Journal articles on the topic 'Endless kiln'

This is your death plan. Choose the easy options. Go with the flow. Do what you want to do. This will get you off the endless conveyor. No more effort and it’s all downhill. Be advised by advertisers, doctors who know nothing about food or exercise, a government that wants to squeeze you and business intent on profit. If you are reading this thinking you can do the opposite, think again. You will be fighting powers you did not know exist. Perhaps you should be in a cave without money, friends or help. Survival in a civilised society is difficult. Only the brave can go against the grain. There are three sectors: food, exercise and lifestyle. All three are waiting for you like monsters of the deep to suck you in and kill you. You think you are being looked after. Beware!

This is your death plan. Choose the easy options. Go with the flow. Do what you want to do. This will get you off the endless conveyor. No more effort and it’s all downhill. Be advised by advertisers, doctors who know nothing about food or exercise, a government that wants to squeeze you and business intent on profit. If you are reading this thinking you can do the opposite, think again. You will be fighting powers you did not know exist. Perhaps you should be in a cave without money, friends or help. Survival in a civilised society is difficult. Only the brave can go against the grain. There are three sectors: food, exercise and lifestyle. All three are waiting for you like monsters of the deep to suck you in and kill you. You think you are being looked after. Beware!

Technology plays a momentous role in almost all the fields mainly far –reaching in educational field. It provides creative freedom, endless resources and learning materials. In the current scenario, students engage themselves in the recent technological advancements which not only kill their time but also entertain them all the time. So, the Teachers can take up these technological tools in their hands to inculcate English language to the younger generation instead of following the traditional method of teaching. Now-a-days, Smart phones have reached all the hands in the world including the rural people and made everything easier. By using smart phones effectively in Language classrooms, English language teachers can provoke interest among the non –native learners in learning English Language. Smart phone is a tool which presents visually attractive materials to the students that would be very much appealing to the second language learners. Through this, the four basic communication skills (LSRW Skills) of the second language learners can be enriched and refined .Thus, this paper predominantly focuses on the pros and cons of using smart phones in learning English based on the feedback accrued from the undergraduate students .

After 12 years as Editor-in-Chief of Fetal and Maternal Medicine Review I have decided to step down, albeit I welcome the opportunity to stay on as an Associate Editor. The last 12 years have witnessed a lot of changes, not only in the field of Perinatal Medicine but also in medical publishing, with the near demise of the ‘paper-based’ journal. I have enjoyed working with Cambridge University Press who have embraced these changes and remained strong supporters of the ‘Review Journal’ concept. The quality of the papers published over this time has progressively improved and we have continued my initial vision of publishing not only clinical but scientific reviews in a range of topics related to Maternal and Fetal Medicine. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to all the Associate Editors who have contributed over the last 12 years; Karel Marsal (Lund, Sweden), Lucilla Poston (London, UK), Mark Kilby (Birmingham, UK), Tze Kin Lau (Hong Kong) and Jason Waugh (Newcastle, UK). However I would particularly like to thank John Kingdon (Toronto, Canada) and Carl Weiner (Kansas, USA) who have stayed the course and whose sage contributions have been outstanding. Most importantly I would like to acknowledge the assistance of Jean Birtles whose endless detective work and ‘polite reminders’ have made my job considerably easier. Jean is also stepping down as Editorial Assistant.

An economy is produced using the structure of a wide range of enterprises like agriculture, service, building, fabricating, and so on. These enterprises give such a significant number of advantages to the economy, for example, work age, production of goods and services, equivalent salary conveyance in the entire economy. Service segment contributes 60% of the Indian GDP while agriculture gives around 14% of GDP. Industrialization assumes a crucial job in the economic development of creating nations. As the chronicled record appears, the established countries of the world broke the endless loop of poverty by industrializing, as opposed to concentrating on horticultural or the production of national assets. At present, India, as a creating nation, needs to accomplish a higher expectation for everyday comforts for its kin. Thus, it is seeking strategies that help privatization and deregulation of the economy. Industry assumes a problematic job in economic development; however, these are a portion of its most significant impacts. In India, a large part of the populace is occupied with horticulture. There is an excessive amount of individuals and insufficient land for all to flourish. To increase the situation, our people are developing at a practically alarming rate. The industrial sector is the leading segment that is producing employments at a quicker pace than our populace is developing. Also, this area will draw surplus work from agriculture to it, along these lines improving farm profitability as well. Hence, the current study has been done too, highlighting the contribution of industries in the economic development of India and the recommendations of new industrial policies.

According to St. Basil the human condition and the State of nature are always the same. The histories of the mankind and natural world are closely connected, because of his conception of the nature, conceived as the whole of which a man is a part. St. Basil basing himself on the Scriptures divides the word history into three stages: 1) the Paradise age, 2) the times after the Fali, and 3) eschatological timeless future. The first age of history - the Paradise - was the time of perfection of human race (represented by Adam and Eve) and of incorruptibility of their natural environment. There was no death, no desease, no disasters. The human condition was very high, because Adam was the king of the nature. His dominion over the earth and the animals was very kind and gentle. The first people were vegetarians and they didn’t kill animals. The Paradise man’s perfectibility corresponded to the perfect State of Paradise plants (for example, a rose had no thoms), to the gentleness of all the animals, and to mildness of the climate. The origin of death and all disasters was the Fali of Adam. St. Basil said that the duty of Adam was everlasting, never-ending contemplation of God, whose novice Adam could hear. But Adam ceased his ascetic practice because of temptation of boredom and sadness. Immediately after the first Adam’s sin started the times of imperfection, corruption, and death. The age of the Paradise happiness has gone, and now, in our times, everywhere there is pain, illness, pollution, climatic anomalies, etc. Man is not already the king of nature: now he is just a steward of God. The good stewardship will be rewarded by God after the Last Judgement and the prize will be eternal salvation or return to the eschatological Paradise. But succeeding generations of people sin in much more terrible manner then Adam, and their crimes, called progress, waste the earth by causing further degeneration and pollution of environment. These bad stewards will be punished in Heli among the lightless fire and the worms eating their bodies. The sins of bad stewards will cause condemnation of some part of nature with them, because the human beings won’t can exist without their natural environment even in eschatological endless Heli. The consummation of the world won’t be the end of existence of nature. After this eschatological event nature will be still exist in some transfigured and spiritual “better shape” except for the lightless fire and worms going to be punished with the reprobates in the Heli, parallel to the higher State of human souls (called by St. Paul “new creation”). Then, man’s responsibility for natural world can be called eschatological or eternal.

Background. The modernist dramaturgy of Fernand Crommelynck allows some literary critics to attribute it to symbolism: continuing the symbolist traditions, the author builds his works “on the development of an abstract position, personified by dramatic characters that can be perceived both as living people and as figurative designations of concepts” [8]. Other researchers believe that the F. Crommelynck’s works are expressionistic, since the Crommelynck Theater is “poetic, but full of pathos, hyperbolized images, in the characteristics of his personages exaggeration is brought to the point of absurdity” [2]. Some scientists attribute Crommelynck to surrealism because the playwright is one of the burlesque theater renovators [3]. At the same time, there is an opinion that a number of later plays by the playwright anticipate the aesthetics of the theater of the absurd [11]. Ambiguously critics evaluate the genre features of Crommelynck’s plays. They are also interpreted as “psychological dramas that combine farce and tragedy”, therefore “the characters of Crommelynck’s plays are tragic jesters, the embodiment of the “eternal” principles of love, jealousy, and stinginess. His highlight is human passions, paradoxes, absurdity” [15]. His pieces are considered and as varieties of drama filled with elements of the grotesque, and “characters often act as personifications of certain moral qualities: jealousy (“Le Cocu magnifique” – “The Magnanimous Cuckold”), stinginess (“Tripes d’or” – “The Golden Womb”), played out virtues (“Carine, ou la jeune fille folle de son âme” –“Carine, or the Mad Girl of self soul”)”, etc. [11]. Neither Vsevolod Meyerhold (production of the play “The Magnanimous Cuckold” in 1922), nor Les Kurbas (production of the play “The Golden Womb” in 1926), who were innovators in theatrical field, revolutionists of the Soviet theater, could not pass by the creativity of the contemporary modernist playwright. The purpose of this study is to identify the peculiarities of the Crommelynck’ dramas produced by stage directors and the lines of the pioneering searches of two great representatives of the theater went when staging Crommelynck’s plays. Methods. The basis of the research methodology is historical analysis. Results. Meyerhold, as shown by his notes and the memoirs of his contemporaries, moved in the 1920s in his theatrical searches went towards formalist experiments, in particular, constructivism and biomechanics. According to the director, the Crommelynck’ grotesque-farcical play “The Magnanimous Cuckold” on the theater stage, saturated with complex diverse physical movements of the actors, was supposed to show one of the workers’ leisure activities. Les Kurbas, also seeking to radically renew the Ukrainian stage, relied on a completely different theatrical concept. Speaking for an active-revolutionary life installation, for the restructuring of social psychology and, consequently, for spiritual and moral values, Kurbas in his articles and conversations called for fighting the limited outlook of the Nepmen and provincial inhabitants who only think about endless prosperity [9; 10]. Realizing his concept in life, it is not by chance that the director chooses for the premiere of the first season of “Berezil” in Kharkov the play “Tripes d’or” (“The Golden Womb”) just written by Crommelynck (1925). Note that “Tripes d’or” in its content is much more complicated than the “Le Cocu magnifique”. In our opinion, the playwright, using allusions to the work of European prose writers of the XIX century, seeks to show that even an honest and decent person, becoming the owner of a large inheritance, will begin to degrade morally; gold, sooner or later, will become a fetish. Moreover, in “Tripes d’or” it is quite clearly shown that the uncle of Pierre-Auguste himself (the hero of the piece) – AnnaRomainHormidas deGutem– passed through the temptation of wealth. Hormidas’ niece Melina, who eventually got the “throne” with a pottery filled with gold dust, will also pass along this path. In addition, Crommelynck in his play reveals a number of stages of Pierre-Auguste’s painful struggle with the attractive power of gold: from understanding that gold will soon turn into a dragon that will kill a knight, through the realization that “gold in itself is fascinating”, to recognition: “I want to destroy everything ... what is near money .. so that there is no – neither the past, nor the present, nor the future ...” [7: 149, 160]. At the same time, the author in a number of scenes departs from the tragic pathos and appeals to the grotesque, which allows in the “Tripes d’or” to organically combine the real and the fantastic. Thoughtfully approaching the text of the play, Kurbas saw in its plot not the single tragedy of Pierre-Auguste, on which a huge inheritance had suddenly fallen, but a rather common phenomenon in the world of ordinary people thinking only of profit. Therefore, the director chooses not a psychological disclosure of characters, but a grotesque beginning, which allows exposing the thinking of the Nepmen and bourgeois living in petty, personal interests. The original design of the play “The Golden Womb”, semi-grotesque and half-realistic costumes of the actors, their playing and characters’ associations with animals to clarify the understanding of the stage images – all this, on the one hand, exposes the mercantile consciousness of the modern tradesman, on the other – discloses the original approach of the director to modernist text. Conclusions. By turning to modernist dramaturgy and relying on the modern possibilities of the avant-garde theater, both outstanding directors created original productions. If Meyerhold, during this period, was interested in formal experiments and revealing the possibilities of constructivism and biomechanics, so for Kurbas, who was also interested of constructivism, nevertheless, other tasks came to the fore. It was necessary for him to bring up a new theater audience in a short time: to change philistine psychology demonstrating new horizons for the development of public life and the wide possibilities of man in it. It is evidently, that the analysis of the new European dramaturgy and new experiments in the Soviet theater of the 1920–1930s is not limited to what has been said, and further careful study of these problems is required.

This is your death plan. Choose the easy options. Go with the flow. Do what you want to do. This will get you off the endless conveyor. No more effort and it’s all downhill. Be advised by advertisers, doctors who know nothing about food or exercise, a government that wants to squeeze you and business intent on profit. If you are reading this thinking you can do the opposite, think again. You will be fighting powers you did not know exist. Perhaps you should be in a cave without money, friends or help. Survival in a civilised society is difficult. Only the brave can go against the grain. There are three sectors: food, exercise and lifestyle. All three are waiting for you like monsters of the deep to suck you in and kill you. You think you are being looked after. Beware!

The article is devoted to the consideration of the image of zombie in two contexts, which are, firstly, the transformation of capitalist figures of production and consumption, and secondly, the transformation of desire and sensuality. Two models of socio-philosophical interpretation of zombies related to the development of capitalism are revealed: the consumer and the proletarian. They concern the discourse of the economic crisis and the disgust to “irrational consumption” and the discourse of the exploitation of the worker by dead labor. It is noted that the image of zombie embodies total alienation, loss of social connection, which is based on emotional affinity, intimacy and affectivity. The figure of zombie is seen as the opposite of the Enlightenment model of human existence, which is characterized by a fundamental multiplicity, sensitivity and taste, which became the basis of a market economy. The image of zombie represents the fear of dissolving human diversity in the identity of desire and corporeality, which is destroyed and appears as “the same”. Zombies embody the instinct and infectivity of being. They denote “naked life”, the signs of which are the right to kill or exploit them. On the other hand, zombies are the embodiment of Use value: an empty post-capitalist, post-proletarian and post-consumer “life” reduced to pure need. Zombies figure represents the inner contradiction of (post)capitalism: on the one hand, the fear of renewing a Labour power that is no longer able to work, and on the other, the fear of losing sensual diversity that suspends the endless process of consumption. Thus, the fear of zombie is a defensive reaction to capitalist existence. On the other hand, it is an adjustment of consciousness, when the coercion to work and consume is based on the fear of becoming a zombie, in the presence of an unconscious willingness to destroy those whom capitalism excludes as zombies.

Neil Tenant of The Pet Shop Boys crooned the song and memorable line ‘I love to hate you’. Today this refrain has become a global phenomenon within public rhetoric. Many thinkers, most famously Freud, have argued that war is innate to human nature, warfare being a projection of internal battles onto the external world. Etymologically war relates to ‘confusion’ and ‘strife’, two words intimately connected with a certain form of lovemadness. As with love, war is ‘play’ where only the noblest survive (Pick 70). While traditionally God is love in most main religions, J.F.C. Fuller maintains ‘war is a God-appointed instrument to teach wisdom to the foolish and righteousness to the evil-minded’ (Pick 109). For Mussolini, ‘war is to man what maternity is to the woman’ (Bollas 205). In the Christian tradition the pains of childbirth are the punishment for the original rejecting of divine love, that is God, for a love of the carnal and a lust for knowledge, just as the toil of work is the punishment for man. Chivalry equated war and love; ‘love is war’ and ‘the gift of her body to man by the woman is a reward for valour … love and war form an endless dialectic; Venus and Mars in eternal symbolic (not actual) copulation in the interests of nation building’ (Bush 158). In the twentieth century the symbolic becomes literal. Mussolini maintained that war must be embraced as a goal for humankind, just as fervently as intercourse must be embraced for procreation. ‘Man’ must metaphorically fuck man to the death and fuck women literally for more war fodder. Love of food is analogous to love of war, one involving masticating and excreting, the other doing the same literally or metaphorically, depending on the type of war. One first world war soldier remarked how it is very close to a picnic but far better because it has a purpose; it is the most glorious experience available (Storr 15). To William James, war defines the essence of humanity and human potential (Pick 140), often the exact description given by others for love. The very fact that men sacrifice their lives for others supposedly raises humans above animals, but this warlike attribute is akin to divine love, as in Christ’s sacrifice. War is mystical in its nature, as many believe madnesslove to be, and is an end in itself, not a tool. The jingoism of war brings out the most extreme form of comments, as in the following example from the Southern literary critic William Gilmore Simms on the US-Mexican War. ‘War is the greatest element of modern civilization, and our destiny is conquest. Indeed the moment a nation ceases to extend its sway it falls a prey to an inferior but more energetic neighbour’ (Bush 154). The current US president’s rhetoric is identical. What is clear is that the debates surrounding war in the nineteenth century take on a similar tone to those on lovereligion. This could be seen as inevitable given the emphasis of both in certain circumstances on sacrifice. Like love, war is seen as the healthiest of pursuits and the most ‘sane’ of activities. Without it only ‘madness’ can result, the irony being, as with love, that war often causes insanity. Contemporary psychotherapists use examples from world history to indicate how the same drives within the individual may manifest in society. The ‘butterfly principle’ is an example of this, where apparently trivial events can trigger enormous consequences (Wieland-Burston 91). Just as war may appease demands of the id for action and the pressure of the super ego for conformity, so love may satisfy these needs. Mad love can been viewed as a process where the conflict between these two forces is not reconciled via the ego and thus ‘insanity’ results. Daniel Pick discusses Hegel’s theories regarding the benefits of death in terms of the state. ‘The death of each nation is shown to contribute to the life of another greater one: “It then serves as material for a higher principle”’ (28). For Hegel, ‘man is the highest manifestation of the absolute’, so these actions which lead man as a group to ‘a higher principle’ must be God driven, God in a Christian context being defined as love(xviii). War is divinely inspired; it is love. ‘Scatter the nations who delight in war’ (NIV 1986 593), but it is inevitable, part of an internal process, and will continue till the end of time (2 Corinthians 10:3; Romans 7:23; Daniel 9:26). Of course there are many types of love and many types of war, current technology making the horrors of war more prolific but less real, more virtual. However, satisfaction from this form of warfare or virtual love may be tenuous, paradoxically making both more fertile. Desire is the desire of the Other, just as in war it is the fear of the Other, the belief that they desire your destruction, that leads you to war. With reference to Lacan, Terry Eagleton comes up with the following: ‘To say ‘I love you’ thus becomes equivalent to saying ‘it’s you who can’t satisfy me! How privileged and unique I must be, to remind you that it isn’t me you want…’ (Eagleton 279). We give each other our desire not satisfaction, so there can be no love or war without desire, which is law-like and anonymous, and outside of individual wishes. George W. Bush’s speech at the Department of Defence Service of Remembrance, The Pentagon, Arlington, Virginia on 11 October 2001 in many ways denied al-Qaida’s responsibility for the September 11th atrocities. The speech mentions that it is enough to know that evil, like good, exists. In true Biblical language, ours is not to reason why and in the terrorists evil has found a willing servant. For Nietzsche the Last Judgement is the sweet consolation of revenge for the lower orders, just as for those who believed they had suffered due to US imperialism, there was something sweet about September 11. Nietzsche as Zarathustra writes ‘God has his Hell; it is love for man (my italics) … God is dead; God has died of his pity for man’ (Nietzsche 114). Nietzsche writes that Zarathustra has grown weary of retribution, punishment, righteous revenge and that this is slavery; he wills that ‘man may be freed from the bondage of revenge’ (123). Importantly, both Bush and bin Laden, while declaring the power of their beliefs, concurrently set themselves and their followers up as victims, the unloved. Nietzsche reveals the essence of public rhetoric by declaring that the central lie is to maintain that it is part of the public’s voice. ‘The state is the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies too; and this lie creeps from its mouth: ‘I, the state, am the people’’ (76). In the Memorial speech quoted above Bush maintains that, unlike ‘our’ enemies, ‘we’ value every life, and ‘we’ mourn every loss. Again, from the Pentagon speech: ‘Theirs is the worst kind of violence, pure malice, while daring to claim the authority of God’. When we kill, so the argument goes, it is out of love, when they kill it is out of malice, hate. There is something infantile about George W. Bush. For Nietzsche every step away from instinct is regression. To suggest that George W. Bush is aping Nietzsche’s superman may appear preposterous, but his anti-intellectual slant is the essence of Nietzsche’s thought: actions speak louder than words; America is not about Being, but Becoming. ‘More than anything on earth he enjoys tragedies, bullfights, and crucifixions; and when he invented Hell for himself, behold, it was his heaven on earth’ (Nietzsche 235). Why were the images of the Twin Towers’ attack shown repeatedly? Do people love the challenge of adversity, or revel in the idea of hell and destruction, loving damnation? Nietzsche himself is not innocent. Despite his feigning to celebrate life, man must be overcome; man is a means to an end, just as the bombing of Afghanistan (or Iraq) and the Twin Towers for rival ideologies is a means to an end. ‘They kill because they desire to dominate’; ‘few countries meet their exacting standards of brutality and oppression’. Both Bush or bin Laden may have made these comments, but they are from the former, George W Bush’s, speech to the UN General Assembly in New York City, 10 November 2001. Bush goes on, maintaining: ‘History will record our response and judge or justify every nation in this hall’. God is not the judge here, but history itself, a form of Hegelian world spirit. Then the Nietzschean style rhetoric becomes more overt: ‘We choose the dignity of life over a culture of death’. And following this, Nietzsche’s comments about the state are once again pertinent, given the illegitimacy of Bush’s government. ‘We choose lawful change and civil disagreement over coercion, subversion and chaos’. The praise, that is, the love heaped on Bush for his rhetoric is telling for ‘when words are called holy - all the truth dies’ (Nietzsche 253). The hangover of the Old Testament revenge judge God swamps those drunk on the lust of hatred and revenge. This is clearly the love of war, of hatred. Any God worth existing needs to be temporal, extemporal and ‘atemporal’, yet ultimately ‘Being itself – and not only beings that are “in time” – is made visible in its “temporal” character’ (Heidegger 62). While I am not therefore insisting on a temporal God of love, a God of judgement, of the moment, makes a post-apocalyptical god unnecessary and transcendent love itself unthinkable. Works Cited Bollas, Chistopher. Being a Character. Psychoanalysis and Self Experience. London, Routledge: 1993. Bush, Clive. The Dream of Reason. London: Edward Arnold, 1977. Duncombe, Stephen. Notes From Underground. Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture. London: Verso 1997. Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. London: Blackwells, 1996. Freud, Sigmund. New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Trans. James Strachey. London: Penguin, 1986. Hegel, G. Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics. Trans. Bernard Bosanquet. London: Penguin, 1993. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time in Basic Writings. Ed. David Farrell Krell. London: Routledge, 1978. Pick, Daniel. War Machine, The Rationalisation of Slaughter in the Modern Age. London: Yale University Press, 1993. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Penguin, 1969. Storr, Anthony, Human Destructiveness. The Roots of Genocide and Human Cruelty. London: Routledge, 1991. Wieland-Burston, Joanne. Chaos and Order in the World of the Psyche. London: Routledge, 1991. The Holy Bible, New International Version. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1986. lt;http://www.september11news.com> Links http://www.september11news.com Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Lee, C. Jason. "I Love To Hate You/All You Need Is Hate" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.6 (2002). Dn Month Year < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/ilovetohateyou.php>. APA Style Lee, C. J., (2002, Nov 20). I Love To Hate You/All You Need Is Hate. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 5,(6). Retrieved Month Dn, Year, from http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/ilovetohateyou.html

“One has to get rid of the bad taste of wanting to be in agreement with many.” (Nietzsche 53)Community is a policing word: the local community, the Christian community, the school community, the international community. The word evokes informal, benign, yet insistent patterns of authority, built around imagined consensuses. It is a judgement word. It includes and excludes, and always on terms that are imagined pre-set, pre-determined by an identity also already determined or incipient, yet always legitimate, receiving the credit, the credibility it deserves. The community is always licensing actions on its own behalf because it is the very authentic logic of legitimation, of folk sovereignty, of a natural peace that should not be disturbed. It is defensive in its very nature, always at risk of being disturbed from its regular state, its constitutive, deserved and deserving calm. It is the community against which you are most likely to offend. It is easily offended.Communities still claim to be natural. They stabilise, definitively, around an identity they assume to have inherited from fact, a locality, a choice, a lifestyle, a sexual preference. This is what allows them to normalise and judge so determinedly. Normalising judgement is the genre of signifying practice which most clearly defines community. Community is not unrelated to family, one of its isotopes. It even evokes family as its formalising logic and rhetorical resource, yet especially now, it cannot, even in its national forms, especially its post-colonial national forms, lay more than a token claim to the consanguinity that still haunts even the most reformed construction of family. The impetus of community therefore is to naturalise. It cites an identity, imagined to be pre-given, and then renders it incontestable by making it the lodestone of a local policy, one that can be used to make you an offender.Coalition is to community what friendship is to family. If family implies a pre-given situation into which one emerges without option, friendship allows for agency, your circulation in the world as a self-fashioning person, an adventurer, a discoverer, a forger of ties. You are a member of a family at home. Family like community even at its most attenuated is where you are at home, even in its most abstract and discontinuous. Yet, you are a friend in the same way you are a citizen, because you are in the world, where you are what you are by the right of election. You choose your friends. You decide who they are to be. Family naturalises even when it forms from those who share no genetic inheritance. Community too naturalises, imagining its chosen identity to be inherited from the established states of the world and therefore enduring, before and beyond us all, and therefore possessed of an authority and legitimacy no-one has chosen and that therefore no-one can question. Friendship, on the other hand, is an artifice. It is taken up and abandoned at will. Coalition too is chosen. Its only past is that of decision, not of inheritance. You enter into friendship with someone because you share no blood or family inheritance with them. The claim of friendship between family members does not convince because it is not necessary, and because it would create a contradictory history: you cannot chose what you have inherited from nature. The past doesn’t need to be that crowded. It can’t be. It is the same with coalition. If you were a member of a community with someone, you wouldn’t need to form a coalition with them. What would be the point? You are together with them, whether you like it or not.Coalition, therefore, requires an irreducible difference. This is both its practical logic, and its governing ethic. It assumes and respects otherness. This is what it has in common with friendship. You are friends with someone because you are different to one another, not because of what you have in common. That is the charm and attraction of friendship, the discovery of connection in difference. Coalition is friendship magnified to a politics. It repeats friendship’s respect for otherness without needing to risk its experiment with intimacy. Unlike community, coalition is a venture. It is proudly extensive, not defensive. It holds out its hand to you even if it doesn’t like you. It is not only the invention of a practice, but of a value, the value of human exteriority. Even when we are at our most solipsistic and closed, our most misanthropic and scornful, it is never impossible for human beings to connect with one another. That possibility can never be reduced to zero. Coalition assumes this irreducible openness to the other, and that is what links it irrevocably to the progressive as an incontestable virtue. What Derrida says of (what Aristotle says of) friendship here is also true of coalition. It is by nature a virtue:Since friendship does not – and above all must not – have the reliability of a natural thing or a machine; since its stability is not given by nature but is won, like constancy . . . through the endurance of a virtue, primary friendship, ‘that which allows all others to be named’ . . . we must say that it is founded on virtue. (Derrida, Politics 23)If we pursue the analogy with friendship, coalition is in itself a value, regardless of the reason that the coalition has formed. Unlike communities which keep obscuring their origins and claiming the authority of the natural or at least the inherited, contrived or naturalised, coalitions never deny they are artifice. They are formed historically for historical purposes. Often they even seem to concede that this makes them second-best. They are the substitute for perhaps the greater legitimacy that a community might purportedly have if we don’t think about it too deeply, or if we rest our politics on sentimentality, the endlessly resurging underside of the politics of the ideological era. Coalitions substitute for the natural bond of community the political purpose of history, even of the moment, as they form and un-form to repeal rogue legislation, combat sectional interests, clarify obscured rights, challenge illegal occupations and so on. Yet, over and above, beyond and before this, they are the institution of a primary, perhaps the primary social value. They are the positive enactment of the idea that relationships form in difference. Coalitions are not inherited or determined, but chosen as the result of a decision, and this decision is the taking on of the responsibility not only towards a specific political issue but to those who might only share with me a momentary commitment. Again unlike community, in which universality, specifically the conformity of all members to a fundamental identity or nature, is not only taken for granted but required, definitive and ineluctable, in coalition, the universality of a shared idea or judgement is merely an agreement destined to be outlived. Coalition is universality without conformity, agreement without oneness.In political terms, it is a double benefit, therefore. It both responds to some kind of political emergency, and models democratic openness to the other as purposeful social action. It is an action and a virtue. The risk, of course, is that these two enter into conflict with one another, especially that the virtue of social relationship trumps the exigencies of the critical political moment. In other words, the logic of relationship becomes the fundamental achievement at the expense of political engagement. It is here that the virtues and dangers of coalition become apparent. What is virtuous about coalition might in fact be the very thing that threatens its political effectiveness. Coalition works by persuasion and enlistment. It is a logic of the endlessly open “plus one.” Because no singular identity restricts membership of the coalition, it is endlessly open to an ever extending inclusivity. If you can be persuaded to agree about perhaps only one thing, then you can become part of a coalition. You can even pronounce on your own membership, given that the formal protocols of coalition membership are loose and the threshold to be crossed for membership is so specific. You can perhaps even be a member of a coalition without anyone else ever knowing. It can rely on the most limited and specific of agreements. The risk is that the logic of persuasion, enlistment and agreement over-shadows the particular politics which is the ostensible pretext for the formation of the coalition in the first place. In short, the logic of persuasion and enlistment takes over from the logic of opposition and resistance, which is what defines the political. Coalition risks becoming a church logic, therefore, and it is arguable that its cultural inheritance is fundamentally consistent with the social mission of Christianity and Islam, which aim to gradually enlist all, despite difference and non-identity. By committing to enlistment, coalition risks substituting an indefinitely extendable agreement for the political efficacy of enmity, the virtues of peace for the achievements of struggle. At its worst, coalition risks substituting the satisfactions of feeling positive about the other for the recognition of enmity as fundamentally definitive of the political and thus of the social. It risks becoming what Nietzsche disliked in democracy, its “talkative good conscience” (cited in Derrida, Politics 38), which is in the end nothing but a repression.The problem lies with coalition’s fundamentally positive construction of the other, and of sociality in general. This emerges through the definitive role of decision in coalition. You don’t decide to join a community. You find yourself in it. You may elect to leave but only in order to become a renegade. Your identity remains haunted by the community you have spurned as a lapsed member. To become a member of a coalition, on the other hand, is the result of some kind of election on your part, and this special event can take on a major significance in the evolution of your self-relation, as an instantiation of your will and thus autonomy. In Derrida, however, the decision is aporetic. Its relationship to the subject is indeterminate. What makes a decision is its openness on an in-determinacy, its possibility of always being radically otherwise, what Derrida calls, citing Nietzsche, its perhaps (Politics 68). The decision is, therefore, an event. It is a pivoting. It turns on what might and might not happen. It always, at some irreducible level, surprises. In any event, what happens might not happen: every event carries within it the traces of what does not happen. Even in its most emphatic confirmation of an option, the event remains haunted by all those things that did not happen, that did not become it, that it did not specify, that still define it as the chosen thing. Something cannot be chosen unless there is that which remains un-chosen.The decision, then, inevitably involves an openness of the subject towards that which it does not and cannot do. It arises in a field unchosen by the subject in which choosing takes place. To this extent, it happens to a subject more than it is a doing by a subject. To Derrida, this makes the decision irreducibly passive, even “unconscious,” (Politics 68), an idea he embraces in its heretical relationship to traditional understandings of agency: “In sum,” he writes, “a decision is unconscious – insane as that may seem, it involves the unconscious and nevertheless remains responsible” (Politics 69). Because it involves the other possibility, it is not certain in the way the automatic enactment of a pre-fixed program you know is right is certain. The latter Derrida calls mere calculation, the implementation of that to which you have or even know no alternative. Calculation does what is known unambiguously to be right, to be without alternative. Decision, requires doubt, uncertainty. It opens the subject to the ineluctable certainty of its own failure, if not now then inevitably. This is what makes it a taking on of the unknown, of the enactment within the subject of that which is unknown to it, its unconscious.Decision then is the overcoming of the subject in its own action. It defies self-identity, exposing the subject to that which is other to it, that otherness which now defines it in its relationship to itself. As the social enactment of decision, then, coalition instantiates the subject’s excess over itself, its constitutional and necessary orientation to that which exceeds it, which it now understands not simply as otherness but as other people. Again, this makes coalition analogous to friendship, the other social relation formed by election. In both cases, the actual decision seems to happen to the subject as much as it seems to be the simple result of will. Why do I find myself a friend with you, but not the person standing next to you? What draws me to this coalition and not that is not simply the patient, systematic, rational evaluation of moral and political alternatives, but my enthusiasm for one thing, my disgust with another. It is through this unstable, semi-obscure and dynamic producing of separating options that my decision suddenly emerges to always in some way surprise me. I don’t know why I like you. I don’t know why I believe this and not that, why I connect in the way I do, even though I know I am answerable, responsible for these choices, at some point, if even just before the casual court of my own curiosity.Friendship then and coalition are made but they are also received. They deconstruct the opposition between these alternatives. This is what distinguishes them from community, which routinely denies that it is made in which the making is denied, even though a rigorous deconstruction would contest the notion that pure inheritance is possible especially as the constitution of a self. Community would then merely be coalition in denial of itself. But the quality of otherness should not be simply taken for granted. Alain Badiou complains about the value given to respect for otherness as the only contemporary ethic. The responsibility of our behaviour is not towards the enactment of priorities and values of our own individual or collective subjectivity, but to a mere logic of do no harm. To engage properly with Badiou’s point would require a whole other argument, but he does alert us to the temptations of sentimentalising respect for otherness as the definition of social relations which thus risk settling into an ethic of a benign and self-justifying harmlessness as the final social good.Is the other always good? Again, I want to approach this question by returning to Derrida’s account of friendship, and its relationship to enmity. Derrida recalls that at least in the hands of Carl Schmitt, decisionism is always a logic of enmity (Politics 67). How does this relate to what we have said about decision, otherness and friendship? As we have seen, coalition like friendship is the enactment of a decision, albeit possibly an unconscious one, in Derrida’s terms. You elect who is to be your friend, and you elect the coalitions you will join. Coalition is artificial, therefore. It does not make the claim implied by the notion of community; that the primary social bonds are natural, and therefore, inherited, unelected, perhaps even instinctive. The institution of the coalition by way of the decision is, therefore, an historical event. Where in community, the natural bond to which I am subject already exists, perhaps even was the very thing that called me into being, the formation of the bond between me and others is something I choose, one way or another in coalition. Where in community, only certain people marked out by some essential attribute over which they have little control (their only choice is to express or repress it) are the ones with whom I can join, in coalition, nothing necessarily or essentially distinguishes the people with whom I enter into alliance, other than the fact that they too have made the decision. The decision, therefore, groups together in coalition those who are in themselves indistinguishable from anyone else. They become my partner in coalition. They become my political friend. Yet, there is nothing about them that has pre-marked them for this friendship. They could just as easily not have entered into relationship with me, or indeed they could have become my enemy. This is the fulfilment of the logic of decision: the option chosen in decision is always in relation to that which has not been chosen. It is marked by the trace of the un-elected. The friend too is marked by the trace of those who are not chosen.In Politics of Friendship, Derrida pursues these issues by way of a reading of Carl Schmitt. Schmitt famously argued that the political grouping is defined by the collective identification of a shared enemy. You become a friend only by agreeing on a specific other who is to be your foe. There is, according to Schmitt’s argument, nothing about the enemy that marks them out to be your enemy: no traditional rivalry, no ethnic contempt, no economic competition or cultural antipathy, nothing about the enemy requires them to be your enemy. If such markers are seen to exist, they are superadded to the antagonism in order to invest it with a motivating intensity. Yet, such emotion is unnecessary. Someone is the constituting enemy of your group because your group could not be a group without an enemy, some enemy or other, someone you need to be prepared to kill, as the enactment of your political being. So, you become a member of a political grouping – you attain political friendship – by your preparedness to kill some other, even though there is nothing about them in themselves that requires you to do this, or even want it. They could just as easily be your friend if circumstances were different. The fact they are your enemy is purely historically contingent.Derrida puts it like this in his reading of Schmitt:There is no friend without this possibility of killing which establishes this non-natural community. Not only could I only enter into friendship only with a mortal, but I could love in friendship only a mortal at least exposed to so-called violent death – that is, exposed to being killed, possibly by myself. (Politics 122)So, in coalition, I decide to enter into relationship with those who could just as well be my enemies. Derrida’s aim in his reading of Schmitt is to show that the fundamental opposition on which the latter’s theory of the political depends – the historically enduring distinction between friend and enemy – is untenable. Since the friend can only be my friend because they are just as equally qualified to be my enemy, the distinction cannot be sustained. The rapid renomination of friends as enemies and enemies as friends in historical experience would seem to bear out the radical fragility of these categories.For our purposes in a discussion of coalition, I want to derive a slightly different point. The formation of political friendship will always bear with it a trace of enmity. You cannot be friends with someone who cannot just as easily be your enemy – in fact perhaps tomorrow, if not in some way always already. The formation of political friendship must also involve the inevitable enactment or at least acknowledgement of enmity. This is clear in the logic of community which imagines essential, natural differences which pre-identify groups implicitly alien and therefore constitutively already on the threshold of enmity. We have seen how these assumptions enact the willing blindness, the determined naivety, of community. Yet, there is blindness in coalition as well, a denial of its constitutive relationship with enmity. Because it forms by way of decision, coalition operates by a practice of persuasion and enlistment, the endlessly open to the other logic of the “plus-one” we have mentioned, the addition of the extra other comrade and so on theoretically forever. In other words, coalition believes in the hypothesis that everyone can enlist, that the addition of yet one more ally, one more member, one more willing other, can go on forever, as long as you use the right language to persuade them, theoretically to the point of absolute universality.The risk here is the repression of the constituting logic of enmity, the forgetting of the role of antagonism in politics. The selection of the political friend involves distinguishing them from those who are your enemies. Your friends are those who are not (now) your enemies. In other words, the selection of your friend involves the ready identification of the non-friend, and this withholding of friendship must stretch, open-endedly, all the way to antagonism and opposition. The formation of coalition should not be seduced by its own image of itself as the incipience of a potential universal agreement. Coalition involves the establishment of political friendship in the context of the separation from political opponents, who will, at some level, never be less than to-be-opposed. Post-1960s politics in the west has been beset by different styles of coalition that have in their own ways striven to deny or frustrate political conflict: on the soft left, an automatic rejection of violence and war, regardless of what might need to be achieved; on the soft right, a complete acceptance of the market as the measure of social progress, a neo-liberal consensus that has tolerated no alternative social logic in planning and policy in government, mainstream media, corporation and institution. Coalition, by valuing agreement as a virtue in and of itself, risks disregarding the historical role and necessity of conflict in politics, a conflict that must potentially run to physical violence.In the historical context of an issue like the politics of climate change, there is the risk of being taken by the idea that what is required is more effective communication, better explanation, more persuasion. Then everyone will understand, agree and join the coalition of the willing to act. What this overlooks is the fact that already, no matter what the stakes, the political context is one in which antagonists have already emerged: whether by way of dogma, self-interest or sub-cultural intolerance. The politics of climate change is a politics nonetheless, built on antagonism as much as consensus, hostility as much as care, enmity as much as friendship. The politics of climate change must be recognised as being, as much about fighting as it is about persuasion.Is otherness always good? The ethic of openness to the other about which Badiou complains is routinely seen as the enactment of the ultimate and endlessly extending commitment to a social generosity. Derrida’s elaborations of a justice in excess of law, of an absolute hospitality in excess over local customs and practices of asylum, of a democracy-to-come in excess of any enacted historical democratic practice, all of which acknowledge the indeterminateness and immeasurability of the other, have all been read as socially optimistic and positive ethical instances of an opening towards a new Enlightenment. But as Derrida never avoided saying, these opennesses on the indeterminate nature of otherness always involves the risk of the worst, perhaps even of “radical evil” (Faith 83). The formation of political friendships, like coalition, also always involves the recognition of enmities. Without enmity, coalitions could not form. The very openness on the other that makes friendship available is the perhaps slightly withheld but always possible identification of the other as enemy, as danger, as something to be fought, as bad. It is this that in the end, every decision decides, in its openness to the other, whether it likes it or not. Without the willingness to accept enmity as necessary, even desirable, politics is not possible.ReferencesBadiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Trans. Peter Hallward. London: Verso, 2001.Derrida, Jacques. “Faith and Knowledge.” Acts of Religion. Ed. Gil Anidjar. Trans. Samuel Weber. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. 40-101. ———. Politics of Friendship. Trans. George Collins. London: Verso, 1997.Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.

Introduction“Cage rage” is one of the most famous Internet memes (Figure 1) which made Nicolas Cage's stylised and sometimes excessive acting style very popular. His outbursts became a subject of many Youtube videos, supercuts (see for instance Hanrahan) and analyses, which turned his rage into a pop-cultural phenomenon. Cage’s outbursts of rage and (over)acting are, according to him (Freeman), inspired by German expressionism as in films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). How should this style of acting and its position within the context of the Hollywood industry today be read in societal and political sense? Is “Cage rage” a symptom of our times? Rage might be a correct reaction to events such the financial crisis or the election of Donald Trump, but the question should also be posed, what comes after the rage, or as Slavoj Žižek often puts it, what comes the “morning after” (the revolution, the protests)?Fig. 1: One of the “Cage Rage” MemesDo we need “Cage rage” as a pop cultural reminder that, to paraphrase Gordon Gekko in Wall Street (1987), rage, for a lack of a better word, is good, or is it here to remind us, that it is a sort of an empty signifier that can only serve for catharsis on an individual level? Žižek, in a talk he gave in Vienna, speaks about rage in the context of revolutions:Rage, rebellion, new power, is a kind of a basic triad of every revolutionary process. First there is chaotic rage, people are not satisfied, they show it in a more or less violent way, without any clear goal and organisation. Then, when this rage gets articulated, organised, we get rebellion, with a minimal organisation and more or less clear awareness of who the enemy is. Finally, if rebellion succeeds, the new power confronts the immense task of organising the new society. The problem is that we almost never get this triad in its logical progression. Chaotic rage gets diluted or turns into rightist populism, rebellion succeeds but loses steam. (“Rage, Rebellion, New Power”)This means that, on the one hand, that rage could be effective. If we look at current events, we can witness the French president Emanuel Macron (if only partially) giving in to some of the demands of the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) protesters. In the recent past, the events of “Arab spring” are reminders of a watershed moment in the history of the participating nations; going back to the year 2000, Slobodan Milošević's regime in Serbia was toppled by the rage of the people who could not put up with his oligarchic rule — alongside international military intervention.On the other hand, all the outrage on the streets and in the media cannot simply “un-elect” or impeach Donald Trump from his position as the American President. It appears that President Trump seems to thrive on the liberal outrage against him, at the same time perpetuating outrage among his supporters against liberals and progressives in general. If we look back at the financial crisis of 2008 and the Occupy Wall Street movement, despite the outrage on the streets, the banks were bailed out and almost no one went to prison (Shephard). Finally, in post-Milošević Serbia, instead of true progressive changes taking place, the society continues to follow similar nationalistic patterns.It seems that many movements fail after expressing rage/aggression, a reaction against something or someone. Another recent example is Greece, where after the 2015 referendum, the left-wing coalition SYRIZA complied to the austerity measures of the Eurozone, thereby ignoring the will of the people, prompting its leaders Varoufakis and Tsipras falling out and the latter even being called a ‘traitor.’ Once more it turned out that, as Žižek states, “rage is not the beginning but also the outcome of failed emancipatory projects” ("Rage, Rebellion, New Power").Rage and IndividualismHollywood, as a part of the "cultural industry" (Adorno and Horkheimer), focuses almost exclusively on the individual’s rage, and even when it nears a critique of capitalism, the culprit always seems to be, like Gordon Gekko, an individual, a greedy or somehow depraved villain, and not the system. To illustrate this point, Žižek uses an example of The Fugitive (1993), where a doctor falsifies medical data for a big pharmaceutical company. Instead of making his character,a sincere and privately honest doctor who, because of the financial difficulties of the hospital in which he works, was lured into swallowing the bait of the pharmaceutical company, [the doctor is] transformed into a vicious, sneering, pathological character, as if psychological depravity […] somehow replaces and displaces the anonymous, utterly non-psychological drive of capital. (Violence 175)The violence that ensues–the hero confronting and beating up the bad guy–is according to Žižek mere passage a l’acte, an acting out, which at the same time, “serves as a lure, the very vehicle of ideological displacement” (Violence 175). The film, instead of pointing to the real culprit, in this case the capitalist pharmaceutical company diverts our gaze to the individual, psychotic villain.Other ‘progressive’ films that Hollywood has to offer chose individual rage, like in Tarantino's Kill Bill Volume I and II (2003/2004), with the story centred around a very personal revenge of a woman against her former husband. It is noted here that most of Nicholas Cage’s films, including his big budget movies and his many B-movies, remain outside the so-called ethos of “liberal Hollywood” (Powers, Rothman and Rothman). Conservative in nature, they support radical individualism, somewhat paradoxically combined with family values. This composite functions well values that go hand-in-hand with neoliberal capitalism. Surprisingly, this was pointed out by the guru of (neo)liberalism in global economy, by Milton Friedman: “as liberals, we take freedom of the individual, or perhaps the family, as our ultimate goal in judging social arrangements” (12). The explicit connections between capitalism, family and commercial film was noted earlier by Rudolf Arnheim (168). Family and traditional male/female roles therefore play an important role in Cage's films, by his daughter's murder in Tokarev (2014, alternative title: Rage); the rape of a young woman and Cage’s love interest in Vengeance: A Love Story (2017); the murder of his wife in Mandy (2018).The audience is supposed to identify with the plight of the father/husband plight, but in the case of Tokarev, it is precisely Cage's exaggerated acting that opens up a new possibility, inviting a different viewpoint on rage/revenge within the context of that film.Tokarev/RageAmong Cage's revenge films, Tokarev/Rage has a special storyline since it has a twist ending – it is not the Russian mafia, as he first suspected, but Cage’s own past that leads to the death of his daughter, as she and her friends find a gun (a Russian-made gun called ‘Tokarev’) in his house. He kept the gun as a trophy from his days as a criminal, and the girls start fooling around with it. The gun eventually goes off and his daughter gets shot in the head by her prospective boyfriend. After tracking down Russian mobsters and killing some of them, Cage’s character realises that his daughter’s death is in fact his own fault and it is his troubled past that came back to haunt him. Revenge therefore does not make any sense, rage turns into despair and his violence acts were literally meaningless – just acting out.Fig. 2: Acting Out – Cage in Tokarev/RageBut within the conservative framework of the film: the very excess of Cage’s acting, especially in the case of Tokarev/Rage, can be read as a critique of the way Hollywood treats these kinds of stories. Cage’s character development points out the absurdity of the exploitative way B-grade movies deal with such subjects, especially the way family is used in order to emotionally manipulate the audience. His explicit and deliberate overacting in certain scenes spits in the face of nuanced performances that are considered as “good acting.” Here, a more subdued performance that delivered a ‘genuine’ character portrayal in conflict, would bring an ideological view into play. “Cage Rage” seems to (perhaps without knowing it) unmask the film’s exploitation of violence. This author finds that Cage’s performance suffices to tear through the wall of the screen and he takes giant steps, crossing over boundaries by his embarrassing and awkward moments. Thus, his overacting and the way rage/revenge-storyline evolves, becomes as a sort of a “parapraxis”, the Freudian slip of the tongue, a term borrowed by Elsaesser and Wedel (131). In other words, parapraxis, as employed in film analysis means that a film can be ambiguous – or can be read ambiguously. Here, contradictory meanings can be localised within one particular film, but also open up a space for alternate interpretations of meanings and events in other movies of a similar genre.Hollywood’s celebration of rugged individualism is at its core ideology and usually overly obvious; but the impact this could on society and our understanding of rage and outrage is not to be underestimated. If Cage's “excess of acting” does function here as parapraxis this indicates firstly, the excessive individualism that these movies promote, but also the futility of rage.Rage and the Death DriveWhat are the origins of Nicholas Cage’s acting style? He has made claims to his connection to the silent film era, as expressive overstating, and melodrama was the norm without spoken dialogue to carry the story (see Gledhill). Cage also states that he wanted to be the “California Klaus Kinski” (“Nicolas Cage Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters”). This author could imagine him in a role similar to Klaus Kinski’s in Werner Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampire (1979), a homage remake of the silent film masterpiece Nosferatu (1922). There remain outstanding differences between Cage and Kinski. It seems that Kinski was truly “crazy”, witnessed by his actions in the documentary My Best Fiend (1999), where he attacks his director and friend/fiend Werner Herzog with a machete. Kinski was constantly surrounded by the air of excessiveness, to this viewer, and his facial expressions appeared unbearably too expressive for the camera, whether in fiction or documentary films. Cage, despite also working with Herzog, does mostly act according to the traditional, method acting norms of the Hollywood cinema. Often he appears cool and subdued, perhaps merely present on screen and seemingly disinterested (as in the aforementioned Vengeance). His switching off between these two extremes can also be seen in Face/Off (1997), where he plays the drug crazed criminal Castor Troy, alongside the role of John Travolta’s ‘normal’ cop Sean Archer, his enemy. In Mandy, in the beginning of the film, before he goes on his revenge killing spree, he presents as a stoic and reserved character.So, phenomena like ‘Cage Rage’, connected to revenge and aggression and are displayed as violent acts, can serve as a stark reminder of the cataclysmic aspect of individual rage as integrated with the death drive – following Freud’s concept that aggression/death drive was significant for self-preservation (Nagera 48).As this author has observed, in fact Cage’s acting only occasionally has outbursts of stylised overacting, which is exactly what makes those outbursts so outstanding and excessive. Here, his acting is an excess itself, a sort of a “surplus” type of acting which recalls Žižek's interpretation of Freud's notion of the death drive:The Freudian death drive has nothing whatsoever to do with the craving for self-annihilation, for the return to the inorganic absence of any life-tension; it is, on the contrary, the very opposite of dying – a name for the “undead” eternal life itself, for the horrible fate of being caught in the endless repetitive cycle of wandering around in guilt and pain. (Parallax 62)Žižek continues to say that “humans are not simply alive, they are possessed by the strange drive to enjoy life in excess, passionately attached to a surplus which sticks out and derails the ordinary run of things” (Parallax 62). This is very similar to the mode of enjoyment detected in Cage’s over-acting.ViolenceRevenge and vigilantism are the staple themes of mass-audience Hollywood cinema and apart from Cage’s films previously mentioned. As Žižek reports, he views the violence depicted in films such as Death Wish (1974) to John Wick (2014) as “one of the key topics of American culture and ideology” (Parallax 343). But these outbursts of violence are simply, again, ‘acting out’ the passage a l’acte, which “enable us to discern the hidden obverse of the much-praised American individualism and self-reliance: the secret awareness that we are all helplessly thrown around by forces out of our control” (Parallax 343f.).Nicholas Cage’s performances express the epitome of being “thrown around by forces out of our control.” This author reads his expressionistic outbursts appear “possessed” by some strange, undead force. Rather than the radical individualism that is trumpeted in Hollywood films, this undead force takes over. The differences between his form of “Cage Rage” and others who are involved in revenge scenarios, are his iconic outbursts of rage/overacting. In his case, vengeance in his case is never a ‘dish best served cold,’ as the Klingon proverb expresses at the beginning of Kill Bill. But, paradoxically, this coldness might be exactly what one needs in the age of the resurgence of the right in politics which can be witnessed in America and Europe, and the outrage it continuously provokes. ConclusionRage has the potential to be positive; it can serve as a wake-up call to the injustices within society, and inspire reform as well as revolution. But rage is defined here as primarily an urge, a drive, something primordial, as an integral expression of the Lacanian Real (Žižek). This philosophic stance contends that in the process of symbolisation, or rage’s translation into language, this articulation tends to open up inconsistencies in a society, and causes the impetus to lose its power. As mentioned at the beginning of this article, the cycle of rage and the “morning after” which inevitably follows, seems to have a problematic sobering effect. (This effect is well known to anyone who was ever hungover and who therefore professed to ‘never drink again’ where feelings of guilt prevail, which erase the night before from existence.) The excess of rage before followed, this author contends, by the excess of rationality after the revolution are therefore at odds, indicating that a reconciliation between these two should happen, a negotiation, providing a passage from the primordial emotion of rage to the more rational awakening.‘Cage Rage’ and its many commentators and critics serve to remind us that reflection is required, and Žižek’s explication of filmic rage allows us to resist the temptation of enacting our rage that merely digresses to an ’acting out’ or a l'acte. In a way, Cage takes on our responsibility here, so we do not have to — not only because a catharsis is ‘achieved’ by watching his films, but as this argument suggests, we are shocked into reason by the very excessiveness of his acting out.Solutions may appear, this author notes, by divisive actors in society working towards generating a ‘sustained rage’ and to learn how to rationally protest. This call to protest need not happen only in an explosive, orgasmic way, but seek a sustainable method that does not exhaust itself after the ‘party’ is over. This reading of Nicholas Cage offers both models to learn from: if his rage could have positive effects, then Cage in his ‘stoic mode’, as in the first act of Mandy (Figure 3), should become a new meme which could provoke us to a potentially new revolutionary act–taking the time to think.Fig. 3: Mandy ReferencesAdorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 2006.Arnheim, Rudolf. Film als Kunst. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002.Cage, Nicolas. “Nicolas Cage Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters.” 18 Sep. 2018. 19 Dec. 2018 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_WDLsLnOSM>. Death Wish. Dir. Michael Winner. Paramount Pictures/Universal International. 1974.Elsaesser, Thomas, and Michael Wedel. Körper, Tod und Technik: Metamorphosen des Kriegsfilms. Paderborn: Konstanz University Press, 2016.Freeman, Hadley. “Nicolas Cage: ‘If I Don't Have a Job to Do, I Can Be Very Self-Destructive.” The Guardian 1 Oct. 2018. 22 Nov. 2018 <https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/oct/01/nicolas-cage-if-i-dont-have-a-job-to-do-it-can-be-very-self-destructive>.Friedman, Milton. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982.Gledhill, Christie. “Dialogue.” Cinema Journal 25.4 (1986): 44-8.Hanrahan, Harry. “Nicolas Cage Losing His Shit.” 1 Mar. 2011. 19 Dec. 2018 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOCF0BLf-BM>.John Wick. Dir. Chad Stahelski. Thunder Road Films. 2014.Kill Bill Vol I & II. Dir. Quentin Tarantino. Miramax. 2003/2004.Mandy. Dir. Panos Cosmatos. SpectreVision. 2018.My Best Fiend. Dir. Werner Herzog. Werner Herzog Filmproduktion. 1999.Nagera, Humberto, ed. Psychoanalytische Grundbegriffe: Eine Einführung in Sigmund Freuds Terminologie und Theoriebildung. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1998.Powers, Stephen, David J. Rothman, and Stanley Rothman. Hollywood’s America: Social and Political Themes in Motion Pictures. Boulder: Westview Press, 1996.Shephard, Alex. “What Occupy Wall Street Got Wrong.” The New Republic 14 Sep. 2016. 26 Feb. 2019 <https://newrepublic.com/article/136315/occupy-wall-street-got-wrong>.Tokarev/Rage. Dir. Paco Cabezas. Patriot Pictures. 2014.Vengeance: A Love Story. Dir. Johnny Martin. Patriot Pictures. 2017.Wall Street. Dir. Oliver Stone. 20th Century Fox. 1987. Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009.———. “Rage, Rebellion, New Power.” Talk given at the Wiener Festwochen Theatre Festival, Mosse Lectures, 8 Nov. 2016. 19 Dec. 2018 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbmvCBFUsZ0&t=3482s>. ———. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: Profile Books, 2009.

IntroductionFor many, north is an abstract point on a compass, an arrow that tells you which way to hold up a map. Though scientifically defined according to the magnetic north pole, and/or the earth’s axis of rotation, these facts are not necessarily discernible to the average person. Perhaps for this reason, the Oxford English Dictionary begins with reference to the far more mundane and accessible sun and features of the human body, in defining north as; “in the direction of the part of the horizon on the left-hand side of a person facing the rising sun” (OED Online). Indeed, many of the words for ‘north’ around the world are etymologically linked to the left hand side (for example Cornish clēth ‘north, left’). We shall see later that even in English, many speakers conceptualise ‘north’ in an egocentric way. Other languages define ‘north’ in opposition to an orthogonal east-west axis defined by the sun’s rising and setting points (see, e.g., the extensive survey of Brown).Etymology aside, however, studies such as Brown’s presume a set of four cardinal directions which are available as primordial ontological categories which may (or may not) be labelled by the languages of the world. If we accept this premise, the fact that a word is translated as ‘north’ is sufficient to understand the direction it describes. There is good reason to reject this premise, however. We present data from three languages among which there is considerable variance in how the words translated as ‘north’ are typically used and understood. These languages are Kuuk Thaayorre (an Australian Aboriginal language spoken on Cape York Peninsula), Marshallese (an Oceanic language spoken in the Republic of the Marshall Islands), and Dhivehi (an Indo-Aryan language spoken in the Maldives). Lastly, we consider the results of an experiment that show Australian English speakers tend to interpret the word north according to the orientation of their own bodies and the objects they manipulate, rather than as a cardinal direction as such.‘North’ in Kuuk ThaayorreKuuk Thaayorre is a Pama-Nyungan language spoken on the west coast of Australia’s Cape York Peninsula in the community of Pormpuraaw. The Kuuk Thaayorre words equivalent to north, south, east and west (hereafter, ‘directionals’) are both complex and frequently used. They are complex in the sense that they combine with prefixes and suffixes to form dozens of words which indicate not only the direction involved, but also the degree of distance, whether there is motion from, towards, to a fixed point, or within a bounded area in that location, proximity to the local river, and more. The ubiquity of these words is illustrated by the fact that the most common greeting formula involves one person asking nhunt wanthan pal yan? ‘where are you going’ and the other responding, for example, ngay yuurriparrop yan ‘I’m going a long way southwards towards the river’, or ngay iilungkarruw yan ‘I’m coming from the northwest’. Directional terms are strewn liberally throughout Kuuk Thaayorre speech. They are employed in the description of both large-scale and small-scale spaces, whether giving directions to a far-off town, asking another person to ‘move a little to the north’, or identifying the person ‘to the east’ of another in a photograph. Likewise, directional gestures are highly frequent, sometimes augmenting the information given in the speech stream, sometimes used in the absence of spoken directions, and other times redundantly duplicating the information given by a directional word.The forms and meanings of directional words are described in detail in Gaby (Gaby 344–52). At the core of this system are six directional roots referring to the north and south banks of the nearby Edward River as well as two intersecting axes. One of these axes is equivalent to the east—west axis familiar to English speakers, and is defined by the apparent diurnal trajectory of the sun. (At a latitude of 14 degrees 54 minutes south, the Kuuk Thaayorre homeland sees little variation in the location of sunrise and sunset through the year.) While the poles of the second axis are translated by the English terms north and south, from a Western perspective this axis is skewed such that Kuuk Thaayorre -ungkarr ‘~north’ lies approximately 35 degrees west of magnetic north. Rather than being defined by magnetic or polar north, this axis aligns with the local coastline. This is true even when the terms are used at inland locations where there is no visual access to the water or parallel sand ridges. How Kuuk Thaayorre speakers apply this system to environments further removed from this particular stretch of coast—especially in the presence of a differently-oriented coast—remains a topic for future research.‘North’ in MarshalleseMarshallese is the language of the people of the Marshall Islands, an expansive archipelago consisting of 22 inhabited atolls and three inhabited non-atoll islands located in the Northern Pacific. The Marshallese have a long history as master navigators, a skill necessary to keep strong links between far-flung and disparate islands (Lewis; Genz).Figure 1: The location of the Marshall IslandsAs with other Pacific languages (e.g. Palmer; Ross; François), Marshallese deploys a complex system of geocentric references. Cardinal directions are historically derived from the Pacific trade winds, reflecting the importance of these winds for navigation and wayfinding. The etymologies of the Marshallese directions are shown in Table 1 below. The terms given in this table are in the Ralik dialect, spoken in the western Marshall Islands. The terms used in the Ratak (eastern) dialect are related, but slightly different in form. See Schlossberg for more detailed discussion. Etymologies originally sourced from Bender et al. and Ross.Table 1: Marshallese cardinal direction words with etymological source semantics EastWestNorthSouthNoun formrearrilik iōn̄ rōkEtymology‘calm shore (of islet)’‘rough shore (of islet)’‘windy season’; ‘season of northerly winds’‘dry season’; ‘season of southerly winds’Verb modifier formtatonin̄a rōn̄aEtymology‘up(wind)’‘down(wind)’‘windy season’; ‘season of northerly winds’‘dry season’; ‘season of southerly winds’As with many other Oceanic languages, Marshallese has three domains of spatial language use: the local domain, the inshore-maritime domain and the navigational domain. Cardinal directions are the sole strategy employed in the navigational domain, which occurs when sailing on the open ocean. In the inshore-maritime domain, which applies when sailing on the ocean or lagoon in sight of land, a land-sea axis is used (The question of whether, in fact, these directions form axes as such is considered further below). Similarly, when walking around an island, a calm side-rough side (of island) axis is employed. In both situations, either the cardinal north-south axis or east-west axis is used to form a secondary cross-axis to the topography-based axis. The cardinal axis parallel to the calm-rough or land-sea axis is rarely used. When the island is not oriented perfectly perpendicular to one of the cardinal axes, the cardinal axes rotate such that they are perpendicular to the primary axis. This can result in the orientation of iōn̄ ‘north’ being quite skewed away from ‘true’ north. An example of how the cardinal and topographic axes prototypically work is exemplified in Figure 2, which shows Jabor, an islet in Jaluit Atoll in the south-west Marshalls.Figure 2: The geocentric directional system of Jabor, Jaluit AtollWhile cartographic cardinal directions comprise two perpendicular axes, this is not the case for many Marshallese. The clearest evidence for this is the directional system of Kili Island, a small non-atoll island approximately 50km west of Jaluit Atoll. The directional system of Kili is similar to that of Jabor, with one notable exception; the iōn̄-rōk ‘north-south’ and rear-rilik ‘east-west’ axes are not perpendicular but rather parallel (Figure 3) The rear-rilik axis takes precedence and the iōn̄-rōk axis is rarely used, showing the primacy of the east-west axis on Kili. This is a clear indication that the Western abstraction of crossed cardinal axes is not in play in the Marshall Islands; the iōn̄-rōk and rear-rilik axes can function completely independently of one another.Figure 3: Geocentric system of spatial reference on KiliSpringdale is a small city in north-west of the landlocked state of Arkansas. It hosts the largest number of expatriate Marshallese in the United States. Of 26 participants in an object placement task, four respondents were able to correctly identify the four cardinal points (Schlossberg). Aside from some who said they simply did not know others gave a variety of answers, including that iōn̄, rōk, rilik and rear only exist in the Marshall Islands. Others imagined a canonical orientation derived from their home atoll and transposed this onto their current environment; one person who was facing the front door in their house in Springdale reported that they imagined they were in their house in the Marshall Islands, where when oriented towards the door, they were facing iōn̄ ‘north’, thus deriving an orientation with respect to a Marshallese cardinal direction. Aside from the four participants who identified the directions correctly, a further six participants responded in a consistent—if incorrect—way, i.e. although the directions were not correctly identified, the responses were consistent with the conceptualisation of crossed cardinal axes, merely that the locations identified were rotated from their true referents. This leaves 16 of the 26 participants (62%) who did not display evidence of having a conceptual system of two crossed cardinal axes.If one were to point in a direction and say ‘this is north’, most Westerners would easily be able to identify ‘south’ by pointing in the opposite direction. This is not the case with Marshallese speakers, many of whom are unable to do the same if given a Marshallese cardinal direction and asked to name its opposite (cf. Schlossberg). This demonstrates that for many Marshallese, each of these cardinal terms do not form axes at all, but rather are four unique locally-anchored points.‘North’ in DhivehiDhivehi is spoken in the Maldives, an archipelago to the southwest of India and Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean (see Figure 4). Maldivians have a long history of sailing on the open waters, in order to fish and to trade. Traditionally, much of the adult male population would spend long periods of time on such voyages, riding the trade winds and navigating by the stars. For Maldivians, uturu ‘north’ is a direction of safety—the long axis of the Maldivian archipelago runs north to south, and so by sailing north, one has the best possible chance of reaching another island or (eventually) the mainlands of India or Sri Lanka.Figure 4: Location of the MaldivesIt is perhaps unsurprising, then, that many Maldivians are well attuned to the direction denoted by uturu ‘north’, as well as to the other cardinal directions. In an object placement task performed by 41 participants in Laamu Atoll, 32 participants (78%) correctly placed a plastic block ‘to the north’ (uturaṣ̊) of another block when instructed to do so (Lum). The prompts dekonaṣ̊ ‘to the south’ and huḷangaṣ̊ ‘to the west’ yielded similarly high rates of correct responses, though as many as 37 participants (90%) responded correctly to the prompt iraṣ̊ ‘to the east’—this is perhaps because the term for ‘east’ also means ‘sun’ and is strongly associated with the sunrise, whereas the terms for the other cardinal directions are comparatively opaque. However, the path of the sun is not the only environmental cue that shapes the use of Dhivehi cardinal directions. As in Kuuk Thaayorre and Marshallese, cardinal directions in Dhivehi are often ‘calibrated’ according to the orientation of local coastlines. In Fonadhoo, for example, which is oriented northeast to southwest, the system of cardinal directions is rotated about 45 degrees clockwise: uturu ‘north’ points to what is actually northeast and dekona/dekunu ‘south’ to what is actually southwest (i.e., along the length of the island), while iru/iramati ‘east’ and huḷangu ‘west’ are perpendicular to shore (see Figure 5). However, despite this rotated system being in use, residents of Fonadhoo often comment that these are not the ‘real’ cardinal directions, which are determined by the path of the sun.Figure 5: Directions in Fonadhoo, Laamu Atoll, MaldivesIn addition to the four cardinal directions, Dhivehi possesses four intercardinal directions, which are compound terms: iru-uturu ‘northeast’, iru-dekunu ‘southeast’, huḷangu-uturu ‘northwest’, and huḷangu-dekunu ‘southwest’. Yet even a system of eight compass points is not sufficient for describing directions over long distances, especially on the open sea where there are no landmarks to refer to. A system of 32 ‘sidereal’ compass directions (see Figure 6), based on the rising and setting points of stars in the night sky, is available for such purposes—for example, simāgu īran̊ ‘Arcturus rising’ points ENE or 67.5°, while simāgu astamān̊ ‘Arcturus setting’ points WNW or 292.5°. (These Dhivehi names for the sidereal directions are borrowings from Arabic, and were probably introduced by Arab seafarers in the medieval period, see Lum 174-79). Eight sidereal directions coincide with the basic (inter)cardinal directions of the solar compass described earlier. For example, gahā ‘Polaris’ in the sidereal compass corresponds exactly with uturu ‘north’ in the solar compass. Thus Dhivehi has both a sidereal ‘north’ and a solar ‘north’, though the latter is sometimes rotated according to local topography. However, the system of sidereal compass directions has largely fallen out of use, and is known only to older and some middle-aged men. This appears to be due to the diversification of the Maldivian economy in recent decades along with the modernisation of Maldivian fishing vessels, including the introduction of GPS technology. Nonetheless, fishermen and fishing communities use solar compass directions much more frequently than other groups in the Maldives (Lum; Palmer et al.), and some of the oldest men still use sidereal compass directions occasionally.Figure 6: Dhivehi sidereal compass with directions in Thaana script (used with kind permission of Abdulla Rasheed and Abdulla Zuhury)‘North’ in EnglishThe traditional definition of north in terms of Magnetic North or Geographic North is well known to native English speakers and may appear relatively straightforward. In practice, however, the use and interpretation of north is more variable. English speakers generally draw on cardinal directions only in restricted circumstances, i.e. in large-scale geographical or navigational contexts rather than, for example, small-scale configurations of manipulable objects (Majid et al. 108). Consequently, most English speakers do not need to maintain a mental compass to keep track of North at all times. So, if English speakers are generally unaware of where North is, how do they perform when required to use it?A group of 36 Australian English speakers participated in an experimental task where they were presented with a stimulus object (in this case, a 10cm wide cube) while facing S72ºE (Poulton). They were then handed another cube and asked to place it next to the stimulus cube in a particular direction (e.g. ‘put this cube to the north of that cube’). Participants completed a total of 48 trials, including each of the four cardinal directions as target, as well as expressions such as behind, in front of and to the left of. As shown in Figure 7, participants’ responses were categorised in one of three ways: correct, near-correct, or incorrect.Figure 7: Possible responses to prompt of north: A = correct, B = near-correct (aligned with the side of stimulus object closest to north), C = incorrect.Every participant placed their cube in alignment with the axes of the stimulus object (i.e. responses B and C in Figure 7). Orientation to Magnetic/Geographic North was thus insufficient to override the local cues of the task at hand. The 9% of participants showed some awareness of the location of Magnetic/Geographic North, however, by making the near-correct response type B. No participants who behaved in such a way expressed certainty in their responses, however. Most commonly, they calculated the rough direction concerned by triangulating with local landmarks such as nearby roads, or the location of Melbourne’s CBD (as verbally expressed both during the task and during an informal interview afterwards).The remaining 91% of participants’ responses were entirely incorrect. Of these, 13.2% involved similar thought processes as the near-correct responses, but did not result in the identification of the closest side of the stimulus to the instructed direction. However, 77.8% of the total participants interpreted north as the far side of the stimulus. While such responses were classified incorrect on the basis of Magnetic or Geographic North, they were consistent with one another and correct with respect to an alternative definition of English north in terms of the participant’s own body. One of the participants alludes to this alternative definition, asking “Do you mean my North or physical North?”. We refer to this alternative definition as Relative North. Relative North is not bound to any given point on the Earth or a derivation of the sun’s position; instead, it is entirely bound to the perceiver’s own orientation. This equates the north direction with forward and the other cardinals’ points are derived from this reference point (see Figure 8). Map-reading practices likely support the development of the secondary, Relative sense of North.Figure 8: Relative North and the Relative directions derived from itConclusionWe have compared the words closest in meaning to the English word north in four entirely unrelated languages. In the Australian Aboriginal language Kuuk Thaayorre, the ‘north’ direction aligns with the local coast, pointing in a direction 35 degrees west of Magnetic North. In Marshallese, the compass direction corresponding to ‘north’ is different for each island, being defined in opposition to an axis running between the ocean and lagoon sides of that island. The Dhivehi ‘north’ direction may be defined either in opposition to the (sun-based) east-west axis, calibrated to the configuration of the local island, as in Marshallese, or defined in terms of Polaris, the Pole star. In all these cases, though, the system of directions is anchored by properties of the external environment. English speakers, by contrast, are shown to—at least some of the time—define north with reference to their own embodied perspective, as the direction extending outwards from the front of their bodies. These findings demonstrate that, far from being universal, ‘north’ is a culture-specific category. As such, great care must be taken when translating or drawing equivalencies between these concepts across languages.ReferencesBender, Byron W., et al. “Proto-Micronesian Reconstructions: I.” Oceanic Linguistics 42.1 (2003): 1–110.Brown, Cecil H. “Where Do Cardinal Direction Terms Come From?” Anthropological Linguistics 25.2 (1983): 121–161. François, Alexandre. “Reconstructing the Geocentric System of Proto-Oceanic.” Oceanic Linguistics 43.1 (2004): 1–31. Gaby, Alice R. A Grammar of Kuuk Thaayorre. Vol. 74. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2017.Genz, Joseph. “Complementarity of Cognitive and Experiential Ways of Knowing the Ocean in Marshallese Navigation.” Ethos 42.3 (2014): 332–351.Lewis, David Henry. We, the Navigators: The Ancient Art of Landfinding in the Pacific. 2nd ed. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1994. Lum, Jonathon. "Frames of Spatial Reference in Dhivehi Language and Cognition." PhD Thesis. Melbourne: Monash University, 2018. Majid, Asifa, et al. “Can Language Restructure Cognition? The Case for Space.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8.3 (2004): 108–114.OED Online. “North, Adv., Adj., and N.” Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. <http://www.oed.com.ezproxy.lib.monash.edu.au/view/Entry/128325>.Palmer, Bill. “Absolute Spatial Reference and the Grammaticalisation of Perceptually Salient Phenomena.” Representing Space in Oceania: Culture in Language and Mind. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics, 2002. 107–133. ———, et al. "“Sociotopography: The Interplay of Language, Culture, and Environment.” Linguistic Typology 21.3 (2017). DOI:10.1515/lingty-2017-0011.Poulton, Thomas. “Exploring Space: Frame-of-Reference Selection in English.” Honours Thesis. Melbourne: Monash University, 2016.Ross, Malcolm D. “Talking about Space: Terms of Location and Direction.” The Lexicon of Proto-Oceanic: The Culture and Environment of Ancestral Oceanic Society: The Physical Environment. Eds. Malcolm D. Ross, Andrew Pawley, and Meredith Osmond. Vol. 2. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics, 2003. 229–294. Schlossberg, Jonathan. Atolls, Islands and Endless Suburbia: Spatial Reference in Marshallese. PhD thesis. Newcastle: University of Newcastle, in preparation.

We'd eat at Cahill's, Cahill's Family Restaurants I believe they were called, and quite plushy looking ... . At Cahill's we'd eat Viennese Schnitzel, with potato salad and some nice red cabbage salad, sort of pickled ... . Even more exotic was Chicken Maryland, served with a banana and a slice of pineapple in batter. It cost 7s 6d. -- Marion Halligan (11) We migrated in the sixties. Born in Cape Town, I was raised in the heart of Jewish Bondi. The flavours of my youth? Probably equal parts peri-peri, horseradish and chicken booster, not bouquet garni. My introduction to what was 'Australian' food was had in restaurants. And yes, I remember Cahill's, though I can't tell you when exactly, or how much things cost. Mid-sixties. I knew, even then, that there were better restaurants, like the places Dad used to take us with checked tablecloths and bottles with candles dripping wax and fish nets everywhere. His favourites were Mother's Cellar and The Gap at Watson's Bay. I think it's still there. This was before they built Australia Square and Dad became obsessed with the Summit, and of course the Blue Angel, where we never doubted that the lobsters were live. Favourite dishes? I would only eat 'chicken in a basket' or spaghetti bolognaise; well, I was very young, and prone to tears. I can remember my father, losing patience and insisting, "you have a basket for the bread, just put the bloody chicken in it". I can't even remember what it was, probably the same Chicken Maryland Halligan mentions, or a cousin. Fried chicken with a battered pineapple ring and chips of course, sometimes magically grated to form a lattice. I know I enjoyed going out to eat but all meals held the prospect of tension. Visser says the tension arises from the prospect of ending up as a main course. In my case, a mere hors d'œuvre for my sarcastic oldest brother. I was the youngest and unsure how to get the best, the most, as much, or even what I wanted. I wouldn't order until I had read the whole menu, which took long enough even when it wasn't in French or Italian. The menu rarely helped me, rather it served to frustrate my entire family because they knew I was going to order spaghetti or chicken anyway, but that made no difference, the menu had to be read before ordering, and no amount of harassment could convince me otherwise. I love the thought of that child, and her passionate sense of propriety. On special occasions Dad would order Spumante and we would all have a glass, and I felt terribly sophisticated; fortunately the experience doesn't seem to have permanently damaged my palate. Spumante reminded Dad of Italy, the war, you know. Granny used to refer to this as "Henry's trip to Europe". My Dad loved the war, and I'm sure it's not all rosy nostalgia because it was the only time he got away from his family. He drove a truck and didn't have to kill anybody and all we ever heard about was the mud, the black market and the girls. So a glass of cheap, sweet fizzy brought it all back, every time, and who am I to scoff, when the merest whiff of retsina and I'm floating in the bath-flat Aegean under a hot blue sky with anybody called Jani? Cahill's, meanwhile, was in the city, in the days when you 'went to town'. Going to town was always a treat but it depended largely on with whom and why. With Mum it meant serious shopping, and though there was the promise of lunch at David Jones Cafeteria, was it worth the endless hours of torture trying on shoes that were too small and school uniforms which were too big, but of course I would grow into them? And how could a pie with sauce in a plastic packet have been a treat? Going to town with Nana was a different story. It was with some expectation that we would descend into the air-conditioned red-walled cavern that was Cahill's. What I remember about Cahill's was the occasion, and the fish and chips. Nana spent her childhood in a Dickensian orphanage and her adulthood in the North of England, waiting for my grandfather to pick a winner, so I imagine that she felt comfortable with what she knew. That she always ordered fish and chips is only strange because Nana was famous for her fish and chips, perhaps she liked to compare. And I really shouldn't find it odd when I find it difficult to order anything other than fritto misto; in two generations we've progressed to "trefe"1 but not past the deep fryer. So I'm sure that I ordered fish and chips too, or perhaps I ate some of hers, because that was the only thing to do, otherwise she would eat one piece, then look around before coughing theatrically into a serviette which she would then drop, casually, over the other piece and put it in her bag. It was absolutely awful, and we grandchildren loved it when she did that. The other thing I have to say about fish and chips is that we Jews like to eat fried fish cold, but then we don't batter the fish, just flour and egg. I suppose it forms a batter anyway but it doesn't separate from the fish, and we like a solid fish, say kingfish, while Australians seem to go for thinner fillets encased in oily batter. Cahill's did something in between. To follow, tea for Nana, while I always ate fruit salad and ice cream; this I also used to eat on our Saturday afternoon excursions to the 'Cross' which Nana said reminded her of Paris, because it was full of 'artists' like herself. So Nana would sip her tea while I ate my tinned fruit salad and we enjoyed each other and the world, and what a delight for a chatty little girl, the undivided attention of such a beloved adult. I do believe that I will never feel as grown up, ever again, as I did when I was a little girl, out for lunch with my Nana. So as you see I have a sentimental attachment to fish and chips. Their cooking and consumption have flavoured my childhood and possibly yours. The association of fish and chips with that Hanson woman2 is therefore particularly galling, and yet also pertinent. I've never believed that it's just a coincidence that she is purveyor of fish and chips; after all, fish and chips are emblematic of 'Englishness'. Hanson wants Australians to maintain their cultural identification with the mother country, she could hardly have achieved her profile were she the proprietor of a noodle shop. So as you see I have a sentimental attachment to fish and chips. Their cooking and consumption have flavoured my childhood and possibly yours. The association of fish and chips with that Hanson woman2 is therefore particularly galling, and yet also pertinent. I've never believed that it's just a coincidence that she is purveyor of fish and chips; after all, fish and chips are emblematic of 'Englishness'. Hanson wants Australians to maintain their cultural identification with the mother country, she could hardly have achieved her profile were she the proprietor of a noodle shop. Here lies the Great Divide and I fear that I may be part of the problem, not the solution. I am hoist on my hybrid petard, uncomfortably, because much as I dislike elitist Epicureanism I have seen that the reality of what we eat in this country is not always pretty. And all the best efforts of the proselytising 'foodie' media are falling on deaf or already converted ears. Back in the mother country, this battleground is already well trod: there remains something shamefaced about the acceptance of fish and chips as a component of 'Englishness' among the 'better classes' ... . This set of perceptions attaches fish and chips to potent patriotic images of land, countryside, industrial might ... and above all, the notion of Britain as a gallant seafaring notion whose little ships do battle with the elements and the foreign enemy to feed and protect the people. (Walton 2) I see Pauline, wrapped in the flag, battered hake in upraised hand ... and let's not forget that fish and chips were one of our first fast foods, at a time when there was little respite for women, often providing the only hot meal of the day, particularly for workers. Of course the practice was seen to be harmful by health care professionals. The consumption of food prepared outside the home was read as poor mothering, a breakdown in the process of policing of 'proper' families and of course no-one is sure just what sort of mother Pauline is. She appears to be estranged from her older children, a case of one Chiko Roll too many? The irony of fish and chips and Englishness is that, according to Walton, fish and chips also symbolise cultural diversity: viewed in other moods and seen from other angles, of course, the image and associations of fish and chips could be very different. They expressed ethnic diversity as well as simplistic national solidarity, from the strong East End Jewish element in the early days of fish frying in London, through the strong Italian presence in the trade from the turn of the century, in urban Scotland and Ireland especially, to the growing importance of the Chinese and Greek Cypriots in the post-Second World War decades. (2) So fish and chips have played a significant role for a number of ethnic groups. They're ours, not hers. But I'm still troubled, I need to tell the gastronomic mafia that Pacific Rim cuisine won't be Oz food until a significant number of Australians are eating it, and I'm afraid "mainstream Australia, out there" is eating extremely boring food. Could it be that the resentment against Asians is because their food is just so much better? Footnotes 1. trefe: (yiddish) animals, seafood or insects considered impure, abomination, not to be eaten under any circumstances, notably pig and shellfish. 2. Pauline Hanson was elected to the Australian Federal Parliament as an independent candidate in 1996, and soon made her presence known with outspoken comments about Aborigines, (mainly Asian) migrants, and welfare recipients [ed.]. 3. Stephanie Alexander is a noted Australian food writer and restaurateur, and her A Shared Table is the latest of a plethora of Australian television series celebrating our gastronomic abundance. References Halligan,Marion. Eat My Words. Sydney: Collins/Angus and Robertson, 1990. Visser, Margaret. The Rituals of Dinner. New York: Grove/Weidenfeld, 1991. Walton, John K. Fish and Chips and the British Working Class: 1870-1940. Leicester: Leicester UP, 1992. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Felicity Newman. "'You Have a Basket for the Bread, Just Put the Bloody Chicken in It'." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.7 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/basket.php>. Chicago style: Felicity Newman, "'You Have a Basket for the Bread, Just Put the Bloody Chicken in It'," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 7 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/basket.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Felicity Newman. (1999) "You have a basket for the bread, just put the bloody chicken in it". M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(7). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/basket.php> ([your date of access]).

Historic-Archaeological Research of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart of Milano on the Indus Delta (2010-2018). The following text is only an abridged note on the excavations at Banbhore and some significant extra-moenia surveys carried out by the Italian Team within the Institutional framework of a “Pak-French-Italian Historical and Archaeological Research at Banbhore” on the basis of a Licence issued by the competent Pakistani Authorities (2010-2015 - Coordinator of the Project Dr Kaleemullah Lashari), and, some later, within a new institutional asset: a “Memorandum of Understanding” (MoU) signed in the 2017 between the Director General of the Department of Antiquities of Sindh (Manzoor A. Kanasro) and the Magnifico Rettore of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart of Milan (Prof. Franco Anelli). Aims of the said MoU are: (a) historical-archaeological research-work at Banbhore and Rani Kot; (b) training (theoretical and on the job) to selected students and officers of the DAS. The Italian group works under the sponsorship of the Italian Ministry for Foreign Affairs (now Ministry for Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation/MAECI). Scientific director for the Italian Team is Prof. Valeria Piacentini, member of the Board of Directors of the Research Centre CRiSSMA of the Catholic University. In the following dissertation I won’t linger on the debated issue about the identification of the site of Banbhore with historic sites on the Indus delta (the historical Mihrān river) mentioned and described in the written sources of the past. Too many respected scholars and archaeologists have entered this debate since the end of the 19th Century, for which I refer to a well-known exhaustive literature. In the “50s of the previous century, Leslie Alckok – then official to the Department of Archaeology of Pakistan – carried out some preliminary excavations, followed by Dr Rafique Mughal and F.A. Khan. This latter carried out a systematic and extensive archaeological campaign of several years between the “50s and the “60s, well backed by one of the most authoritative Pakistani historians, N.A. Baloch. Khan brought to light extraordinary archaeological and architectural evidence, but, unfortunately, his excavation-notes have gone lost and little or nothing has been published. Thence, our research-work had to start from nothing. First of all and most urgent was an updated planimetric and altimetric study of the site by kite-photos: a massive wall of c. 1,4 km with 55 towers, 7 posterns, and major and secondary accesses to the citadel (2010-2012 by Y. Ubelman, S. Reynard, A. Tilia), regularly updated with advanced technologies (A. Tilia). Then, in collaboration with Dr M. Kervran, head of the French Team, we undertook an accurate study of the bastions and the shapes of its towers (squared, U-shaped, circular), which has brought to envisage three main occupational phases of the intra-moenia area: 1. Indo-Parthian/Indo-Kushan phase (c. III-II Century b.CE – III-IV Century CE); 2. Sasanian/Indo-Sasanian phase (c. III-IV Century – early VIII Century CE); 3. Islamic phase (VIII – XII/early XIII Century CE). Decay and/or abandonment and end of any settled life on the site can be dated around the XII-early XIII Century, due to attacks and pillaging by Turco-Mongol nomadic tribes, and/or the deviation of this branch of the Indus delta and consequent filling of the harbour, or both. Archaeological evidence come to light confirms the historical information. Our third aim (2010-2015) was to arrive to a first chronological panorama of the site through levels in stratigraphy and the assemblage of pottery and other significant evidence with the individual levels (N. Manassero – A. Fusaro – A. Tilia). Deep trenches were excavated (T/7 and T/9 on the Italian side; T/1 on the French side near the western portion of the bastions skirting the Hindu Temple. These brought to the very early Sasanian period or late Indo-Parthian (c. II-III Century CE), then the water-table invaded the trenches preventing us to go deeper; however, drillings (T/9) have allowed to go deeper for c.1,8 mt of shards …thus reaching a much earlier occupational phase. The question about an Hellenistic occupation at the bottom of the site (Arrian’s harbour of Alexander) is still unanswered… a dream…but the importance of Banbhore has induced to take it seriously and include it within our priorities. Ours and the French trenches have also produced significant information on the architectural panorama of the site for its earlier periods of life. A main N-S and E-W road axis was traced. The site was organised in insulae, each insula with its pits of organic and inorganic refusals, densely built along narrow roads by small mono-nuclear houses, roofed, bases in local stones and the elevation in unbacked bricks. Interesting the presence of refusals of some crafts, as if each building had at the same time the function of “home” and workshop. The refusals shew activities of ivory-working (T/1,T/4, T/9), and other crafts carried out “within the bastions of the citadel”, such as glass, shells and mother of pearl, alloys and various metallurgic activities, too, and so on. Significant the presence of a wealth of clay-moulds. T/5 has produced a clay-mould nearly intact in its shape. No less interesting, in the deeper layers, the presence of a well arranged organisation of the hydraulic resources (small canals, little domed cisterns in roughly cut local stones, wells..: T/9). One element of the site attracted our attention: the so called “Partition Wall”. It has a North-South direction; then, it bends Eastwards, including the Mosque and the Eastern lagoon, but cutting out the majestic Southern Gate. So far, it had been interpreted as a Wall that had a “religious” or “social” function to separate – after the Islamic conquest – the Muslims from the non-Muslim inhabitants of the site. Manassero dedicated the 2014 Field-Season to investigate: T/7 and T/8 were the trenches that gave a new profile to this structure and to the general occupational organisation of the citadel during its last period of life. The round-shaped tower in mud-bricks and the walls on both sides show that they had been hurriedly erected in a late phase of the life of the citadel (around the end of the X – early XI Century CE). They had been built on the top of pre-existing buildings either abandoned and collapsed or hastily flatted-down, likely to defend this eastern portion of the site and its Mosque by some human ravage that had succeeded to open a breach in the lower western bastion leaving the higher north-eastern area exposed to attacks (the skeleton found by Dr Kervran on her portion of the wall, and Khan’s skeletons with arrow-heads in their skulls and chests). According to F.A. Khan’s excavations and what he left us in his little booklet that so far – printed and re-printed – is the guide for visitors to Banbhore, in the eastern portion of the site during the latest stage of its life still stood beautiful palaces, the Friday Mosque, markets, and an eastern gate where a staircase (still in situ in the 2015) brought to a lagoon at the foot of the eastern bastions and to the river. At the end of this first stage of our historical and archaeological research-work, the identification of the site of Banbhore with the historic Sasanian/Indo-Sasanian fortified harbour-town seemed quite feasible. When we resumed our field-work in the 2017, we decided to go deeper in this direction. In the meantime, Dr Manassero had resigned due to personal choices of life. Dr Simone Mantellini bravely accepted to be our Field-Director for the archaeological sector. T/9 had unearthed an imposing Building (Building 1) running along the East-West road-axis, parallel to a second Building (Building 2). The road – wide about 5 meters – must have been a major road, that had played a central role within the general architectural urban asset of the site. Building 2 had the typical structure of the local houses: base in rough stones, elevation in mud-bricks. Excavations of Building 1 produced fillings well flatted and an endless chronological procession of floors in row mud, likely the re-occupation of an important palace during the last phase of the occupational life of Banbhore. The material (pottery and others) associated with the various levels in stratigraphy (Dr A. Fusaro) confirmed the dating of the dug portion from c. the early XIII to the XI Century CE. Historically speaking, it makes sense: chronicles of the time report about the invasion of Lower Sindh by the Seljuks (second half of the XI Century CE); they indulge on the assaults against the walls of its great harbour-town named Daybul, its long siege concluded with a peace-treaty that fixed the border with Makrān at Gwadar and gave to Daybul an autonomous status (nāḥiya) within the Seljuk dominion of Qāvurd-Khān ibn Chaghrī Beg. More interesting was the copious filling with ivory refusals. Along Building 2, were found semi-worked shells, glass, iron and brass rivets, iron instruments, alloys, coins and other. This induced to think to a late quarter of work-shops outside the Partition Wall, built on previous buildings. Lastly, some surveys extra-moenia and in the Lahiri Bandar and Mullah-ka Kot islands have revealed a close connection and interaction between these spaces and the citadel. Around the bastions: the remains of a densely settled area and a well organised regulation of the waters and the territory, rock quarries, urban quarters, dwellings, cairn-tombs (some of them re-used), an artificial lake of sweet water delimited to the south by a “barrage”, wells, and a vast so called “industrial area” to the north-northwest of the bastions, pottery kilns and others completed the image of a urban asset at least for a given span of time. Architectural and archaeological evidences have regularly been graphically, photographically and topographically documented (A. Tilia). Archaeometric analyses on the job (pottery, metals, alloys, coins…) and in Italy (ivory, glass, clay-moulds, shards…) have provided precious support and new elements to the archaeological work. We are now confronted with the plan of a positive shahristān. Banbhore is no longer only a fortified citadel. Written sources in Arabic and Persian confirm this feature. After the Jan.-Feb. 2018 field-season, the Islamic occupational phase of Banbhore and the “archaeological park” surrounding it enhanced this image: a positive fluvial and maritime system stemmed out, a well-fortified system and harbour-town, a centre of mercantile power, production and re-distribution of luxury goods, an international centre of pilgrimage and religious learning, too, outlet to the sea of the capital-city of the moment. For the forthcoming field-seasons, it was decided to concentrate the attention on the sector where the North-South axis crosses the East-West one. In particular: to further investigate Building 1; to look for the ivory-workshops that must be there around – given the copious pieces so far brought to light and used as refilling (more than 9.000 fragments) and some fragments of rough ivory (specialist of the Italian Team G. Affanni); to organise a deep-trench in the Pakistani sector (T/11), in order to resume Manassero’s investigations on the urban and architectural features of the pre-Islamic phases...and (why not?) try to overcome the water-table problem with the technological support offered by the Bahrya University of Karachi…the much dreamed quest of Alexander the Macedonian’s port. All in all and to conclude. Nowadays, at the end of this first stage of historical and archaeological research-work in collaboration with the DAS, the identification of the site of Banbhore and its surrounding area with the Sasanian/Indo-Sasanian and the Early-Islamic well-fortified harbour-town of Daybul/Debol can be confirmed. No other site with the characteristics described by the written sources of the time (chronicles, geographies, travelogues…plus Marco Polo and some significant Genoese archival documents) has so far come to light on the Indus deltaic region. Conversely, still un-answered are other queries: Banbhore can be identified also with the great harbour of Alexander the Macedonian? Or with the Barbaricum/Barbarikon/Barbariké, harbour-town of Parthian rulers or local lords of “Skuthia”, also mentioned in the Periplus Maris Erythraei? Or again with Dib/Deb, harbour mentioned in a Parthian-Manichaean text? Or again the Dibos of Greek sources? Or the Dêbuhl/Dêphul of an Arminian text à propos of the Prophet Mani? Wishful thinking; however, these queries represent some amongst the ambitious aims of our future research-work.

The first home video-gaming console, the Magnavox Odyssey, was released in 1972. Its limited graphical capacities led Magnavox to ship it with a number of plastic overlays for the user's television that would admit a little variety into the then relatively crude gaming experience, limited to a built-in, Pong-like game. Computer and video games have come a long way since then, but it often seems as if critical approaches to gaming have continued shuffling through these plastic films, taking transformations of the screen, or on-screen events, for the whole of the gaming experience. It seems to me that reflection has been paralysed, becoming a discourse of regulation as it revolves around anxieties about gender, violence and narrative. I'd like to explore these anxieties as they've emerged in a few places, and then see if I can articulate the beginnings of an approach that might afford us a more complex, less pessimistic aesthetics of gaming. Anxieties around gender are partly premised upon an evident difference in the types, frequency and extent of gameplay on the part of boys and girls. Recent Australian research suggests that while 76% of boys use home computers for gameplay, the proportion of girls who do the same is around 60% (Cuppitt and Stockbridge 1996). In addition, similar Australian research suggests that while 98% of 12-17 year old boys play games regularly, only around 89% of girls do (Durkin and Aisbett 2000). There is evidence that girls and boys favour different gaming genres (Durkin and Aisbett 2000), and there is little doubt that the magazines and Websites that operate so integrally within gaming cultures tend to hail and attract a mostly male audience. Evidence of this kind of gender split can be seen across the extant research, and from it the argument is often made that this gender imbalance implies a lifelong advantage for boys proceeding from an early pleasurable familiarity with computers. In addressing this problem, rather than confronting questions of access, and parental or teacherly responsibilities to guarantee equity of access for boys and girls, or even looking at issues of gender representation, many critics have instead argued that most games are fundamentally unsuited to the way girls play. In a recent anthology, From Barbie To Mortal Kombat (1998), essentialist discourses of gender are deployed in assembling a consensus around what is termed the 'girls games movement'. Time and again in most of the assembled articles and interviews, claims are made that girls' and boys' interests and styles of play are fundamentally different. While boys allegedly favour destructive play, with an emphasis on mastery, control and competition, girls -- it's constantly asserted -- require collaboration and co-operation, an emphasis on feelings and discussion, a less competitive framework for play, and, above all, narrative. Repeatedly in the anthology, its impugned that games now do not encompass the narrative complexity or richness that girls need, and that girls are alienated from the violent 'twitch and kill' dynamic that pervades gaming. Apart from the thoroughgoing essentialism -- which is brilliantly interrogated by the game-grrlz featured at the end of the anthology -- what troubles me about much of the anthology and much contemporary critical work on games is the implied moral demand that young people's game-culture begin to measure up to another generation's notions of 'appropriate' cultural experiences. A persistent trope in critical work on games -- from Jenkins's piece in the anthology (Jenkins 1998) to works like Marsha Kinder's Playing with Power (1991) -- is the parent-critic watching their children playing video games and becoming perplexed and worried about what is going on. The panic around the lack of 'girls games' -- apart from affording a lucrative opportunity to produce and market worthy material to concerned parents -- serves to authorise the 'correction' of young people's culture. The move from a critique of gaming -- one which rarely engages sympathetically with its pleasures -- to an attempt to inject strong, adult-devised narrative content into games is a move from speaking about gamers ('over their heads') to speaking for gamers. This speaking-for, this flutter of panic has, I think, more than a little to do with an anxiety around the dissipation of cultural power. Theorists of moral panic like John Springhall tell us that moral panics function as attempts to preserve the intergenerational status quo and the cultural-critical hierarchy of a particular period (Springhall 1998). Catharine Lumby argues that new media are like force-fields that reorganise social relations in their wake, and that the anxieties they can inspire can tell us a lot about who feels threatened by such re-organisations, and why (Lumby 1997). Gaming is disturbing in that although it shares some features with other, more familiar visual media, it seems finally, stubbornly unassimilable to the modes of criticism that have developed in relation to those forms. Entrenched critical narratives of spectatorship, or the relationship between viewers, texts, meaning and the economies of cultural production don't seem to find any useful or lasting purchase here. No-one would now argue that televisual or cinematic experiences are passive, but gaming's requirement in principle for the player's direct physical participation in the production of cultural experience means that the old separations underpinning mechanisms of identification or notions of consuming audiences seem irritatingly awkward. Faced with these and other difficulties, criticism has tended to become mesmerised with what is shared -- the screen -- and to be at once frustrated and provoked by the enormous differences still inscribed there. While the close scrutiny of gender representations in gaming has uncovered some serious problems, alongside the demand for narrative we can also see it as part of an older generation's attempt to adapt familiar, free-floating critical modes and models to a group of media with which it has no apparent deep or pleasurable engagement. Faced with a radical analytical and critical failure, the lack of any pleasure to account for or recover, and the need to preserve a cultural and critical hierarchy premised upon the study of other media, it is perhaps inevitable that a desire to alter gaming -- to make it more familiar -- has arisen, and with it a critical discourse of regulation. If we move beyond the screen, if we simply attend to what happens when we and others play games, we allow the possibility of a new aesthetics of gaming to emerge that moves beyond such desires for control. When we realise that what is almost never talked about in current critical work is the body of the player or the nature of machine-mediated play, a field begins to open that might allow us to talk about the uses and pleasures of gaming, and to see its various forms in a wider network of interactions. Paradigm-cases for beginning the sorts of investigations I'm thinking of are those amazing arcade games, like Dance Dance Revolution, that enable and even require public performance and public display. Often positioned at the street entrances of arcades, these games usually attract passing crowds to stop and watch (male and female) players dancing in time with thumping tunes and on-screen instructions. Points are scored by closely matching foot placement with the directional arrows thrown up onto the small screen, but what really attracts the onlookers is the undeniable, individual -- and, strictly, unnecessary -- flair with which the dancers often execute their moves. What at the level of programming, and from an analysis of the screen alone, is the most rudimentary of narratives nevertheless mediates a thrilling and spectacular playful-performative display. And this is where we begin to see that gaming pleasures do not, perhaps cannot, rely on finished or closed narratives. It seems to me that the undeniable popularity of gaming comes from the provision of endlessly recursive grammars and vocabularies for cyborg players to narrate performance, play and self. While many gaming genres and titles do include chunks of traditional narrative storytelling, it seems to me that these often simply embellish the distinctive pleasures of gaming, which require and enact the fundamental redistribution of authorial and narrative power. Gaming establishes a new relationship between perceptual fields and bodies -- a relationship fundamentally different from cinematic or televisual relationships. Associated with these pleasures and relationships is gaming's demand for an ontology -- a series of ontologies -- that can conceive of the moment of play as simultaneously social, mechanical, neither, both. Code and performance, programming and improvised play, when seen together in this way, make the demand for narrative -- ultimately premised upon the separation of consumer and product, spectator and image -- empty of any force. This is to say that when we begin to see the moment of gameplay as a hybrid one -- one where human and machine, play and code, text and reading, producer and consumer cannot be meaningfully distinguished -- we can then begin to see that its unfixed, unstriated forms of play demand a hybrid aesthetics. Such a hybrid aesthetics would move beyond the screen alone to consider gaming's involvement in multiple networks, and thus come to a consideration of its pleasures and possibilities that avoided discourses of morality and control. What it would consider is not only the relationship between gaming and other forms of 'visual culture', but simultaneously its technological artefacts, its involvement with transnational industry, the physical dexterities and epistemologies it demands, the differing shapes of its collectives as it proliferates, its interactions with urban spaces, and its production of different kinds and mixtures of spectators, players, narratives and machines. This kind of Latourean anthropology, with its refusal to bracket gaming as another form of 'soft' culture, is a critical approach that will allow us some traction on gaming's slippery surface, as it allows us to talk about its complexity all at once. If we begin to see games as 'mediators -- that is, actors endowed with the ability to translate what they transport', who in turn 'associate, combine and redeploy countless actors' (Latour 1993), if we look beyond the screen and instead, following Wittgenstein, look for the meaning of games in their everyday social use, we will have begun to look at games in a way that is more interested in what they do, than in what they allegedly do not do. Carrying out this kind of aesthetic project will require not only an attention to the involvement of players' bodies in gaming, but to the patterns of games' dissemination, and to what players themselves say about the games they play. Such an approach need not, in opposing the pessimism that goes with screen-fetishism, veer toward the utopianism of so much cyber-rhetoric. If we take arguments like Latour's seriously, we will say not that gaming represents a revolutionary moment, but that there has always been a deep involvement between humans and our technologies, such that machines and humans constitute collectives for social action. An aesthetics of gaming that takes cognisance of this will short-circuit conveniently polarised debates, and clear space for a more interesting consideration of the networks and uses of gaming. Perhaps those of us who have keenly felt the pleasures and possibilities of gaming can extend a conversation that is no longer sifting through the Odyssey's yellowing transparencies. References Cassell, Justine and Henry Jenkins, eds. From Barbie to Mortal Kombat. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998. Cuppitt, Margaret, and Sally Stockbridge. Families and Electronic Entertainment. Sydney: Office of Film and Literature Classification, 1997. Douglas, Nikki, et al. "Voices from the Combat Zone: Game Grrlz Talk Back." In Cassell and Jenkins. Durkin, Kevin, and Kate Aisbett. Computer Games and Australians Today. Sydney: Office of Film and Literature Classification, 2000. Haraway, Donna J. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. Jenkins, Henry. "'Complete Freedom of Movement': Video Games as Gendered Play Spaces." In Cassell and Jenkins. Kinder, Marsha. Playing with Power in Movies, Television and Video Games: From Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Berkeley: U of California P, 1991. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1993. Lumby, Catharine. "Panic Attacks: Old Fears in a New Media Era." Media International Australia, 85 (1997): 40-6. Springhall, John. Youth, Popular Culture and Moral Panic. Houndmills: MacMillan, 1998. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell, 1951. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Jason A. Wilson. "Odyssey Renewed: Towards a New Aesthetics of Video-Gaming." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.5 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/odyssey.php>. Chicago style: Jason A. Wilson, "Odyssey Renewed: Towards a New Aesthetics of Video-Gaming," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 5 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/odyssey.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Jason A. Wilson. (2000) Odyssey renewed: towards a new aesthetics of video-gaming. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(5). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/odyssey.php> ([your date of access]).

What is a machine? As part of his answer to this, historian and philosopher of technology Lewis Mumford cites a classic definition: "a machine is a combination of resistant bodies so arranged that by their means the mechanical forces of nature can be compelled to do work accompanied by certain determinant motions" (Reuleaux [1876], qtd. in Mumford, Technics and Civilisation 9). Mumford's own definition is focussed on machines as part of a technological continuum between human body and automaton: Machines have developed out of a complex of non-organic agents for converting energy, for performing work, for enlarging the mechanical or sensory capacities of the human body, or for reducing to a mensurable order and regularity the processes of life. The automaton is the last step in a process that began with the use of one part or another of the human body as a tool. (9-10) The tool and the machine can be distinguished along this technological continuum, with the tool more dependent on "the skill and motive power of the operator", subject to "manipulation", and potentially more flexible in its uses, whereas the machine lends itself more to "automatic action" of a specialised kind. However, it is difficult to ultimately separate them, since the embodied skill of the tool-user becomes more mechanical and reflexive with practice (Technics and Civilisation 10), while the machine also evolves along increasingly organic lines (367), and there are common examples of hybrid machine-tools like the lathe or drill, which combine "the accuracy of the finest machine ... with the skilled attendance of the workman" (10). A powerfully attractive feature of the computer is that it is an effective hybrid of machine and tool: like a machine it performs many specialised functions at super-human speed and accuracy on command, but like a tool it is flexible and adaptable (through add-on software and plug-in peripherals) to a seemingly endless variety of users and uses. Fascinating Assemblages The automatic machine ... involves the notion of an external source of power, a more or less complicated inter-relation of parts, and a limited kind of activity. From the beginning the machine was a sort of minor organism, designed to perform a single set of functions. (Mumford, Technics and Civilisation 11) The autonomy of the machine is perhaps its most fascinating aspect. That the machine is an assemblage of parts and restricted functions -- a "minor organism" as Mumford puts it -- suggests to us a body. There is something ineluctably erotic about scenes of lubricated pistons moving in and out of cylinders, or greased gear wheels moving around each other, and a masturbatory energy seems to be involved in the machine that repetitively and by itself performs the same limited actions over and over and over. While there are parallels between masculine masturbation and machinic repetition, there are also associations with femininity. As Andreas Huyssen pointed out, the modern machine became associated with a dangerous female sexuality and took the place of the early moderns' untamed Mother Nature as the principal representative of non-human forces with autonomy and agency that could evade human control. But arguably, expressed fears of machinic autonomy are the flip side of a wish for it, arising from masculine reproductive fantasies that have been played out in technoscience by generations of fictional and real-life Frankensteins fanatically seeking to create artificial life in the form of technoscientific brainchildren (who are nevertheless often neglected and left to run wild at birth). At a conscious level, machines express what may be interpreted as anal-sadistic desires for order, regularity and control, but unconsciously there is an element of masochistic pleasure in being passive, in yielding up control to the machine, in letting it set the scene and determine the actions and roles for the humans as well as non-humans (Sofia, "Contested Zones", and "Mythic Machine" 44-8). Machinic Zeal What is the use of conquering nature if we fall a prey to nature in the form of unbridled men? What is the use of equipping mankind with mighty powers to move and build and communicate, if the final result of this secure food supply and this excellent organisation is to enthrone the morbid impulses of a thwarted humanity? (Mumford, Technics and Civilisation 366) With his emphasis on the social context and drives towards technology, Mumford (Technics and Civilisation 364-5) suggests that while some kinds of machines have existed for thousands of years, what we have come to think of as the mechanical age only arose with the widespread adoption of the machine as a way of securing order, regularity and calculability of physical and human resources, coupled with the ideological shift which made the machine into "a goal of desire" and an object of almost obsessive veneration from the mid-18th century to the early 20th century. Now, he said (writing first in the early 1930s) faith in the machine has been somewhat shaken, and it is no longer seen as "the paragon of progress" but as "merely a series of instruments" to be used when useful; yet despite this loss of faith the machine in capitalist contexts continues to be "over-worked, over-enlarged, over-exploited because of the possibility of making money out of it" (Technics and Civilisation 367). Almost seventy years after Mumford was writing, the obsessive zeal for the machine still has not completely disappeared, but has been displaced from giant smoke-puffing steel assemblages, whirling cogs and gearwheels, or the motors driving trains, cars and planes, and onto the silicon, plastic and light of computers (whose machineries of production and assembly are largely hidden off-shore to the bulk of users, thereby producing the illusion of "post-industrial" societies). The computer is now the paragon of progress and has become the "defining technology" of our age (Bolter), its place reinforced by an actively boosterist popular press (e.g. popular computing magazines; regular computer supplements in newspapers). Sociotechnical Not Posthuman Mumford continually makes the point that questions posed by/in technology are never answerable only technologically. It always comes down to human choices, and even when the results of these "are uncontrollable they are not external" to human culture: Choice manifests itself in society in small increments and moment-to-moment decisions as well as in loud dramatic struggles; and he who does not see choice in the development of the machine merely betrays his incapacity to observe cumulative effects until they are bunched together so closely that they seem completely external and impersonal. (Mumford, Technics and Civilisation 6) In a certain way Mumford's perspective anticipates actor-network theory, which looks at artefacts -- including machines -- as parts of sociotechnical networks that involve human decisions, including about the distribution of agency to non-humans. Even in the most automated machine, Mumford argues "there must intervene somewhere, at the beginning and end of the process ... the conscious participation of a human agent" (10). Actor-network studies of the development of scientific and technological artefacts aim in part to critique the sense of the external, impersonal or inevitable in scientific and technical 'progress' by insisting that "things might have been otherwise" (Bijker & Law 3), not just at the beginning and end, but all the way through the process of an artefact's development and use. The artefact is studied as a particular outcome of a set of decisions and performances made in the midst of contingencies affecting human and non-human actors with conflicting goals and contested powers within a dynamic sociotechnical network. Although actor-network theory is very interested in non-human agents, it does not, as do some recent participants in and theorists of cyberculture, celebrate the so-called post-human. There can be no agentic machines without there having been human competencies downloaded into them; there can be no technical order that is not also social and cultural. As Latour argues, the modernist work of purification has tried vainly to impose a separation between the social and technical, denying their mutual inextricability. From this Latourian perspective, the notion of the "post-human" is not, as it appears to be, post modern, but thoroughly modern. It carries through the quintessentially modernist project of denying after the fact the human agency and capacities that have been invested in producing hybrid artefacts which are then proclaimed as extra-human; it denies the cumulative effects of sociotechnical choices and instead represents the machinic imperative as somehow impersonal and external to human affairs. The notion of the posthuman can readily reinforce the pervasive popular cultural myths of technological inevitability and dominance, conveniently for those humans and corporations who actually do profit from decisions they make about developing and marketing machines of increasing autonomy, intelligence and subtlety. Machines and Provision The role of the machine has been overemphasised in histories of technology, according to Mumford. For aside from tools and machines which perform dynamic actions, there are technologies of containment and supply, which he categorizes as utensils (like baskets or pots), apparatus (such as dye vats, brick kilns), utilities (reservoirs, aqueducts, roads, buildings) and the modern power utility (railroad tracks, electric transmission lines). Some of the most effective adaptations of the environment came, not from the invention of machines, but from the equally admirable invention of utensils, apparatus, and utilities. ... But since people's attention is directed most easily to the noisier and more active parts of the environment, the role of the utility and the apparatus has been neglected ... both [tool and utensil] have played an enormous part in the development of the modern environment and at no stage in history can the two means of adaptation be split apart. Every technological complex includes both: not least our modern one. (Technics and Civilisation, 11-2). The development of various utensils and apparatus for storage (urns, granaries) and flow (irrigation, aqueducts) was essential for the emergence of settled agricultural communities in the neolithic period (Mumford, Technics and Human Development 140-1). As I explore in a related article (Sofia, "Container"), Mumford finds a prudish sexism in the relative neglect of technologies evocative of the female organs of storage, nutrition and transformation, compared with the overemphasis on technologies that are extensions of the muscular masculine body (Technics and Human Development, 140). However, the contrast between dynamic, noisy, active and autonomous machines, and passive, quiet, backgrounded containers cannot be sustained. For one the utensil even in its most basic form, has something machinic about it: a container can perform its function autonomously, without needing manipulation like a tool. Further, it is arguable that holding or containing is not simply a property of a shaped space, but a form of action in itself. Moreover in practice there are many hybrids of machine and utensil or utility, for example in domestic technologies like the food processor, a container with a machine-driven blade, or the washing machine, featuring a tub with mechanical agitation and rotary motion. Although Mumford is primarily interested in the machine, he observes that as modern "neotechnics" proceeds to develop ever more sophisticated machinery, so does it evolve more complex technologies of containment, as described in this passage which depicts both machines and utilities as active agents: Behind the façade [of the crisp lines of steel and glass that define the modern built environment] are rows and rows of machines, weaving cotton, transporting coal ... [etc.], machines with steel fingers and lean muscular arms, with perfect reflexes, sometimes even with electric eyes. Alongside them are the new utilities -- the coke oven, the transformer, the dye vats -- chemically cooperating with these mechanical processes, assembling new qualities in chemical compounds and materials. Every effective part in this whole environment represents an effort of the collective mind to widen the province of order and control and provision. (Technics and Civilisation, 356) Another way of getting the over-emphasised machine back into proportion is to look more closely at what it is used for, what purposes it serves. Mumford writes of the machine as part of the effort to produce "order and regularity" into the processes of life (10); to "widen the province of order and control and provision" (356) or to produce a "secure food supply and ... excellent organisation" (366). In other words, the machine is serving the goals typically associated with utensils, utilities and apparatus: smoothing out fluctuations in supply and distributing resources more evenly. Likewise Mumford suggests that in the back of developments of machine and tool is the effort to adapt by extending the body's powers and/or by altering the environment, so that, for example, instead of a physiological adaptation to cold through hair growth or hibernation, "there is an environmental adaptation, such as that made possible by the use of clothes and the erection of shelters" (10). These technologies are not machines, but container technologies, in the province of what philosopher of technology Don Ihde would call "background technics". We can think of the shift in emphasis here in relation to the example of road works. The large machines for bulldozing a path and laying down layers of road surface are very impressive in their size, power and technical capacity. But the road surface could not be laid down without there being technologies (including hybrids of machine and container, like the pick-up truck) for transporting, storing and mixing the materials used. And when it is done, the big machines lumber off elsewhere, and what we have before us is a road, a utility which facilitates orderly communication, transport and the supply of people and materials. In other words, these machines have served the goal of provisioning. The machine can enthral us with its autonomy, its alterity, its thingness, but as Heidegger has claimed, even such a powerful and seemingly stand-alone machine as a plane on a runway ready for take-off is ultimately just a "completely unautonomous" element when considered as part of a global system ordered "to ensure the possibility of transportation" (17). Like other modern machines, its own objectness and machinic resistance is dissolved as it becomes part of the "standing reserve", which can be understood as a macro-technology of provisioning through a matrix of mobilisable human and non-human resources. In the broader project of which this piece is a fragment, I want to investigate more closely the role and relative importance of machines compared to other kinds of equipment, especially for containment, supply or provisioning in contemporary technoculture, on the suspicion that it is apparatus and utilities rather than machines that define our contemporary lifeworld. References Bijker, Wiebe E., and John Law. General Introduction. Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change. Eds. Bijker and Law. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1992. Bolter, Jay David. "The Computer as a Defining Technology." Computers in the Human Context: Information Technology, Production, and People. Ed. Tom Forester. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989. Heidegger, Martin. "The Question Concerning Technology." The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Andreas Huyssen. "The Vamp and the Machine: Technology and Sexuality in Fritz Lang's Metropolis." New German Critique 24-25 (1982), 221-37. Also in Huyssen. After the Great Divide. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986. Ihde, Don. Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1993. Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Civilisation. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1962 [1934]. ---. Technics and Human Development. New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1966. Sofia, Zoë. "Container Technologies." Hypatia, Spring 2000 (forthcoming). ---. "Contested Zones: Futurity and Technological Art." Leonardo: Journal of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology 29.1 (1996): 59-66. ---. "The Mythic Machine: Gendered Irrationalities and Computer Culture." Education/Technology/Power: Educational Computing as a Social Practice. Eds. Hank Bromley and Michael W. Apple. Albany NY: SUNY, 1998. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Zoë Sofoulis. "Machinic Musings with Mumford." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.6 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/mumford.php>. Chicago style: Zoë Sofoulis, "Machinic Musings with Mumford," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 6 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/mumford.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Zoë Sofoulis. (1999) Machinic musings with Mumford. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(6). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/mumford.php> ([your date of access]).

As one of the more visible manifestations of the boom in new media, computer games have attracted a great deal of attention, both from the popular press, and from academics. In the case of the former, much of this coverage has focussed on the perceived danger games pose to the young mind, whether that danger be physical (in terms of bodily atrophy due to inactivity) or social (in terms of anti-social and even violent behaviour, caused by exposure to specific types of content). The massacre at Columbine High School in the United States seems to have further fuelled these fears, with several stories focusing on the fact that the killers were both players of violent video games (Dickinson 1999; Hansen 1999). These concerns have also found their way into political circles, promoting a seemingly endless cycle of inquiries and reports (for example, see Durkin 1995; Durkin and Aisbett 1999). Academic discourse on the subject has, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, tended to adopt a similar line, tracing out a return to the dark days of media effects theory. This is especially true of those studies that focus on the psychological aspects of computer game usage. For example, Scott (1995) conducted a study specifically aimed at investigating "to what extent, if any, aggressive computer game playing would have on individuals of different personality composition, and in which particular aspects of aggressiveness this might be experienced" (Scott 1995, 122). Similarly, Ballard (1999) examined the relationship between gender and violent computer games arguing that the level of violence depicted in a game directly affects the interaction between players of different genders. Almost without exception, these studies come from the experimental tradition of media research, often employing laboratory experiments in order to test their hypotheses. As the problems with this methodology have been covered extensively elsewhere (for example, see Hall 1982; Murdock and Golding 1977; Lowery and DeFleur 1983) I will not go into detail here, except to point out that most experimental research underestimates the importance of physical context in media use. Other studies have attempted to approach the subject from a more qualitative perspective, often utilising theories derived from post-structuralism to examine the construction of identity in games. For example, Alloway and Gilbert (1998) explore relationship between computer games and notions of masculinity, arguing that simplistic notions of effects dramatically underestimate the sophistication of the readers. Similarly, Beavis (1998) argues that it is necessary to more fully explore the relationship between games players and games before engaging in debates about the social benefits or dangers of the medium. According to Beavis: Other studies have attempted to approach the subject from a more qualitative perspective, often utilising theories derived from post-structuralism to examine the construction of identity in games. For example, Alloway and Gilbert (1998) explore relationship between computer games and notions of masculinity, arguing that simplistic notions of effects dramatically underestimate the sophistication of the readers. Similarly, Beavis (1998) argues that it is necessary to more fully explore the relationship between games players and games before engaging in debates about the social benefits or dangers of the medium. According to Beavis: However, while arguments like that of Beavis clearly take the debate in another direction, in many cases the writers find themselves mired in the same ideological paradigm as the effects theorists. While stressing the need for a more nuanced conceptualisation of the game-player relationship, Beavis also implies that games are potentially destructive, stating that "young people need to be helped to critique and resist the subject positions and ideologies of video games" (Beavis, 1998). In response, the games industry itself has launched several attacks on the academic community, many of which, ironically, are framed in the kind of aggressive terminology the researchers are themselves concerned about. For example, Green argues, But for a group of academics to draw sweeping conclusions about an industry they are so obviously clueless about, based on a ludicrous, half-assed experiment that sounds like something out of a Simpsons episode, adds absolutely nothing to the discussion. (136) While it could be argued that Green's "from the hip" response itself adds little to the dialogue, it does serve to highlight one of the more surprising aspects of the computer games debate. As Green asserts, it is apparent that many of the scholars conducting research into computer games seem to know very little about the subject they are studying, a situation analogous to television researchers watching only cinematic films. Indeed, given the descriptions some researchers give of particular games, it is doubtful that they have actually played the game themselves, raising questions about the extent to which they are authorities in the area. This paper is, at least in part, aimed at rectifying this situation, by providing some broad commentary on the specific characteristics of the game medium. For the sake of convenience, I will be focussing mainly on games available on home consoles such as the Sony Playstation, and will restrict my argument to single-player games. Computer games are clearly a distinct form of media; while many are played through established technology like televisions and computers, there would seem to be something intrinsically different about their mode of address. This is primarily a function of their interactivity; unlike most forms of media, computer games respond to direct input from their audience. However, at the same time, games also display characteristics that are, at least superficially, similar to existing media forms. While games are often categorised according to the type of action required of the player (eg shooting, driving, puzzle-solving etc), they can also readily be categorised into the same genres used for other entertainment media such as films and video cassettes. Games can be based on sports, action, drama, comedy and even music, although admittedly the broad category of "simulation" game has no direct counterpart in film and video, except, perhaps philosophically, for documentary. Film and television genres are traditionally defined in terms of a set of key textual characteristics, with iconography, setting and narrative being perhaps the most obvious. Applying these notions to computer games it soon becomes clear why the generic classifications used for other media have been so easily adapted to the new medium. For example, the iconography of an action film like Face Off (explosions, guns, corpses etc) can all be found in an action game such as Syphon Filter. Similarly, the settings of horror films like I Know What You Did Last Summer (old houses, dark alleys etc) are all faithfully reproduced in horror games like Resident Evil. These correlations are true of most filmic genres and computer games, to such an extent that there is a growing trend in crossover production of "game of the film" (eg. Tomorrow Never Dies, Die Hard, Independence Day) and "film of the game" (Pokémon, Mortal Kombat) texts. When we turn our attention to narrative, however, the situation becomes somewhat more complex. Like films and television programs, games usually have definite beginning and end points, but what happens between these points seems, at least superficially, to be dramatically different. Regardless of their genre, films and television programs are self-propelling entities; the actions of the characters drive the narrative forward toward some kind of resolution. In the case of a television series, this resolution might only be partial, but at the end of the program's duration there is still some kind of finality to the narrative process, albeit temporary. Games, on the other hand, are designed for extended and often repeated playing, and as such necessarily resist narrative closure, and therefore have to provide pleasure for the player in other ways. In some cases, games adopt a strategy that is similar in many ways to episodic television; the game is divided in into several "sub-games", with overall narrative resolution only being achieved through the successful completion of the sub-games. A good example of this is Dreamworks' Medal of Honor, a first-person action game set is World War Two. In order to complete the game, players must successfully carry out a series of missions, which are themselves divided into several tasks. In keeping with the action orientation of the genre, these tasks usually involve destroying some piece of military equipment, and players are rewarded based upon their proficiency in carrying them out. What is especially interesting about games like Medal of Honor is their ability to create an illusion of narrative freedom; players can effectively dictate the course the narrative takes depending on how they perform certain tasks. Resident Evil and its sequels take this concept one step further, creating a virtual gaming environment in which the player is seemingly free to go wherever they want. However, while the players are free to dictate the narrative flow at the level of what I have termed the sub-game, completion of the overall game (and therefore narrative closure) requires the player to follow a rigidly pre-established path through the game's levels. Players could in theory spend days wandering the desolate landscape of Resident Evil 2, but they just wouldn't get anywhere. Other genres of game present different problems in terms of narrative progression, and indeed some would argue that certain games progress without possessing a narrative at all. Racing games are the most obvious example of this; driving around the same track for up to 80 laps does not constitute a narrative as it is traditionally conceptualised. However, racing games are increasingly adopting narrative conventions in order to deepen the gaming experience. Formula One 99, for example, allows the player to take the place of any of the drivers from the 1999 Formula One season, accruing points depending on finishing position in the same way as the real championship. In this context, each race operates as a sub-game, and the successful completion of each race allows the game as a whole to be completed. A slightly different take on the idea of a racing narrative is taken by Gran Turismo, a game that quickly became the most successful title from Sony's Polyphony Digital. Over the traditional racing format, Polyphony superimposed a narrative based on the game's own fictional economy. Players begin the game with enough credits to purchase a low-performance vehicle, which can then be upgraded as players win races and earn enough credits to afford the necessary parts. In this way, Gran Turismo generates a narrative that is described by the player's quest to constantly purchase faster and better cars, a narrative which, given the game's 400-car menu, can take months to reach its conclusion. One aspect of computer game narratives that has surprisingly received little attention to this point is the introductory video: the short animated sequence used to set the scene for the game that follows. Typically, these sequences are created entirely from computer generated images, and in terms of genre, perform a similar function to film trailers. As well as introducing the main characters, introductory videos inform the player about the type of game they're about to play, whether it be a racing game like Gran Turismo or a sports simulation like Cricket 2000. More importantly, introductory videos also work to discursively position the player within the narrative, providing them with information about the subject positions they are permitted to assume. For fighting-based action games like Tekken and its sequels, the introductory video provides information about all the characters in the game, telling the player that they can assume any one of the multiple identities the game offers. Other games, like Medal of Honor, are much more restrictive in terms of their subject possibilities, allowing the player to adopt only one role in the single-player version. In fact, the introductory video for Medal of Honor explicitly positions the player in a very narrowly-defined role, using a first person voice over to instruct the player that they will be acting as a particular American soldier, "Jimmy Patterson". However, even games that offer very limited latitude in terms of subject positioning can still be open to radical interpretation. The very interactivity that differentiates games from other forms of audio-visual media means that players can actively "read against" the narrative provided for them, driving the game toward new (but still inherently limited) conclusions. For example, players of Medal of Honor can attempt to achieve the game's goals through stealth rather than violence, a tactic which, interestingly, always results in a lower score. Similarly, players of some racing games can usurp the game's internal logic, substituting the goal of a race win with one of vehicular destruction. The key here is that pleasure seems to be derived through a complex relationship between the player-driven narrative and the narrative imposed by the game engine. This notion of the "resistant" reading of game narratives serves to demonstrate that the relationship between the player and game text is more complex than it at first appears; certainly it is more complex than simple media effects studies imply. What is needed now is a more rigorous investigation of both the textual characteristics of the game medium, and of how players interact with those characteristics. It is only after such an investigation has been carried out that a more constructive dialogue on the socio-cultural implications of game playing can be begun. References Alloway, N., and P. Gilbert. "Video Game Culture: Playing with Masculinity, Violence and Pleasure." Wired-up: Young People and the Electronic Media. Ed. S. Howard. London: UCL Press, 1996. Ballard, M. E. "Video Game Violence and Confederate Gender: Effects on Reward and Punishment Given." Sex Roles: A Journal of Research Oct. 1999: 541. Beavis, C. "Computer Games: Youth Culture, Resistant Readers and Consuming Passions." 1998. 23 Mar. 2000 <http://www.swin.edu.au/aare/98pap/bea98139.php>. Dickinson, A. "Where Were the Parents?" Time 153.17 (1999): 40. Durkin, K., and K. Aisbett. Computer Games and Australians Today. Sydney: Office of Film and Literature Classification, 1999. Durkin, K. Computer Games: Their Effects on Young People. Sydney: Office of Film and Literature Classification, 1995. Green, J. "The Violence Problem -- And My Humble Solution: Kill the Academics." Computer Gaming World July 2000: 136. Hall, S. "The Rediscovery of Ideology; The Return of the Repressed in Media Studies." Culture, Society and The Media. Ed. M. Gurevitch et al. London: Methuen, 1982. Hansen, G. "The Violent World of Video Games." Insight on the News 15.24: 14. Lowery, S., and M. L. DeFleur. Milestones in Mass Communications Research: Media Effects. New York: Longman, 1983. Murdock, G., and P. Golding. "Capitalism, Communication and Class Relations." Mass Communication and Society. Ed. J. Curran et al. London: Edward Arnold, 1977. Scott, D. "The Effect of Video Games on Feelings of Aggression." The Journal of Psychology 129.2 (1995): 121-134. Games and Films Cited Face Off. Film. Paramount Pictures, 1997. Formula One 99. Sony Playstation Game. Psygnosis, 1999. Gran Turismo. Sony Playstation Game. Polyphony Digital, 1999. I Know What You Did Last Summer. Film. Sony Pictures, 1997. Independence Day. Sony Playstation Game. Fox Interactive, 1998. Mortal Kombat. New Line Pictures, 1995. Pokémon. Film. Warner Brothers, 1999. Resident Evil. Sony Playstation Game. Capcom, 1997. Resident Evil 2. Sony Playstation Game. Capcom, 1998. Syphon Filter. Sony Playstation Game. Sony Interactive, 1999. Tekken. Sony Playstation Game. Namco, 1997. Tomorrow Never Dies. Sony Playstation Game. Electronic Arts, 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Mark Finn. "Computer Games and Narrative Progression." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.5 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/narrative.php>. Chicago style: Mark Finn, "Computer Games and Narrative Progression," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 5 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/narrative.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Mark Finn. (2000) Computer games and narrative progression. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(5). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/narrative.php> ([your date of access]).

The word 'nigger' is arguably the most charged epithet in American English; thus it is surprising that this word has been appropriated by some African Americans to refer to themselves. To be precise, the African-American version of this term is not 'nigger' but 'nigga', a word that has, as Geneva Smitherman notes, "a variety of meanings ranging from positive to negative to neutral" (Black Talk 167). Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in his study of African-American literature, provides a theoretical foundation for understanding why some African Americans use this word and how it operates rhetorically. Building on Gates's work, I will argue that the co-optation of the slur often involves a complex of three rhetorical devices that fall under the rubric of an African-American rhetorical strategy called Signifyin(g)—a term that will be discussed at length later. The first of these devices is agnominatio, defined as "the repetition of a word with an alteration of both one letter and a sound" (Gates 46). The second, semantic inversion, is the reversal of the meaning of a term (Holt qtd. in Smitherman, "Chain"). Chiastic slaying, the third rhetorical strategy, is a critique that transforms the status of a group or individual.1 Through these three modes of rhetorical transfiguration, the slur 'nigger' becomes 'nigga' a positive term that carries with it a critique of racism. I will further argue that all of these rhetorical devices operate through a principle I term "semantic looping" in which a new term derives meaning by continual reference to an older, existing term. This principle is a key to understanding how Signifyin(g) works in the appropriation of 'nigger' and helps to reveal how, in the words of Michel Foucault, the appropriation is a culturally rooted form of "reverse discourse" (101). Ultimately, this rhetorical analysis reveals that the African-American usage of 'nigga' is a strategy for asserting the humanity of black people in the face of continuing racism, a strategy that celebrates an anti-assimilationist vision of African-American identity. Foucault has argued that while the naming of oppressed groups by those in power serves as an instrument for oppression, such naming can also engender group identification and resistance to oppression (101). The coining of the word 'homosexual', for example, allowed for the repression of gay people but also allowed homosexuals to organise a gay rights movement using the very terminology utilized to oppress them (Foucault 101). One strategy for resisting hostile slurs like 'queer' or 'nigger' is for the oppressed group to appropriate the name and transform it into a rallying cry or "reverse discourse". An understanding of how 'nigga' operates as a reverse discourse requires a culturally rooted rhetorical analysis of the term. Gates, in The Signifyin(g) Monkey, provides background for such an analysis. Because his project is ultimately to derive an African-American theory of literary criticism, he touches on the appropriation of 'nigger' only briefly, asserting that a "political offensive" was mounted against the term by African-Americans through a black rhetorical strategy called Signifyin(g) (47). Gates, however, does not explain precisely how Signifyin(g) works in this case, except to suggest that it involves agnominatio (46). Thus 'nigger' becomes 'nigga', a word that differs from the racial slur but originates from and recalls it.2 Although Gates's commentary on the appropriation of 'nigger' amounts to little more than a sentence, much of his explication of the term Signifyin(g) implicitly applies to the co-optation of 'nigger'. The rhetorical analysis presented in this paper is a logical extension of Gates's initial linkage of the appropriation of 'nigger' with the rhetorical practice of Signifyin(g). The social baggage attached to 'nigga' assures that every use of the term is double-voiced in the Bakhtinian sense. More precisely, 'nigga' is a Bakhtinian parody of 'nigger'; the new connotation parodies or comments on the original because the new term carries with it the history of its pejorative use as well as the refashioned connotation of defiant group pride.3 This kind of rhetorical turn or critique is an example of the African-American rhetorical practice Gates identifies as Signifyin(g). Pinning down exactly what constitutes Signifyin(g) is difficult. Numerous black language scholars have commented on the expansiveness of the term.4 Gates argues that in its broadest sense, to Signify means to be "figurative," further noting that "to define it in practice is to define it through any number of its embedded tropes" (81).5 For our purposes it can be described as a rhetorical action that indirectly critiques another term or sign by revising it. Gates explains that, fundamentally, this revision and critique involve "repetition, with a signal difference" (51). Gates distinguishes the African-American term, 'Signifyin(g)', from the word 'signifying' by capitalizing the 'S' and bracketing the 'g' (46). It is helpful to think of the former term as 'Signifyin(g) on' (or critiquing) something whereas the latter word 'signifies' (or means) something but does not inherently involve a critique. Thus, to parody the motions of a police officer behind his or her back 'Signifies on' the officer and 'signifies' one's disrespect.6 Signifyin(g) is inherently a counter-puncher's strategy, an act of resistance against an oppressive force. Gates even goes so far as to call it the "slave's trope" (52). In Signifyin(g), the revised term, through its parodic double-voicedness, enters into a semantic loop with the original term; recollection of past oppressive usage must occur to fuel the term's new meaning. Figure 1 - Semantic Loop of Semantic Inversion and Agnominatio This semantic loop recalls what W.E. B. Dubois termed African-American double consciousness, a consciousness that yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of the world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. (16-17) While 'nigga' recalls how blacks have been measured by the tape of the world, it also defies this estimation through ironic revision of the name. Although Dubois would criticize this pathway through the white term as a road to false consciousness, others might insist that since revision of the white term occurs through distinctly African-American rhetorical strategies, the revision is emblematic of an authentically African-American consciousness—which is a double consciousness. In this view the revision does not attempt to reconcile what DuBois calls the "two unreconciled strivings" of the black person as "an American and a Negro" but instead involves them in an endless interplay (17). The interplay of the two signs sustains an antagonistic stand toward the dominant white community through the polemical comment: "this is how whites see us but we are something more". 'Nigga', then, is "authentically black" speech because it recognizes and maintains the divide between black and white worlds. As Smitherman notes: [e]ncoded within the rhetoric of racial resistance, nigga is used to demarcate (Black) culturally rooted from (white) culturally assimilated African Americans. Niggaz are those Bloods (Blacks) who are down for Blackness and identify with the trials as well as triumphs of the Black experience… ("Chain") The defiance implied by the revision of the white slur is also an assertion of human subjectivity. Gates identifies a parallel strategy in African-American slave narratives. Referring to Frederick Douglass's famous chiasmus—"You have seen how a man became a slave, you will see how a slave became a man."—Gates asserts that "Douglass's major contribution to the slave narrative was to make chiasmus the central trope of slave narration, in which a slave-object writes himself or herself into a human subject through the act of writing" (172). By comparison, through the semantic inversion of 'nigger'/'nigga', dehumanized blacks speak themselves into human subjects through the act of speaking. This transfiguration conforms to what Gates terms "chiastic slaying" (66). His somewhat off-hand phrase is inspired by the African-American use of chiasmus, which is defined as, "a grammatical figure by which the order of words in one of two parallel clauses is inverted in the other" (Oxford English Dictionary qtd. in Grothe). Chiasmus is often represented as an ABBA pattern (so Douglass's chiasmus would be reduced to: (A) man - (B) slave - (B) slave - (A) man). In Gates's usage, chiastic slaying involves repetition and reversal but not necessarily a literal ABBA pattern of chiasmus. In the same vein, 'nigga' is a repetition of 'nigger' that reverses the position of African Americans (from objects to subjects). Analogously, 'nigger to nigga' can be conceived of as the inverted second clause of a chiastic statement like Douglass's 'man - slave - slave - man' in which personhood and agency are re-affirmed. This re-affirmation of humanity implicit in 'nigga' is not likely to be understood by many whites given, as Smitherman notes, that they often fail to recognize the semantic difference between 'nigger' and 'nigga'.7 Since whites are frequently unaware of the Signification of 'nigga', it is impossible for African Americans to kill (i.e. end) the white use of the racist term. In the context of Signification, chiastic slaying does not put an end to the idea Signified upon. In fact, Signification must be activated by what Gates calls the "absent presence" of the original term (48). The critique of racism and assertion of subjectivity implicit in the employment of 'nigga' is not aimed at white people or the elimination of their sign; it is aimed at a black audience that must survive in a continually racist environment. What, then, is the "slaying" of chiastic slaying? It must be seen as a refutation of the original term or sign. In the case of 'nigga', it is a rejection of the dehumanization implied by 'nigger' with the recognition that African Americans will still be continually subjected to this libel despite its refutation. Thus, the chiastic slaying of 'nigger' by 'nigga' requires a continual interplay or semantic loop between the two terms. The context of continuing racism, then, requires 'nigga' to recurrently signify on (i.e. assert the falsity of) the slur. The recurrent Signification can be thought of as a loop inscribed upon the linear chiastic pattern: Figure 2 - Semantic Loop Inscribed on the Chiastic PatternThe context of continuing racism is one factor that accounts for the value of semantic looping in African-American rhetoric. Since the semantic loops of African-American culture draw their strength from the oppression to which they react, they are continually useful. This kind of resistance does not attempt to overcome racism but instead draws African-American attention to it so blacks can survive it. The first step in this survival is to be aware, as DuBois might say, that blacks in America are perceived of as a "problem" (15). The Signification of 'nigga' also "keeps it real", by reminding African Americans of the harsh truth of racism and by continually enacting a refutation of racism through a complex of culturally familiar rhetorical strategies. In this respect, the appropriation of the white slur is, to borrow the words of Foucault, a culturally inspired "reverse discourse" aimed at responding to white oppression. The identification of semantic looping in this case opens up an array of other questions. How does semantic looping function in the appropriation of other epithets by other groups? (A few cases that may be worth investigating in addition to the previously mentioned 'queer', are 'dyke', 'girl'/'grrl' by young feminists and 'anorexia'/'ana' as well as 'bulimia'/'mia' by pro-eating-disorder advocates.) Do the cultural differences of various groups affect how semantic looping operates? What does semantic looping reveal about the struggle over authenticity or identity, especially with respect to gender, class and subculture? And lastly, how do groups respond to re-appropriations by dominant groups? (In particular I am thinking of the increasing use of 'nigga' by white American teenagers.) I hope others will find these questions worth pursuing. Notes 1. While Gates suggests that agnominatio is involved in the co-optation of 'nigger', he does not mention the term 'semantic inversion' at all (although he is obviously aware that Signifyin(g) often involves this rhetorical action). Gates's phrase, chiastic slaying, occurs only in the context of a general discussion of Signifyin(g). See 66 in Gates for his use of chiastic slaying. 2. Other English speakers including Australians and the English may find it difficult to distinguish between these spoken words and 'hear' them both as 'nigguh'. But to those from the United States the distinction is noticeable. 3. Gates identifies Bakhtin's notion of the double voiced word and his concept of narrative parody as relevant to African-American rhetoric. See 50, 110-13 and 131 in Gates. Bakhtin's most comprehensive discussion of double-voiced discourse can be found in 185-186, and 190-99. Bakhtin's distinction between parody and other types of discourse can be found in 193-99. 4. Gates lists the following as providing substantive definitions of Signifyin(g): H. Rap Brown, Roger D. Abrahams, Thomas Kochman, Claudia Mitchell-Kernan, Geneva Smitherman and Ralph Ellison (71). Gates considers Mitchell Kernan's data to be more representative than the others' and even she states that she could not get consensus from her informants regarding Signifyin(g) (Gates 80-81). 5. Gates has identified numerous rhetorical strategies that can be involved in Signifyin(g). See 52 in Gates for a complete list of these tropes. 6. I build on an example from Abrahams who states that "... it is signifying to make fun of a policeman by parodying his motions behind his back..." (52). 7. Smitherman notes that the semantic inversion of 'nigger' (or 'flippin the script' as it is known in the hip-hop world) "... is often misunderstood by European Americans and castigated by some African Americans" (Chain). Smitherman's comment suggests that the ability to discriminate between the two terms (as well as one's comfort level with the usage of 'nigga') is not racially monolithic. Whites who participate in hip-hop culture, for example, are likely to see the distinction between 'nigger' and 'nigga'. Some factors that seem likely to complicate any generalization about understanding and comfort level with 'nigga' are race, affinity for hip-hop, class, age and geographic location. References Abrahams, Roger D. Deep Down in the Jungle: Negro Narrative Folklore from the Streets of Philadelphia. Chicago: Aldine, 1970. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Ed. and Trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999. DuBois, W.E. Burghardt. The Souls of Black Folk. Greenwich: Fawcett, 1961. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1980. Grothe, Mardy. Chiasmus.com. Online. Internet. 9 Oct. 2001. Available <http://www.chiasmus.com/whatischiasmus.shtml>. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford U P, 1988. Smitherman, Geneva. "'The Chain Remain the Same'." Journal of Black Studies 28 (1997): n.pag. Online. Academic Search Elite. 10 May 2002. - - -. Black Talk. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994. Links http://www.chiasmus.com/whatischiasmus.shtml Citation reference for this article MLA Style Jacobs, Andrew T.. "Appropriating a Slur" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.4 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/semantic.php>. Chicago Style Jacobs, Andrew T., "Appropriating a Slur" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 4 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/semantic.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Jacobs, Andrew T.. (2002) Appropriating a Slur. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(4). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/semantic.php> ([your date of access]).

February 15, 1999 THE DIGITAL EXAM digital was such a sanitary hi-tech word until my urologist snuck up from behind and gave me the bird shocked and taken back I try to ignore the painful experience by pondering the conundrum of homosexuality there had to be more to it than that "You can get dressed now" was the good doctor’s way of saying "Pull up your pants, Dude, and I’ll see you back in my office." but his casual demeanor seemed to exude foreboding "There is a stiffness in the gland demanding further examination. I’d like to schedule a blood test, ultrasound and biopsy." the doctor’s lips kept moving but I couldn’t hear him through the sheet of white fear that guillotined between us CANCER! The big C! Me? I spent the rest of that day up to my genitals in the grave I was digging. Hamlet gazing full into the face of the skull "Alas poor Yorick, I knew him well, Horatio. Before scalpel took gland. Back when he sang in a bass baritone." desperate for encouragement I turn to the illustrated brochure the informative flyer detailing the upcoming procedure where in the ultrasound and biopsy probe resembled the head of a black water moccasin baring its fang "Dang!" says I jumping back relief came 36 hours later something about the PSA blood test the prostate specific-antigen results leading the doctor to now suspect infection prescribing an antibiotic of course five weeks from now the FOLLOW-UP APPOINTMENT! and as the date approaches tension will build like in those Mel Gibson Lethal Weapon films when you know there’s a snake in the grass and Danny Glover isn’t there to cover your ass *** April 2, 1999 As it turns out, at the follow-up appointment, things had worsened so the biopsy and bone scan were re-scheduled and it was discovered that I do have incurable metastatic advanced prostate cancer. Of course the doctor is most optimistic about all the new and miraculous treatments available. But before I go into that, I want you to know that I find myself experiencing a strange and wonderful kind of peace. Hell, I’ve lived 70 years already — done exactly what I wanted to do with my life. All worthwhile dreams have come true. Made my living since 1968 as a "Performance Poet" — Billie Barbara and I have been together for 47 years — growing closer with each passing day. We have four great kids, five neat and nifty grandchildren. All things considered, I’ve been truly blessed and whether my departure date is next year or 15 years from now I’m determined not to wreck my life by doing a lousy job with my death. LIKE HAROLD / LIKE HOWARD like Harold I don’t want to blow my death I don’t want to see a lifetime of pluck and courage rubbed out by five weeks of whiny fractious behavior granted Harold’s was a scary way to go from diagnosis to last breath the cancer moving fast but five weeks of bitching and moaning was more than enough to erase every trace of a man I have wanted to emulate his wife sending word that even she can’t remember what he was like before his undignified departure no — I don’t want to go like Harold like Howard let me come swimming up out of the deepening coma face serene as if seen through undisturbed water breaking the surface to eagerly take the hand of bedside well wishers unexpected behavior I must admit as Howard has always been a world class hypochondriac second only to me the two of us able to sit for hours discussing the subtle shade of a mole turning each other on with long drawn out organ recitals in the end one would have thought such a legendary self centered soul would cower and fold up completely like Harold but no — when my time comes let me go sweetly like Howard *** April 7, 1999 The treatment was decided upon. Next Monday, the good Doctor is going to pit my apricots. From here on the Sultan can rest easy when Masten hangs with his harem. Prognosis good. No more testosterone - no more growth. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not looking forward to giving up the family jewels. I must say that over the years they’ve done me proud and to be totally honest I don’t think Billie Barbara will be all that disappointed either. I’m told that Viagra will help in this area., However, I’m also told that the drug is very expensive. Something like twelve bucks a pop. But hell, Billie Barbara and I can afford twenty four dollars a year.. Some thoughts the morning of— Yesterday I did a program for the Unitarian Society of Livermore. About 60 people. I had a bet with the fellow who introduced me, that at least 7 out of the 60 would come up after the reading (which would include my recent prostate musings) and share a personal war story about prostate cancer. I was right. Exactly 7 approached with an encouraging tale about themselves, a husband, a brother, a son. I was told to prepare myself for hot flashes and water retention. To which Billie Barbara said "Join the club!" I ended the presentation with one of those inspirational poetic moments. A hot flash, if you will. "It just occurred to me," I said, " I’m going to get rich selling a bumper sticker I just thought of — REAL MEN DON’T NEED BALLS A couple of days after the event The Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula is referred to as CHOMP, and the afternoon of April 12th I must say this august institution certainly lived up to it’s name. The waiting room in the Out Patient Wing is an event unto itself. Patients huddled together with friends and family, everyone speaking in hushed voices. The doomed keeping a wary eye on the ominous swinging doors, where a big tough looking nurse appeared from time to time shouting: NEXT! Actually the woman was quite sweet and mild mannered, enunciating each patient’s name in a calm friendly manner. But waiting to have done to me what was going to be done to me - the chilling word "NEXT!" is what I heard and "Out Patient Wing" certainly seemed a misnomer to me. Wasn’t the "Out-Patient Wing" where you went to have splinters removed? Of course I knew better, because in the pre-op interview the young interviewer, upon reading "Bilateral Orchiectomy" winced visibly, exclaiming under her breath "Bummer!" I recently came across this haiku — bilateral orchiectomy the sound a patient makes when he learns what it is Our daughter April lives in New York and couldn’t join the Waiting Room rooting section so as her stand in she sent her best friend Molly Williams. Now, Molly works as a veterinarian in a local animal shelter and a when I told her my operation was supposed to take no more than half an hour, she laughed: "Heck Ric, I’ll do it in five minutes and not even use gloves." NEXT! My turn to be led through those swinging doors, pitifully looking back over my shoulder. Wife, family and friends, bravely giving me the thumbs up. Things blur and run together after that. I do remember telling the nurse who was prepping me that I was afraid of being put to sleep. "Not to worry" she said, I’d have a chance to express these fears to the anesthetist before the operation would begin. And as promised the man did drop by to assure me that I would get a little something to ease my anxiety before he put me under. When the moment finally arrived, he said that I might feel a slight prick as he gave me the relaxant. Of course, that is the last thing I remember - the prick! Obviously, I‘d been suckered in by the mask man’s modus operandi. On the other side of this I surface to begin the waiting. WAITING for the catheter to be removed — for the incision to heal — WAITING to see if the pain subsides and I can loose the cane — WAITING to learn if my PSA will respond to treatment. Waiting—waiting—waiting—and I’ve never been a cheerful waiter. *** May 7, 1999 The doctor tells me I must keep taking Casodex— one a day at eleven dollars a cap - for the rest of my life. And no more doctor freebees. No wonder the listed side effect of this pricey medication is depression. But the recent funk I’ve fallen into is much deeper than dollars and cents. In the past I’ve had my share of operations and illnesses and always during the recuperation I could look forward to being my old self again. But not this time .... Not this time. Funny bumper stickers can only hold reality at bay for a short while. And anyway Billie had me remove the homemade REAL MEN DON’T NEED BALLS bumper sticker from the back of our car — She didn’t like the dirty looks she got while driving around town alone. *** Eight months later BILATERAL ORCHECTOMY never could look up words in the dictionary in a high school assignment writing an autobiography I described my self as a unique person scribbled in the margin the teachers correction fairly chortled "unique" not "eunuch" how could he have known that one day I would actually become a misspelling backed against the wall by advanced prostate cancer I chose the operation over the enormous ongoing expense of chemical castration "No big deal." I thought at the time what’s the difference they both add up to the same thing but in the movies these days during the hot gratuitous sex scene I yawn…bored... wishing they’d quit dicking around and get on with the plot and on TV the buxom cuties that titillate around the products certainly arn’t selling me anything I realize now that although it would probably kill them the guys who went chemical still have an option I don’t philosophically I’m the same person but biologically I ‘m like the picture puzzle our family traditionally puts together over the holidays the French impressionist rendition of a flower shop interior in all it’s bright colorful confusion this season I didn’t work the puzzle quite as enthusiastically... and for good reason this year I know pieces are missing where the orchids used to be "So?" says I to myself "You’re still here to smell the roses." *** January 13, 2000 Real bad news! At the third routine follow-up appointment. My urologist informs me that my PSA has started rising again. The orchectomy and Casodex are no longer keeping the cancer in remission. In the vernacular, I have become "hormone refractory" and there was nothing more he, as a urologist could do for me. An appointment with a local oncologist was arranged and another bone scan scheduled. The "T" word having finally been said the ostrich pulled his head from the sand and began looking around. Knowing what I know now, I’m still annoyed at my urologist for not telling me when I was first diagnosed to either join a support group and radically change my diet or find another urologist. I immediately did both - becoming vegan and finding help on-line as well as at the local Prostate Cancer Support Group. This during the endless eighteen day wait before the oncologist could fit me in. *** IRON SOCKS time now for a bit of reverse prejudice I once purchased some stockings called "Iron Socks" guaranteed to last for five years they lasted ten! but when I went back for another pair the clerk had never heard of them as a cancer survivor… so far in an over populated world I consider the multi-billion dollar medical and pharmaceutical industries realizing that there is absolutely no incentive to come up with a permanent cure *** From here on, I’ll let the poems document the part of the journey that brings us up to the present. A place where I can say — spiritually speaking, that the best thing that ever happened to me is metastatic hormone refractory advanced prostate cancer. *** SUPPORT GROUPS included in this close fraternity... in this room full of brotherly love I wonder where I’ve been for the last 11 months no — that’s not quite right… I know where I’ve been I’ve been in denial after the shock of diagnosis the rude indignity of castration the quick fix of a Casodex why would I want to hang out with a bunch of old duffers dying of prostate cancer? ignoring the fact that everybody dies we all know it but few of us believe it those who do, however rack up more precious moments than the entire citizenry of the fools paradise not to mention studies showing that those who do choose to join a support group on average live years longer than the stiff upper lip recluse and while I’m on the subject I wonder where I’d be without the internet and the dear supportive spirits met there in cyber-space a place where aid care and concern are not determined by age, gender, race, physical appearance, economic situation or geological location and this from a die-hard like me who not ten years ago held the computer in great disdain convinced that poetry should be composed on the back of envelopes with a blunt pencil while riding on trains thank god I’m past these hang-ups because without a support system I doubt if this recent malignant flare-up could have been withstood how terrifying… the thought of being at my writing desk alone… disconnected typing out memos to myself on my dead father’s ancient Underwood *** PC SPES in the sea that is me the hormone blockade fails my urologist handing me over to a young oncologist who recently began practicing locally having retired from the stainless steel and white enamel of the high tech Stanford medical machine in the examination room numbly thumbing through a magazine I wait expecting to be treated like a link of sausage another appointment ground out in a fifteen minute interval what I got was an 18th century throw back a hands-on horse and buggy physician with seemingly all the time in the world it was decided that for the next three weeks (between blood tests) all treatment would cease to determine how my PSA was behaving this done, at the next appointment the next step would be decided upon and after more than an hour of genial give and take with every question answered all options covered it was I who stood up first to go for me a most unique experience in the annals of the modern medicine show however condemned to three weeks in limbo knowing the cancer was growing had me going online reaching out into cyberspace to see what I could find and what I found was PC SPES a botanical herbal alternative medicine well documented and researched but not approved by the FDA aware that the treatment was not one my doctor had mentioned (I have since learned that to do so would make him legally vulnerable) I decided to give it a try on my own sending off for a ten day supply taking the first dose as close after the second blood test as I could two days later back in the doctors office I confess expecting a slap on the wrist instead I receive a bouquet for holding off until after the second PSA then taking the PC SPES container from my hand and like a Native American medicine man he holds it high over his head shaking it "Okay then, this approach gets the first ride!" at the receptionist desk scheduling my next appointment I thought about how difficult it must be out here on the frontier practicing medicine with your hands tied *** PREJUDICE "It's a jungle out there!" Dr. J. George Taylor was fond of saying "And all chiropractors are quacks! Manipulating pocket pickers!" the old physician exposing his daughter to a prejudice so infectious I suspect it became part of her DNA and she a wannabe doctor herself infects me her son with the notion that if it wasn’t performed or prescribed by a licensed M.D. it had to be Medicine Show hoopla or snake oil elixir certainly today’s countless array of practitioners and patent remedies has both of them spinning in their grave but Ma you and Grandpa never heard the words hormone-refractory even the great white hunters of our prestigious cancer clinics don't know how to stop the tiger that is stalking me and so with a PSA rising again to 11.9 I get my oncologist to let me try PC SPES a Chinese herbal formula yes, the desperate do become gullible me, reading and re-reading the promotional material dutifully dosing myself between blood tests and this against the smirk of disapproval mother and grandfather wagging their heads in unison: "It won’t work." "It won’t work." having condemned myself beforehand the moment of truth finally arrives I pace the floor nervously the doctor appears at the door "How does it feel to be a man with a PSA falling to 4.8?" it seems that for the time being at least the tiger is content to play a waiting game which is simply great! Mother tell Grandpa I just may escape our families bigotry before it’s too late *** HELPLINE HARRY "Hi, how are you?" these days I'm never sure how to field routine grounders like this am I simply being greeted? or does the greeter actually want a list of grisly medical details my wife says it's easy she just waits to see if the "How is he?" is followed by a hushed "I mean… really?" for the former a simple "Fine, and how are you?" will do for the latter the news isn't great indications are that the miracle herbal treatment is beginning to fail my oncologist offering up a confusing array of clinical trials and treatments that flirt seductively but speak in a foreign language I don't fully understand so Harry, once again I call on you a savvy old tanker who has maneuvered his battle scared machine through years of malignant mine fields and metastatic mortar attacks true five star Generals know much about winning wars and such but the Command Post is usually so far removed from the front lines I suspect they haven't a clue as to what the dog-faces are going through down here in the trenches it's the seasoned campaigners who have my ear the tough tenacious lovable old survivors like you *** "POOR DEVIL!" in my early twenties I went along with Dylan Thomas boasting that I wanted to go out not gently but raging shaking my fist staring death down however this daring statement was somewhat revised when in my forties I realized that death does the staring I do the down so I began hoping it would happen to me like it happened to the sentry in all those John Wayne Fort Apache movies found dead in the morning face down — an arrow in the back "Poor devil." the Sergeant always said "Never knew what hit him." at the time I liked that... the end taking me completely by surprise the bravado left in the hands of a hard drinking Welshman still wet behind the ears older and wiser now over seventy and with a terminal disease the only thing right about what the Sergeant said was the "Poor devil" part "Poor devil" never used an opening to tell loved ones he loved them never seized the opportunity to give praise for the sun rise or drink in a sunset moment after moment passing him by while he marched through life staring straight ahead believing in tomorrow "Poor devil!" how much fuller richer and pleasing life becomes when you are lucky enough to see the arrow coming *** END LINE (Dedicated to Jim Fulks.) I’ve always been a yin / yang - life / death - up / down clear / blur - front / back kind of guy my own peculiar duality being philosopher slash hypochondriac win win characteristics when you’ve been diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer finally the hypochondriac has something more than windmills to tilt with the philosopher arming himself with exactly the proper petard an anonymous statement found in an e-mail message beneath the signature of a cancer survivor’s name a perfect end line wily and wise quote: I ask God: "How much time do I have before I die?" "Enough to make a difference." God replies *** STRUM lived experience taught them most of what they know so MD's treating men diagnosed with androgen-independent advanced prostate cancer tend to put us on death row and taking the past into account this negativity is understandable… these good hearted doctors watching us come and go honestly doing what they can like kindly prison guards attempting to make the life we have left as pleasant as possible to be otherwise a physician would have to be a bit delusional evangelical even… to work so diligently for and believe so completely in the last minute reprieve for those of us confined on cell block PC doing time with an executioner stalking it is exhilarating to find an oncologist willing to fly in the face of history refusing to call the likes of me "Dead man walking." *** BAG OF WOE there are always moments when I can almost hear the reader asking: "How can you use that as grist for your poetry mill? How can you dwell on such private property, at least without masking the details?" well... for the feedback of course the war stories that my stories prompt you to tell but perhaps the question can best be answered by the ‘bag of woe’ parable the "Once Upon a Time" tale about the troubled village of Contrary its harried citizens and the magical mystical miracle worker who showed up one dreary day saying: I am aware of your torment and woe and I am here to lighten your load! he then instructed the beleaguered citizens to go home and rummage through their harried lives bag up your troubles he said both large and small stuff them all in a sack and drag them down to the town square and stack them around on the wall and when everyone was back and every bag was there the magical mystical miracle worker said: "It’s true, just as I promised. You won’t have to take your sack of troubles home leave it behind when you go however, you will have to take along somebody’s bag of woe so the citizens of Contrary all went to find their own bag and shouldering the load discovered that it was magically and mystically much easier to carry --- End ---

'He did what the cipher could not, he rescued himself.' -- Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination (23) On many levels, the new Nine Inch Nails album The Fragile is a gritty meditation about different types of End: the eternal relationship cycle of 'fragility, tension, ordeal, fragmentation' (adapted, with apologies to Wilhelm Reich); fin-de-siècle anxiety; post-millennium foreboding; a spectre of the alien discontinuity that heralds an on-rushing future vastly different from the one envisaged by Enlightenment Project architects. In retrospect, it's easy for this perspective to be dismissed as jargon-filled cyber-crit hyperbole. Cyber-crit has always been at its best too when it invents pre-histories and finds hidden connections between different phenomena (like the work of Greil Marcus and early Mark Dery), and not when it is closer to Chinese Water Torture, name-checking the canon's icons (the 'Deleuze/Guattari' tag-team), texts and key terms. "The organization of sound is interpreted historically, politically, socially ... . It subdues music's ambition, reins it in, restores it to its proper place, reconciles it to its naturally belated fate", comments imagineer Kodwo Eshun (4) on how cyber-crit destroys albums and the innocence of the listening experience. This is how official histories are constructed a priori and freeze-dried according to personal tastes and prior memes: sometimes the most interesting experiments are Darwinian dead-ends that fail to make the canon, or don't register on the radar. Anyone approaching The Fragile must also contend with the music industry's harsh realities. For every 10 000 Goth fans who moshed to the primal 'kill-fuck-dance' rhythms of the hit single "Closer" (heeding its siren-call to fulfil basic physiological needs and build niche-space), maybe 20 noted that the same riff returned with a darker edge in the title track to The Downward Spiral, undermining the glorification of Indulgent hedonism. "The problem with such alternative audiences," notes Disinformation Creative Director Richard Metzger, "is that they are trying to be different -- just like everyone else." According to author Don Webb, "some mature Chaos and Black Magicians reject their earlier Nine Inch Nails-inspired Goth beginnings and are extremely critical towards new adopters because they are uncomfortable with the subculture's growing popularity, which threatens to taint their meticulously constructed 'mysterious' worlds. But by doing so, they are also rejecting their symbolic imprinting and some powerful Keys to unlocking their personal history." It is also difficult to separate Nine Inch Nails from the commercialisation and colossal money-making machine that inevitably ensued on the MTV tour circuit: do we blame Michael Trent Reznor because most of his audience are unlikely to be familiar with 'first-wave' industrial bands including Cabaret Voltaire and the experiments of Genesis P. Orridge in Throbbing Gristle? Do we accuse Reznor of being a plagiarist just because he wears some of his influences -- Dr. Dre, Daft Punk, Atari Teenage Riot, Pink Floyd's The Wall (1979), Tom Waits's Bone Machine (1992), David Bowie's Low (1977) -- on his sleeve? And do we accept no-brain rock critic album reviews who quote lines like 'All the pieces didn't fit/Though I really didn't give a shit' ("Where Is Everybody?") or 'And when I suck you off/Not a drop will go to waste' ("Starfuckers Inc") as representative of his true personality? Reznor evidently has his own thoughts on this subject, but we should let the music speak for itself. The album's epic production and technical complexity turned into a post-modern studio Vision Quest, assisted by producer Alan Moulder, eleventh-hour saviour Bob Ezrin (brought in by Reznor to 'block-out' conceptual and sonic continuity), and a group of assault-technicians. The fruit of these collaborations is an album where Reznor is playing with our organism's time-binding sense, modulating strange emotions through deeply embedded tonal angularities. During his five-year absence, Trent Reznor fought diverse forms of repetitious trauma, from endogenous depression caused by endless touring to the death of his beloved grandmother (who raised him throughout childhood). An end signals a new beginning, a spiral is an open-ended and ever-shifting structure, and so Reznor sought to re-discover the Elder Gods within, a shamanic approach to renewal and secular salvation utilised most effectively by music PR luminary and scientist Howard Bloom. Concerned with healing the human animal through Ordeals that hard-wire the physiological baselines of Love, Hate and Fear, Reznor also focusses on what happens when 'meaning-making' collapses and hope for the future cannot easily be found. He accurately captures the confusion that such dissolution of meaning and decline of social institutions brings to the world -- Francis Fukuyama calls this bifurcation 'The Great Disruption'. For a generation who experienced their late childhood and early adolescence in Reagan's America, Reznor and his influences (Marilyn Manson and Filter) capture the Dark Side of recent history, unleashed at Altamont and mutating into the Apocalyptic style of American politics (evident in the 'Star Wars'/SDI fascination). The personal 'psychotic core' that was crystallised by the collapse of the nuclear family unit and supportive social institutions has returned to haunt us with dystopian fantasies that are played out across Internet streaming media and visceral MTV film-clips. That such cathartic releases are useful -- and even necessary (to those whose lives have been formed by socio-economic 'life conditions') is a point that escapes critics like Roger Scruton, some Christian Evangelists and the New Right. The 'escapist' quality of early 1980s 'Rapture' and 'Cosmocide' (Hal Lindsey) prophecies has yielded strange fruit for the Children of Ezekiel, whom Reznor and Marilyn Manson are unofficial spokes-persons for. From a macro perspective, Reznor's post-human evolutionary nexus lies, like J.G. Ballard's tales, in a mythical near-future built upon past memory-shards. It is the kind of worldview that fuses organic and morphogenetic structures with industrial machines run amok, thus The Fragile is an artefact that captures the subjective contents of the different mind produced by different times. Sonic events are in-synch but out of phase. Samples subtly trigger and then scramble kinaesthetic-visceral and kinaesthetic-tactile memories, suggestive of dissociated affective states or body memories that are incapable of being retrieved (van der Kolk 294). Perhaps this is why after a Century of Identity Confusion some fans find it impossible to listen to a 102-minute album in one sitting. No wonder then that the double album is divided into 'left' and 'right' discs (a reference to split-brain research?). The real-time track-by-track interpretation below is necessarily subjective, and is intended to serve as a provisional listener's guide to the aural ur-text of 1999. The Fragile is full of encrypted tones and garbled frequencies that capture a world where the future is always bleeding into a non-recoverable past. Turbulent wave-forms fight for the listener's attention with prolonged static lulls. This does not make for comfortable or even 'nice' listening. The music's mind is a snapshot, a critical indicator, of the deep structures brewing within the Weltanschauung that could erupt at any moment. "Somewhat Damaged" opens the album's 'Left' disc with an oscillating acoustic strum that anchor's the listener's attention. Offset by pulsing beats and mallet percussion, Reznor builds up sound layers that contrast with lyrical epitaphs like 'Everything that swore it wouldn't change is different now'. Icarus iconography is invoked, but perhaps a more fitting mythopoeic symbol of the journey that lies ahead would be Nietzsche's pursuit of his Ariadne through the labyrinth of life, during which the hero is steadily consumed by his numbing psychosis. Reznor fittingly comments: 'Didn't quite/Fell Apart/Where were you?' If we consider that Reznor has been repeating the same cycle with different variations throughout all of his music to date, retro-fitting each new album into a seamless tapestry, then this track signals that he has begun to finally climb out of self-imposed exile in the Underworld. "The Day the World Went Away" has a tremendously eerie opening, with plucked mandolin effects entering at 0:40. The main slashing guitar riff was interpreted by some critics as Reznor's attempt to parody himself. For some reason, the eerie backdrop and fragmented acoustic guitar strums recalls to my mind civil defence nuclear war films. Reznor, like William S. Burroughs, has some powerful obsessions. The track builds up in intensity, with a 'Chorus of the Damned' singing 'na na nah' over apocalyptic end-times imagery. At 4:22 the track ends with an echo that loops and repeats. "The Frail" signals a shift to mournful introspectiveness with piano: a soundtrack to faded 8 mm films and dying memories. The piano builds up slowly with background echo, holds and segues into ... "The Wretched", beginning with a savage downbeat that recalls earlier material from Pretty Hate Machine. 'The Far Aways/Forget It' intones Reznor -- it's becoming clear that despite some claims to the contrary, there is redemption in this album, but it is one borne out of a relentless move forward, a strive-drive. 'You're finally free/You could be' suggest Reznor studied Existentialism during his psychotherapy visits. This song contains perhaps the ultimate post-relationship line: 'It didn't turn out the way you wanted it to, did it?' It's over, just not the way you wanted; you can always leave the partner you're with, but the ones you have already left will always stain your memories. The lines 'Back at the beginning/Sinking/Spinning' recall the claustrophobic trapped world and 'eternal Now' dislocation of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder victims. At 3:44 a plucked cello riff, filtered, segues into a sludge buzz-saw guitar solo. At 5:18 the cello riff loops and repeats. "We're in This Together Now" uses static as percussion, highlighting the influence of electricity flows instead of traditional rock instrument configurations. At 0:34 vocals enter, at 1:15 Reznor wails 'I'm impossible', showing he is the heir to Roger Waters's self-reflective rock-star angst. 'Until the very end of me, until the very end of you' reverts the traditional marriage vow, whilst 'You're the Queen and I'm the King' quotes David Bowie's "Heroes". Unlike earlier tracks like "Reptile", this track is far more positive about relationships, which have previously resembled toxic-dyads. Reznor signals a delta surge (breaking through barriers at any cost), despite a time-line morphing between present-past-future. At 5:30 synths and piano signal a shift, at 5:49 the outgoing piano riff begins. The film-clip is filled with redemptive water imagery. The soundtrack gradually gets more murky and at 7:05 a subterranean note signals closure. "The Fragile" is even more hopeful and life-affirming (some may even interpret it as devotional), but this love -- representative of the End-Times, alludes to the 'Glamour of Evil' (Nico) in the line 'Fragile/She doesn't see her beauty'. The fusion of synths and atonal guitars beginning at 2:13 summons forth film-clip imagery -- mazes, pageants, bald eagles, found sounds, cloaked figures, ruined statues, enveloping darkness. "Just like You Imagined" opens with Soundscapes worthy of Robert Fripp, doubled by piano and guitar at 0:39. Drums and muffled voices enter at 0:54 -- are we seeing a pattern to Reznor's writing here? Sonic debris guitar enters at 1:08, bringing forth intensities from white noise. This track is full of subtle joys like the 1:23-1:36 solo by David Bowie pianist Mike Garson and guitarist Adrian Belew's outgoing guitar solo at 2:43, shifting back to the underlying soundscapes at 3:07. The sounds are always on the dissipative edge of chaos. "Just like You Imagined" opens with Soundscapes worthy of Robert Fripp, doubled by piano and guitar at 0:39. Drums and muffled voices enter at 0:54 -- are we seeing a pattern to Reznor's writing here? Sonic debris guitar enters at 1:08, bringing forth intensities from white noise. This track is full of subtle joys like the 1:23-1:36 solo by David Bowie pianist Mike Garson and guitarist Adrian Belew's outgoing guitar solo at 2:43, shifting back to the underlying soundscapes at 3:07. The sounds are always on the dissipative edge of chaos. "Pilgrimage" utilises a persistent ostinato and beat, with a driving guitar overlay at 0:18. This is perhaps the most familiar track, using Reznor motifs like the doubling of the riff with acoustic guitars between 1:12-1:20, march cries, and pitch-shift effects on a 3:18 drumbeat/cymbal. Or at least I could claim it was familiar, if it were not that legendary hip-hop producer and 'edge-of-panic' tactilist Dr. Dre helped assemble the final track mix. "No, You Don't" has been interpreted as an attack on Marilyn Manson and Hole's Courntey Love, particularly the 0:47 line 'Got to keep it all on the outside/Because everything is dead on the inside' and the 2:33 final verse 'Just so you know, I did not believe you could sink so low'. The song's structure is familiar: a basic beat at 0:16, guitars building from 0:31 to sneering vocals, a 2:03 counter-riff that merges at 2:19 with vocals and ascending to the final verse and 3:26 final distortion... "La Mer" is the first major surprise, a beautiful and sweeping fusion of piano, keyboard and cello, reminiscent of Symbolist composer Debussy. At 1:07 Denise Milfort whispers, setting the stage for sometime Ministry drummer Bill Reiflin's jazz drumming at 1:22, and a funky 1:32 guitar/bass line. The pulsing synth guitar at 2:04 serves as anchoring percussion for a cinematic electronica mindscape, filtered through new layers of sonic chiaroscuro at 2:51. 3:06 phase shifting, 3:22 layer doubling, 3:37 outgoing solo, 3:50-3:54 more swirling vocal fragments, seguing into a fading cello quartet as shadows creep. David Carson's moody film-clip captures the end more ominously, depicting the beauty of drowning. This track contains the line 'Nothing can stop me now', which appears to be Reznor's personal mantra. This track rivals 'Hurt' and 'A Warm Place' from The Downward Spiral and 'Something I Can Never Have' from Pretty Hate Machine as perhaps the most emotionally revealing and delicate material that Reznor has written. "The Great Below" ends the first disc with more multi-layered textures fusing nostalgia and reverie: a twelve-second cello riff is counter-pointed by a plucked overlay, which builds to a 0:43 washed pulse effect, transformed by six second pulses between 1:04-1:19 and a further effects layer at 1:24. E-bow effects underscore lyrics like 'Currents have their say' (2:33) and 'Washes me away' (2:44), which a 3:33 sitar riff answers. These complexities are further transmuted by seemingly random events -- a 4:06 doubling of the sitar riff which 'glitches' and a 4:32 backbeat echo that drifts for four bars. While Reznor's lyrics suggest that he is unable to control subjective time-states (like The Joker in the Batman: Dark Knight series of Kali-yuga comic-books), the track constructions show that the Key to his hold over the listener is very carefully constructed songs whose spaces resemble Pythagorean mathematical formulas. Misdirecting the audience is the secret of many magicians. "The Way Out Is Through" opens the 'Right' disc with an industrial riff that builds at 0:19 to click-track and rhythm, the equivalent of a weaving spiral. Whispering 'All I've undergone/I will keep on' at 1:24, Reznor is backed at 1:38 by synths and drums coalescing into guitars, which take shape at 1:46 and turn into a torrential electrical current. The models are clearly natural morphogenetic structures. The track twists through inner storms and torments from 2:42 to 2:48, mirrored by vocal shards at 2:59 and soundscapes at 3:45, before piano fades in and out at 4:12. The title references peri-natal theories of development (particularly those of Stanislav Grof), which is the source of much of the album's imagery. "Into the Void" is not the Black Sabbath song of the same name, but a catchy track that uses the same unfolding formula (opening static, cello at 0:18, guitars at 0:31, drums and backbeat at 1:02, trademark industrial vocals and synth at 1:02, verse at 1:23), and would not appear out of place in a Survival Research Laboratories exhibition. At 3:42 Reznor plays with the edge of synth soundscapes, merging vocals at 4:02 and ending the track nicely at 4:44 alone. "Where Is Everybody?" emulates earlier structures, but relies from 2:01 on whirring effects and organic rhythms, including a flurry of eight beat pulses between 2:40-2:46 and a 3:33 spiralling guitar solo. The 4:26 guitar solo is pure Adrian Belew, and is suddenly ended by spluttering static and white noise at 5:13. "The Mark Has Been Made" signals another downshift into introspectiveness with 0:32 ghostly synth shimmers, echoed by cello at 1:04 which is the doubled at 1:55 by guitar. At 2:08 industrial riffs suddenly build up, weaving between 3:28 distorted guitars and the return of the repressed original layer at 4:16. The surprise is a mystery 32 second soundscape at the end with Reznor crooning 'I'm getting closer, all the time' like a zombie devil Elvis. "Please" highlights spacious noise at 0:48, and signals a central album motif at 1:04 with the line 'Time starts slowing down/Sink until I drown'. The psychic mood of the album shifts with the discovery of Imagination as a liberating force against oppression. The synth sound again is remarkably organic for an industrial album. "Starfuckers Inc" is the now infamous sneering attack on rock-stardom, perhaps at Marilyn Manson (at 3:08 Reznor quotes Carly Simon's 'You're So Vain'). Jungle beats and pulsing synths open the track, which features the sound-sculpting talent of Pop Will Eat Itself member Clint Mansell. Beginning at 0:26, Reznor's vocals appear to have been sampled, looped and cut up (apologies to Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs). The lines 'I have arrived and this time you should believe the hype/I listened to everyone now I know everyone was right' is a very savage and funny exposure of Manson's constant references to Friedrich Nietzsche's Herd-mentality: the Herd needs a bogey-man to whip it into submission, and Manson comes dangerous close to fulfilling this potential, thus becoming trapped by a 'Stacked Deck' paradox. The 4:08 lyric line 'Now I belong I'm one of the Chosen Ones/Now I belong I'm one of the Beautiful Ones' highlights the problem of being Elect and becoming intertwined with institutionalised group-think. The album version ditches the closing sample of Gene Simmons screaming "Thankyou and goodnight!" to an enraptured audience on the single from KISS Alive (1975), which was appropriately over-the-top (the alternate quiet version is worth hearing also). "The danger Marilyn Manson faces", notes Don Webb (current High Priest of the Temple of Set), "is that he may end up in twenty years time on the 'Tonight Show' safely singing our favourite songs like a Goth Frank Sinatra, and will have gradually lost his antinomian power. It's much harder to maintain the enigmatic aura of an Evil villain than it is to play the clown with society". Reznor's superior musicianship and sense of irony should keep him from falling into the same trap. "Complication" juggernauts in at 0:57 with screaming vocals and a barrage of white noise at 1:56. It's clear by now that Reznor has read his psychological operations (PSYOP) manuals pertaining to blasting the hell out of his audiences' psyche by any means necessary. Computer blip noise and black light flotation tank memories. Dislocating pauses and time-bends. The aural equivalent of Klein bottles. "Complication" juggernauts in at 0:57 with screaming vocals and a barrage of white noise at 1:56. It's clear by now that Reznor has read his psychological operations (PSYOP) manuals pertaining to blasting the hell out of his audiences' psyche by any means necessary. Computer blip noise and black light flotation tank memories. Dislocating pauses and time-bends. The aural equivalent of Klein bottles. "The Big Come Down" begins with a four-second synth/static intro that is smashed apart by a hard beat at 0:05 and kaleidoscope guitars at 0:16. Critics refer to the song's lyrics in an attempt to project a narcissistic Reznor personality, but don't comment on stylistic tweaks like the AM radio influenced backing vocals at 1:02 and 1:19, or the use of guitars as a percussion layer at 1:51. A further intriguing element is the return of the fly samples at 2:38, an effect heard on previous releases and a possible post-human sub-text. The alien mythos will eventually reign over the banal and empty human. At 3:07 the synths return with static, a further overlay adds more synths at 3:45 as the track spirals to its peak, before dissipating at 3:1 in a mesh of percussion and guitars. "Underneath It All" opens with a riff that signals we have reached the album's climatic turning point, with the recurring theme of fragmenting body-memories returning at 0:23 with the line 'All I can do/I can still feel you', and being echoed by pulsing static at 0:42 as electric percussion. A 'Messiah Complex' appears at 1:34 with the line 'Crucify/After all I've died/After all I've tried/You are still inside', or at least it appears to be that on the surface. This is the kind of line that typical rock critics will quote, but a careful re-reading suggests that Reznor is pointing to the painful nature of remanifesting. Our past shapes us more than we would like to admit particularly our first relationships. "Ripe (With Decay)" is the album's final statement, a complex weaving of passages over a repetitive mesh of guitars, pulsing echoes, back-beats, soundscapes, and a powerful Mike Garson piano solo (2:26). Earlier motifs including fly samples (3:00), mournful funeral violas (3:36) and slowing time effects (4:28) recur throughout the track. Having finally reached the psychotic core, Reznor is not content to let us rest, mixing funk bass riffs (4:46), vocal snatches (5:23) and oscillating guitars (5:39) that drag the listener forever onwards towards the edge of the abyss (5:58). The final sequence begins at 6:22, loses fidelity at 6:28, and ends abruptly at 6:35. At millennium's end there is a common-held perception that the world is in an irreversible state of decay, and that Culture is just a wafer-thin veneer over anarchy. Music like The Fragile suggests that we are still trying to assimilate into popular culture the 'war-on-Self' worldviews unleashed by the nineteenth-century 'Masters of Suspicion' (Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche). This 'assimilation gap' is evident in industrial music, which in the late 1970s was struggling to capture the mood of the Industrial Revolution and Charles Dickens, so the genre is ripe for further exploration of the scarred psyche. What the self-appointed moral guardians of the Herd fail to appreciate is that as the imprint baseline rises (reflective of socio-political realities), the kind of imagery prevalent throughout The Fragile and in films like Strange Days (1995), The Matrix (1999) and eXistenZ (1999) is going to get even darker. The solution is not censorship or repression in the name of pleasing an all-saving surrogate god-figure. No, these things have to be faced and embraced somehow. Such a process can only occur if there is space within for the Sadeian aesthetic that Nine Inch Nails embodies, and not a denial of Dark Eros. "We need a second Renaissance", notes Don Webb, "a rejuvenation of Culture on a significant scale". In other words, a global culture-shift of quantum (aeon or epoch-changing) proportions. The tools required will probably not come just from the over-wordy criticism of Cyber-culture and Cultural Studies or the logical-negative feeding frenzy of most Music Journalism. They will come from a dynamic synthesis of disciplines striving toward a unity of knowledge -- what socio-biologist Edward O. Wilson has described as 'Consilience'. Liberating tools and ideas will be conveyed to a wider public audience unfamiliar with such principles through predominantly science fiction visual imagery and industrial/electronica music. The Fragile serves as an invaluable model for how such artefacts could transmit their dreams and propagate their messages. For the hyper-alert listener, it will be the first step on a new journey. But sadly for the majority, it will be just another hysterical industrial album promoted as selection of the month. References Bester, Alfred. The Stars My Destination. London: Millennium Books, 1999. Eshun, Kodwo. More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction. London: Quartet Books, 1998. Van der Kolk, Bessel A. "Trauma and Memory." Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society. Eds. Bessel A. van der Kolk et al. New York: Guilford Press, 1996. Nine Inch Nails. Downward Spiral. Nothing/Interscope, 1994. ---. The Fragile. Nothing, 1999. ---. Pretty Hate Machine. TVT, 1989. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Alex Burns. "'This Machine Is Obsolete': A Listeners' Guide to Nine Inch Nails' The Fragile." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.8 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9912/nine.php>. Chicago style: Alex Burns, "'This Machine Is Obsolete': A Listeners' Guide to Nine Inch Nails' The Fragile," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 8 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9912/nine.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Alex Burns. (1999) 'This machine is obsolete': a listeners' guide to Nine Inch Nails' The fragile. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(8). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9912/nine.php> ([your date of access]).

IntroductionThe common origin of the adjective “corporeal” and the noun “corpse” in the Latin root corpus points to the value of mortuary practices for investigating how the human body is objectified. In post-mortem rituals, the body—formerly the manipulator of objects—becomes itself the object that is manipulated. Thus, these funerary rituals provide a type of double reflexivity, where the object and subject of manipulation can be used to reciprocally illuminate one another. To this extent, any consideration of corporeality can only benefit from a discussion of how the body is objectified through mortuary practices. This paper offers just such a discussion with respect to a selection of two contrasting mortuary practices, in the context of the prehistoric past and the Classical Era respectively. At the most general level, we are motivated by the same intellectual impulse that has stimulated expositions on corporeality, materiality, and incarnation in areas like phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty 77–234), Marxism (Adorno 112–119), gender studies (Grosz vii–xvi), history (Laqueur 193–244), and theology (Henry 33–53). That is to say, our goal is to show that the body, far from being a transparent frame through which we encounter the world, is in fact a locus where historical, social, cultural, and psychological forces intersect. On this view, “the body vanishes as a biological entity and becomes an infinitely malleable and highly unstable culturally constructed product” (Shilling 78). However, for all that the cited paradigms offer culturally situated appreciations of corporeality; our particular intellectual framework will be provided by cognitive science. Two reasons impel us towards this methodological choice.In the first instance, the study of ritual has, after several decades of stagnation, been rewarded—even revolutionised—by the application of insights from the new sciences of the mind (Whitehouse 1–12; McCauley and Lawson 1–37). Thus, there are good reasons to think that ritual treatments of the body will refract historical and social forces through empirically attested tendencies in human cognition. In the present connection, this means that knowledge of these tendencies will reward any attempt to theorise the objectification of the body in mortuary rituals.In the second instance, because beliefs concerning the afterlife can never be definitively judged to be true or false, they give free expression to tendencies in cognition that are otherwise constrained by the need to reflect external realities accurately. To this extent, they grant direct access to the intuitive ideas and biases that shape how we think about the world. Already, this idea has been exploited to good effect in areas like the cognitive anthropology of religion, which explores how counterfactual beings like ghosts, spirits, and gods conform to (and deviate from) pre-reflective cognitive patterns (Atran 83–112; Barrett and Keil 219–224; Barrett and Reed 252–255; Boyer 876–886). Necessarily, this implies that targeting post-mortem treatments of the body will offer unmediated access to some of the conceptual schemes that inform thinking about human corporeality.At a more detailed level, the specific methodology we propose to use will be provided by conceptual blending theory—a framework developed by Gilles Fauconnier, Mark Turner, and others to describe how structures from different areas of experience are creatively blended to form a new conceptual frame. In this system, a generic space provides the ground for coordinating two or more input spaces into a blended space that synthesises them into a single output. Here this would entail using natural or technological processes to structure mortuary practices in a way that satisfies various psychological needs.Take, for instance, W.B. Yeats’s famous claim that “Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart” (“Easter 1916” in Yeats 57-8). Here, the poet exploits a generic space—that of everyday objects and the effort involved in manipulating them—to coordinate an organic input from that taxonomy (the heart) with an inorganic input (a stone) to create the blended idea that too energetic a pursuit of an abstract ideal turns a person into an unfeeling object (the heart-as-stone). Although this particular example corresponds to a familiar rhetorical figure (the metaphor), the value of conceptual blending theory is that it cuts across distinctions of genre, media, language, and discourse level to provide a versatile framework for expressing how one area of human experience is related to another.As indicated, we will exploit this versatility to investigate two ways of objectifying the body through the examination of two contrasting mortuary practices—cremation and inhumation—against different cultural horizons. The first of these is the conceptualisation of the body as an object of a technical process, where the post-mortem cremation of the corpse is analogically correlated with the metallurgical refining of ore into base metal. Our area of focus here will be Bronze Age cremation practices. The second conceptual scheme we will investigate focuses on treatments of the body as a vegetable object; here, the relevant analogy likens the inhumation of the corpse to the planting of a seed in the soil from which future growth will come. This discussion will centre on the Classical Era. Burning: The Body as Manufactured ObjectThe Early and Middle Bronze Age in Western Europe (2500-1200 BCE) represented a period of change in funerary practices relative to the preceding Neolithic, exemplified by a move away from the use of Megalithic monuments, a proliferation of grave goods, and an increase in the use of cremation (Barrett 38-9; Cooney and Grogan 105-121; Brück, Material Metaphors 308; Waddell, Bronze Age 141-149). Moreover, the Western European Bronze Age is characterised by a shift away from communal burial towards single interment (Barrett 32; Bradley 158-168). Equally, the Bronze Age in Western Europe provides us with evidence of an increased use of cist and pit cremation burials concentrated in low-lying areas (Woodman 254; Waddell, Prehistoric 16; Cooney and Grogan 105-121; Bettencourt 103). This greater preference for lower-lying location appears to reflect a distinctive change in comparison to the distribution patterns of the Neolithic burials; these are often located on prominent, visible aspects of a landscape (Cooney and Grogan 53-61). These new Bronze Age burial practices appear to reflect a distancing in relation to the territories of the “old ancestors” typified by Megalithic monuments (Bettencourt 101-103). Crucially, the Bronze Age archaeological record provides us with evidence that indicates that cremation was becoming the dominant form of deposition of human remains throughout Central and Western Europe (Sørensen and Rebay 59-60).The activities associated with Bronze Age cremations such as the burning of the body and the fragmentation of the remains have often been considered as corporeal equivalents (or expressions) of the activities involved in metal (bronze) production (Brück, Death 84-86; Sørensen and Rebay 60–1; Rebay-Salisbury, Cremations 66-67). There are unequivocal similarities between the practices of cremation and contemporary bronze production technologies—particularly as both processes involve the transformation of material through the application of fire at temperatures between 700 ºC to 1000 ºC (Musgrove 272-276; Walker et al. 132; de Becdelievre et al. 222-223).We assert that the technologies that define the European Bronze Age—those involved in alloying copper and tin to produce bronze—offered a new conceptual frame that enabled the body to be objectified in new ways. The fundamental idea explored here is that the displacement of inhumation by cremation in the European Bronze Age was motivated by a cognitive shift, where new smelting technologies provided novel conceptual metaphors for thinking about age-old problems concerning human mortality and post-mortem survival. The increased use of cremation in the European Bronze Age contrasts with the archaeological record of the Near Eastern—where, despite the earlier emergence of metallurgy (3300–3000 BCE), we do not see a notable proliferation in the use of cremation in this region. Thus, mortuary practices (i.e. cremation) provide us with an insight into how Western European Bronze Age cultures mediated the body through changes in technological objects and processes.In the terminology of conceptual blending, the generic space in question centres on the technical manipulation of the material world. The first input space is associated with the anxiety attending mortality—specifically, the cessation of personal identity and the extinction of interpersonal relationships. The second input space represents the technical knowledge associated with bronze production; in particular, the extraction of ore from source material and its mixing with other metals to form an alloy. The blended space coordinates these inputs to objectify the human body as an object that is ritually transformed into a new but more durable substance via the cremation process. In this contention we use the archaeological record to draw a conceptual parallel between the emergence of bronze production technology—centring on transition of naturally occurring material to a new subsistence (bronze)—and the transitional nature of the cremation process.In this theoretical framework, treating the body as a mixture of substances that can be reduced to its constituents and transformed through technologies of cremation enabled Western European Bronze Age society to intervene in the natural process of putrefaction and transform the organic matter into something more permanent. This transformative aspect of the cremation is seen in the evidence we have for secondary burial practices involving the curation and circulation of cremated bones of deceased members of a group (Brück, Death 87-93). This evidence allows us to assert that cremated human remains and objects were considered products of the same transformation into a more permanent state via burning, fragmentation, dispersal, and curation. Sofaer (62-69) states that the living body is regarded as a person, but as soon as the transition to death is made, the body becomes an object; this is an “ontological shift in the perception of the body that assumes a sudden change in its qualities” (62).Moreover, some authors have proposed that the exchange of fragmented human remains was central to mortuary practices and was central in establishing and maintaining social relations (Brück, Death 76-88). It is suggested that in the Early Bronze Age the perceptions of the human body mirrored the perceptions of objects associated with the arrival of the new bronze technology (Brück, Death 88-92). This idea is more pronounced if we consider the emergence of bronze technology as the beginning of a period of capital intensification of natural resources. Through this connection, the Bronze Age can be regarded as the point at which a particular natural resource—in this case, copper—went through myriad intensive manufacturing stages, which are still present today (intensive extraction, production/manufacturing, and distribution). Unlike stone tool production, bronze production had the addition of fire as the explicit method of transformation (Brück, Death 88-92). Thus, such views maintain that the transition achieved by cremation—i.e. reducing the human remains to objects or tokens that could be exchanged and curated relatively soon after the death of the individual—is equivalent to the framework of commodification connected with bronze production.A sample of cremated remains from Castlehyde in County Cork, Ireland, provides us with an example of a Bronze Age cremation burial in a Western European context (McCarthy). This is chosen because it is a typical example of a Bronze Age cremation burial in the context of Western Europe; also, one of the authors (MG) has first-hand experience in the analysis of its associated remains. The Castlehyde cremation burial consisted of a rectangular, stone-lined cist (McCarthy). The cist contained cremated, calcined human remains, with the fragments generally ranging from a greyish white to white in colour; this indicates that the bones were subject to a temperature range of 700-900ºC. The organic content of bone was destroyed during the cremation process, leaving only the inorganic matrix (brittle bone which is, often, described as metallic in consistency—e.g. Gejvall 470-475). There is evidence that remains may have been circulated in a manner akin to valuable metal objects. First of all, the absence of long bones indicates that there may have been a practice of removing salient remains as curatable records of ancestral ties. Secondly, remains show traces of metal staining from objects that are no longer extant, which suggests that graves were subject to secondary burial practices involving the removal of metal objects and/or human bone. To this extent, we can discern that human remains were being processed, curated, and circulated in a similar manner to metal objects.Thus, there are remarkable similarities between the treatment of the human body in cremation and bronze metal production technologies in the European Bronze Age. On the one hand, the parallel between smelting and cremation allowed death to be understood as a process of transformation in which the individual was removed from processes of organic decay. On the other hand, the circulation of the transformed remains conferred a type of post-mortem survival on the deceased. In this way, cremation practices may have enabled Bronze Age society to symbolically overcome the existential anxiety concerning the loss of personhood and the breaking of human relationships through death. In relation to the former point, the resurgence of cremation in nineteenth century Europe provides us with an example of how the disposal of a human body can be contextualised in relation to socio-technological advancements. The (re)emergence of cremation in this period reflects the post-Enlightenment shift from an understanding of the world through religious beliefs to the use of rational, scientific approaches to examine the natural world, including the human body (and death). The controlled use of fire in the cremation process, as well as the architecture of crematories, reflected the industrial context of the period (Rebay-Salisbury, Inhumation 16).With respect to the circulation of cremated remains, Smith suggests that Early Medieval Christian relics of individual bones or bone fragments reflect a reconceptualised continuation of pre-Christian practices (beginning in Christian areas of the Roman Empire). In this context, it is claimed, firstly, that the curation of bone relics and the use of mobile bone relics of important, saintly individuals provided an embodied connection between the sacred sphere and the earthly world; and secondly, that the use of individual bones or fragments of bone made the Christian message something portable, which could be used to reinforce individual or collective adherence to Christianity (Smith 143-167). Using the example of the Christian bone relics, we can thus propose that the curation and circulation of Bronze Age cremated material may have served a role similar to tools for focusing religiously oriented cognition. Burying: The Body as a Vegetable ObjectGiven that the designation “the Classical Era” nominates the entirety of the Graeco-Roman world (including the Near East and North Africa) from about 800 BCE to 600 CE, there were obviously no mortuary practices common to all cultures. Nevertheless, in both classical Greece and Rome, we have examples of periods when either cremation or inhumation was the principal funerary custom (Rebay-Salisbury, Inhumation 19-21).For instance, the ancient Homeric texts inform us that the ancient Greeks believed that “the spirit of the departed was sentient and still in the world of the living as long as the flesh was in existence […] and would rather have the body devoured by purifying fire than by dogs or worms” (Mylonas 484). However, the primary sources and archaeological record indicate that cremation practices declined in Athens circa 400 BCE (Rebay-Salisbury, Inhumation 20). With respect to the Roman Empire, scholarly opinion argues that inhumation was the dominant funerary rite in the eastern part of the Empire (Rebay-Salisbury, Inhumation 17-21; Morris 52). Complementing this, the archaeological and historical record indicates that inhumation became the primary rite throughout the Roman Empire in the first century CE. Inhumation was considered to be an essential rite in the context of an emerging belief that a peaceful afterlife was reflected by a peaceful burial in which bodily integrity was maintained (Rebay-Salisbury, Inhumation 19-21; Morris 52; Toynbee 41). The question that this poses is how these beliefs were framed in the broader discourses of Classical culture.In this regard, our claim is that the growth in inhumation was driven (at least in part) by the spread of a conceptual scheme, implicit in Greek fertility myths that objectify the body as a seed. The conceptual logic here is that the post-mortem continuation of personal identity is (symbolically) achieved by objectifying the body as a vegetable object that will re-grow from its own physical remains. Although the dominant metaphor here is vegetable, there is no doubt that the motivating concern of this mythological fabulation is human mortality. As Jon Davies notes, “the myths of Hades, Persephone and Demeter, of Orpheus and Eurydice, of Adonis and Aphrodite, of Selene and Endymion, of Herakles and Dionysus, are myths of death and rebirth, of journeys into and out of the underworld, of transactions and transformations between gods and humans” (128). Thus, such myths reveal important patterns in how the post-mortem fate of the body was conceptualised.In the terminology of mental mapping, the generic space relevant to inhumation contains knowledge pertaining to folk biology—specifically, pre-theoretical ideas concerning regeneration, survival, and mortality. The first input space attaches to human mortality; it departs from the anxiety associated with the seeming cessation of personal identity and dissolution of kin relationships subsequent to death. The second input space is the subset of knowledge concerning vegetable life, and how the immersion of seeds in the soil produces a new generation of plants with the passage of time. The blended space combines the two input spaces by way of the funerary script, which involves depositing the body in the soil with a view to securing its eventual rebirth by analogy with the sprouting of a planted seed.As indicated, the most important illustration of this conceptual pattern can be found in the fertility myths of ancient Greece. The Homeric Hymns, in particular, provide a number of narratives that trace out correspondences between vegetation cycles, human mortality, and inhumation, which inform ritual practice (Frazer 223–404; Carney 355–65; Sowa 121–44). The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, for instance, charts how Persephone is abducted by Hades, god of the dead, and taken to his underground kingdom. While searching for her missing daughter, Demeter, goddess of fertility, neglects the earth, causing widespread devastation. Matters are resolved when Zeus intervenes to restore Persephone to Demeter. However, having ingested part of Hades’s kingdom (a pomegranate seed), Persephone is obliged to spend half the year below ground with her captor and the other half above ground with her mother.The objectification of Persephone as both a seed and a corpse in this narrative is clearly signalled by her seasonal inhumation in Hades’ chthonic realm, which is at once both the soil and the grave. And, just as the planting of seeds in autumn ensures rebirth in spring, Persephone’s seasonal passage from the Kingdom of the Dead nominates the individual human life as just one season in an endless cycle of death and rebirth. A further signifying element is added by the ingestion of the pomegranate seed. This is evocative of her being inseminated by Hades; thus, the coordination of vegetation cycles with life and death is correlated with secondary transition—that from childhood to adulthood (Kerényi 119–183).In the examples given, we can see how the Homeric Hymn objectifies both the mortal and sexual destiny of the body in terms of thresholds derived from the vegetable world. Moreover, this mapping is not merely an intellectual exercise. Its emotional and social appeal is visible in the fact that the Eleusinian mysteries—which offered the ritual homologue to the Homeric Hymn to Demeter—persisted from the Mycenaean period to 396 CE, one of the longest recorded durations for any ritual (Ferguson 254–9; Cosmopoulos 1–24). In sum, then, classical myth provided a precedent for treating the body as a vegetable object—most often, a seed—that would, in turn, have driven the move towards inhumation as an important mortuary practice. The result is to create a ritual form that makes key aspects of human experience intelligible by connecting them with cyclical processes like the seasons of the year, the harvesting of crops, and the intergenerational oscillation between the roles of parent and child. Indeed, this pattern remains visible in the germination metaphors and burial practices of contemporary religions such as Christianity, which draw heavily on the symbolism associated with mystery cults like that at Eleusis (Nock 177–213).ConclusionWe acknowledge that our examples offer a limited reflection of the ethnographic and archaeological data, and that they need to be expanded to a much greater degree if they are to be more than merely suggestive. Nevertheless, suggestiveness has its value, too, and we submit that the speculations explored here may well offer a useful starting point for a larger survey. In particular, they showcase how a recurring existential anxiety concerning death—involving the fear of loss of personal identity and kinship relations—is addressed by different ways of objectifying the body. Given that the body is not reducible to the objects with which it is identified, these objectifications can never be entirely successful in negotiating the boundary between life and death. In the words of Jon Davies, “there is simply no let-up in the efforts by human beings to transcend this boundary, no matter how poignantly each failure seemed to reinforce it” (128). For this reason, we can expect that the record will be replete with conceptual and cognitive schemes that mediate the experience of death.At a more general level, it should also be clear that our understanding of human corporeality is rewarded by the study of mortuary practices. 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