie J. Zhao. Hong Kong UP, 2023. 105–23. Lei, Wei. Radio and Social Transformation in China. Routledge, 2019. Li, Jie. “Revolutionary Echoes: Radios and Loudspeakers in the Mao Era.” Twentieth-Century China 45.1 (2020): 25–45. Madill, A., and Y. Zhao. “Engagement with Female-Oriented Male-Male Erotica in Mainland China and Hong Kong: Fandom Intensity, Social Outlook, and Region.” Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies 18.1 (May 2021): 111–31. Madsen, Virginia, and John Potts. “Voice-Cast: The Distribution of the Voice via Podcasting.” In VOICE: Vocal Aesthetics in Digital Arts and Media, eds. Norie Neumark et al. MIT P, 2010. Mumford, Russell E. Love and Ideology in the Afternoon: Soap Opera, Women and Television Genre. Indiana UP, 1995. Rattigan, Dermot. Theatre of Sound: Radio and the Dramatic Imagination. Carysfort, 2002. Schafer, R. Murray. The Soundscape. Destiny, 1993. Shao, Maomao. “魔道祖师广播剧播放2000万 [The Audio Drama Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation Has Been Played 20 Million Times].” JMedia 2018. <https://www.jiemian.com/article/2324030.html>. Stankievech, Charles. “From Stethoscopes to Headphones: An Acoustic Spatialisation of Subjectivity.” Leonardo Music Journal 17 (Dec. 2007): 55–59. Stedman, Kyle D., et al. "Tuning into Soundwriting." Intermezzo, 2020. <http://intermezzo.enculturation.net/14-stedman-et-al/index.html>. Sugawa-Shimada, Akiko, and Sandra Annett. “Introduction.” Mechademia: Second Arc 15.2 (Spring 2023): 1–7. Wang, Chien Hua. “聲音的「腐」能量：宅宅腐眾的跨國bl廣播劇聆聽與妄想 [The Voice Fantasies of Boy’s Love: How Otaku and Fujoshi Listen to and Consume Boy’s Love Audio Drama].” Master's thesis. National Taiwan Normal University, 2021. Wang, Ying. “ ‘耳朵经济’ 时代下猫耳FM广播剧发展策略研究 [Research on the Development Strategy of Maoer FM Radio Drama in the Era of ‘Ear Economy’].” 新闻传播科学 [Journalism and Communications] 11.4 (2023): 847–51. Wei, Chao. Interview. In “Free Talk of the Voice Actors I”, Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation Season 2. 14 Mar. 2019. <https://www.missevan.com/sound/player?id=1185150>. Weldon, Glen. “It’s All in Your Head: The One-Way Intimacy of Podcast Listening.” NPR, 2 Feb. 2018. <https://www.npr.org/2018/02/02/582105045/its-all-in-your-head-the-one-way-intimacy-of-podcast-listening>. Welker, James, ed. Queer Transfigurations: Boys Love Media in Asia. U of Hawai'i P, 2023. Zhang, Chunyu. “Loving Boys Twice as Much: Chinese Women’s Paradoxical Fandom of ‘Boys’ Love’ Fiction.” Women’s Studies in Communication 39.3 (July 2016): 249–67.