Academic literature on the topic 'Citations sanskrites'

L'un des plaisirs que Charles Malamoud offre à son lecteur est de découvrir en exergue à ses différents écrits des citations littéraires toujours choisies avec une acuité et une ironie suprêmes. « Cuire le monde », l'essai qui a donné son titre au recueil récemment publié, s'ouvre ainsi sur une formule de Jean Cocteau dans Essai de critique indirecte : « La métaphore est un calembour mal noué. Je serre le nœud jusqu'à ce que le doigt ne sente plus rien sur la corde. » Malamoud traque tout au long de son œuvre un malentendu qui renaît sans cesse entre l'Inde et nous. Nous prenons pour métaphores, en effet, des connexions qui pour les Indiens sont inscrites dans les choses mêmes. Serrons le noeud et les formules sanskrites qui semblaient faire image et ne pouvoir se comprendre qu'en un sens figuré récupèrent la solidité première du sens littéral.

Rasa Jala Nidhi is an important treatise of Rasa Shastra which is also pronounced as "Ocean of Indian Chemistry & Alchemy". It is a compilation work of Sanskrit verses transmitted from generation to generation either through oral tradition or from the citations occurring in ancient texts of alchemical chemistry. It is considered as one of the elaborated works written on Rasa Shastra. The present work is an illustrative and critical review on the text Rasa Jala Nidhi to highlight the unique and significant contribution in the field of Rasa Shastra.

ntroduction. The etymology of the Chinese character 佛 (fó) shows that not only phonetics but also morphology of the character proper, as well as its interpretation in ancient Chinese texts, serve important factors of its use to translate the concept of ‘Buddha’ from Sanskrit Indian sutras. Goals. Etymological analysis of the hieroglyph 佛 with identification of early meanings based on citations from classical philosophical writings will reveal reasons for the primary use of the character 佛 in translations, in contrast to other assonant lexemes (e.g., 浮). Insights into historical and cultural backgrounds, peculiarities of the dissemination of Buddha’s teachings and beginnings of Chinese translation studies prove instrumental in emphasizing the influence of these processes on subsequent development of the new meaning. Materials. The study analyzes Chinese etymological and explanatory dictionaries, language databases and Chinese historical texts, as well as materials presented in works of linguists and historians. Results. The sign 佛 had been used in Taoist and Confucian literature long before the arrival of Buddhism in China. Its etymological and semantic analyses, interpretations of main meanings discovered in philosophical texts make it possible to show origins of the new meaning of the hieroglyph 佛 ‘Buddha’ and its use in translations. The history of development of the pictophonetic 佛 involves a cognitive aspect of linguoregional studies and reflects the complex process of Buddhist teachings adaptation in China, as well as the formation of Chinese translation studies in the context of interaction between India, China and domains of Tokharistan (Xiyu states) in the earliest centuries AD.

Editor's note: Although the general policy of this journal is to publish only new research, an exception is being made in the present case, in order to publish a work of unusual value which has been inaccessible to most scholars for a century or more, and which has now been translated into English for the first time. In 1877, K. F. Holle published his Tabel van oud en nieuw-indische alphabetten, with the support of the Batavia Society of Arts and Letters (the Batavia of that period is the Jakarta of today); it was printed by C. Lang at Buitenzorg, Java. Hoik's "Table" is spread over 49 pages followed by four pages of appendices). In 81 rows, arranged in the Indic canonical order, it displays the symbols of 198 scripts, one per column, which are native to areas reaching from the Indian subcontinent to insular Southeast Asia. These are the writing systems of the Indic tradition that begins with the Brahmi script, used in the Buddhist inscriptions of the Emperor Asoka, in the 3rd century BCE. From that starting point, Holle's display moves forward in time and eastward from India, following the Brahmi-descended scripts through Tibet and Southeast Asia, then extending over the length of the Netherlands Indies, and finally ending with a sample from the Philippines. Neither before Hoik's time nor since has a comparable display been published, showing the multiple historical developments of a script over such an extension of time and space. For scholars interested in the myriad ways that scripts can change through history, Holle's "Table" is a unique source of data. It is reprinted here unchanged; readers will find that they need only know something of the Sanskrit phonological system in order to grasp the organization by rows, and a minimum of Dutch in order to understand the labeling of the columns. In 1882, Holle published a commentary on his "Table", with the added subtitle Bijdrage tot de palaeographie van Nederlandsch-Indie 'Contribution to the paleography of the Netherlands Indies'. This work, of just 20 pages, was again published by the Batavia Society of Arts and Letters; it was distributed by W. Bruining & Co., Batavia, and by M. Njhoff in The Hague. It is published here, preceding the "Table" proper, in an English translation by Carol Molony and Henk Pechler. A unified bibliographical listing, giving fuller citations than those provided by Holle, is a great desideratum; unfortunately, resources were not available for preparing such a listing. Also to be desired is a reconsideration and evaluation of Holle's materials in terms of scholarship since his time; I hope that the publication of this reprint will stimulate scholars to undertake such work. The editor is indebted to Elly Amade — a linguist, speaker of Dutch, and native of Indonesia —for help in preparing the translation for publication.

AbstractThe Yogārṇava (‘the ocean of yoga’) is a Sanskrit compendium on yoga that has not been published, translated or even mentioned in secondary literature on yoga. Citations attributed to it occur in several premodern commentaries and compendiums on yoga, and a few published library catalogues report manuscripts of a work on yoga called the Yogārṇava. This article presents the results of the first academic study of the text. It has attempted to answer basic questions, such as the work’s provenance and textual sources. The authors then discuss the importance of the Yogārṇava within the broader history of yoga based on their identification of citations and parallel verses in other Sanskrit texts and a detailed analysis of the Yogārṇava’s content.

प्रस्तुत लेख एपिए सातौँ संस्करणका प्रावधानहरू खोजी गर्ने उद्देश्यले तयार पारिएको हो । यसमा एपिए ढाँचाका प्रावधानसँग सम्बन्धित समस्याको समाधान गर्ने प्रयास गरिएको छ । यसमा दस्तावेजको विश्लेषणमा आधारित गुणात्मक ढाँचा अवलम्बन गरी सोद्देश्यमूलक नमुना छनोट विधि अपनाइएको छ । एपिएका प्रावधानहरूको वर्णन र विश्लेषण गरिएको यस लेखमा एपिए शैलीलाई नै सैद्धान्तिक पर्याधार बनाइएको छ । अनुसन्धानको प्रस्तुति गर्ने एपिए, एमएलए, सिकागो स्टाइल, तुरेबियन स्टाइल, वेन्कुवर स्टाइल, हावर्ट स्टाइल र ब्रिली चाइनिज साइटेसन स्टाइल गाइडजस्ता बहुप्रचलित ढाँचाहरू रहेका छन् । तीमध्ये एपिए ढाँचाको प्रयोग वाङ्मयका शिक्षा, विज्ञानलगायतका विभिन्न क्षेत्रमा गरिन्छ । एपिएको सर्वप्रथम प्रकाशन सन् १९२९ मा भएको थियो भने २०२० मा यसको सातौँ संस्करण प्रकाशित भएको छ । यसमा गुणात्मक, परिमाणात्मक र मिश्रित अनुसन्धान विधिको चर्चासँगै अनुसन्धानात्मक लेख, प्रतिवेदन तथा पुस्तकहरू सेटिङ गर्ने तरिकाबारे पनि उल्लेख गरिएको छ । यसमा अनुसन्धानको भाषाशैली, छपाइ प्रविधि, वर्णविन्यास, पृष्ठाङ्कन, मार्जिन छोडाइ, अङ्क, तथ्याङ्कको प्रयोगका तरिका, उद्धरण, टिप्पणी र भावहरणका तरिकादेखि लेख, पुस्तक र विद्युतीय माध्यममा प्रकाशित सामग्रीको सन्दर्भाङ्कन गर्ने तरिकालाई सरलीकृत गरिएको छ । अङ्ग्रेजी भाषामा पहुँच नभएका नेपाली, संस्कृत, मैथिली, थारु, नेवारी आदि भाषामा एपिए शैलीको प्रयोग गर्न चाहने अनुसन्धाताहरूका लागि उपयोगी हुने निष्कर्ष निकालिएको छ । [This article is intended to explore the provisions of the seventh edition of the APA. It attempts to resolve issues related to the provisions of the APA framework. In this, purposeful sample selection method has been adopted by adopting qualitative format based on the analysis of the document. This article describes and analyzes the provisions of the APA, making the APA style the theoretical basis. There are many popular formats for presenting research, such as APA, MLA, Chicago style, Turbian style, Vancouver style, Howart style and Brilliant Chinese citation style guide. Among them, the APA format is used in various fields including classical education and science. The first edition of APA was published in 1929 and the seventh edition was published in 2020. It discusses qualitative, quantitative and mixed research methods as well as how to set up research articles, reports and books. This includes research language style, printing techniques, typography, layout, margin skipping, numbers, usage of data, quotes, the methods of commenting and commenting on the content of articles, books and electronic media have been simplified. It has been concluded that, it will be useful for researchers who want to use APA style in Nepali, Sanskrit, Maithili, Tharu, Newari etc. languages, ​​who do not have access to English language.]

Thirteen years ago, Kenichi Ohmae proclaimed that the world had become “borderless,” and the nation-state nothing more than a “bit actor” in a globalised economy. Around the same time, “interdisciplinarity” appeared as the prime strategy for breaking down the rigid stratifications of traditional disciplines, promising an equivalently borderless academe. However, despite the rhetoric of globalisation and interdisciplinarity, territorial boundaries—both physical and conceptual—remain in evidence and under contention. We chose Christy Collis’s article, “Australia’s Antartic Turf,” as our feature article because it foregrounds what we were most interested in: the collaboration between the physical and representational aspects of territory in the creation of “turf.” Ironically, as Collis notes, the territory she maps out—the Australian Antarctic Territory—is, in a physical sense, a “turfless space,” though it is one that is legally claimed as Australian turf. In this space, once again, we can see the collapsing of the literal and conceptual aspects of turf. Collis’s “anatomy” of Australia’s Antarctican space is exciting reading for questions of territorial claims and territorial representations and their implications. She informs us about the often forgotten complex geopolitical and legal aspects involved in such territory-making, and shows how these aspects, together with certain cultural spatialising technologies, have transformed vast areas of Antarctica into Australian sovereign space. As Collis’s article shows, the territories these practices mark out are not neutral spaces, but highly politicised turfs, themselves fragmented by conflicting interests and agendas. Eric D. Mason’s article, “Border-Building: Cultural Turf and the Maintenance of Hybridity,” examines the way in which, in the context of international capitalism, the border-eliding practice of hybridity is, paradoxically, fostered through the “strategic reinforcement of national and cultural borders.” The problems of this paradox are exemplified in “the idealistic American view of culture as a ‘melting pot’” in which disparate cultural identities are subsumed into a “greater national identity.” However, as Mason argues, the 9/11 attacks have shattered this homogeneous hybridity and “prompted a host of culturally-focused turf disputes ranging from the bombing of mosques to the deliberate dumping of French champagne.” In “Allegiance and Renunciation at the Border,” Brian J. Norman also addresses changes to U.S. immigration and citizenship policies post-9/11, but from a rhetorical standpoint. He examines the way in which the Bush administration responded to the attacks “with vigorous efforts to shore up national borders within a language of terrorism, evildoers, and the dire need for domestic security.” The Oath of Allegiance, he argues, is one such example of how rhetoric creates new political realities. Norman’s article, in this way, rethinks the figure of the immigrant and questions of citizenship within the context of state procedures, and considers these shifts as a result of newly inflamed discourses of terrorism and national security. This theme of the production and circulation of nationalism through language continues to run through Terrence Maybury’s article, “The Literacy Control Complex.” This article examines the literate domain and some of the changes it has experienced throughout the new media communications revolution. Maybury ultimately relates questions of literacy and its control to the concepts of sovereignty, territoriality, and nationalism. New media technologies are among the most effective and pervasive means for circulating and maintaining such politicised turfs, and, in “Transformations: A Nation State Responds,” Tim Dwyer looks specifically at these technologies in an Australian context. Dwyer addresses issues of “turf” as part of national debates about the institutional reshaping of media regulation at times of rapid changes within communications media. Using debates in Australia about how to merge the functions of the Australian Communications Authority and the Australian Broadcasting Authority as an example, he discusses social, technological, and politico-economic dimensions of regulatory policies. From these more geo-political and mediatised aspects of turf, our articles take a turn towards academic questions of disciplinary turf. Fred Mason’s story of his personal experiences of the academic “turf protection” maintained by traditional disciplines offers thoughts about interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity—those much-touted new prime strategies in cultural research. For Zach Whalen, games studies is a new field of cultural research at the edges of academe that must deal with the issues surrounding interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity raised by Fred Mason. He poses the question as to whether “ludology is sufficiently robust as a hypothetical academic discipline” to firmly establish games studies within the confines of the traditional university. He argues that the study of video games has been the subject of “a quiet disciplinary turf war between scholars who attempt to bring games into existing academic discourse communities and scholars who see games as an entirely unique medium warranting independent academic infrastructures.” Whalen’s conclusion is that, at present, ludology may not be able to resolve this turf war and, instead, games studies may be better considered as a “melting pot” of competing methodologies. Laurie Taylor’s article on the spaces of video games can be considered a telling counterpoint to Whalen’s for two reasons. First, Taylor shifts the focus from the disciplinary turf war of games studies to the internal turf spaces and violent turf wars within video games themselves. Second, her article exemplifies the way in which new fields of study carve out ideological territories that delimit critical language, critical practice, and the object of study. Taylor maintains that what has been lacking in the debate over violence in video games is an awareness of the relationship between the virtual game space and the physical space of play. She argues that “the internal game space of a video game cannot be examined outside of the space of play because the space of play dictates how the game is played and how the game space is to be read.” In some way, each of these articles portrays a “turf war,” which, by definition, relies upon competing claims for cultural, spatial, or intellectual exclusivity. However, the word “turf” itself is intrinsically transcultural, sharing an Indo-European root with the Sanskrit darbha or “tuft of grass.” Moreover, in this sense of the word, turf can be carved up and exploited, burned for fuel; however, as a living network of roots and soil, it is also resilient and transplantable. It is this aspect of “turf” that Michelle Dicinoski’s poem “Golf” draws out. Dicinoski’s poem gives us a living image of one such cultural grafting as she opens the geopolitics of “turf” up to the everyday, the tangible, the local, and the familial. In her humorous and personal way, Dicinoski distils the genealogy of “culture” that Raymond Williams maps out in Keywords. In the same way, we need to cultivate an attentiveness to the spatial metaphors we (and these articles) use to talk about knowledge. Traditional epistemology has been consistently defined in geographical terms—knowledge is surveyed and divided into fields, topics (from topos, or place), provinces, domains, realms, and spheres. Implied in this subdivision of epistemological territory is a mastery or dominance over knowledge, as the terms “subject” and “discipline” make evident. An awareness of these metaphors alerts us to the fact that the language we use is not neutral, apolitical, or simply academic. Critical encounters with “turf” are not mere rhetoric: they at once establish, erase, or contest borders both of knowledge and physical territory. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Mitchell, Peta & Buettner, Angi. "Editorial" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0403/01-editorial.php>. APA Style Mitchell, P. & Buettner, A. (2004, Mar17). Editorial. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0403/01-editorial.php>

In a networked virtual world, interconnected participants are able to enter a dialogue and to interact with one another; they cannot actually do so, however, with the remote participants, but rather with the interpretation and representation of the data transferred from the remote site(s). The process of the evolving dialogue in such tele-immersive scenarios is complexly interwoven with another liquid, hybrid and oscillating process, that of ‘becoming a subject’. The actual opacity of the individual sites – in that all sources, such as the participants’ appearance, their input and in fact anything connected to the actual and physical site are only represented on the ‘other site’ – holds something ambiguous, almost uncanny, opening the scope of something third, other, in between. This article addresses the issues of disguise inherent to tele-immersive virtual environments and communication; it examines the issue of presence emerging from the interrelationships between the networked participants, their virtual representation and the underlying computer-controlled system, as well as between the virtual place and the physical location. The issue of presence and embodiment in tele-immersive virtual environments differs from other virtual social spaces, such as chat rooms and current forms of online-games, in the human-scale, three-dimensional representation of the space and the user's manifestation – the so-called avatar. One of the main purposes of networking such virtual environments is the visual and acoustic representation of remote participants as they share the same virtual space with one’s Self, and thus create a virtual meeting place somewhere in between the participants’ remote locations. In such an environment, the tele-dialogue evolves based on an almost absurd scenario of disguise: while, locally, one is limited to communicating with an electronically masked opposite, this form of dialogue also implies that one’s Self only appears to our ‘human’ opposite as its computer graphic incarnation, an avatar – with which one is nevertheless identified. In a typical example of a networked scenario, multiple copies of the environment, as well as the representations of the users (avatars) are displayed at all client sites. Yet the fact that all modes of representations appear as an exact duplicate on the ‘other side’ does not represent a system-inherent condition, but is exclusively based on the intention of the programmer/designer and/or a convention shared by users of the tele-immersive environment. One possible reason for this common convention might be found in the primary impetus behind the development of virtual reality technologies, which is the most indistinguishable and controllable electronic replication of our physical reality and its inhabitants. Assuming, however, that the shared data is based on mathematical descriptions and instructions, their form of interpretation and representation is entirely subject to the modality of the program/system – and thus, in most cases, also to the individual system of each remote recipient (client). How an environment is represented remotely and how users (avatars) appear and behave on each client’s site is thus the expression of a (possibly selected) option, whereby the convention of reproduction is only one possible choice. As the temporary inhabitants are not actually able to enter the ‘other’ remote site, the virtual environment likewise cannot extend to another, remote place, but rather is generated at each local site (a server’s location, respectively). Decisions about the extent to which the data content can be reinterpreted, and in which form it is represented, establish political and hierarchical structures. Centralized network architectures, like the ‘master-slave’ model or the ‘server-client’ model, also shape our virtual architectures of communication. The politicization of the virtual terrain is thereby partly inscribed by the environment’s author and partly emerges from the opaque, disguising nature of each remote system’s signal- and data-processing. The author defines whether the participants are able to choose their own form of representation, how ‘permeable’, in general, the environment is designed to be, to what degree the user can modify its evolution and its outgoing and incoming signals, and the importance attributed to the imagination and identity of the participating co-author. However much the users are accommodated, the implementation of such a representing mediator and translator in between will never result in a ‘neutral’ system. According to the aforementioned mathematical encoding of represented realities, any structure and instruction can be modulated, re-associated or replaced, every single frame. Whether implemented as a time-based, narrative, or independently generative structure, such a potentially nonlinear sequence of dynamic, transformative events is very likely to entangle with the participants’ subjective Self and its formation of identity. For N. Katherine Hayles, Cyberspace opens common construction of body borders for transformative configurations, which always carry the trace of ‘the Other’. The simultaneous estrangement of the self from itself and its cybernetic reconstitution as ‘the Other’ produces a “diffusion of subjectivity” that “constitutes a second mirror stage: the Mirror of the Cyborg." (Hayles 1993, 186) In my tele-immersive installation Maya--Veil of Illusion, the interferences and distortions caused by the system as a third, unknown participant – the allegedly ‘other’ in the system’s own reflection of the participants’ dialogue –gain a strange, ambiguous component. The project translates the Hindu-Buddhist notion of ‘Maya’ (Sanskrit: illusion) into an elastic veil, spanned between two remote, networked sites. The relationship between the Self and the virtual representation of one’s Self and of the other remote participant becomes the cast of something third, other in the virtual layer in between. Although the veil’s distorted mirror image remains the untouchable ‘other’, it spatially materialises the other participant’s presence as it penetrates the electronic filter, occupying one’s private local space. (see figures 1,2 and 3) The combination of immersive, embodying representation, networking technology and a performative, systemic translator in between opens yet another chapter in the concept of ‘suspension of disbelief’ in contemporary media. In a tele-immersive virtual environment, the participants not only deal with a simple feedback loop (between themselves and the environment), but rather with a nesting of loops, in which the other (remote) sides are likewise involved. In other words, the participants pursue their dialogue via the dialogue with the virtual environment and the projection of their Selves. As addressed in Maya--Veil of Illusion, the dialogue between the remote participants becomes entirely mediated – and consequently controlled by the underlying computer system, which might be more or less transparent to the users. Click on image to see figures 1,2 and 3: Maya--Veil of Illusion; local site ingold: EVL, UIC Chicago, remote site in blue: IAO Fraunhofer Stuttgart In their realisation, tele-immersive virtual spaces appear much more introverted than extroverted, in the sense of actually stretching across the multiple remote sites. So it seems that we don’t actually travel to distant places but rather bring them into our local environment – together with the (representations of the) remote users. Both the sensuous experience as well as the process of interacting take place locally, ‘at home'. Thereby, the virtual place doesn’t seem to be able to break away from its physical anchorage and the cybernetic transfer of our Self (still) seems to be somewhat uncanny. The most exciting aspect for remote users is commonly the fact that they are connected to other participants, located in Chicago and Tokyo, physical places they can relate to in their mental world map, rather than the fact that all of them actually – virtually – share the same space. Does this imply that the virtual place and the virtual body, materialised in virtually accessible environments, are coupled with one another in a similar way as we experience the physical and cultural boundaries in our daily life? It seems that space, however, will always rub against the body – in whatever form of reality. Once, during a networking event at the Ars Electronica Center (Linz, Austria) (EVL: Alive on the Grid, Ars Electronica Festival, 2001), connected to Amsterdam, Chicago, and some other remote sites worldwide, I was approached by a participant. “I don’t believe that I am really interacting with all these remote people in Europe and America. How can you prove to me that it is not just a technical fake?” Well, I can’t. Works Cited Hayles, N. Katherine. The Seductions of Cyberspace. Conley, Verena (ed.): Rethinking Technologies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1993. Alive on the Grid: <http://www.evl.uic.edu/art/art_project.php3?indi=209> Maya--Veil of Illusion: <http://www.evl.uic.edu/art/art_project.php3?indi=240> Links http://www.evl.uic.edu/art/art_project.php3?indi=209 http://www.evl.uic.edu/art/art_project.php3?indi=240 Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Gemeinboeck, Petra. "Something Third, Other " M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0308/09-something3rd.php>. APA Style Gemeinboeck, P. (2003, Aug 26). Something Third, Other . M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0308/09-something3rd.php>

From elephants to ABBA fans, silicon to hormone, the following discussion uses a new research method to look at printed text, motion pictures and a teenage rebel icon. If by ‘print’ we mean a mechanically reproduced impression of a cultural symbol in a medium, then printing has been with us since before microdot security prints were painted onto cars, before voice prints, laser prints, network servers, record pressings, motion picture prints, photo prints, colour woodblock prints, before books, textile prints, and footprints. If we accept that higher mammals such as elephants have a learnt culture, then it is possible to extend a definition of printing beyond Homo sapiens. Poole reports that elephants mechanically trumpet reproductions of human car horns into the air surrounding their society. If nothing else, this cross-species, cross-cultural reproduction, this ‘ability to mimic’ is ‘another sign of their intelligence’. Observation of child development suggests that the first significant meaningful ‘impression’ made on the human mind is that of the face of the child’s nurturer – usually its mother. The baby’s mind forms an ‘impression’, a mental print, a reproducible memory data set, of the nurturer’s face, voice, smell, touch, etc. That face is itself a cultural construct: hair style, makeup, piercings, tattoos, ornaments, nutrition-influenced skin and smell, perfume, temperature and voice. A mentally reproducible pattern of a unique face is formed in the mind, and we use that pattern to distinguish ‘familiar and strange’ in our expanding social orbit. The social relations of patterned memory – of imprinting – determine the extent to which we explore our world (armed with research aids such as text print) or whether we turn to violence or self-harm (Bretherton). While our cultural artifacts (such as vellum maps or networked voice message servers) bravely extend our significant patterns into the social world and the traversed environment, it is useful to remember that such artifacts, including print, are themselves understood by our original pattern-reproduction and impression system – the human mind, developed in childhood. The ‘print’ is brought to mind differently in different discourses. For a reader, a ‘print’ is a book, a memo or a broadsheet, whether it is the Indian Buddhist Sanskrit texts ordered to be printed in 593 AD by the Chinese emperor Sui Wen-ti (Silk Road) or the US Defense Department memo authorizing lower ranks to torture the prisoners taken by the Bush administration (Sanchez, cited in ABC). Other fields see prints differently. For a musician, a ‘print’ may be the sheet music which spread classical and popular music around the world; it may be a ‘record’ (as in a ‘recording’ session), where sound is impressed to wax, vinyl, charged silicon particles, or the alloys (Smith, “Elpida”) of an mp3 file. For the fine artist, a ‘print’ may be any mechanically reproduced two-dimensional (or embossed) impression of a significant image in media from paper to metal, textile to ceramics. ‘Print’ embraces the Japanese Ukiyo-e colour prints of Utamaro, the company logos that wink from credit card holographs, the early photographs of Talbot, and the textured patterns printed into neolithic ceramics. Computer hardware engineers print computational circuits. Homicide detectives investigate both sweaty finger prints and the repeated, mechanical gaits of suspects, which are imprinted into the earthy medium of a crime scene. For film makers, the ‘print’ may refer to a photochemical polyester reproduction of a motion picture artifact (the reel of ‘celluloid’), or a DVD laser disc impression of the same film. Textualist discourse has borrowed the word ‘print’ to mean ‘text’, so ‘print’ may also refer to the text elements within the vision track of a motion picture: the film’s opening titles, or texts photographed inside the motion picture story such as the sword-cut ‘Z’ in Zorro (Niblo). Before the invention of writing, the main mechanically reproduced impression of a cultural symbol in a medium was the humble footprint in the sand. The footprints of tribes – and neighbouring animals – cut tracks in the vegetation and the soil. Printed tracks led towards food, water, shelter, enemies and friends. Having learnt to pattern certain faces into their mental world, children grew older and were educated in the footprints of family and clan, enemies and food. The continuous impression of significant foot traffic in the medium of the earth produced the lines between significant nodes of prewriting and pre-wheeled cultures. These tracks were married to audio tracks, such as the song lines of the Australian Aborigines, or the ballads of tramping culture everywhere. A typical tramping song has the line, ‘There’s a track winding back to an old-fashion shack along the road to Gundagai,’ (O’Hagan), although this colonial-style song was actually written for radio and became an international hit on the airwaves, rather than the tramping trails. The printed tracks impressed by these cultural flows are highly contested and diverse, and their foot prints are woven into our very language. The names for printed tracks have entered our shared memory from the intersection of many cultures: ‘Track’ is a Germanic word entering English usage comparatively late (1470) and now used mainly in audio visual cultural reproduction, as in ‘soundtrack’. ‘Trek’ is a Dutch word for ‘track’ now used mainly by ecotourists and science fiction fans. ‘Learn’ is a Proto-Indo-European word: the verb ‘learn’ originally meant ‘to find a track’ back in the days when ‘learn’ had a noun form which meant ‘the sole of the foot’. ‘Tract’ and ‘trace’ are Latin words entering English print usage before 1374 and now used mainly in religious, and electronic surveillance, cultural reproduction. ‘Trench’ in 1386 was a French path cut through a forest. ‘Sagacity’ in English print in 1548 was originally the ability to track or hunt, in Proto-Indo-European cultures. ‘Career’ (in English before 1534) was the print made by chariots in ancient Rome. ‘Sleuth’ (1200) was a Norse noun for a track. ‘Investigation’ (1436) was Latin for studying a footprint (Harper). The arrival of symbolic writing scratched on caves, hearth stones, and trees (the original meaning of ‘book’ is tree), brought extremely limited text education close to home. Then, with baked clay tablets, incised boards, slate, bamboo, tortoise shell, cast metal, bark cloth, textiles, vellum, and – later – paper, a portability came to text that allowed any culture to venture away from known ‘foot’ paths with a reduction in the risk of becoming lost and perishing. So began the world of maps, memos, bills of sale, philosophic treatises and epic mythologies. Some of this was printed, such as the mechanical reproduction of coins, but the fine handwriting required of long, extended, portable texts could not be printed until the invention of paper in China about 2000 years ago. Compared to lithic architecture and genes, portable text is a fragile medium, and little survives from the millennia of its innovators. The printing of large non-text designs onto bark-paper and textiles began in neolithic times, but Sui Wen-ti’s imperial memo of 593 AD gives us the earliest written date for printed books, although we can assume they had been published for many years previously. The printed book was a combination of Indian philosophic thought, wood carving, ink chemistry and Chinese paper. The earliest surviving fragment of paper-print technology is ‘Mantras of the Dharani Sutra’, a Buddhist scripture written in the Sanskrit language of the Indian subcontinent, unearthed at an early Tang Dynasty site in Xian, China – making the fragment a veteran piece of printing, in the sense that Sanskrit books had been in print for at least a century by the early Tang Dynasty (Chinese Graphic Arts Net). At first, paper books were printed with page-size carved wooden boards. Five hundred years later, Pi Sheng (c.1041) baked individual reusable ceramic characters in a fire and invented the durable moveable type of modern printing (Silk Road 2000). Abandoning carved wooden tablets, the ‘digitizing’ of Chinese moveable type sped up the production of printed texts. In turn, Pi Sheng’s flexible, rapid, sustainable printing process expanded the political-cultural impact of the literati in Asian society. Digitized block text on paper produced a bureaucratic, literate elite so powerful in Asia that Louis XVI of France copied China’s print-based Confucian system of political authority for his own empire, and so began the rise of the examined public university systems, and the civil service systems, of most European states (Watson, Visions). By reason of its durability, its rapid mechanical reproduction, its culturally agreed signs, literate readership, revered authorship, shared ideology, and distributed portability, a ‘print’ can be a powerful cultural network which builds and expands empires. But print also attacks and destroys empires. A case in point is the Spanish conquest of Aztec America: The Aztecs had immense libraries of American literature on bark-cloth scrolls, a technology which predated paper. These libraries were wiped out by the invading Spanish, who carried a different book before them (Ewins). In the industrial age, the printing press and the gun were seen as the weapons of rebellions everywhere. In 1776, American rebels staffed their ‘Homeland Security’ units with paper makers, knowing that defeating the English would be based on printed and written documents (Hahn). Mao Zedong was a book librarian; Mao said political power came out of the barrel of a gun, but Mao himself came out of a library. With the spread of wireless networked servers, political ferment comes out of the barrel of the cell phone and the internet chat room these days. Witness the cell phone displays of a plane hitting a tower that appear immediately after 9/11 in the Middle East, or witness the show trials of a few US and UK lower ranks who published prints of their torturing activities onto the internet: only lower ranks who published prints were arrested or tried. The control of secure servers and satellites is the new press. These days, we live in a global library of burning books – ‘burning’ in the sense that ‘print’ is now a charged silicon medium (Smith, “Intel”) which is usually made readable by connecting the chip to nuclear reactors and petrochemically-fired power stations. World resources burn as we read our screens. Men, women, children burn too, as we watch our infotainment news in comfort while ‘their’ flickering dead faces are printed in our broadcast hearths. The print we watch is not the living; it is the voodoo of the living in the blackout behind the camera, engaging the blood sacrifice of the tormented and the unfortunate. Internet texts are also ‘on fire’ in the third sense of their fragility and instability as a medium: data bases regularly ‘print’ fail-safe copies in an attempt to postpone the inevitable mechanical, chemical and electrical failure that awaits all electronic media in time. Print defines a moral position for everyone. In reporting conflict, in deciding to go to press or censor, any ‘print’ cannot avoid an ethical context, starting with the fact that there is a difference in power between print maker, armed perpetrators, the weak, the peaceful, the publisher, and the viewer. So many human factors attend a text, video or voice ‘print’: its very existence as an aesthetic object, even before publication and reception, speaks of unbalanced, and therefore dynamic, power relationships. For example, Graham Greene departed unscathed from all the highly dangerous battlefields he entered as a novelist: Riot-torn Germany, London Blitz, Belgian Congo, Voodoo Haiti, Vietnam, Panama, Reagan’s Washington, and mafia Europe. His texts are peopled with the injustices of the less fortunate of the twentieth century, while he himself was a member of the fortunate (if not happy) elite, as is anyone today who has the luxury of time to read Greene’s works for pleasure. Ethically a member of London and Paris’ colonizers, Greene’s best writing still electrifies, perhaps partly because he was in the same line of fire as the victims he shared bread with. In fact, Greene hoped daily that he would escape from the dreadful conflicts he fictionalized via a body bag or an urn of ashes (see Sherry). In reading an author’s biography we have one window on the ethical dimensions of authority and print. If a print’s aesthetics are sometimes enduring, its ethical relationships are always mutable. Take the stylized logo of a running athlete: four limbs bent in a rotation of action. This dynamic icon has symbolized ‘good health’ in Hindu and Buddhist culture, from Madras to Tokyo, for thousands of years. The cross of bent limbs was borrowed for the militarized health programs of 1930s Germany, and, because of what was only a brief, recent, isolated yet monstrously horrific segment of its history in print, the bent-limbed swastika is now a vilified symbol in the West. The sign remains ‘impressed’ differently on traditional Eastern culture, and without the taint of Nazism. Dramatic prints are emotionally charged because, in depicting Homo sapiens in danger, or passionately in love, they elicit a hormonal reaction from the reader, the viewer, or the audience. The type of emotions triggered by a print vary across the whole gamut of human chemistry. A recent study of three genres of motion picture prints shows a marked differences in the hormonal responses of men compared to women when viewing a romance, an actioner, and a documentary (see Schultheiss, Wirth, and Stanton). Society is biochemically diverse in its engagement with printed culture, which raises questions about equality in the arts. Motion picture prints probably comprise around one third of internet traffic, in the form of stolen digitized movie files pirated across the globe via peer-to-peer file transfer networks (p2p), and burnt as DVD laser prints (BBC). There is also a US 40 billion dollar per annum legitimate commerce in DVD laser pressings (Grassl), which would suggest an US 80 billion per annum world total in legitimate laser disc print culture. The actively screen literate, or the ‘sliterati’ as I prefer to call them, research this world of motion picture prints via their peers, their internet information channels, their television programming, and their web forums. Most of this activity occurs outside the ambit of universities and schools. One large site of sliterate (screen literate) practice outside most schooling and official research is the net of online forums at imdb.com (International Movie Data Base). Imdb.com ‘prints’ about 25,000,000 top pages per month to client browsers. Hundreds of sliterati forums are located at imdb, including a forum for the Australian movie, Muriel’s Wedding (Hogan). Ten years after the release of Muriel’s Wedding, young people who are concerned with victimization and bullying still log on to http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0110598/board/> and put their thoughts into print: I still feel so bad for Muriel in the beginning of the movie, when the girls ‘dump’ her, and how much the poor girl cried and cried! Those girls were such biartches…I love how they got their comeuppance! bunniesormaybemidgets’s comment is typical of the current discussion. Muriel’s Wedding was a very popular film in its first cinema edition in Australia and elsewhere. About 30% of the entire over-14 Australian population went to see this photochemical polyester print in the cinemas on its first release. A decade on, the distributors printed a DVD laser disc edition. The story concerns Muriel (played by Toni Collette), the unemployed daughter of a corrupt, ‘police state’ politician. Muriel is bullied by her peers and she withdraws into a fantasy world, deluding herself that a white wedding will rescue her from the torments of her blighted life. Through theft and deceit (the modus operandi of her father) Muriel escapes to the entertainment industry and finds a ‘wicked’ girlfriend mentor. From a rebellious position of stubborn independence, Muriel plays out her fantasy. She gets her white wedding, before seeing both her father and her new married life as hollow shams which have goaded her abandoned mother to suicide. Redefining her life as a ‘game’ and assuming responsibility for her independence, Muriel turns her back on the mainstream, image-conscious, female gang of her oppressed youth. Muriel leaves the story, having rekindled her friendship with her rebel mentor. My methodological approach to viewing the laser disc print was to first make a more accessible, coded record of the entire movie. I was able to code and record the print in real time, using a new metalanguage (Watson, “Eyes”). The advantage of Coding is that ‘thinks’ the same way as film making, it does not sidetrack the analyst into prose. The Code splits the movie print into Vision Action [vision graphic elements, including text] (sound) The Coding splits the vision track into normal action and graphic elements, such as text, so this Coding is an ideal method for extracting all the text elements of a film in real time. After playing the film once, I had four and a half tightly packed pages of the coded story, including all its text elements in square brackets. Being a unique, indexed hard copy, the Coded copy allowed me immediate access to any point of the Muriel’s Wedding saga without having to search the DVD laser print. How are ‘print’ elements used in Muriel’s Wedding? Firstly, a rose-coloured monoprint of Muriel Heslop’s smiling face stares enigmatically from the plastic surface of the DVD picture disc. The print is a still photo captured from her smile as she walked down the aisle of her white wedding. In this print, Toni Collette is the Mona Lisa of Australian culture, except that fans of Muriel’s Wedding know the meaning of that smile is a magical combination of the actor’s art: the smile is both the flush of dreams come true and the frightening self deception that will kill her mother. Inserting and playing the disc, the text-dominant menu appears, and the film commences with the text-dominant opening titles. Text and titles confer a legitimacy on a work, whether it is a trade mark of the laser print owners, or the household names of stars. Text titles confer status relationships on both the presenters of the cultural artifact and the viewer who has entered into a legal license agreement with the owners of the movie. A title makes us comfortable, because the mind always seeks to name the unfamiliar, and a set of text titles does that job for us so that we can navigate the ‘tracks’ and settle into our engagement with the unfamiliar. The apparent ‘truth’ and ‘stability’ of printed text calms our fears and beguiles our uncertainties. Muriel attends the white wedding of a school bully bride, wearing a leopard print dress she has stolen. Muriel’s spotted wild animal print contrasts with the pure white handmade dress of the bride. In Muriel’s leopard textile print, we have the wild, rebellious, impoverished, inappropriate intrusion into the social ritual and fantasy of her high-status tormentor. An off-duty store detective recognizes the printed dress and calls the police. The police are themselves distinguished by their blue-and-white checked prints and other mechanically reproduced impressions of cultural symbols: in steel, brass, embroidery, leather and plastics. Muriel is driven in the police car past the stenciled town sign (‘Welcome To Porpoise Spit’ heads a paragraph of small print). She is delivered to her father, a politician who presides over the policing of his town. In a state where the judiciary, police and executive are hijacked by the same tyrant, Muriel’s father, Bill, pays off the police constables with a carton of legal drugs (beer) and Muriel must face her father’s wrath, which he proceeds to transfer to his detested wife. Like his daughter, the father also wears a spotted brown print costume, but his is a batik print from neighbouring Indonesia (incidentally, in a nation that takes the political status of its batik prints very seriously). Bill demands that Muriel find the receipt for the leopard print dress she claims she has purchased. The legitimate ownership of the object is enmeshed with a printed receipt, the printed evidence of trade. The law (and the paramilitary power behind the law) are legitimized, or contested, by the presence or absence of printed text. Muriel hides in her bedroom, surround by poster prints of the pop group ABBA. Torn-out prints of other people’s weddings adorn her mirror. Her face is embossed with the clown-like primary colours of the marionette as she lifts a bouquet to her chin and stares into the real time ‘print’ of her mirror image. Bill takes the opportunity of a business meeting with Japanese investors to feed his entire family at ‘Charlie Chan’’s restaurant. Muriel’s middle sister sloppily wears her father’s state election tee shirt, printed with the text: ‘Vote 1, Bill Heslop. You can’t stop progress.’ The text sets up two ironic gags that are paid off on the dialogue track: “He lost,’ we are told. ‘Progress’ turns out to be funding the concreting of a beach. Bill berates his daughter Muriel: she has no chance of becoming a printer’s apprentice and she has failed a typing course. Her dysfunction in printed text has been covered up by Bill: he has bribed the typing teacher to issue a printed diploma to his daughter. In the gambling saloon of the club, under the arrays of mechanically repeated cultural symbols lit above the poker machines (‘A’ for ace, ‘Q’ for queen, etc.), Bill’s secret girlfriend Diedre risks giving Muriel a cosmetics job. Another text icon in lights announces the surf nightclub ‘Breakers’. Tania, the newly married queen bitch who has made Muriel’s teenage years a living hell, breaks up with her husband, deciding to cash in his negotiable text documents – his Bali honeymoon tickets – and go on an island holiday with her girlfriends instead. Text documents are the enduring site of agreements between people and also the site of mutations to those agreements. Tania dumps Muriel, who sobs and sobs. Sobs are a mechanical, percussive reproduction impressed on the sound track. Returning home, we discover that Muriel’s older brother has failed a printed test and been rejected for police recruitment. There is a high incidence of print illiteracy in the Heslop family. Mrs Heslop (Jeannie Drynan), for instance, regularly has trouble at the post office. Muriel sees a chance to escape the oppression of her family by tricking her mother into giving her a blank cheque. Here is the confluence of the legitimacy of a bank’s printed negotiable document with the risk and freedom of a blank space for rebel Muriel’s handwriting. Unable to type, her handwriting has the power to steal every cent of her father’s savings. She leaves home and spends the family’s savings at an island resort. On the island, the text print-challenged Muriel dances to a recording (sound print) of ABBA, her hand gestures emphasizing her bewigged face, which is made up in an impression of her pop idol. Her imitation of her goddesses – the ABBA women, her only hope in a real world of people who hate or avoid her – is accompanied by her goddesses’ voices singing: ‘the mystery book on the shelf is always repeating itself.’ Before jpeg and gif image downloads, we had postcard prints and snail mail. Muriel sends a postcard to her family, lying about her ‘success’ in the cosmetics business. The printed missal is clutched by her father Bill (Bill Hunter), who proclaims about his daughter, ‘you can’t type but you really impress me’. Meanwhile, on Hibiscus Island, Muriel lies under a moonlit palm tree with her newly found mentor, ‘bad girl’ Ronda (Rachel Griffiths). In this critical scene, where foolish Muriel opens her heart’s yearnings to a confidante she can finally trust, the director and DP have chosen to shoot a flat, high contrast blue filtered image. The visual result is very much like the semiabstract Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints by Utamaro. This Japanese printing style informed the rise of European modern painting (Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso, etc., were all important collectors and students of Ukiyo-e prints). The above print and text elements in Muriel’s Wedding take us 27 minutes into her story, as recorded on a single page of real-time handwritten Coding. Although not discussed here, the Coding recorded the complete film – a total of 106 minutes of text elements and main graphic elements – as four pages of Code. Referring to this Coding some weeks after it was made, I looked up the final code on page four: taxi [food of the sea] bq. Translation: a shop sign whizzes past in the film’s background, as Muriel and Ronda leave Porpoise Spit in a taxi. Over their heads the text ‘Food Of The Sea’ flashes. We are reminded that Muriel and Ronda are mermaids, fantastic creatures sprung from the brow of author PJ Hogan, and illuminated even today in the pantheon of women’s coming-of-age art works. That the movie is relevant ten years on is evidenced by the current usage of the Muriel’s Wedding online forum, an intersection of wider discussions by sliterate women on imdb.com who, like Muriel, are observers (and in some cases victims) of horrific pressure from ambitious female gangs and bullies. Text is always a minor element in a motion picture (unless it is a subtitled foreign film) and text usually whizzes by subliminally while viewing a film. By Coding the work for [text], all the text nuances made by the film makers come to light. While I have viewed Muriel’s Wedding on many occasions, it has only been in Coding it specifically for text that I have noticed that Muriel is a representative of that vast class of talented youth who are discriminated against by print (as in text) educators who cannot offer her a life-affirming identity in the English classroom. Severely depressed at school, and failing to type or get a printer’s apprenticeship, Muriel finds paid work (and hence, freedom, life, identity, independence) working in her audio visual printed medium of choice: a video store in a new city. Muriel found a sliterate admirer at the video store but she later dumped him for her fantasy man, before leaving him too. One of the points of conjecture on the imdb Muriel’s Wedding site is, did Muriel (in the unwritten future) get back together with admirer Brice Nobes? That we will never know. While a print forms a track that tells us where culture has been, a print cannot be the future, a print is never animate reality. At the end of any trail of prints, one must lift one’s head from the last impression, and negotiate satisfaction in the happening world. References Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “Memo Shows US General Approved Interrogations.” 30 Mar. 2005 http://www.abc.net.au>. 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Muriel’s Wedding. Dir. PJ Hogan. Perf. Toni Collette, Rachel Griffiths, Bill Hunter, and Jeannie Drynan. Village Roadshow, 1994. O’Hagan, Jack. On The Road to Gundagai. 1922. 2 Apr. 2005 http://ingeb.org/songs/roadtogu.html>. Poole, J.H., P.L. Tyack, A.S. Stoeger-Horwath, and S. Watwood. “Animal Behaviour: Elephants Are Capable of Vocal Learning.” Nature 24 Mar. 2005. Sanchez, R. “Interrogation and Counter-Resistance Policy.” 14 Sept. 2003. 30 Mar. 2005 http://www.abc.net.au>. Schultheiss, O.C., M.M. Wirth, and S.J. Stanton. “Effects of Affiliation and Power Motivation Arousal on Salivary Progesterone and Testosterone.” Hormones and Behavior 46 (2005). Sherry, N. The Life of Graham Greene. 3 vols. London: Jonathan Cape 2004, 1994, 1989. Silk Road. Printing. 2000. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.silk-road.com/artl/printing.shtml>. Smith, T. “Elpida Licenses ‘DVD on a Chip’ Memory Tech.” The Register 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02>. —. “Intel Boffins Build First Continuous Beam Silicon Laser.” The Register 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02>. Watson, R. S. “Eyes And Ears: Dramatic Memory Slicing and Salable Media Content.” Innovation and Speculation, ed. Brad Haseman. Brisbane: QUT. [in press] Watson, R. S. Visions. Melbourne: Curriculum Corporation, 1994. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Watson, Robert. "E-Press and Oppress: Audio Visual Print Drama, Identity, Text and Motion Picture Rebellion." M/C Journal 8.2 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/08-watson.php>. APA Style Watson, R. (Jun. 2005) "E-Press and Oppress: Audio Visual Print Drama, Identity, Text and Motion Picture Rebellion," M/C Journal, 8(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/08-watson.php>.