Journal articles on the topic 'Christian teenage girls'

AbstractThe paper examines the changes that occurred over time between Christians and Muslim in rural settlements. The study collected data from focus group discussions (FGDs) with married literate adolescent girls and unmarried non-literate adolescent girls. Christian and Muslim faith leaders as well as a government official were interviewed. The study revealed the rising rate of early marriage among Christians who were hitherto known to the delayed marriage of girl-child above 18 years. These changes have been attributed to the rising rate of poverty. This is because most of the rural families in the areas surveyed regardless of their faith; are polygamous because of the nature of their occupation––subsistence farming which relied on manual labour from the family. Cultural beliefs are still adhered to in rural settlements, most parents viewed girl-child as a problem which if left unmarried, may bring shame to the family: teenage pregnancy out of wedlock which is regarded as a taboo. The paper concludes that there is a need for the cultural reorientation and awareness on how rural dwellers view girl-child. Also, it is pertinent to introduce poverty reduction projects in rural areas and the establishment of schools closer to the people as well as imparting sex education

Since theRoev.WadeSupreme Court ruling in 1973 made abortion legal in the United States, it has consistently been subject to attempts to limit its reach, to make abortions harder to access, and thus to restrict their availability or frequency. In recent years, both pro-life and pro-choice groups have been reenergized, through calls to defund Planned Parenthood in Congress in 2015, and the 2016 Supreme Court ruling which prohibited a Texas “clinic-shutdown” law, for obstructing women's legal access to abortion underRoe. An era where this law was particularly contested, however, was the 1980s, which saw the Christian right crystallize and rally together to support the election of Ronald Reagan as President, in the hopes that he would promote their goals. Though extra-governmental pro-life groups and antiabortion individuals within the federal government were not ultimately able to do away withRoe, and would eventually become disappointed with Reagan's efforts in securing this, a series of measures over the course of the administration saw abortion access limited for one group of women in particular: teenage girls. This essay follows these legislative moves over the course of the 1980s, which include the first federal abstinence-only education bill, the Adolescent Family Life Act, a series of laws that allowed states to enact parental notification or consent clauses for minors’ abortions, and a “squeal rule” for doctors who treated sexually active teenagers. It analyses the discourse of and around each of these measures in order to understand how young women's sexual conduct mobilized abortion policy in this era. In doing so, it offers new perspectives on the significance of adolescent female sexuality to Reagan, to the Christian right, and to progressives involved in the heated debates over abortion and related battles of the 1980s culture wars.

The Kenya Demographic and Health Survey (KDHS 2014) revealed changing patterns in the contraceptive use of young women aged 15–24, shifting from injectable methods to implants. Long-acting reversible contraception (LARC) is user friendly, long-term, and more effective than other modern methods. It could be a game-changer in dealing with unintended pregnancies and herald a new chapter in the reproductive health and rights of young women. This study determined the factors associated with LARC use among adolescent girls and young women to expand the evidence of its potential as the most effective method of reducing unwanted pregnancies among the cohort. This study analysed secondary data from KDHS 2014 using binary logistic regression. The findings showed a rise in LARC use (18%), with identified predictors of reduced odds being aged 15–19 [OR = 0.735, 95% CI = 0.549–0.984], residence (rural) [OR = 0.674, CI = 0.525–0.865], religion (Protestant/other Christian) [OR = 0.377, CI = 0.168–0.842], married, [OR = 0.746, CI = 0.592–0.940], and region (high contraception) [OR = 0.773, CI = 0.626–0.955], while the number of living children showed increased odds for 1–2 children [OR = 17.624, CI = 9.482–32.756] and 3+ children [OR = 23.531, CI = 11.751–47.119]. This study established the rising popularity of LARC and identified factors that can be addressed to promote it. Its increased uptake could help Kenya achieve the International Conference on Population and Development 25’s first and second commitments on teenage pregnancies and maternal and new-born health, thus promoting the health, wellbeing, educational goals, and rights of this critical cohort. This study can guide the accelerated efforts needed in Kenya’s march towards the five zeros of unmet need for contraception, teenage pregnancies, unsafe abortions, preventable maternal deaths, and preventable neonatal/infant deaths.

Background and Objectives: Without mandatory school-based education, Romania is a leading European country in teen pregnancy. This survey aimed at assessing the level of knowledge and the opinions about sexual education and sexual-related issues among mothers of female teenagers aged 13–18 years old. Material and Methods: The survey was conducted between 2015 and 2017 and had four parts, collecting data about sociodemographic variables, the level of knowledge about sexuality, sexually transmitted diseases, and contraception. The respondents were mothers of female teenagers hospitalized in a tertiary pediatric clinic. Data were analyzed using IBM Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) Statistics for Windows, version 25 (Inc., Chicago, IL, USA). Results: One hundred and thirty-five mothers (42.46 ± 6.81 years old) were included in the research. Most of them were from rural areas, had graduated secondary school, were Christian-orthodox, married, and with a stable job. More than half of the mothers (61.42%) declared that they personally knew adolescents that were already mothers. In great proportion, mothers proved good knowledge about sexual education, contraception, and STDs. They considered that the minimum age for becoming married, in general, is about M = 18.62 ± 2.09 years old but in the case of their daughters, mothers appreciated that the best age would be 23.56 ± 9.37. Mothers considered that they had good communication with their daughters (M = 4.28 ± 0.99) and two-thirds sustained that they had discussed with them about sexual activity, pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, and contraception. In case of unwanted pregnancy of their daughters, one-third of the mothers (38.50%) would advise their girls to continue the pregnancy and 7.40% mentioned the termination of pregnancy. Two-thirds of them (74.10%) agreed to school-based sexual education. In the order of preferred sources for sexual education, mothers mentioned parents (85.90%), teachers (33.30%), and family doctors (24.40%). Comparative results regarding their own sex life and that of their daughters are presented. Conclusions: School-based programs should meet parental beliefs about sexuality and sexual education. School, as a creator of values and models, should find the golden ratio to better shape the personal, familial, and social needs for the healthy sexual behavior of the new generation.

A teenage Catholic girl lies immobilized in her bed in Worcester, Massachusetts, her dark hair gathered in pink satin ribbons, her lacy nightgown spread neatly around her. The pleasing effect of a damsel in a pre-Raphaelite painting is broken by the sight of a tracheotomy tube in her neck attached to a ventilator, and a feeding tube in her stomach. For the last six years the American media has provided glimpses into the curious vegetative existence of Audrey Santo (1984–), who has lain in a coma-like state since a swimming pool accident at the age of three. Despite the girl's lack of consciousness and brain function, she has been credited as the conduit for extraordinary events in her home which have included bleeding hosts, stigmata, weeping statues, exuding walls, and physical healings. Audrey's popularity is largely a media creation, stemming from a 1996 televised documentary film about her on EWTN, a Christian broadcasting network in Alabama, which spawned a deluge of requests to the Santo family from people wanting to make a pilgrimage to see their daughter.

The image appeared on the cover of a Sunday bulletin, produced and distributed by one of Guatemala City's most conservative neo-Pentecostal mega-churches. The picture presented the face of a young teenage girl, her eyes closed, lips wet, and skin kissed by a soft, transcendent light; the young woman's head was even tilted to the side in what Jacques Lacan would call jouissance (1998). Across her pink lips read Psalm 4:6: “In peace, I lay myself down.” This image, stitched together by the church's media relations department, makes a sly reference to Gian Lorenzo Bernini's sculpture, St. Teresa in Ecstasy (1652). The statue in Rome presents one of Teresa of Ávila's (1515–1582) mystical experiences of God, which the sixteenth-century Spanish saint narrates with unblinkingly erotic imagery. In her autobiography, St. Teresa writes how “the great love of God” often left her “utterly consumed,” “penetrated to [her] entrails,” and made her “utter several moans” for both the “intense pain” and its “sweetness” (Peers 1927: 197). With St. Teresa in mind, my own reaction to the church bulletin parroted Jacques Lacan's response to Bernini's statue. “She's coming,” Lacan commented, “There's no doubt about it” (1998: 76).

Abstract.DIFFERENCES BY CULTURE IN AN INITIAL VALIDATION OF AN INSTRUMENT IN CONSTRUCTION TO EVALUATE EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE IN A SAMPLE OF PRIMARY STUDENTSCulture differences over initial a validation of a test under construction to asses Emotional Intelligence in Primary degree students. The objective of this paper is to develop a questionnaire to assess Emotional Intelligence (EI), following the model which sees it as a set of skills, using as reference the MSCEIT (Mayer et al., 2009) aimed at a sample of students from Primary Education. To prevent the validity be adversely affected, we applied analysis to both customs/religion separately. We focused on 404 participants from 6 to 12 years old, from 4 different schools; 42.2% are boys and 57.8% girls; 58.9% are Muslims and 41.1% Christians. The techniques used in this survey are a test developed to assess EI in teenagers and a similar adaptation of EHS (Gismero, 2000). The results show high levels of reliability for both customs/religion groups. The dimensions are different (4 Christians and 5 Muslims) for both groups. There are positive correlations between totals and the dimensions that make them. We found no significant correlations between the two scales. Therefore this questionnaire is an appropriate tool to evaluate these capabilities after making some modifications in future works. It is more appropriate to apply the analysis separately.Keywords: Emotions, Emotional Intelligence, emotional education, assessment tool, pluricultural context.Resumen.Este trabajo tiene como objetivo elaborar un cuestionario para evaluar la Inteligencia Emocional (IE), siguiendo el modelo que la considera como un conjunto de habilidades, utilizando como referencia el MSCEIT (Mayer Salovey y Caruso, 2009) y destinado a una muestra infantil. Para evitar que la validez del instrumento se pueda ver negativamente afectada se aplicó en análisis a ambos grupos culturales por separado. Para esto se contó con una muestra de 404 participantes, procedentes de 4 centros distintos, de los cuales, el 47.8% son niños y el 52.2% niñas y el 68.8% de cultura/religión musulmana y el 31.2% cristiana, con edades comprendidas entre los 6 y los 12 años. Como instrumentos de evaluación se emplearon un test elaborado para la evaluación de la IE, junto con una adaptación propia de la EHS (Gismero, 2000). Los resultados obtenidos reflejan niveles de fiabilidad aceptables para ambos grupos culturales. Las dimensiones esperadas fueron diferentes (4 cristianos y 5 musulmanes), apareciendo intercorrelaciones positivas entre los totales y las dimensiones que lo conforman. No fue así para las Habilidades Sociales, medidas a través de este cuestionario. Este cuestionario se muestra como instrumento adecuado para evaluar estas capacidades en la población infantil, tras realizar algunas modificaciones en trabajos futuros, siendo más indicado aplicar el análisis por separado.Palabras Clave: Emociones, Inteligencia Emocional, educación emocional, instrumento de evaluación,contexto pluricultural.

Abstract: Obesity is a multifactorial disease, which is caused by excessive accumulation of fat tissue. So that it can be detrimental to health. Children who had obesity tend to have obesity during their adulthood. The school age of children have risks to get obesity. Ignoring breakfast and tend to consume fast food, tend to make teenagers at risk of suffering obesity.The research aim to identify the obese prevalence of adolescent at Tumou Tou Christian Senior High School Bitung City. The method of research used cross sectional descriptive approach. Samples were taken of 137 people aged 13-18 years by using simple random sampling. Based on the results of waist circumference there were 17 students obtained obese category. However, by using IMT examination there were only 5 students found obese category. Therefore, it can be concluded that the prevalence of obesity in adolescent is equal to 12.40% of the sample, and consists of 2.91% boys and 9.5% among girls. Keyword: Obesity, Adolescent, Tumou Tou Christian Senior High School Bitung City. Abstrak: Obesitas merupakan suatu penyakit multifaktorial, yang terjadi akibat akumulasi jaringan lemak berlebihan, sehingga dapat mengganggu kesehatan. Obesitas pada anak adalah faktor penentu yang sangat penting terhadap obesitas pada usia dewasa. Salah satu kelompok umur yang berisiko terjadinya obesitas adalah kelompok umur usiasekolah. Gaya hidup remaja saat ini yang sering melewatkan sarapan dan lebih suka mengkonsumsi fast food serta cenderung sedentary life style, membuat remaja berisiko untuk menderita obesitas. Tujuan dari penelitian untuk mengetahui prevalensi obesitas pada remaja di SMA Kristen Tumou Tou Kota Bitung. Jenis penelitian yang digunakan bersifat cross sectional dengan pendekatan deskriptif.Sampel yang diambil sebanyak 137 orang dengan usia 13-18 tahun di SMA Kristen Tumou Tou Kota Bitung secara simple random sampling. Berdasarkan hasil pemeriksaan lingkar pinggang pada 137 populasi didapatkan 17 siswa termasuk dalam kategori obesitas, namun dengan menggunakan pemeriksaan IMT ditemukan 5 orang siswa yang mengalami obesitas, sehingga dapat disimpulkan prevalensi obesitas pada remaja adalah sebesar 12,40% yang terdiri dari 2,91% remaja laki-laki dan 9,5% remaja perempuan. Kata kunci: Obesitas, Remaja, SMA Kristen Tumou Tou Kota Bitung.

Herbstein, Manu. Brave Music of a Distant Drum. Red Deer, AB: Red Deer Press. 2012. Print. A young African-American man, Zachariah Wiliams, comes to visit his mother, who has been enslaved all her adult life. He, too, is a slave, but views his Brazilian owners as benevolent Christians, who have taught him how to read and write, gave him some pay for his bookkeeping work, and have promised to set him free in the coming years. He is reticent to meet with his mother who has never converted to Christianity, and with whom he is not close; she calls him by the name Kwame Zumbi, and she is uninterested in his successes working for his owners. She has asked him to smuggle some paper from his office, for she is going to tell a story she wishes him to write down for his own daughter to read when she is older.Ama's story is brutal in a way that is familiar to many readers, but not predictable. She tells of a failed rebellion on the slave ship, the beatings and sexual assaults that were a part of her everyday life, and of her love for Tomba, Zacharias' father. She writes of her intimacy with the daughter of her owners, emphasizing the strangeness of a girl who attempts to treat Ama well as a slave, but who does not truly want Ama to have her freedom. Although Ama has some momentary victories against people involved in the slave trade, she is never ultimately free. The novel does not attempt to fulfill a reader's hope for Ama's emancipation, and in this way, is more realistic than some fictional narratives of slavery in the Americas; it also avoids 'containing' the issue of slavery by ending with an individual's escape. This makes for a difficult, but strong novel.This young adult novel is based on author Herbstein's earlier historical novel for adults, Ama: A Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade. Herbstein has made an unusual move here, revising the original novel for a younger audience, and has made thoughtful choices in doing so. He has shortened the story significantly, skimming over much of Ama's experiences that take place between her kidnapping in her village, and her forced placement on a slave ship headed for Brazil. (He skillfully explains this change as the limited amount of paper that Zachariah been able to procure; Ama wishes to retain only the details of her brutal enslavement in Brazil.) Herbstein's use of shifting first-person perspective, alternating between Ama and Zacharias, efficiently conveys Ama's blunt telling with her son's change from disbelief to anger at the injustice she has endured—an injustice that implicates his Brazilian owners. Brave Music of a Distant Drum is a brutal, thoughtful, well-written book that would be excellent for teenage readers.Recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Allison SivakAllison Sivak is the Public Services Librarian at the University of Alberta Libraries. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Library and Information Studies and Elementary Education, focusing on how the aesthetics of information design influence young people’s trust in the credibility of information content.

Approaching the third millennium of the Christian calendar (a fact which in spite of its ethnocentrism is a culturally significant means of making temporal sense of the world), more people in the industrialised world than ever before are stamped with the imprimatur granted by formal education. To draw on the work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, the world is loaded with people in possession of cultural capital. However, while Bourdieu wrote in a milieu concerned with the capacity to distinguish between the 'Well-Tempered Clavier' and 'Blue Danube' as a pivotal mark of distinction, in the postmodern times in which we apparently live, these distinctions are no longer quite so distinguishable nor distinguished. This is no more true than at the ground zero of popular culture where a small army of mostly young people sit in lounge rooms, cinemas, and cafés armed with media and/or cultural studies training of one form or another, reading their world as texts. The net effect: advertisements become 'clever' and cinemagraphic; irony has become an empty signifier; intertextuality eats itself; and the weekly late night broadcast of Buffy (the Vampire Slayer) has -- at least here in Brisbane -- become a flashpoint for the local universities' public relations wars. Go girl! In this short article it is my intention to explore -- in a none too systematic manner -- some of the ways in which the traditional determinants of class are being redefined in the light of the so-called postmodern capitalist informational economy which arguably defines this moment. From this, I will then segue into a discussion of contemporary cultural distinctions -- the consumer practices inflecting style and fashion -- that draw upon an informed and educated subject as both their inspiration and market. Cultural Capital and Bricolage Those with cultural capital are in this socio-political moment the 'haves' (as distinct from the 'have nots') of an age where much certainty is being challenged. In both consumer choices and in the wider spheres of employment and kinship structures, bricolage -- the piecing together of value and/or meaning from the assortment of possibilities that can be wrenched from what's 'out there' -- is the modus operandi of those with the educational chutzpah to venture to try. Of course, the starting points are still far from equal; some hit the ground running due to privileges of birth, skin, class, gender, nationality, normative sexualities and biologies, others have often sought out education as the first step in an attempt to endow themselves with capital in any form. But the fact remains that the hurdle has been raised and formal -- preferably post-secondary -- education is now something of a pre-requisite for social mobility. Zygmunt Bauman equates this endowed subjectivity with that of the tourist: the mobile bourgeois consumer par excellence. As bricoleur our (I use the term 'our' to refer to those people similarly 'marked by our non-markedness' as myself: white, educated citizens of an industrialised nation, even if that is Australia) highly portable knowledge confers upon us a privileged status within global racial and economic structures of power. Cultural knowledge can operate literally as both right of passage and funding; hence cultural capital. As those in the best position from which to maximise the possibilities of the postmodern world, Bauman argues that the 'tourist' never actually arrives per se, rather the achievement is the journey -- the capacity to move on when the need arises or the whim strikes (90). That sort of mobility presumes agency. 'Tourists' choose to be mobile and transient and so can arrive somewhere bigger and better if they wish; they are not forcibly dislocated to what may well be a worse option. In Bauman's words, 'tourists' possess 'situational control': "the ability to choose where and with what parts of the world to 'interface' and when to switch off the connection" (91). By definition such a system also requires a larger grouping of people who are excluded from Nirvana; Bauman names this status that of the 'vagabond', those who are forcibly moved on from any space which may present as a possible home and who are allowed to settle precisely nowhere. They too are on the move, but unlike the movement of the 'tourist' this is not a chosen path; for the 'vagabond' freedom means the freedom "not to have to wander around" (92). The 'vagabonds' freedom is on par with that of the person forced by institutional status to live on the streets of industrialised societies wanting nothing more than a vaguely secure place to have a kip. The road may be mythic and romantic -- a site of freedom -- if you can choose to be there (and to return 'home'), but, and this can be said of many situations, something is not romantic nor desirable if you have no choice but to be there or to do it, even if the case were that if such a choice were possible you would indeed choose such a course of action. 'Slumming it' is fun if you know a hot bath and warm bed awaits you at the end of the day. Needless to say, it's also incredibly insulting to those who don't have this choice. Therefore, returning to Bauman, the point is that the greater "freedom of choice one has, the higher one's rank in the postmodern social hierarchy" (93). This embodied characterisation of the material significance of cultural capital in an age where information is king, should serve as a warning signal to those for whom the hype of a technologically mediated informational economy of global proportions equals rings somehow true. New horizons are being opened up and will soon be visited by independent travellers in search of a more 'authentic' and 'exotic' experience, who will subsequently open up the space for the more overtly imperialist agents who inevitably follow. Goa is no longer where it's happening, grab the Rough Guide to cyberspace and hang on. Nerd Chic At this point however, it's time to relate this all back to my putative title for this piece and to come clean on some moments of interpellation, which, as always, got me thinking on my own place within global systems of power (and desire). And I have to 'fess up that all my cultural capital came at a price, as it did for many of us: I was a teenage nerd (and arguably still am). What brings me joy however, is that long after the guys had their nerd chic moment in the sun -- Jarvis Cocker, glasses, lots of corduroy, (indeed, all those British non-laddish lads and their iconography) -- it's finally also the nerd chicks' time in the warm glow of funkiness. I'm afraid I'm not referring here to the popularity of the Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace section of the Powerhouse Museum's "Universal Machine" Exhibition currently running in Sydney which included a piece of the original analytical engine itself as well as details regarding Ava and her status as the world's first computer programmer. The clunkiness of the world's first computer -- in all its tarnished metal and mechanistic glory -- couldn't compete in the eyes of the punters with the free Internet access provided by the spiffy new colourful Apple I-Macs. No, the current moment of female nerd chic, as I see it, is one much more firmly anchored in fashion, consumption and image. It is on a direct continuum from the emergence of nerd chic which is only now providing a space for women on vaguely equal terms [and by way of example, I refer you to the not necessarily unattractive, but still problematically infantilising, trend that hit the industrialised world in recent years which drew upon a cutesy schoolgirl aesthetic: I'm thinking of hair clips and 'baby doll' dresses in 'sweet' prints here]. Too Many Pockets As the new millennium beckons, in the industrialised world, technology saturates our lives; we are increasingly -- both literally and figuratively -- becoming cyborg beings. Cyborg subjectivity is a frequently cited concept which is used to describe, in broad terms, the manner in which human beings are already located as agents and vehicles within technological networks. Overt examples of cyborg beings are provided by science fiction, but this serves as a distraction from the fact that cyborgs already walk amongst us. Indeed probably are us. Maybe not in a strictly technical sense, but certainly as beings for whom the negotiation of cyborg identities is a taken for granted feature of everyday life. A cyborg being is one which is fitted with any manner of medical accoutrements (pacemaker, artificial limb, etc.), or which has been inoculated, wears glasses, sits at a computer, works in the electronics manufacturing industry, rides a bike, takes vitamin supplements, and on the list goes. The cyborg is a hard concept to pin down but it is precisely this slippery property which renders it a useful vehicle for exploring a world of overwhelming diversity and multiple subjectivities. This is also why it can be conceptually seized upon as a fashion concept, stripped of its political ramifications as posited by feminists (in particular Donna Haraway and her now legendary piece "A Manifesto For Cyborgs" in which she seeks to map out the possibilities for a technologically-able, contingently adept socialist feminism), but remain associated with women as a strong and powerful image of empowered -- and significantly embodied -- female identity. Hence, we have a series of interpellating fashion trends that borrow heavily from dance party/rave culture -- itself a space loaded with technological and cyborg possibilities -- and are manifest in a fashion which emphasises utility with an androgynous and sharp edge: combat trousers; record/porterage bags or bags which sit around the hip and look like fabric gun holsters (both of which supposedly sit on the body in such a way as to minimise their presence, while maximising one's cultural capital); puffer jackets with lots of zipped pockets so that your gear doesn't fall out while you dance all night; body adornment in the form of mehindi (henna tattoos); tattoos, bindi, glitter, piercing, body hugging jewellery; and, of course, trainers for mobility. This nerd-girl moment, the particular meeting of contemporary dance music and the fashionability of the savvy smart cyborg woman is discursively marked by the (unedited) video clip for the Chemical Brothers' 'Hey Boy, Hey Girl'. It features a young book-reading, museum visiting girl, hassled by boys, who (through a nice graphic match involving her image in a mirror) transforms into a cool, nightclub groover. A unifying motif is provided throughout by the girl/woman's fascination with an exploration of the role of the skeletal system as it holds us up and allows us to function, hence the book, the museum and some interesting renderings of sex in a nightclub toilet. The organic body as finely tuned skeletal machine, and Chemical Brothers video -- go girl? References Bauman, Zygmunt. "Tourists and Vagabonds: the Heroes and Victims of Postmodernity." Postmodernity and Its Discontents. Cambridge: Polity P, 1997. 83-94. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. London: Routledge, 1994 (1979). Harraway, Donna. "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980's." Socialist Review 80 15.2 (1985): 64-107. [This article was also subsequently reprinted in Haraway's Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991.] Citation reference for this article MLA style: Susan Luckman. "XX @ MM: Cyborg Subjectivity as Millennial Fashion Statement." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.6 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/xxmm.php>. Chicago style: Susan Luckman, "XX @ MM: Cyborg Subjectivity as Millennial Fashion Statement," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 6 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/xxmm.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Susan Luckman. (1999) XX @ MM: cyborg subjectivity as millennial fashion statement. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(6). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/xxmm.php> ([your date of access]).

Uhh, dirrty Filthy Nasty (too dirrty to clean my act up If you ain’t dirrty .. you ain’t here to party)—Christina Aguilera “DIRRTY” The teacher engaged in a pedagogy which requires some articulation of knowledge forms and pleasures integral to students’ daily life is walking a dangerous road.—Henry Giroux and Roger Simon, “Schooling, Popular Culture and a Pedagogy of Possibility” Pornography and pedagogy have been positioned as mutually exclusive domains within educational discourses that seek to regulate the borders between rational knowledge and sexually lewd commercial imagery. Yet these realms begin to overlap in productive ways when hypersexual popular cultures are integrated as meaningful social texts within the classroom. As mainstream youth media increasingly play up the appeal of what Brian McNair calls “porno-chic” cultural entertainment, teachers and students of cultural meanings are compelled to take seriously the pervasive power of soft porn influencing everyday desires and identifications. McNair writes that “porno-chic is not porn, then, but the representation of porn in non-pornographic art and culture, the pastiche and parody of, the homage to and investigation of porn; the postmodern transformation of porn into mainstream cultural artifact for a variety of purposes.” (61) The crossover of porn imagery into commercial advertising and entertainment industries is an extension of a problem that Sut Jhally refers to as the commodity-image system which frames sexy bodies within marketing strategies that encourage fast voyeuristic forms of consumption (252). Yet complex questions about how youth engage with the intensification of their sexual fields of vision as part of their daily routines watching TV, playing video games, enjoying films and music videos as desiring subjects are often overlooked. As young people grow up today within porno saturated visual cultures, they need to be given space to talk about their ideas, feelings and contradictory responses. In this way, bringing porn into university curriculum is a necessary part of a critical and creative pedagogical practice. I learned about the urgency and difficulty of such a practice when my students brought in Christina Aguilera’s video Dirrty to a class on consumer cultures and sexual representation. Out of some wildly disparate and complex readings of this video developed by my students, we were able to explore ideas about body images, censorship, queerness, commodification and fantasy without foreclosing the ambivalence unleashed in the process of studying Dirrty pornographic styles. In my introductory popular culture classes, I give permission to students to exchange stories about the sexualized pleasures of mediated youth cultures as a way to encourage awareness of the specific icons, textual details and patterns of representation that make up our viewing and listening experiences. I use this as a take off point to consider how our popular conceptions of sexuality are constructed and contested by desiring and relational interpretations connecting hegemonic image fantasies with subjective investments. Once students start conversing about what they notice and how they see and feel about sexually explicit images shown in class, the contested terrain of popular cultural porn becomes vividly animated. The point is to demystify the topic of pornographic imagery as something fixed, taboo, banal, asocial, shameful or demeaning. What students of media cultures do not expect is that their personal pleasures and longings will be socially situated and theorized as a dialogue about the politics of representation. Student pleasures collide in unexpected ways. I am always surprised by what appeals to their fantasy ideals, and the reasons they offer to explain why and how they seek out and utilize their desires as viewers. To spur discussion, I bring in sex texts that range from Hollywood film clips to nightclub fliers to queer photography to internet homepages. But while I have a rough idea of the conceptual course we will take, we usually end up following alternative paths, negotiating incommensurable psychic and social life-worlds. What I find troubling, erotic or fascinating might not connect up with what my students notice or experience as seductive or meaningful. Foregrounding the pleasures of sexual images in teaching popular culture is tricky because they are hard to predict or contain for analysis. Consensus is an impossibility from the start as sexual fears, denial and fantasies disrupt any possibility of rational unity. Pornography leaks across disciplinary boundaries and blurs conventional distinctions between, private/public, subjective/social, work/play, school/leisure, sexual/intellectual realms of experience. Teaching pornography is risky business. Turning theoretically back upon the popular fascinations of “porno-chic” images also invites pleasure into the very process of academic learning that has traditionally scorned its worth and relevance. The interactions of teaching and learning become infused with affective longings and frustrations. Questions arise such as: What happens when sexualized pleasure as an experience lived through popular cultures is reenacted in the classroom? Who is willing to risk exposure and vulnerability? What are the ethical and political limits of interrogating intimate pleasures? How do I render this intimacy culturally meaningful? When personal pleasures are questioned as part of a public dialogue are they diminished? Intensified? Transformed? I have spent many years theorizing sexuality and pleasure, trying to find a language that overcomes the one-sided institutional focus and conceptual detachment of ideological critiques without falling prey to empirical approaches that claims to pin down the authentic transparent truth of popular pleasures as fixed and isolated data. What is needed is a process of reading experience as a social semiotic process capable of attending to textual representations and institutional power formations that organize popular pleasures, without foreclosing the nuances of the erotic subjective and collective engagements with culture that exceed and disturb hegemonic meanings. Teresa de Lauretis’ writings are useful toward interconnecting subjectivity and social/cultural worlds in terms of dynamic mediations between texts, contexts, psychic memories and sense perceptions. Drawing upon Charle’s Peirce’s notion of interpretants, de Lauretis theorizes a semiosis of experience that is actively engaged with and constituted through everyday signs, objects, relations and events. A cultural sign such as a song or music video becomes mediated through intellectual, emotional and energetic interpretants, to comprise a “habit-change,” changes in consciousness and concrete action in the social world. The experiential process here is open-ended and ongoing in its formation and includes rational will and reflection in reading signs along with affective, bodily responses and enactments (1984). The realm of subjective experience and pleasure does not abstract or diminish the status of cultural texts and meanings but implicates them in a living practice. De Lauretis uses this approach to think through the exchanges of “perverse” desires that exceed heteronormative sex/gender relations between texts and spectators (1994). Acknowledging the normalization of “perverse” desire enables a more dynamic understanding of the psychic and social movements of fantasy scenarios as a historical process. I think it’s impossible to begin to embrace pornographic pleasure as pedagogically productive without such an elaboration of experience as always already appropriating, mediating, and transforming dominant social texts. At the same time, what has become vividly apparent to me is that translating a theory of the semiosis of experience into practical strategies performed in the classroom is easier said than done. Nothing complicates and impels thinking about pleasure more than a room filled with dozens of teenage students who are asked to speak openly about their feelings and thoughts about sexy pop music stars and performances – especially when the topics and examples are chosen by, for and about students. During a week of my pop culture class last year, several students giving presentations coincidentally brought in the same video to show and talk about: Christina Aguilera’s music video for her song Dirrty – from the album Stripped. The video features aggressive erotic scenes of young women taking the lead with young men watching and dancing in a darkly lit underground boxing club, including signs of Hip Hop street culture- graffiti, break dancing, and rap, intermixed with raunchy soft-porn images of women wrestling and showering together. It is a massive party verging on sexual orgy compelling the audience to join in and get “dirty, filthy, nasty, and if you ain’t dirty you ain’t here to party.” This is an exemplary televised fantasy product designed shock and tease youth audiences with rebellious hip seductive visual forms and contents. What is important for my purposes is not any single value or meaning of this video but the ways it elicited multiple engagements and interpretations from student presenters and classmates through their experiential pleasures and displeasures. The first presenter analyzed Dirrty as an example of the corporate commodification of youth sexuality. >From this perspective the video sells packaged consumable fragments of sexy bodies as imaginary fetish ideals. Drawing upon feminist analysis of pornography, the student argued that girls’ bodies continue to be objectified in the guise of physical femme dominance, remaining on display for the dreamworlds of adolescent men. What gets stressed are the ways sexual transgressions within mass media work in the service of maintaining inequalities, idolizing promiscuous feminine aggressors whose power is contained to feed fantasies of sexual submission that reinforce hierarchical control. Eroticized grrrl power becomes a contest of popularity intensified through the polymorphous visual style of MTV. Referring to Giroux’s critique of the hypersexual promotion and commercial branding of youth (1998), this student articulates her own desires for representations of youth sexuality focused on historically grounded and substantial relational qualities rather than normative beauty ideals. In the first presentation “porno-chic” entertainment pleasures are analyzed as something to be wary of, as cheap surface distractions and corporate manipulations. The next presentation explored the cultural and emotional volatility of Dirrty’s visual spectacles. This student identified herself as seeing something else, a glimpse of sexual openness, diversity and freedom. Multi-racial/sexual groups of men and women, women with women and men moving together in playful scenarios through fluid urgent expression of desire, become framed here in terms of a productive excess. This person glimpsed utopian possibilities through exaggerated sexed-up styles of commodification. Postmodern theories of queer subjectivity are used in this presentation to challenge the binary categories structuring the first presentation. Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity is engaged with to help interpret possibilities for mobile gender identifications and sexual desires constituted within discursively organized frameworks (1990). The contingency and improvisation of her reading as a queer student confronts the limits of the previous presentation’s focus on uniform hegemonic ideological powers. The final presenter turned the class’s attention to the surrounding media commentary and context of Aguilera’s video. In this argument, the public moral panic targeting Aguilera’s video Dirrty as obscene was contrasted with the acceptance and normalization of sexuality in videos by male artists such as Nelly’s Hot in Here where women move and strip in the background as decorations of male artists. The controversy in the press surrounding the sexually explicit images in Dirrty, which were seen as going too far (provoking an advisory warning), becomes politically meaningful to this student who insists that young women artists are regulated by different standards, demonized as vulgar, slutty and dangerous. This student affirmed the need for a broad range of images that affirm women taking sexual control, displaying creative sexual lust and publicly voicing desires as a way to confront conservative moral codes. Here viewing pleasures become focused on media pluralization and critical debates that situate sexual representations in relation to diverse forms of reception as politically vital for those historically censored and marginalized. Each of these presentations ends in dissonant readings of a specific set of images, rhythms and words, making use of a wide range of theoretical ideas combined with experiential reflection. Tension fills the room as students realize their ideas and pleasures are contested, refused, challenged, and altered when in dialogue with others. What is my role as an instructor at this point? Do I synthesize the scattered heterogeneity of experiences arising in relation to Dirrty by promoting a single issue, theory or concept? Do I emphasize a playful “pornographication” of mainstream youth culture and encourage their guilty pleasures? Do I assert my authority as professor and provide a critical reading that tops theirs as moral, rational and free of personal pleasure and bias? Do I allow my class to become a free for all? None of these options are pedagogically satisfying to me since I am interested in the very discomfort and questions provoked by the differences unleashed by this video. Perhaps it is precisely the wild loose ends of a questioning process that makes pornography a useful pedagogical tool. Differences produced through porno-chic entertainment are about a shifting divergence of social experiences, media powers and embodied pleasures. As a teacher I try to foster an ongoing dialogue about such differences by theorizing what gets privileged and left out of our purview without delimiting new ways of experiencing and interpreting their subjective and political significance. I smile, turn off my power point presentation and allow for a space of silence in which no definitions are offered, no contradictions resolved, no conclusions are reached. I try to convey the productive tensions between positions offered within this moment of radical ambivalence as part of a pedagogy engaged with popular sex cultures. It is at such times of learning as a semiosis of experience engaged with the pornographic edges of media cultures, that possibilities emerge for understanding our vulnerable pleasures in relation to those of others. References Aguilera, Christina. “DIRRTY,” from Stripped, 2002. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1990. De Lauretis, Teresa. Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Basingstoke an London: Macmillan, 1984. —-. The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire. Bloomington and Indianapoli: Indiana University Press, 1994. Giroux, Henry. “Teenage Sexuality, Body Politics, and the Pedagogy of display,” Youth Culture: Identity in a Postmodern World, ed. Jonathan Epstein, Blackwell, 1998. Giroux, Henry and Roger Simon. “Schooling, Popular Culture and a Pedagogy of Possibility,” Popular Culture Schooling and Everyday Life, Henry Giroux and Roger Simon eds., Bergin & Garvey, 1989. Sut Jhally, “Image-Based Culture: advertising and popular culture,” Gender, Race and Class in Media. Eds. Gail Dines and Jean Humez, Sage, 2003. McNair, Brian. Striptease Culture: Sex, Media and the Democratization of Desire. New York: Routledge, 2002. MLA Style Driver, Susan. "Pornographic Pedagogies?: The Risks of Teaching “Dirrty” Popular Cultures." M/C Journal 7.4 (2004). 10 October 2004 <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0410/03_teaching.php>. APA Style Driver, S. (2004 Oct 11). Pornographic Pedagogies?: The Risks of Teaching “Dirrty” Popular Cultures, M/C Journal, 7(4). Retrieved Oct 10 2004 from <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0410/03_teaching.php>

1991 An afternoon in late 1991 found me on a Sydney bus reading Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho (1991). A disembarking passenger paused at my side and, as I glanced up, hissed, ‘I don’t know how you can read that filth’. As she continued to make her way to the front of the vehicle, I was as stunned as if she had struck me physically. There was real vehemence in both her words and how they were delivered, and I can still see her eyes squeezing into slits as she hesitated while curling her mouth around that final angry word: ‘filth’. Now, almost fifteen years later, the memory is remarkably vivid. As the event is also still remarkable; this comment remaining the only remark ever made to me by a stranger about anything I have been reading during three decades of travelling on public transport. That inflamed commuter summed up much of the furore that greeted the publication of American Psycho. More than this, and unusually, condemnation of the work both actually preceded, and affected, its publication. Although Ellis had been paid a substantial U.S. $300,000 advance by Simon & Schuster, pre-publication stories based on circulating galley proofs were so negative—offering assessments of the book as: ‘moronic … pointless … themeless … worthless (Rosenblatt 3), ‘superficial’, ‘a tapeworm narrative’ (Sheppard 100) and ‘vile … pornography, not literature … immoral, but also artless’ (Miner 43)—that the publisher cancelled the contract (forfeiting the advance) only months before the scheduled release date. CEO of Simon & Schuster, Richard E. Snyder, explained: ‘it was an error of judgement to put our name on a book of such questionable taste’ (quoted in McDowell, “Vintage” 13). American Psycho was, instead, published by Random House/Knopf in March 1991 under its prestige paperback imprint, Vintage Contemporary (Zaller; Freccero 48) – Sonny Mehta having signed the book to Random House some two days after Simon & Schuster withdrew from its agreement with Ellis. While many commented on the fact that Ellis was paid two substantial advances, it was rarely noted that Random House was a more prestigious publisher than Simon & Schuster (Iannone 52). After its release, American Psycho was almost universally vilified and denigrated by the American critical establishment. The work was criticised on both moral and aesthetic/literary/artistic grounds; that is, in terms of both what Ellis wrote and how he wrote it. Critics found it ‘meaningless’ (Lehmann-Haupt C18), ‘abysmally written … schlock’ (Kennedy 427), ‘repulsive, a bloodbath serving no purpose save that of morbidity, titillation and sensation … pure trash, as scummy and mean as anything it depicts, a dirty book by a dirty writer’ (Yardley B1) and ‘garbage’ (Gurley Brown 21). Mark Archer found that ‘the attempt to confuse style with content is callow’ (31), while Naomi Wolf wrote that: ‘overall, reading American Psycho holds the same fascination as watching a maladjusted 11-year-old draw on his desk’ (34). John Leo’s assessment sums up the passionate intensity of those critical of the work: ‘totally hateful … violent junk … no discernible plot, no believable characterization, no sensibility at work that comes anywhere close to making art out of all the blood and torture … Ellis displays little feel for narration, words, grammar or the rhythm of language’ (23). These reviews, as those printed pre-publication, were titled in similarly unequivocal language: ‘A Revolting Development’ (Sheppard 100), ‘Marketing Cynicism and Vulgarity’ (Leo 23), ‘Designer Porn’ (Manguel 46) and ‘Essence of Trash’ (Yardley B1). Perhaps the most unambiguous in its message was Roger Rosenblatt’s ‘Snuff this Book!’ (3). Of all works published in the U.S.A. at that time, including those clearly carrying X ratings, the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW) selected American Psycho for special notice, stating that the book ‘legitimizes inhuman and savage violence masquerading as sexuality’ (NOW 114). Judging the book ‘the most misogynistic communication’ the organisation had ever encountered (NOW L.A. chapter president, Tammy Bruce, quoted in Kennedy 427) and, on the grounds that ‘violence against women in any form is no longer socially acceptable’ (McDowell, “NOW” C17), NOW called for a boycott of the entire Random House catalogue for the remainder of 1991. Naomi Wolf agreed, calling the novel ‘a violation not of obscenity standards, but of women’s civil rights, insofar as it results in conditioning male sexual response to female suffering or degradation’ (34). Later, the boycott was narrowed to Knopf and Vintage titles (Love 46), but also extended to all of the many products, companies, corporations, firms and brand names that are a feature of Ellis’s novel (Kauffman, “American” 41). There were other unexpected responses such as the Walt Disney Corporation barring Ellis from the opening of Euro Disney (Tyrnauer 101), although Ellis had already been driven from public view after receiving a number of death threats and did not undertake a book tour (Kennedy 427). Despite this, the book received significant publicity courtesy of the controversy and, although several national bookstore chains and numerous booksellers around the world refused to sell the book, more than 100,000 copies were sold in the U.S.A. in the fortnight after publication (Dwyer 55). Even this success had an unprecedented effect: when American Psycho became a bestseller, The New York Times announced that it would be removing the title from its bestseller lists because of the book’s content. In the days following publication in the U.S.A., Canadian customs announced that it was considering whether to allow the local arm of Random House to, first, import American Psycho for sale in Canada and, then, publish it in Canada (Kirchhoff, “Psycho” C1). Two weeks later, when the book was passed for sale (Kirchhoff, “Customs” C1), demonstrators protested the entrance of a shipment of the book. In May, the Canadian Defence Force made headlines when it withdrew copies of the book from the library shelves of a navy base in Halifax (Canadian Press C1). Also in May 1991, the Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC), the federal agency that administers the classification scheme for all films, computer games and ‘submittable’ publications (including books) that are sold, hired or exhibited in Australia, announced that it had classified American Psycho as ‘Category 1 Restricted’ (W. Fraser, “Book” 5), to be sold sealed, to only those over 18 years of age. This was the first such classification of a mainstream literary work since the rating scheme was introduced (Graham), and the first time a work of literature had been restricted for sale since Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint in 1969. The chief censor, John Dickie, said the OFLC could not justify refusing the book classification (and essentially banning the work), and while ‘as a satire on yuppies it has a lot going for it’, personally he found the book ‘distasteful’ (quoted in W. Fraser, “Sensitive” 5). Moreover, while this ‘R’ classification was, and remains, a national classification, Australian States and Territories have their own sale and distribution regulation systems. Under this regime, American Psycho remains banned from sale in Queensland, as are all other books in this classification category (Vnuk). These various reactions led to a flood of articles published in the U.S.A., Canada, Australia and the U.K., voicing passionate opinions on a range of issues including free speech and censorship, the corporate control of artistic thought and practice, and cynicism on the part of authors and their publishers about what works might attract publicity and (therefore) sell in large numbers (see, for instance, Hitchens 7; Irving 1). The relationship between violence in society and its representation in the media was a common theme, with only a few commentators (including Norman Mailer in a high profile Vanity Fair article) suggesting that, instead of inciting violence, the media largely reflected, and commented upon, societal violence. Elayne Rapping, an academic in the field of Communications, proposed that the media did actively glorify violence, but only because there was a market for such representations: ‘We, as a society love violence, thrive on violence as the very basis of our social stability, our ideological belief system … The problem, after all, is not media violence but real violence’ (36, 38). Many more commentators, however, agreed with NOW, Wolf and others and charged Ellis’s work with encouraging, and even instigating, violent acts, and especially those against women, calling American Psycho ‘a kind of advertising for violence against women’ (anthropologist Elliot Leyton quoted in Dwyer 55) and, even, a ‘how-to manual on the torture and dismemberment of women’ (Leo 23). Support for the book was difficult to find in the flood of vitriol directed against it, but a small number wrote in Ellis’s defence. Sonny Mehta, himself the target of death threats for acquiring the book for Random House, stood by this assessment, and was widely quoted in his belief that American Psycho was ‘a serious book by a serious writer’ and that Ellis was ‘remarkably talented’ (Knight-Ridder L10). Publishing director of Pan Macmillan Australia, James Fraser, defended his decision to release American Psycho on the grounds that the book told important truths about society, arguing: ‘A publisher’s office is a clearing house for ideas … the real issue for community debate [is] – to what extent does it want to hear the truth about itself, about individuals within the community and about the governments the community elects. If we care about the preservation of standards, there is none higher than this. Gore Vidal was among the very few who stated outright that he liked the book, finding it ‘really rather inspired … a wonderfully comic novel’ (quoted in Tyrnauer 73). Fay Weldon agreed, judging the book as ‘brilliant’, and focusing on the importance of Ellis’s message: ‘Bret Easton Ellis is a very good writer. He gets us to a ‘T’. And we can’t stand it. It’s our problem, not his. American Psycho is a beautifully controlled, careful, important novel that revolves around its own nasty bits’ (C1). Since 1991 As unlikely as this now seems, I first read American Psycho without any awareness of the controversy raging around its publication. I had read Ellis’s earlier works, Less than Zero (1985) and The Rules of Attraction (1987) and, with my energies fully engaged elsewhere, cannot now even remember how I acquired the book. Since that angry remark on the bus, however, I have followed American Psycho’s infamy and how it has remained in the public eye over the last decade and a half. Australian OFLC decisions can be reviewed and reversed – as when Pasolini’s final film Salo (1975), which was banned in Australia from the time of its release in 1975 until it was un-banned in 1993, was then banned again in 1998 – however, American Psycho’s initial classification has remained unchanged. In July 2006, I purchased a new paperback copy in rural New South Wales. It was shrink-wrapped in plastic and labelled: ‘R. Category One. Not available to persons under 18 years. Restricted’. While exact sales figures are difficult to ascertain, by working with U.S.A., U.K. and Australian figures, this copy was, I estimate, one of some 1.5 to 1.6 million sold since publication. In the U.S.A., backlist sales remain very strong, with some 22,000 copies sold annually (Holt and Abbott), while lifetime sales in the U.K. are just under 720,000 over five paperback editions. Sales in Australia are currently estimated by Pan MacMillan to total some 100,000, with a new printing of 5,000 copies recently ordered in Australia on the strength of the book being featured on the inaugural Australian Broadcasting Commission’s First Tuesday Book Club national television program (2006). Predictably, the controversy around the publication of American Psycho is regularly revisited by those reviewing Ellis’s subsequent works. A major article in Vanity Fair on Ellis’s next book, The Informers (1994), opened with a graphic description of the death threats Ellis received upon the publication of American Psycho (Tyrnauer 70) and then outlined the controversy in detail (70-71). Those writing about Ellis’s two most recent novels, Glamorama (1999) and Lunar Park (2005), have shared this narrative strategy, which also forms at least part of the frame of every interview article. American Psycho also, again predictably, became a major topic of discussion in relation to the contracting, making and then release of the eponymous film in 2000 as, for example, in Linda S. Kauffman’s extensive and considered review of the film, which spent the first third discussing the history of the book’s publication (“American” 41-45). Playing with this interest, Ellis continues his practice of reusing characters in subsequent works. Thus, American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman, who first appeared in The Rules of Attraction as the elder brother of the main character, Sean – who, in turn, makes a brief appearance in American Psycho – also turns up in Glamorama with ‘strange stains’ on his Armani suit lapels, and again in Lunar Park. The book also continues to be regularly cited in discussions of censorship (see, for example, Dubin; Freccero) and has been included in a number of university-level courses about banned books. In these varied contexts, literary, cultural and other critics have also continued to disagree about the book’s impact upon readers, with some persisting in reading the novel as a pornographic incitement to violence. When Wade Frankum killed seven people in Sydney, many suggested a link between these murders and his consumption of X-rated videos, pornographic magazines and American Psycho (see, for example, Manne 11), although others argued against this (Wark 11). Prosecutors in the trial of Canadian murderer Paul Bernardo argued that American Psycho provided a ‘blueprint’ for Bernardo’s crimes (Canadian Press A5). Others have read Ellis’s work more positively, as for instance when Sonia Baelo Allué compares American Psycho favourably with Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs (1988) – arguing that Harris not only depicts more degrading treatment of women, but also makes Hannibal Lecter, his antihero monster, sexily attractive (7-24). Linda S. Kauffman posits that American Psycho is part of an ‘anti-aesthetic’ movement in art, whereby works that are revoltingly ugly and/or grotesque function to confront the repressed fears and desires of the audience and explore issues of identity and subjectivity (Bad Girls), while Patrick W. Shaw includes American Psycho in his work, The Modern American Novel of Violence because, in his opinion, the violence Ellis depicts is not gratuitous. Lost, however, in much of this often-impassioned debate and dialogue is the book itself – and what Ellis actually wrote. 21-years-old when Less than Zero was published, Ellis was still only 26 when American Psycho was released and his youth presented an obvious target. In 1991, Terry Teachout found ‘no moment in American Psycho where Bret Easton Ellis, who claims to be a serious artist, exhibits the workings of an adult moral imagination’ (45, 46), Brad Miner that it was ‘puerile – the very antithesis of good writing’ (43) and Carol Iannone that ‘the inclusion of the now famous offensive scenes reveals a staggering aesthetic and moral immaturity’ (54). Pagan Kennedy also ‘blamed’ the entire work on this immaturity, suggesting that instead of possessing a developed artistic sensibility, Ellis was reacting to (and, ironically, writing for the approval of) critics who had lauded the documentary realism of his violent and nihilistic teenage characters in Less than Zero, but then panned his less sensational story of campus life in The Rules of Attraction (427-428). Yet, in my opinion, there is not only a clear and coherent aesthetic vision driving Ellis’s oeuvre but, moreover, a profoundly moral imagination at work as well. This was my view upon first reading American Psycho, and part of the reason I was so shocked by that charge of filth on the bus. Once familiar with the controversy, I found this view shared by only a minority of commentators. Writing in the New Statesman & Society, Elizabeth J. Young asked: ‘Where have these people been? … Books of pornographic violence are nothing new … American Psycho outrages no contemporary taboos. Psychotic killers are everywhere’ (24). I was similarly aware that such murderers not only existed in reality, but also in many widely accessed works of literature and film – to the point where a few years later Joyce Carol Oates could suggest that the serial killer was an icon of popular culture (233). While a popular topic for writers of crime fiction and true crime narratives in both print and on film, a number of ‘serious’ literary writers – including Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Kate Millet, Margaret Atwood and Oates herself – have also written about serial killers, and even crossed over into the widely acknowledged as ‘low-brow’ true crime genre. Many of these works (both popular or more literary) are vivid and powerful and have, as American Psycho, taken a strong moral position towards their subject matter. Moreover, many books and films have far more disturbing content than American Psycho, yet have caused no such uproar (Young and Caveney 120). By now, the plot of American Psycho is well known, although the structure of the book, noted by Weldon above (C1), is rarely analysed or even commented upon. First person narrator, Patrick Bateman, a young, handsome stockbroker and stereotypical 1980s yuppie, is also a serial killer. The book is largely, and innovatively, structured around this seeming incompatibility – challenging readers’ expectations that such a depraved criminal can be a wealthy white professional – while vividly contrasting the banal, and meticulously detailed, emptiness of Bateman’s life as a New York über-consumer with the scenes where he humiliates, rapes, tortures, murders, mutilates, dismembers and cannibalises his victims. Although only comprising some 16 out of 399 pages in my Picador edition, these violent scenes are extreme and certainly make the work as a whole disgustingly confronting. But that is the entire point of Ellis’s work. Bateman’s violence is rendered so explicitly because its principal role in the novel is to be inescapably horrific. As noted by Baelo Allué, there is no shift in tone between the most banally described detail and the description of violence (17): ‘I’ve situated the body in front of the new Toshiba television set and in the VCR is an old tape and appearing on the screen is the last girl I filmed. I’m wearing a Joseph Abboud suit, a tie by Paul Stuart, shoes by J. Crew, a vest by someone Italian and I’m kneeling on the floor beside a corpse, eating the girl’s brain, gobbling it down, spreading Grey Poupon over hunks of the pink, fleshy meat’ (Ellis 328). In complete opposition to how pornography functions, Ellis leaves no room for the possible enjoyment of such a scene. Instead of revelling in the ‘spine chilling’ pleasures of classic horror narratives, there is only the real horror of imagining such an act. The effect, as Kauffman has observed is, rather than arousing, often so disgusting as to be emetic (Bad Girls 249). Ellis was surprised that his detractors did not understand that he was trying to be shocking, not offensive (Love 49), or that his overall aim was to symbolise ‘how desensitised our culture has become towards violence’ (quoted in Dwyer 55). Ellis was also understandably frustrated with readings that conflated not only the contents of the book and their meaning, but also the narrator and author: ‘The acts described in the book are truly, indisputably vile. The book itself is not. Patrick Bateman is a monster. I am not’ (quoted in Love 49). Like Fay Weldon, Norman Mailer understood that American Psycho posited ‘that the eighties were spiritually disgusting and the author’s presentation is the crystallization of such horror’ (129). Unlike Weldon, however, Mailer shied away from defending the novel by judging Ellis not accomplished enough a writer to achieve his ‘monstrous’ aims (182), failing because he did not situate Bateman within a moral universe, that is, ‘by having a murderer with enough inner life for us to comprehend him’ (182). Yet, the morality of Ellis’s project is evident. By viewing the world through the lens of a psychotic killer who, in many ways, personifies the American Dream – wealthy, powerful, intelligent, handsome, energetic and successful – and, yet, who gains no pleasure, satisfaction, coherent identity or sense of life’s meaning from his endless, selfish consumption, Ellis exposes the emptiness of both that world and that dream. As Bateman himself explains: ‘Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in. This was civilisation as I saw it, colossal and jagged’ (Ellis 375). Ellis thus situates the responsibility for Bateman’s violence not in his individual moral vacuity, but in the barren values of the society that has shaped him – a selfish society that, in Ellis’s opinion, refused to address the most important issues of the day: corporate greed, mindless consumerism, poverty, homelessness and the prevalence of violent crime. Instead of pornographic, therefore, American Psycho is a profoundly political text: Ellis was never attempting to glorify or incite violence against anyone, but rather to expose the effects of apathy to these broad social problems, including the very kinds of violence the most vocal critics feared the book would engender. Fifteen years after the publication of American Psycho, although our societies are apparently growing in overall prosperity, the gap between rich and poor also continues to grow, more are permanently homeless, violence – whether domestic, random or institutionally-sanctioned – escalates, and yet general apathy has intensified to the point where even the ‘ethics’ of torture as government policy can be posited as a subject for rational debate. The real filth of the saga of American Psycho is, thus, how Ellis’s message was wilfully ignored. While critics and public intellectuals discussed the work at length in almost every prominent publication available, few attempted to think in any depth about what Ellis actually wrote about, or to use their powerful positions to raise any serious debate about the concerns he voiced. Some recent critical reappraisals have begun to appreciate how American Psycho is an ‘ethical denunciation, where the reader cannot but face the real horror behind the serial killer phenomenon’ (Baelo Allué 8), but Ellis, I believe, goes further, exposing the truly filthy causes that underlie the existence of such seemingly ‘senseless’ murder. But, Wait, There’s More It is ironic that American Psycho has, itself, generated a mini-industry of products. A decade after publication, a Canadian team – filmmaker Mary Harron, director of I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), working with scriptwriter, Guinevere Turner, and Vancouver-based Lions Gate Entertainment – adapted the book for a major film (Johnson). Starring Christian Bale, Chloë Sevigny, Willem Dafoe and Reese Witherspoon and, with an estimated budget of U.S.$8 million, the film made U.S.$15 million at the American box office. The soundtrack was released for the film’s opening, with video and DVDs to follow and the ‘Killer Collector’s Edition’ DVD – closed-captioned, in widescreen with surround sound – released in June 2005. Amazon.com lists four movie posters (including a Japanese language version) and, most unexpected of all, a series of film tie-in action dolls. The two most popular of these, judging by E-Bay, are the ‘Cult Classics Series 1: Patrick Bateman’ figure which, attired in a smart suit, comes with essential accoutrements of walkman with headphones, briefcase, Wall Street Journal, video tape and recorder, knife, cleaver, axe, nail gun, severed hand and a display base; and the 18” tall ‘motion activated sound’ edition – a larger version of the same doll with fewer accessories, but which plays sound bites from the movie. Thanks to Stephen Harris and Suzie Gibson (UNE) for stimulating conversations about this book, Stephen Harris for information about the recent Australian reprint of American Psycho and Mark Seebeck (Pan Macmillan) for sales information. References Archer, Mark. “The Funeral Baked Meats.” The Spectator 27 April 1991: 31. Australian Broadcasting Corporation. First Tuesday Book Club. First broadcast 1 August 2006. Baelo Allué, Sonia. “The Aesthetics of Serial Killing: Working against Ethics in The Silence of the Lambs (1988) and American Psycho (1991).” Atlantis 24.2 (Dec. 2002): 7-24. Canadian Press. “Navy Yanks American Psycho.” The Globe and Mail 17 May 1991: C1. Canadian Press. “Gruesome Novel Was Bedside Reading.” Kitchener-Waterloo Record 1 Sep. 1995: A5. Dubin, Steven C. “Art’s Enemies: Censors to the Right of Me, Censors to the Left of Me.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 28.4 (Winter 1994): 44-54. Dwyer, Victor. “Literary Firestorm: Canada Customs Scrutinizes a Brutal Novel.” Maclean’s April 1991: 55. Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho. London: Macmillan-Picador, 1991. ———. Glamorama. New York: Knopf, 1999. ———. The Informers. New York: Knopf, 1994. ———. Less than Zero. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985. ———. Lunar Park. New York: Knopf, 2005. ———. The Rules of Attraction. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987. Fraser, James. :The Case for Publishing.” The Bulletin 18 June 1991. Fraser, William. “Book May Go under Wraps.” The Sydney Morning Herald 23 May 1991: 5. ———. “The Sensitive Censor and the Psycho.” The Sydney Morning Herald 24 May 1991: 5. Freccero, Carla. “Historical Violence, Censorship, and the Serial Killer: The Case of American Psycho.” Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism 27.2 (Summer 1997): 44-58. Graham, I. “Australian Censorship History.” Libertus.net 9 Dec. 2001. 17 May 2006 http://libertus.net/censor/hist20on.html>. Gurley Brown, Helen. Commentary in “Editorial Judgement or Censorship?: The Case of American Psycho.” The Writer May 1991: 20-23. Harris, Thomas. The Silence of the Lambs. New York: St Martins Press, 1988. Harron, Mary (dir.). American Psycho [film]. Edward R. Pressman Film Corporation, Lions Gate Films, Muse Productions, P.P.S. Films, Quadra Entertainment, Universal Pictures, 2004. Hitchens, Christopher. “Minority Report.” The Nation 7-14 January 1991: 7. Holt, Karen, and Charlotte Abbott. “Lunar Park: The Novel.” Publishers Weekly 11 July 2005. 13 Aug. 2006 http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA624404.html? pubdate=7%2F11%2F2005&display=archive>. Iannone, Carol. “PC & the Ellis Affair.” Commentary Magazine July 1991: 52-4. Irving, John. “Pornography and the New Puritans.” The New York Times Book Review 29 March 1992: Section 7, 1. 13 Aug. 2006 http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/15/lifetimes/25665.html>. Johnson, Brian D. “Canadian Cool Meets American Psycho.” Maclean’s 10 April 2000. 13 Aug. 2006 http://www.macleans.ca/culture/films/article.jsp?content=33146>. Kauffman, Linda S. “American Psycho [film review].” Film Quarterly 54.2 (Winter 2000-2001): 41-45. ———. Bad Girls and Sick Boys: Fantasies in Contemporary Art and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Kennedy, Pagan. “Generation Gaffe: American Psycho.” The Nation 1 April 1991: 426-8. Kirchhoff, H. J. “Customs Clears Psycho: Booksellers’ Reaction Mixed.” The Globe and Mail 26 March 1991: C1. ———. “Psycho Sits in Limbo: Publisher Awaits Customs Ruling.” The Globe and Mail 14 March 1991: C1. Knight-Ridder News Service. “Vintage Picks up Ellis’ American Psycho.” Los Angeles Daily News 17 November 1990: L10. Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher. “Psycho: Wither Death without Life?” The New York Times 11 March 1991: C18. Leo, John. “Marketing Cynicism and Vulgarity.” U.S. News & World Report 3 Dec. 1990: 23. Love, Robert. “Psycho Analysis: Interview with Bret Easton Ellis.” Rolling Stone 4 April 1991: 45-46, 49-51. Mailer, Norman. “Children of the Pied Piper: Mailer on American Psycho.” Vanity Fair March 1991: 124-9, 182-3. Manguel, Alberto. “Designer Porn.” Saturday Night 106.6 (July 1991): 46-8. Manne, Robert. “Liberals Deny the Video Link.” The Australian 6 Jan. 1997: 11. McDowell, Edwin. “NOW Chapter Seeks Boycott of ‘Psycho’ Novel.” The New York Times 6 Dec. 1990: C17. ———. “Vintage Buys Violent Book Dropped by Simon & Schuster.” The New York Times 17 Nov. 1990: 13. Miner, Brad. “Random Notes.” National Review 31 Dec. 1990: 43. National Organization for Women. Library Journal 2.91 (1991): 114. Oates, Joyce Carol. “Three American Gothics.” Where I’ve Been, and Where I’m Going: Essays, Reviews and Prose. New York: Plume, 1999. 232-43. Rapping, Elayne. “The Uses of Violence.” Progressive 55 (1991): 36-8. Rosenblatt, Roger. “Snuff this Book!: Will Brett Easton Ellis Get Away with Murder?” New York Times Book Review 16 Dec. 1990: 3, 16. Roth, Philip. Portnoy’s Complaint. New York: Random House, 1969. Shaw, Patrick W. The Modern American Novel of Violence. Troy, NY: Whitson, 2000. Sheppard, R. Z. “A Revolting Development.” Time 29 Oct. 1990: 100. Teachout, Terry. “Applied Deconstruction.” National Review 24 June 1991: 45-6. Tyrnauer, Matthew. “Who’s Afraid of Bret Easton Ellis?” Vanity Fair 57.8 (Aug. 1994): 70-3, 100-1. Vnuk, Helen. “X-rated? Outdated.” The Age 21 Sep. 2003. 17 May 2006 http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/09/19/1063625202157.html>. Wark, McKenzie. “Video Link Is a Distorted View.” The Australian 8 Jan. 1997: 11. Weldon, Fay. “Now You’re Squeamish?: In a World as Sick as Ours, It’s Silly to Target American Psycho.” The Washington Post 28 April 1991: C1. Wolf, Naomi. “The Animals Speak.” New Statesman & Society 12 April 1991: 33-4. Yardley, Jonathan. “American Psycho: Essence of Trash.” The Washington Post 27 Feb. 1991: B1. Young, Elizabeth J. “Psycho Killers. Last Lines: How to Shock the English.” New Statesman & Society 5 April 1991: 24. Young, Elizabeth J., and Graham Caveney. Shopping in Space: Essays on American ‘Blank Generation’ Fiction. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1992. Zaller, Robert “American Psycho, American Censorship and the Dahmer Case.” Revue Francaise d’Etudes Americaines 16.56 (1993): 317-25. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Brien, Donna Lee. "The Real Filth in : A Critical Reassessment." M/C Journal 9.5 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/01-brien.php>. APA Style Brien, D. (Nov. 2006) "The Real Filth in American Psycho: A Critical Reassessment," M/C Journal, 9(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/01-brien.php>.

Introduction The short film Noah (2013) depicts the contemporary story of an adolescent relationship breakdown and its aftermath. The film tells the story by showing events entirely as they unfold on the computer screen of Noah, the film’s teenaged protagonist. All of the characters, including Noah, appear on film solely via technological mediation.Although it is a fictional representation, Noah has garnered a lot of acclaim within an online public for the authenticity and realism of its portrayal of computer-mediated life (Berkowitz; Hornyak; Knibbs; Warren). Judging by the tenor of a lot of this commentary, the film has keyed in to a larger cultural anxiety around issues of communication and relationships online. Many reviewers and interested commentators have expressed concern at how closely Noah’s distracted, frenetic and problematic multitasking resembles their own computer usage (Beggs; Berkowitz; Trumbore). They frequently express the belief that it was this kind of behaviour that led to the relationship breakdown depicted in the film, as Noah proves to be “a lot better at opening tabs than at honest communication” (Knibbs para. 2).I believe that the cultural resonance of the film stems from the way in which the film is an implicit attempt to assess the nature of contemporary online persona. By understanding online persona as a particular kind of “hybrid object” or “quasi-object”—a combination of both human and technological creation (Latour We Have)—the sense of the overall problems, as well as the potential, of online persona as it currently exists, is traceable through the interactions depicted within the film. By understanding social relationships as constituted through dynamic interaction (Schutz), I understand the drama of Noah to stem principally from a tension in the operation of online persona between a) the technological automation of presentation that forms a core part of the nature of contemporary online persona, and b) the need for interaction in effective relationship development. However, any attempt to blame this tension on an inherent tendency in technology is itself problematised by the film’s presentation of an alternative type of online persona, in a Chatroulette conversation depicted in the film’s second half.Persona and Performance, Mediation and DelegationMarshall (“Persona Studies” 163) describes persona as “a new social construction of identity and public display.” This new type of social construction has become increasingly common due to a combination of “changes in work, transformation of our forms of social connection and networking via new technologies, and consequent new affective clusters and micropublics” (Marshall “Persona Studies” 166). New forms of “presentational” media play a key role in the construction of persona by providing the resources through which identity is “performed, produced and exhibited by the individual or other collectives” (Marshall “Persona Studies” 160).In this formulation of persona, it is not clear how performance and presentation interlink with the related concepts of production and exhibition. Marshall’s concept of “intercommunication” suggests a classificatory scheme for these multiple registers of media and communication that are possible in the contemporary media environment. However, Marshall’s primary focus has so far been on the relationship between existing mediated communication forms, and their historical transformation (Marshall “Intercommunication”). Marshall has not as yet made clear the theoretical link between performance, presentation, production and exhibition. Actor-Network Theory (ANT) can provide this theoretical link, and a way of understanding persona as it operates in an online context: as online persona.In ANT, everything that exists is an object. Objects are performative actors—the associations between objects produce the identity of objects and the way they perform. The performative actions of objects, equally, produce the nature of the associations between them (Latour Reassembling). Neither objects nor associations have a prior existence outside of their relationship to each other (Law).For Latour, the semiotic distinction between “human” and “non-human” is itself an outcome of the performances of objects and their associations. There are also objects, which Latour calls “quasi-objects” or “hybrids,” that do not fit neatly on one side of the human/non-human divide or the other (Latour We Have). Online persona is an example of such a hybrid or quasi-object: it is a combination of both human creation and technological mediation.Two concepts formulated by Latour provide some qualitative detail about the nature of the operation of Actor-Networks. Firstly, Latour emphasises that actors are also “mediators.” This name emphasises that when an actor acts to create a connection between two or more other objects, it actively transforms the way that objects encounter the performance of other objects (Latour Reassembling). This notion of mediation resembles Hassan’s definition of “media” as an active agent of transferral (Hassan). But Latour emphasises that all objects, not just communication technologies, act as mediators. Secondly, Latour describes how an actor can take on the actions originally performed by another actor. He refers to this process as “delegation.” Delegation, especially delegation of human action to a technological delegate, can render action more efficient in two ways. It can reduce the effort needed for action, causing “the transformation of a major effort into a minor one.” It can also reduce the time needed to exert effort in performing an action: the effort need not be ongoing, but can be “concentrated at the time of installation” (Latour “Masses” 229-31).Online persona, in the terminology of ANT, is a constructed, performative presentation of identity. It is constituted through a combination of human action, ongoing mediation of present human action, and the automation, through technological delegation, of previous actions. The action of the film Noah is driven by the changes in expected and actual interaction that these various aspects of persona encourage.The Problems and Potential of Online PersonaBy relaying the action entirely via a computer screen, the film Noah is itself a testament to how encounters with others solely via technological mediation can be genuinely meaningful. Relaying the action in this way is in fact creatively productive, providing new ways of communicating details about characters and relationships through the layout of the screen. For instance, the film introduces the character of Amy, Noah’s girlfriend, and establishes her importance to Noah through her visual presence as part of a photo on his desktop background at the start of the film. The film later communicates the end of the relationship when the computer boots up again, but this time with Amy’s photo notably absent from the background.However, the film deviates from a “pure” representation of a computer screen in a number of ways. Most notably, the camera frame is not static, and moves around the screen in order to give the viewer the sense that the camera is simulating Noah’s eye focus. According to the directors, the camera needed to show viewers where the focus of the action was as the story progressed. Without this indication of where to focus, it was hard to keep viewers engaged and interested in the story (Paulas).Within the story of the film itself, the sense of drama surrounding Noah’s actions similarly stem from the exploration of the various aspects of what it is and is not possible to achieve in the performance of persona – both the positive and the negative consequences. At the start of the film, Noah engages in a Skype conversation with his girlfriend Amy. While Noah is indeed “approximating being present” (Berkowitz para. 3) for the initial part of this conversation, once Noah hears an implication that Amy may want to break up with him, the audience sees his eye movements darting between Amy’s visible face in Skype and Amy’s Facebook profile, and nowhere else.It would be a mistake to think that this double focus means Noah is not fully engaging with Amy. Rather, he is engaging with two dimensions of Amy’s available persona: her Facebook profile, and her Skype presence. Noah is fully focusing on Amy at this point of the film, but the unitary persona he experiences as “Amy” is constructed from multiple media channels—one dynamic and real-time, the other comparatively stable and static. Noah’s experience of Amy is multiplexed, a unitary experience constructed from multiple channels of communication. This may actually enhance Noah’s affective involvement with Amy.It is true that at the very start of the Skype call, Noah is focusing on several unrelated activities, not just on Amy. The available technological mediators enable this division of attention. But more than that, the available technological mediators also assume in their functioning that the user’s attention can be and should be divided. Thus some of the distractions Noah experiences at this time are of his own making (e.g. the simple game he plays in a browser window), while others are to some degree configured by the available opportunity to divide one’s attention, and the assumption of others that the user will do so. One of the distractions faced by Noah comes in the form of repeated requests from his friend “Kanye East” to play the game Call of Duty. How socially obligated is Noah to respond to these requests as promptly as possible, regardless of what other important things (that his friend doesn’t know about) he may be doing?Unfortunately, and for reasons which the audience never learns, the Skype call terminates abruptly before Noah can fully articulate his concerns to Amy. With a keen eye, the audience can see that the image of Amy froze not long after Noah started talking to her in earnest. She did indeed appear to be having problems with her Skype, as her later text message suggested. But there’s no indication why Amy decided, as described in the same text message, to postpone the conversation after the Skype call failed.This is a fairly obvious example of the relatively common situation in which one actor unexpectedly refuses to co-operate with the purposes of another (Callon). Noah’s uncertainty at how to address this non-cooperation leads to the penultimate act of the film when he logs in to Amy’s Facebook account. In order to fully consider the ethical issues involved, a performative understanding of the self and of relationships is insufficient. Phenomenological understandings of the self and social relationships are more suited to ethical considerations.Online Persona and Social RelationshipsIn the “phenomenological sociology” of Alfred Schutz, consciousness is inescapably temporal, constantly undergoing slight modification by the very process of progressing through time. The constitution of a social relationship, for Schutz, occurs when two (and only two) individuals share a community of space and time, simultaneously experiencing the same external phenomena. More importantly, it also requires that these two individuals have an ongoing, mutual and simultaneous awareness of each other’s progress and development through time. Finally, it requires that the individuals be mutually aware of the very fact that they are aware of each other in this ongoing, mutual and simultaneous way (Schutz).Schutz refers to this ideal-typical relationship state as the “We-relationship,” and the communal experience that constitutes it as “growing older together.” The ongoing awareness of constantly generated new information about the other is what constitutes a social relationship, according to Schutz. Accordingly, a lack of such information exchange will lead to a weaker social bond. In situations where direct interaction does not occur, Schutz claimed that individuals would construct their knowledge of the other through “typification”: pre-learned schemas of identity of greater or lesser generality, affixed to the other based on whatever limited information may be available.In the film, when Amy is no longer available via Skype, an aspect of her persona is still available for interrogation. After the failed Skype call, Noah repeatedly refreshes Amy’s Facebook profile, almost obsessively checking her relationship status to see if it has changed from reading “in a relationship.” In the process he discovers that, not long after their aborted Skype conversation, Amy has changed her profile picture—from one that had an image of the two of them together, to one that contains an image of Amy only. He also in the process discovers that someone he does not know named “Dylan Ramshaw” has commented on all of Amy’s current and previous profile pictures. Dylan’s Facebook profile proves resistant to interrogation—Noah’s repeated, frustrated attempts to click on Dylan’s profile picture to bring up more detail yields no results. In the absence of an aspect of persona that undergoes constant temporal change, any new information attained—a profile picture changed, a not-previously noticed regular commenter discovered—seems to gain heightened significance in defining not just the current relationship status with another, but the trajectory which that relationship is taking. The “typification” that Noah constructs of Amy is that of a guilty, cheating girlfriend.The penultimate act of the film occurs when Noah chooses to log in to Amy’s Facebook account using her password (which he knows), “just to check for sketchy shit,” or so he initially claims to Kanye East. His suspicions appear to be confirmed when he discovers that private exchanges between Amy and Dylan which indicate that they had been meeting together without Noah’s knowledge. The suggestion to covertly read Amy’s private Facebook messages comes originally from Kanye East, when he asks Noah “have you lurked [covertly read] her texts or anything?” Noah’s response strongly suggests the normative uncertainty that the teenaged protagonist feels at the idea; his initial response to Kanye East reads “is that the thing to do now?” The operation of Facebook in this instance has two, somewhat contradictory, delegated tasks: let others feel connected to Amy and what she’s doing, but also protect Amy’s privacy. The success of the second goal interferes with Noah’s desire to achieve the first. And so he violates her privacy.The times that Noah’s mouse hovers and circles around a button that would send a message from Amy’s account or update Amy’s Facebook profile are probably the film’s most cringe-inducing moments. Ultimately Noah decides to update Amy’s relationship status to single. The feedback he receives to Amy’s account immediately afterwards seems to confirm his suspicions that this was what was going to happen anyway: one friend of Amy’s says “finally” in a private message, and the suspicious “Dylan” offers up a shoulder to cry on. Apparently believing that this reflects the reality of their relationship, Noah leaves the status on Amy’s Facebook profile as “single.”The tragedy of the film is that Noah’s assumptions were quite incorrect. Rather than reflecting their updated relationship status, the change revealed to Amy that he had violated her privacy. Dylan’s supposedly over-familiar messages were perfectly acceptable on the basis that Dylan was not actually heterosexual (and therefore a threat to Noah’s role as boyfriend), but gay.The Role of Technology: “It’s Complicated”One way to interpret the film would be to blame Noah’s issues on technology per se. This is far too easy. Rather, the film suggests that Facebook was to some degree responsible for Noah’s relationship issues and the problematic way in which he tried to address them. In the second half of the film, Noah engages in a very different form of online interaction via the communication service known as Chatroulette. This interaction stands in sharp contrast to the interactions that occurred via Facebook.Chatroulette is a video service that pairs strangers around the globe for a chat session. In the film, Noah experiences a fairly meaningful moment on Chatroulette with an unnamed girl on the service, who dismisses Facebook as “weird and creepy”. The sheer normative power of Facebook comes across when Noah initially refuses to believe the unnamed Chatroulette girl when she says she does not have a Facebook profile. She suggests, somewhat ironically, that the only way to have a real, honest conversation with someone is “with a stranger, in the middle of the night”, as just occurred on Chatroulette.Besides the explicit comparison between Facebook and Chatroulette in the dialogue, this scene also provides an implicit comparison between online persona as it is found on Facebook and as it is found on Chatroulette. The style of interaction on each service is starkly different. On Facebook, users largely present themselves and perform to a “micro-public” of their “friends.” They largely engage in static self-presentations, often “interacting” only through interrogating the largely static self-presentations of others. On Chatroulette, users interact with strangers chosen randomly by an algorithm. Users predominantly engage in dialogue one-on-one, and interaction tends to be a mutual, dynamic affair, much like “real life” conversation.Yet while the “real-time” dialogue possible on Chatroulette may seem more conducive to facilitating Schutz’ idea of “growing older together,” the service also has its issues. The randomness of connection with others is problematic, as the film frankly acknowledges in the uncensored shots of frontal male nudity that Noah experiences in his search for a chat partner. Also, the problematic lack of a permanent means of staying in contact with each other is illustrated by a further tragic moment in the film when the session with the unnamed girl ends, with Noah having no means of ever being able to find her again.ConclusionIt is tempting to dismiss the problems that Noah encounters while interacting via mediated communication with the exhortation to “just go out and live [… ] life in the real world” (Trumbore para. 4), but this is also over-simplistic. Rather, what we can take away from the film is that there are trade-offs to be had in the technological mediation of self-presentation and communication. The questions that we need to address are: what prompts the choice of one form of technological mediation over another? And what are the consequences of this choice? Contemporary persona, as conceived by David Marshall, is motivated by the commodification of the self, and by increased importance of affect in relationships (Marshall “Persona Studies”). In the realm of Facebook, the commodification of the self has to some degree flattened the available interactivity of the online self, in favour of what the unnamed Chatroulette girl derogatorily refers to as “a popularity contest.”The short film Noah is to some degree a cultural critique of dominant trends in contemporary online persona, notably of the “commodification of the self” instantiated on Facebook. By conceiving of online persona in the terms of ANT outlined here, it becomes possible to envision alternatives to this dominant form of persona, including a concept of persona as commodification. Further, it is possible to do this in a way that avoids the trap of blaming technology for all problems, and that recognises both the advantages and disadvantages of different ways of constructing online persona. The analysis of Noah presented here can therefore provide a guide for more sophisticated and systematic examinations of the hybrid-object “online persona.”References Beggs, Scott. “Short Film: The Very Cool ‘Noah’ Plays Out Madly on a Teenager’s Computer Screen.” Film School Rejects 11 Sep. 2013. 3 Mar. 2014. Callon, M. “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay.” Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? Ed. John Law. London, UK: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986. 196–223. Berkowitz, Joe. “You Need to See This 17-Minute Film Set Entirely on a Teen’s Computer Screen.” Fast Company 10 Sep. 2013. 1 Mar. 2014. Hassan, Robert. Media, Politics and the Network Society. Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2004. Hornyak, Tim. “Short Film ‘Noah’ Will Make You Think Twice about Facebook—CNET.” CNET 19 Sep. 2013. 2 Mar. 2014. Knibbs, Kate. “‘Have You Lurked Her Texts?’: How the Directors of ‘Noah’ Captured the Pain of Facebook-Era Dating.” Digital Trends 14 Sep. 2013. 9 Feb. 2014. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford University Press, 2005. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993. Latour, Bruno. “Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts.” Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change. Ed. Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. 225–58. Law, John. “After ANT: Complexity, Naming and Topology.” Actor-Network Theory and After. Ed. John Law and John Hassard. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999. 1–14. Marshall, P. David. “Persona Studies: Mapping the Proliferation of the Public Self.” Journalism 15.2 (2014): 153–170. Marshall, P. David. “The Intercommunication Challenge: Developing a New Lexicon of Concepts for a Transformed Era of Communication.” ICA 2011: Proceedings of the 61st Annual ICA Conference. Boston, MA: Intrenational Communication Association, 2011. 1–25. Paulas, Rick. “Step inside the Computer Screen of ‘Noah.’” VICE 18 Jan. 2014. 8 Feb. 2014. Schutz, Alfred. The Phenomenology of the Social World. Trans. George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert. London, UK: Heinemann, 1972. Trumbore, Dave. “Indie Spotlight: NOAH - A 17-Minute Short Film from Patrick Cederberg and Walter Woodman.” Collider 2013. 2 Apr. 2014. Warren, Christina. “The Short Film That Takes Place Entirely inside a Computer.” Mashable 13 Sep.2013. 9 Feb. 2014. Woodman, Walter, and Patrick Cederberg. Noah. 2013.

In January of this year, artist Christian Marclay’s 24-hour video installation The Clock came to Melbourne. As Ben Lerner explains in 10:04, the autofictional novel Lerner published in 2014, The Clock by Christian Marclay “is a clock: it is a twenty-four hour montage of thousands of scenes from movies and a few from TV edited together so as to be shown in real time; each scene indicates the time with a shot of a timepiece or its mention in dialogue, time in and outside of the film is synchronized” (52). I went to see The Clock at ACMI several times, with friends and alone, in the early morning and late at night. Each time I sank back into the comfortable chairs and settled into the communal experience of watching time pass on a screen in a dark room. I found myself sucked into the enforced narrative of time, the way in which the viewer – in this case myself, and those sharing the experience with me – sought to impose a sort of meaning on the arguably meaningless passing of the hours. In this essay, I will explore how we can expand our thinking of the idea of autofiction, as a genre, to include contemporary forms of digital media such as social media or activity trackers, as the authors of these new forms of digital media act as author-characters by playing with the divide between fact and fiction, and requiring their readers to ascertain meaning by interpreting the clues layered within. I will analyse the ways in which the meaning of autofictional texts—such as Lerner’s 10:04, but also including social media feeds, blogs and activity trackers—shifts depending on their audience. I consider that as technology develops, we increasingly use data to contextualise ourselves within a broader narrative – health data, media, journalistic data. As the sociologist John B. Thompson writes, “The development of the media not only enriches and transforms the process of self-formation, it also produces a new kind of intimacy which did not exist before … individuals can create and establish a form of intimacy which is essentially non-reciprocal” (208). New media and technologies have emerged to assist in this process of self-formation through the collection and publication of data. This essay is interested in analysing this process of self-formation, and its relationship to the genre of autofiction.Contemporary Digital Media as AutofictionWhile humans have always recorded themselves throughout history, with the rise of new technologies the instinct to record the self is increasingly becoming an automatic one; an instinct we can tie to what media theorist Nick Couldry terms as “presencing”: an “emerging requirement in everyday life to have a public presence beyond one’s bodily presence, to construct an objectification of oneself” (50). We are required to participate in ‘presencing’ by opting-in to new media; it is now uncommon – even unfavourable – for someone not to engage in any forms of social media or self-monitoring. We are now encouraged to participate in ‘presencing’ through the recording and online publication of data that would have once been considered private, such as employment histories and activity histories. Every Instagram photo, Snapchat or TikTok video contributes to an accumulating digital presence, an emerging narrative of the self. Couldry notes that presencing “is not the same as calling up a few friends to tell them some news; nor, although the audience is unspecific, is it like putting up something on a noticeboard. That is because presencing is oriented to a permanent site in public space that is distinctively marked by the producer for displaying that producer’s self” (50).In this way, we can see that in effect we are all becoming increasingly positioned to become autofiction authors. As an experimental form of literature, autofiction has been around for a long time, the term having first been introduced in the 1970s, and with Serge Doubrovsky widely credited with having introduced the genre with the publication of his 1977 novel Fils (Browning 49). In the most basic terms, autofiction is simply a work of fiction featuring a protagonist who can be interpreted as a stand-in for its author. And while autofiction is also confused with or used interchangeably with other genres such as metafiction or memoir, the difference between autofiction and other genres, writes Arnaud Schmitt, is that autoficton “relies on fiction—runs on fiction, to be exact” (141). Usually the reader can pick up on the fact that a novel is an autofictional one by noting that the protagonist and the author share a name, or key autobiographical details, but it is debatable as to whether the reader in fact needs to know that the work is autofictional in the first place in order to properly engage with it as a literary text.The same ideas can be applied to the application of digital media today. Kylie Cardell notes that “personal autobiographical but specifically diaristic (confessional, serial, quotidian) disclosure is increasingly positioned as a symptomatic feature of online life” (507). This ties in with Couldry’s idea of ‘presencing’; confession is increasingly a requirement when it comes to participation in digital media. As technology advances, the ways in which we can present and record the self evolve, and the narrative we can produce of the self expands alongside our understanding of the relationship between fact and fiction. Though of course we have always fabricated different narratives of the self, whether it be through diary entries or letter-writing, ‘presencing’ occurs when we literally present these edited versions of ourselves to an online audience. Lines become blurred between fiction and non-fiction, and the ability to distinguish between ‘fake’ and ‘real’ becomes almost impossible.Increasingly, such a distinction fails to seem important, and in some cases, this blurred line becomes the point, or a punchline; we can see this most clearly in TikTok videos, wherein people (specifically, or at least most typically, young people—Generation Z) play with ideas of truth and unreality ironically. When a teenager posts a video of themselves on TikTok dancing in their school cafeteria with the caption, “I got suspended for this, don’t let this flop”, the savvy viewer understands without it needing to be said that the student was not actually suspended – and also understands that even less outlandish or unbelievable digital content is unreliable by nature, and simply the narrative the author or producer wishes to convey; just like the savvy reader of an autofiction novel understands, without it actually being said, that the novel is in part autobiographical, even when the author and protagonist do not share a name or other easily identifiable markers.This is the nature of autofiction; it signals to the reader its status as a work of autofiction by littering intertextual clues throughout. Readers familiar with the author’s biography or body of work will pick up on these clues, creating a sense of uneasiness in the reader as they work to discern what is fact and what is not.Indeed, in 10:04, Lerner flags the text as a work of autofiction by sketching a fictional-not-fictional image of himself as an author of a story, ‘The Golden Vanity’ published in The New Yorker, that earned him a book deal—a story the ‘real’ Ben Lerner did in fact publish, two years before the publication of 10:04: “a few months before, the agent had e-mailed me that she believed I could get a “strong six-figure” advance based on a story of mine that had appeared in The New Yorker” (Lerner 4).In a review of 10:04 for the Sydney Review of Books, Stephanie Bishop writes:we learn that he did indeed write a proposal, that there was a competitive auction … What had just happened? Where are we in time? Was the celebratory meal fictional or real? Can we (and should we) seek to distinguish these categories?Here Lerner is ‘presencing’, crafting a multilayered version of himself across media by assuming that the reader of his work is also a reader of The New Yorker (an easy assumption to make given that his work often appears in, and is reviewed in, The New Yorker). Of course, this leads to the question: what becomes of autofiction when it is consumed by someone who is unable to pick up on the many metareferences layered within its narrative? In this case, the work itself becomes a joke that doesn’t land – much like a social media feed being consumed by someone who is not its intended audience.The savvy media consumer also understands that even the most meaningless or obtuse of media is all part of the overarching narrative. Lerner highlights the way we try and impose meaning onto (arguably) meaningless media when he describes his experience of watching time pass in Marclay’s The Clock:Big Ben, which I would come to learn appears frequently in the video, exploded, and people in the audience applauded… But then, a minute later, a young girl awakes from a nightmare and, as she’s comforted by her father (Clark Gable as Rhett Butler), you see Big Ben ticking away again outside their window, no sign of damage. The entire preceding twenty-four hours might have been the child’s dream, a storm that never happened, just one of many ways The Clock can be integrated into an overarching narrative. Indeed it was a greater challenge for me to resist the will to integration. (Lerner 52-53)This desire to impose an overarching narrative that Lerner speaks of – and which I also experienced when watching The Clock, as detailed in the introduction to this essay – is what the recording of the self both aims to achieve and achieves by default; it is the point and also the by-product. The Self as DataThe week my grandmother died, in 2017, my father bought me an Apple Watch. I had recently started running and—perhaps as an outlet for my grief—was looking to take my running further. I wanted a smart watch to help me record my runs; to turn the act of running into data that I could quantify and thus understand. This, in turn, would help me understand something about myself. Deborah Lupton explains my impulse here when she writes, “the body/self is portrayed as a conglomerate of quantifiable data that can be revealed using digital devices” (65). I wanted to reveal my ‘self’ by recording it, similar to the way the data accumulated in a diary, when reflected upon, helps a diarist understand their life more broadly. "Is a Fitbit a diary?”, asks Kylie Cardell. “The diary in the twenty-first century is already vastly different from many of its formal historical counterparts, yet there are discursive resonances. The Fitbit is a diary if we think of diary as a chronological record of data, which it can be” (348). The diary, as with the Apple Watch or Fitbit, is simply just a record of the self moving through time.Thus I submitted myself to the task of turning as much of myself into digital data as was possible to do so. Every walk, swim, meditation, burst of productivity, lapse in productivity, and beat of my heart became quantified, as Cardell might say, diarised. There is a very simple sort of pleasure in watching the red, green and blue rings spin round as you stand more, move more, run more. There is something soothing in knowing that at any given moment in time, you can press a button and see exactly what your heart is doing; even more soothing is knowing that at any given time, you can open up an app and see what your heart has been doing today, yesterday, this month, this year. It made sense to me that this data was being collected via my timepiece; it was simply the accumulation of my ‘self,’ as viewed through the lens of time.The Apple Watch was just the latest in a series of ways I have tasked technology with the act of quantifying myself; with my iPhone I track my periods with the Clue app. I measure my mental health with apps such as Shine, and my daily habits with Habitica. I have tried journaling apps such as Reflectly and Day One. While I have never actively tracked my food intake, or weight, or sex life, I know if I wanted to I could do this, too. And long before the Apple Watch, and long before my iPhone, too, I measured myself. In the late 2000s, I kept an online blog. Rebecca Blood notes that the development of blogging technology allowed blogging to become about “whatever came to mind. Walking to work. Last night’s party. Lunch” (54). Browning expands on this, noting that bloggingemerged as a mode of publication in the late ’90s, expressly smudging the boundaries of public and private. A diaristic mode, the blog nonetheless addresses (a) potential reader(s), often with great intimacy — and in its transition to print, as a boundary-shifting form with ill-defined goals regarding its readership. (49)(It is worth noting here that while of course many different forms of blogging exist and have always existed, this essay is only concerned with the diaristic blog that Blood and Browning speak of – arguably the most popular, and at least the most well known, form of blog.)My blog was also ostensibly about my own life, but really it was a work of autofiction, in the same way that my Apple Watch data, when shared, became a work of autofiction – which is to say that I became the central character, the author-character, whose narrative I was shaping with each post, using time as the setting. Jenny Davis writes:if self-quantifiers are seeking self-knowledge through numbers, then narratives and subjective interpretations are the mechanisms by which data morphs into selves. Self-quantifiers don’t just use data to learn about themselves, but rather, use data to construct the stories that they tell themselves about themselves.Over time, I became addicted to the blogging platform’s inbuilt metrics. I would watch with interest as certain posts performed better than others, and eventually the inevitable happened: I began – mostly unconsciously – to try and mould the content of my blogs to achieve certain outcomes – similar to the way that now, in 2019, it is hard to say whether I use an app to assist myself to meditate/journal/learn/etc, or whether I meditate/journal/learn/etc in order to record myself having done so.David Sedaris notes how the collection of data subconsciously, automatically leads to its manipulation in his essay collection, Calypso:for reasons I cannot determine my Fitbit died. I was devastated when I tapped the broadest part of it and the little dots failed to appear. Then I felt a great sense of freedom. It seemed that my life was now my own again. But was it? Walking twenty-five miles, or even running up the stairs and back, suddenly seemed pointless, since, without the steps being counted and registered, what use were they? (Sedaris, 49)In this way, the data we collect on and produce about ourselves, be it fitness metrics, blog posts, Instagram stories or works of literature or art, allows us to control and shape our own narrative, and so we do, creating what Kylie Cardell describes as “an autobiographical representation of self that is coherent and linear, “excavated” from a mass of personal data” (502).Of course, as foregrounded earlier, it is important to highlight the way ideas of privacy and audience shift in accordance with the type of media being consumed or created. Within different media, different author-characters emerge, and the author is required to participate in ‘presencing’ in different ways. For instance, data that exists only for the user does not require the user, or author, to participate in the act of ‘presencing’ at all – an example of this might be the Clue app, which records menstruation history. This information is only of interest to myself, and is not published or shared anywhere, with anyone. However even data intended for a limited audience still requires participation in ‘presencing’. While I only ‘share’ my Apple Watch’s activity with a few people, even just the act of sharing this activity influences the activity itself, creating an affect in which the fact of the content’s consumption shapes the creation of the content itself. Through consumption of Apple Watch data alone, a narrative can be built in which I am lazy, or dedicated, an early riser or a late sleeper, the kind of person who prefers setting their own goals, or the kind of person who enjoys group activities – and knowing that this narrative is being built requires me to act, consciously, in the experience of building it, which leads to the creation of something unreal or fictional interspersed with factual data. (All of which is to admit that sometimes I go on a run not because I want to go on a run, but because I want to be the sort of person who has gone on a run, and be seen as such: in this way I am ‘presencing’.)Similarly, the ephemeral versus permanent nature of data shared through media like Snapchat or Instagram dictates its status as a work of autofiction. When a piece of data – for instance, a photograph on Instagram – is published permanently, it contributes to an evolving autofictional narrative. The ‘Instagrammed’ self is both real and unreal, both fictional and non-fictional. The consumer of this data can explore an author’s social media feed dating back years and consume this data in exactly the way the author intends. However, the ‘stories’ function on Instagram, for instance, allows the consumption of this data to change again. Content is published for a limited amount of time—usually 24 hours—then disappears, and is able to be shared with either the author’s entire group of followers, or a select audience, allowing an author more creative freedom to choose how their data is consumed.Anxiety and AutofictionWhy do I feel the need to record all this data about myself? Obviously, this information is, to an extent, useful. If you are a person who menstruates, knowing exactly when your last period was, how long it lasted and how heavy it was is useful information to have, medically and logistically. If you run regularly, tracking your runs can be helpful in improving your time or routine. Similarly, recording the self in this way can be useful in keeping track of your moods, your habits, and your relationships.Of course, as previously noted, humans have always recorded ourselves. Cardell notes that “although the forms, conditions, and technology for diary keeping have changed, a motivation for recording, documenting, and accounting for the experience of the self over time has endured” (349). Still, it is hard to ignore the fact that ultimately, we seem to be entering some sort of age of digital information hoarding, and harder still to ignore the sneaking suspicion that this all seems to speak to a growing anxiety – and specifically, an anxiety of the self.Gayle Greene writes that “all writers are concerned with memory, since all writing is a remembrance of things past; all writers draw on the past, mine it as a quarry. Memory is especially important to anyone who cares about change, for forgetting dooms us to repetition” (291). If all writers are concerned with memory, as Greene posits, then perhaps we can draw the conclusion that autofiction writers are concerned with an anxiety of forgetting, or of being forgotten. We are self-conscious as authors of autofictional media; concerned with how our work is and will continue to be perceived – and whether it is perceived at all. Marjorie Worthington believes that that the rise in self-conscious fiction has resulted in an anxiety of obsolescence; that this anxiety in autofiction occurs “when a cultural trope (such as 'the author' is deemed to be in danger of becoming obsolete (or 'dying')” (27). However, it is worth considering the opposite – that an anxiety of obsolescence has resulted in a rise of self-conscious fiction, or autofiction.This fear of obsolescence is pervasive in new digital media – Instagram stories and Snapchats, which once disappeared forever into a digital void, are now able to be saved and stored. The fifteen minutes of fame has morphed into fifteen seconds: in this way, time works both for and against the anxious author of digital autofiction. Technologies evolve quicker than we can keep up, with popular platforms becoming obsolete at a rapid pace. This results in what Kylie Cardell sees as an “anxiety around the traces of lives accumulating online and the consequences of 'accidental autobiography,' as well as the desire to have a 'tidy,' representable, and 'storied' life” (503).This same desire can be seen at the root of autofiction. The media theorist José van Dijck notes thatwith the advent of photography, and later film and television, writing tacitly transformed into an interior means of consciousness and remembrance, whereupon electronic forms of media received the artificiality label…writing gained status as a more authentic container of past recollection. (15)Autofiction, however, disrupts this tacit transformation. It is a co-mingling of a desire to record the self, as well as a desire to control one’s own narrative. The drive to represent oneself in a specific way, with consideration to one’s audience and self-brand, has become the root of social media, but is so pervasive now that it is often an unexamined, subconscious one. In autofiction, this drive is not subconscious, it is self-conscious.ConclusionAs technology has developed, new ways to record, present and evaluate the self have emerged. While an impulse to self-monitor has always existed within society, with the rise of ‘presencing’ through social media this impulse has been made public. In this way, we can see presencing, or the public practice of self-performing through media, as an inherently autofictional practice. We can understand that the act of presencing stems from a place of anxiety and self-consciousness, and understand that is in fact impossible to create autofiction without self-consciousness. As we begin to understand that all digital media is becoming inherently autofictional in nature, we’re increasingly required to force to draw our own conclusions about the media we consume—just like the author-character of 10:04 is forced to draw his own conclusions about the passing of time, as represented by Big Ben, when interacting with Marclay’s The Clock. By analysing and comparing the ways in which the emerging digital landscape and autofiction both share a common goal of recording and preserving an interpretation of the ‘self’, we can then understand a deeper understanding of the purpose that autofiction serves. ReferencesBishop, Stephanie. “The Same but Different: 10:04 by Ben Lerner.” Sydney Review of Books 6 Feb. 2015. <https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/10-04-ben-lerner/>.Blood, Rebecca. "How Blogging Software Reshapes the Online Community." Communications of the ACM 47.12 (2004): 53-55.Browning, Barbara. "The Performative Novel." TDR: The Drama Review 62.2 (2018): 43-58. Davis, Jenny. “The Qualified Self.” Cyborgology 13 Mar. 2013. <http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2013/03/13/the-qualified-self/>.Cardell, Kylie. “The Future of Autobiography Studies: The Diary.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 32.2 (2017): 347-350.Cardell, Kylie. “Modern Memory-Making: Marie Kondo, Online Journaling, and the Excavation, Curation, and Control of Personal Digital Data.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 32.3 (2017): 499-517.Couldry, Nick. Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice. Great Britain: Polity Press, 2012.Greene, Gayle. “Feminist Fiction and the Uses of Memory.” Signs 16.2 (1991): 290-321.Lerner, Ben. 10:04. London: Faber and Faber, 2014.Lerner, Ben. “The Golden Vanity.” The New Yorker 11 June 2012. <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/06/18/the-golden-vanity>.Lupton, Deborah. “You Are Your Data: Self-Tracking Practices and Concepts of Data.” Lifelogging. Ed. Stefan Selke. Wiesbaden: Springer, 2016. 61-79.Schmitt, Arnaud. “David Shields's Lyrical Essay: The Dream of a Genre-Free Memoir, or beyond the Paradox.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 31.1 (2016): 133-146.Sedaris, David. Calypso. United States: Little Brown, 2018.Thompson, John B. The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media. California: Stanford University Press, 1995.Van Dijck, José. Mediated Memories in the Digital Age. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007.Worthington, Marjorie. The Story of "Me": Contemporary American Autofiction. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2018.

IntroductionClowns can be seen as enacting catastrophe with a small “c.” They are experts in “failing better” who perhaps live on the cusp of turning catastrophe into a metaphorical whirlwind while ameliorating the devastation that lies therein. They also have the propensity to succumb to the devastation, masking their own sense of the void with the gestures of play. In this paper, knowledge about clowns emerges from my experience, working with circus clowns in Circus Knie (Switzerland) and Circo Tihany (South America), observing performances and films about clowns, and reading, primarily in European fiction, of clowns in multiple guises. The exposure to a diverse range of texts, visual media and performance, has led me to the possibility that clowning is not only a conceptual discipline but also a state of being that is yet to be fully recognised.Diminutive CatastropheI have an idea (probably a long held obsession) of the clown as a diminutive figure of catastrophe, of catastrophe with a very small “c.” In the context of this incisive academic dialogue on relationships between catastrophe and creativity where writers are challenged with the horrendous tragedies that nature and humans unleash on the planet, this inept character appears to be utterly insignificant and, moreover, unworthy of any claim to creativity. A clown does not solve problems in the grand scheme of society: if anything he/she simply highlights problems, arguably in a fatalistic manner where innovation may be an alien concept. Invariably, as Eric Weitz observes, when clowns depart from their moment on the stage, laughter evaporates and the world settles back into the relentless shades of oppression and injustice. In response to the natural forces of destruction—earthquakes, tsunamis, cyclones, and volcanic eruptions—as much as to the forces of rage in war and ethnic cleansing that humans inflict on one another, a clown makes but a tiny gesture. Curiously, though, those fingers brushing dust off a threadbare jacket may speak volumes.Paradox is the crux of this exploration. Clowns, the best of them, project the fragility of human value on a screen beyond measure and across many layers and scales of metaphorical understanding (Big Apple Circus; Stradda). Why do odd tramps and ordinary inept people seem to pivot against the immense flows of loss and outrage which tend to pervade our understanding of the global condition today? Can Samuel Beckett’s call to arms of "failing better” in the vein of Charles Chaplin, Oleg Popov, or James Thiérrée offer a creative avenue to pursue (Bala; Coover; Salisbury)? Do they reflect other ways of knowing in the face of big “C” Catastrophes? Creation and CatastropheTo wrestle with these questions, I wish to begin by proposing a big picture view of earth-life wherein, across inconceivable aeons, huge physical catastrophes have wrought unimaginable damage on the ecological “completeness” of the time. I am not a palaeontologist or an evolutionary scientist but I suspect that, if human life is taken out of the equation, the planet since time immemorial has been battered by “disaster” which changed but ultimately did not destroy the earth. Evolution is replete with narratives of species wiped out by ice-ages, volcanoes, earthquakes, and meteors and yet the organism of this planet has survived and even regenerated. In metaphorical territory, the Sanskrit philosophers have a wise take on this process. Indian concepts are always multiple, crowded with possibilities, but I find there is something intriguing in the premise (even if it is impossible to tie down) of Shiva’s dance:Shiva Nataraja destroys creation by his Tandava Dance, or the Dance of Eternity. As he dances, everything disintegrates, apparently into nothingness. Then, out of the thin vapours, matter and life are recreated again. Shiva also dances in the hearts of his devotees as the Great Soul. As he dances, one’s egotism is consumed and one is rendered pure in soul and without any spiritual blemish. (Ghosh 109–10)For a dancer, the central location of dance in life’s creation forces is a powerful idea but I am also interested in how this metaphysical perspective aligns with current scientific views. How could these ancient thinkers predict evolutionary processes? Somehow, in the mix of experiential observation and speculation, they foresaw the complexity of time and, moreover, appreciated the necessary interdependence of creation and destruction (creativity and catastrophe). In comparison to western thought which privileges progression—and here evolution is a prime example—Hindu conceptualisation appears to prefer fatalism or a cyclical system of understanding that negates the potential of change to make things better. However, delving more closely into scientific narratives on evolution, the progression of life forms to the human species has involved the decimation of an uncountable number of other living possibilities. Contrariwise, Shiva’s Dance of Eternity is premised on endless diachronic change crossed vertically by reincarnation, through which progression and regression are equally expressed. I offer this simplistic view of both accounts of creation merely to point out that the interdependency of destruction and creation is deeply embodied in human knowledge.To introduce the clown figure into this idea, I have to turn to the minutiae of destruction and creation; to examples in the everyday nature of regeneration through catastrophe. I have memories of touring in the Northern Territory of Australia amidst strident green shoots bursting out of a fire-tortured landscape or, earlier in Paris, of the snow-crusted earth being torn asunder by spring’s awakening. We all have countless memories of such small-scale transformations of pain and destruction into startling glimpses of beauty. It is at this scale of creative wrestling that I see the clown playing his/her role.In the tension between fatalism and, from a human point of view, projections of the right to progression, a clown occupying the stage vacated by Shiva might stamp out a slight rhythm of his/her own with little or no meaning in the action. The brush on the sleeve might be hard to detect in an evolutionary or Hindu time scale but zoom down to the here and now of performance exchange and the scene may be quite different?Turning the Lens onto the Small-ScaleSmall-scale, clowns tend to be tiny bundles or, sometimes, gangly unbundles of ineptitude, careering through the simplest tasks with preposterous incompetence or, alternatively, imbibing complexity with the virtuosic delicacy—take Charles Chaplin’s shoe-lace spaghetti twirling and nibbling on nail-bones as an example. Clowns disrupt normalcy in small eddies of activity which often wreak paths of destruction within the tightly ordered rage of social formations. The momentum is chaotic and, not dissimilar to storms, clownish enactment bears down not so much to threaten human life but to disrupt what we humans desire and formulate as the natural order of decorum and success. Instead of the terror driven to consciousness by cyclones and hurricanes, the clown’s chaos is superficially benign. When Chaplin’s generous but unrealistic gesture to save the tightrope-act is thwarted by an escaped monkey, or when Thiérrée conducts a spirited debate with the wall of his abode in the midst of an identity crisis (Raoul), life is not threatened. Such incongruous and chaotic trajectories generate laughter and, sometimes, sadness. Moreover, as Weitz observes, “the clown-like imagination, unfettered by earthly logic, urges us to entertain unlikely avenues of thought and action” (87). While it may seem insensitive, I suggest that similar responses of laughter, sadness and unlikely avenues of thought and action emerge in the aftermath of cataclysmic events.Fear, unquestionably, saturates big states of catastrophe. Slide down the scale and intriguing parallels between fear and laughter emerge, one being a clown’s encapsulation of vulnerability and his/her stoic determination to continue, to persevere no matter what. There are many ways to express this continuity: Beckett’s characters are forever waiting, fearful that nothing will arrive, yet occupy themselves with variations of cruelty and amusement through the interminable passage of time. A reverse action occurs in Grock’s insistence that he can play his tiny violin, in spite of his ever-collapsing chair. It never occurs to him to find another chair or play standing up: that, in an incongruous way, would admit defeat because this chair and his playing constitute Grock’s compulsion to succeed. Fear of failure generates multiple innovations in his relationship with the chair and in his playing skills. Storm-like, the pursuit of a singular idea in both instances triggers chaotic consequences. Physical destruction may be slight in such ephemeral storms but the act, the being in the world, does leave its mark on those who witness its passage.I would like to offer a mark left in me by a slight gesture on the part of a clown. I choose this one among many because the singular idea played out in Circus Knie (Switzerland) back in the early 1970s does not conform to the usual parameters. This Knie season featured Dimitri, an Italian-Swiss clown, as the principal attraction. Following clown conventions, Dimitri appeared across the production as active glue between the various circus acts, his persona operating as an odd-jobs man to fix and clean. For instance, he intervened in the elephant act as a cleaner, scrubbing and polishing the elephant’s skin with little effect and tuned, with much difficulty, a tiny fiddle for the grand orchestration to come. But Dimitri was also given moments of his own and this is the one that has lodged in my memory.Dimitri enters the brightly lit and empty circus ring with a broom in hand. The audience at this point have accepted the signal that Dimitri’s interludes prepare the ring for the next attraction—to sweep, as it were, the sawdust back to neutrality. He surveys the circle for a moment and then takes a position on the periphery to begin what appears to be a regular clean-up. The initial brushes over the sawdust, however, produce an unexpected result—the light rather than the sawdust responds to his broom stokes. Bafflement swiftly passes as an idea takes hold: the diminutive figure trots off to the other side of the ring and, after a deep breath and a quick glance to see if anyone is looking (we all are), nudges the next edge of light. Triumphantly, the pattern is pursued with increasing nimbleness, until the figure with the broom stands before a pin-spot of light at the ring’s centre. He hesitates, checks again about unwanted surveillance, and then, in a single strike (poof), sweeps light and the world into darkness.This particular clown gesture contradicts usual commentaries of ineptitude and failure associated with clown figures but the incongruity of sweeping light and the narrative of the little man who scores a win lie thoroughly in the characteristic grounds of clownish behaviour. Moreover, the enactment of this simple idea illustrates for me today, as much as it did on its initial viewing, how powerful a slight clown gesture can be. This catastrophe with a very small “c:” the little man with nothing but a broom and an idea destroyed, like the great god Shiva, the world of light.Jesse McKnight’s discussion of the peculiar attraction of two little men of the 20th century, James Joyce’s Bloom and Charles Chaplin, could also apply to Dimitri:They are at sixes and sevens here on earth but in tune with the stars, buffoons of time, and heroes of eternity. In the petty cogs of the causal, they appear foolish; in the grand swirl of the universe, they are wise, outmaneuvering their assailants and winning the race or the girl against all odds or merely retaining their skins and their dignity by nightfall. (496) Clowning as a State of Mind/ConsciousnessAnother perspective on a clown’s relationship to ideas of catastrophe which I would like to examine is embedded in the discussion above but, at the same time, deviates by way of a harsh tangent from the beatitude and almost sacred qualities attributed by McKnight’s and my own visions of the rhythmic gestures of these diminutive figures. Beckett’s advice in Worstward Ho (1983) is a fruitful starting place wherein the directive is “to keep on trying even if the hope of success is dashed again and again by failure: ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better’” (Le Feuvre 13). True to the masterful wordsmith, these apparently simple words are not transparent; rather, they deflect a range of contradictory interpretations. Yes, failure can facilitate open, flexible and alternative thought which guards against fanatical and ultra-orthodox certitude: “Failure […] is free to honour other ways of knowing, other construals of power” (Werry & O’Gorman 107). On the other hand, failure can mask a horrifying realisation of the utter meaninglessness of human existence. It is as if catastrophe is etched lightly in external clown behaviour and scarred pitilessly deep in the psyches that drive the comic behaviour. Pupils of the pre-eminent clown teacher Jacques Lecoq suggest that theatrical clowning pivots on “finding that basic state of vulnerability and allowing the audience to exist in that state with you” (Butler 64). Butler argues that this “state of clowning” is “a state of anti-intellectualism, a kind of pure emotion” (ibid). From my perspective, there is also an emotional stratum in which the state or condition involves an adult anxiety desiring to protect the child’s view of the world with a fierceness equal to that of a mother hen protecting her brood. A clown knows the catastrophe of him/herself but refuses to let that knowledge (of failure) become an end. An obstinate resilience, even a frank acknowledgement of hopelessness, makes a clown not so much pure emotion or childlike but a kind of knowledgeable avenger of states of loss. Here I need to admit that I attribute the clowning state or consciousness to an intricate lineage inclusive of the named clowns, Grock, Chaplin, Popov, Dimitri, and Thiérrée, which extends to a whole host of others who never entered a circus or performance ring: Mikhail Dostoyevsky’s Mushkin (the holy Russian fool), Henry Miller’s Auguste, Salman Rushdie’s Saleem, Jacques Tati, Joan Miro, Marc Chagall, Jean Cocteau, Eric Satie’s sonic whimsy, and Pina Bausch’s choreography. In the following observation, the overlay of catastrophe and play is a crucial indication of this intricate lineage:Heiner Müller compared Pina Bausch's universe to the world of fairy tales. “History invades it like trouble, like summer flies [...] The territory is an unknown planet, an emerging island product of an ignored (forgotten or future) catastrophe [...] The whole is nothing but children's play”. (Biro 68)Bausch clearly recognises and is interested in the catastrophic moments or psychological wiring of life and her works are not exempt from comic (clownish) modulations in the play of violence and despair that often takes centre stage. In fact, Bausch probably plays on ambivalence between despair and play more explicitly than most artists. From one angle, this ambivalence is generational, as her adult performers bear the weight of oppression within the structures (and remembering of) childhood games. An artistic masterstroke in this regard is the tripling reproduction over many years of her work exploring gender negotiations at a social dance gathering: Kontakhof. Initially, the work was performed by Bausch’s regular company of mature, if diverse, dancers (Bausch 1977), then by an elderly ensemble, some of whom had appeared in the original production (Kontakhof), and, finally, by a group of adolescents in 2010. The latter version became the subject of a documentary film, Dancing Dreams (2010), which revealed the fidelity of the re-enactment, subtly transformed by the brashness and uncertainty of the teenage protagonists playing predetermined roles and moves. Viewing the three productions side-by-side reveals socialised relations of power and desire, resonant of Michel Foucault’s seminal observations (1997), and the catastrophe of gender relations subtly caught in generational change. The debility of each age group becomes apparent. None are able to engage in communication and free-play (dream) without negotiating an unyielding sexual terrain and, more often than not, the misinterpretation of one human to another within social conventions. Bausch’s affinity to the juxtaposition of childhood aspiration and adult despair places her in clown territory.Becoming “Inhuman” or SacrificialA variation on this condition of a relentless pursuit of failure is raised by Joshua Delpech-Ramey in an argument for the “inhuman” rights of clowns. His premise matches a “grotesque attachment to the world of things” to a clown’s existence that is “victimized by an excessive drive to exist in spite of all limitation. The clown is, in some sense, condemned to immortality” (133). In Delpech-Ramey’s terms:Chaplin is human not because his are the anxieties and frustrations of a man unable to realize his destiny, but because Chaplin—nearly starving, nearly homeless, a ghost in the machine—cannot not resist “the temptation to exist,” the giddiness of making something out of nothing, pancakes out of sawdust. In some sense the clown can survive every accident because s/he is an undead immortal, demiurge of a world without history. (ibid.)The play on a clown’s “undead” propensity, on his/her capacity to survive at all costs, provides a counterpoint to a tragic lens which has not been able, in human rights terms, to transcend "man’s inhumanity to man.” It might also be argued that this capacity to survive resists nature’s blindness to the plight of humankind (and visa versa). While I admire the skilful argument to place clowns as centrepieces in the formulation of alternative and possibly more potent human rights legislations, I’m not absolutely convinced that the clown condition, as I see it, provides a less mysterious and tragic state from which justice can be administered. Lear and his fool almost become interchangeable at the end of Shakespeare’s tragedy: both grapple with but cannot resolve the problem of justice.There is a little book written by Henry Miller, The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder (1948), which bears upon this aspect of a clown’s condition. In a postscript, Miller, more notorious for his sexually explicit fiction, states his belief in the unique status of clowns:Joy is like a river: it flows ceaselessly. It seems to me this is the message which the clown is trying to convey to us, that we should participate through ceaseless flow and movement, that we should not stop to reflect, compare, analyse, possess, but flow on and through, endlessly, like music. This is the gift of surrender, and the clown makes it symbolically. It is for us to make it real. (47)Miller’s fictional Auguste’s “special privilege [was] to re-enact the errors, the foibles, the stupidities, all the misunderstandings which plague human kind. To be ineptitude itself” (29). With overtones of a Christian resurrection, Auguste surrenders himself and, thereby, flows on through death, his eyes “wide open, gazing with a candour unbelievable at the thin sliver of a moon which had just become visible in the heavens” (40). It may be difficult to reconcile ineptitude with a Christ figure but those clowns who have made some sort of mark on human imagination tend to wander across territories designated as sacred and profane with a certain insouciance and privilege. They are individuals who become question marks: puzzles not meant to be solved. Maybe similar glimpses of the ineffable occur in tiny, miniscule shifts of consciousness, like the mark given to me by Dimitri and Chaplin and...—the unending list of clowns and clown conditions that have gifted their diminutive catastrophes to the problem of creativity, of rebirth after and in the face of destruction.With McKnight, I dedicate the last word to Chaplin, who speaks with final authority on the subject: “Be brave enough to face the veil and lift it, and see and know the void it hides, and stand before that void and know that within yourself is your world” (505).Thus poised, the diminutive clown figure may not carry the ferment of Shiva’s message of destruction and rebirth, he/she may not bear the strength to creatively reconstruct or re-birth normality after catastrophic devastation. But a clown, and all the humanity given to the collisions of laughter and tears, may provide an inept response to the powerlessness which, as humans, we face in catastrophe and death. Does this mean that creativity is inimical with catastrophe or that existing with catastrophe implies creativity? As noted at the beginning, these ruminations concern small “c” catastrophes. They are known otherwise as clowns.ReferencesBala, Michael. “The Clown.” Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche 4.1 (2010): 50–71.Bausch, Pina. Kontakthof. Wuppertal Dance Theatre, 1977.Big Apple Circus. Circopedia. 27 Feb. 2013 ‹http://www.circopedia.org/index.php/Main_Page›.Biro, Yvette. “Heartbreaking Fragments, Magnificent Whole: Pina Bausch’s New Minimyths.” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 20.2 (1998): 68–72.Butler, Lauren. “Everything Seemed New: Clown as Embodied Critical Pedagogy.” Theatre Topics 22.1 (2012): 63–72.Coover, Robert. “Tears of a Clown.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 42.1 (2000): 81–83.Dancing Dreams. Dirs. Anne Linsel and Rainer Hoffmann. 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