Journal articles on the topic 'Hardt, Michael, 1960-'

It has been suggested that beneath the sunny personality and enormous productivity of Sir William Osler (1849–1919) lurked a deep sorrow. A longstanding rumor suggests this sorrow was a prolonged affair with an older first cousin, Marian Osler (Bath) Francis (1841–1915), which resulted in Osler’s paternity of William Willoughby Francis (1878–1959). Osler treated W.W. Francis like a son. Francis after Osler’s death devoted the rest of his life to preserving Osler’s memory. Osler’s great-great niece Anne Wilkinson (1910–1961) strongly endorses this rumor; Osler scholar George T. Harrell (1908–1999) strongly suggests its truth, while Osler biographer Michael Bliss (1941–2017) dismisses it. Evidence supporting the rumor includes ample opportunities for mating, biographical details, and phenotypic resemblances that are hard to explain otherwise. Barring a DNA-based family study, the truth will probably never be known.

In the forty years since its publication, Hunter S. Thompson's most famous work, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, has received relatively little attention from scholars, in spite of its continuing popularity and acknowledged influence. Because the narrative is so thoroughly rooted in what Thompson called “this foul year of Our Lord, 1971,” the novel is generally approached (when it is discussed at all) as a historical artifact, a gonzo first draft of history, with its fortunes rising and falling with the counterculture of the 1960s. This article argues that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, far from being merely an epitaph for the 1960s, actually anticipates the more recent work of political theorists Giorgio Agamben, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri. Thompson's work, like Agamben's, concerns the emergence of the state of exception and the homo sacer as new paradigms for the relationship between citizen and state; and, like Hardt and Negri, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas attempts to formulate a response to the emergence of global empire.

O texto discute a fusão contínua entre as esferas pública e privada na obra de Warhol, divisando em tal fusão a matriz de uma “cultura de celebridades”, esse fenômeno da sociedade contemporânea auspiciado pelo regime biopolítico e pelo mundo pós-fordista que seriam mais tarde descritos por autores como Antonio Negri e Michael Hardt. Focalizando principalmente os experimentos de Warhol na Factory, estúdio que ele manteve entre 1963 e 1968, a autora mostra como a obra do artista se estende muito além das pinturas, filmes e outras peças que produziu, incluindo também, e de modo crucial, suas inúmeras aparições e declarações públicas.

Andrea Acri, Helen Creese, and Arlo Griffiths (eds), From Laṅkā Eastwards: The Rāmāyaṇa in the literature and visual arts of Indonesia (Dick van der Meij) Michael Arthur Aung-Thwin and Kenneth R. Hall (eds), New perspectives on the history and historiography of Southeast Asia: Continuing explorations (David Henley) Steven Farram, A short-lived enthusiasm: The Australian consulate in Portuguese Timor (Hans Hägerdal) R. Michael Feener, Patrick Daly and Anthony Reid (eds), Mapping the Acehnese past (William Bradley Horton) Geoffrey C. Gunn, History without borders: The making of an Asian world region, 1000-1800 (Craig A. Lockard) Andrew Hardy, Mauro Cucarzi and Patrizia Zolese, (eds), Champa and the archaeology of Mỹ Sơn (Vietnam) (William A. Southworth) Jac. Hoogerbrugge, Asmat: Arts, crafts and people; A photographic diary, 1969-1974 (Karen Jacobs) Felicia Katz-Harris, Inside the puppet box: A performance of wayang kulit at the Museum of international folk art (Sadiah Boonstra) Douglas Lewis, The Stranger-Kings of Sikka (Keng We Koh) Jennifer Lindsay and Maya H.T. Liem (eds), Heirs to world culture: Being Indonesian 1950-1965 (Manneke Budiman) Trần Kỳ Phương and Bruce M. Lockhart, The Cham of Vietnam: History, society and art (Arlo Griffiths) Krishna Sen and David T. Hill (eds), Politics and the media in twenty-first century Indonesia: Decade of democracy (E.P. Wieringa) Andrew N. Weintraub (ed.), Islam and popular culture in Indonesia and Malaysia (Andy Fuller) Meredith L. Weiss, Student activism in Malaysia: Crucible, mirror, sideshow (Richard Baxstrom) Widjojo Nitisastro, The Indonesian development experience: A collection of writings and speeches of Widjojo Nitisastro (J. Thomas Lindblad)

-Stanley L. Engerman, B.W. Higman, Slave populations of the British Caribbean, 1807-1834. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, Johns Hopkins Studies in Atlantic History and Culture, 1984. xxxiii + 781 pp.-Susan Lowes, Gad J. Heuman, Between black and white: race, politics, and the free coloureds in Jamaica, 1792-1865. Westport CT: Greenwood Press, Contributions in Comparative Colonial Studies No. 5, 1981. 20 + 321 pp.-Anthony Payne, Lester D. Langley, The banana wars: an inner history of American empire, 1900-1934. Lexington KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1983. VIII + 255 pp.-Roger N. Buckley, David Geggus, Slavery, war and revolution: the British occupation of Saint Domingue, 1793-1798. New York: The Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, 1982. xli + 492 pp.-Gabriel Debien, George Breathett, The Catholic Church in Haiti (1704-1785): selected letters, memoirs and documents. Chapel Hill NC: Documentary Publications, 1983. xii + 202 pp.-Alex Stepick, Michel S. Laguerre, American Odyssey: Haitians in New York City. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1984. 198 pp-Andres Serbin, H. Michael Erisman, The Caribbean challenge: U.S. policy in a volatile region. Boulder CO: Westview Press, 1984. xiii + 208 pp.-Andres Serbin, Ransford W. Palmer, Problems of development in beautiful countries: perspectives on the Caribbean. Lanham MD: The North-South Publishing Company, 1984. xvii + 91 pp.-Carl Stone, Anthony Payne, The politics of the Caribbean community 1961-79: regional integration among new states. Oxford: Manchester University Press, 1980. xi + 299 pp.-Evelyne Huber Stephens, Michael Manley, Jamaica: struggle in the periphery. London: Third World Media, in association with Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative Society, 1982. xi + 259 pp.-Rhoda Reddock, Epica Task Force, Grenada: the peaceful revolution. Washington D.C., 1982. 132 pp.-Rhoda Reddock, W. Richard Jacobs ,Grenada: the route to revolution. Havana: Casa de Las Americas, 1979. 157 pp., Ian Jacobs (eds)-Jacqueline Anne Braveboy-Wagner, Andres Serbin, Geopolitica de las relaciones de Venezuela con el Caribe. Caracas: Fundación Fondo Editorial Acta Cientifica Venezolana, 1983.-Idsa E. Alegria-Ortega, Jorge Heine, Time for decision: the United States and Puerto Rico. Lanham MD: North-South Publishing Co., 1983. xi + 303 pp.-Richard Hart, Edward A. Alpers ,Walter Rodney, revolutionary and scholar: a tribute. Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies and African Studies Center, University of California, 1982. xi + 187 pp., Pierre-Michel Fontaine (eds)-Paul Sutton, Patrick Solomon, Solomon: an autobiography. Trinidad: Inprint Caribbean, 1981. x + 253 pp.-Paul Sutton, Selwyn R. Cudjoe, Movement of the people: essays on independence. Ithaca NY: Calaloux Publications, 1983. xii + 217 pp.-David Barry Gaspar, Richard Price, To slay the Hydra: Dutch colonial perspectives on the Saramaka wars. Ann Arbor MI: Karoma Publishers, 1983. 249 pp.-Gary Brana-Shute, R. van Lier, Bonuman: een studie van zeven religieuze specialisten in Suriname. Leiden: Institute of Cultural and Social Studies, ICA Publication no. 60, 1983. iii + 132 pp.-W. van Wetering, Charles J. Wooding, Evolving culture: a cross-cultural study of Suriname, West Africa and the Caribbean. Washington: University Press of America 1981. 343 pp.-Humphrey E. Lamur, Sergio Diaz-Briquets, The health revolution in Cuba. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983. xvii + 227 pp.-Forrest D. Colburn, Ramesh F. Ramsaran, The monetary and financial system of the Bahamas: growth, structure and operation. Mona, Jamaica: Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies, 1984. xiii + 409 pp.-Wim Statius Muller, A.M.G. Rutten, Leven en werken van de dichter-musicus J.S. Corsen. Assen, The Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1983. xiv + 340 pp.-Louis Allaire, Ricardo E. Alegria, Ball courts and ceremonial plazas in the West Indies. New Haven: Department of Anthropology of Yale University, Yale University Publications in Anthropology No. 79, 1983. lx + 185 pp.-Kenneth Ramchand, Sandra Paquet, The Novels of George Lamming. London: Heinemann, 1982. 132 pp.

A descending bass line coordinated with sad lyrics is often described as evoking the "lament" topic—a signal to listeners that grief is being conveyed (Caplin, 2014). In human speech, a similar pattern of pitch declination occurs as air pressure is lost ('t Hart, Collier, & Cohen, 1990) which—coordinated with the premise that sad speech is lower in pitch (Lieberman & Michaels, 1962)—suggests there may be a cognitive-ecological association between descending bass lines and negative emotion more broadly. This study reexamines the relationship between descending bass lines and sadness in songs with lyrics. First, two contrasting repertoires were surveyed: 703 cantata movements by J. S. Bach and 740 popular music songs released ca. 1950–1990. Works featuring descending bass lines were identified and bass lines extracted by computationally parsing scores for bass or the lowest sounding musical line that descends incrementally by step. The corresponding lyrics were then analyzed using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (Pennebaker et al., 2015a, 2015b). Results were not consistent with the hypothesis that descending bass lines are associated with a general negative affect and thus also not specifically with sadness. In a follow-up behavioral study, popular music excerpts featuring a descending bass were evaluated for the features of sad sounds (Huron, Anderson, & Shanahan, 2014) by undergraduate musicians. Here, tempo and articulation, but not interval size as anticipated, were found to be the best predictors of songs with descending bass lines.

- Rogier Busser, Peter Post, Japanse bedrijvigheid in Indonesië, 1868-1942; Structurele elementen van Japan’s vooroorlogse economische expansie in Zuidoost Azië. Proefschrift Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, 1991, xviii + 374 pp. - H.J.M. Claessen, Arne Aleksej Perminow, The long way home; Dilemmas of everyday life in a Tongan village. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1993, 166 pp. - Aone van Engelenhoven, René van den Berg, Studies in Sulawesi linguistics III. Jakarta: Badan Penyelenggara Seri Nusa, Universitas Katolik Indonesia Atma Jaya, 1994, xii + 116 pp. [NUSA, Linguistic Studies of Indonesian and Other Languages in Indonesia 36.] - Will Derks, Wolfgang Marschall, Texts from the Islands; Oral and written traditions of Indonesia and the Malay world, (Procedings of the 7th European Colloquium on Indonesia and Malay Studies, Berne, June 1989) 1994, iii + 411 pp. [Ethnologica Bernensia 4]. - Michael Kaden, Krishna Sen, Indonesian Cinema; Framing the New Order, London: Zed Books, 1994, x + 188 pp. - Nico Kaptein, Mona Abaza, Indonesian Students in Cairo; Islamic education perceptions and exchanges, Paris: Association Archipel, 1994, 198 pp. [Cahier d’Archipel 23.] - P. Keppy, Chris Manning, Indonesia assessment 1993; Labour: Sharing in the benefits of growth? Canberra: Australian National University, 1993, xxi + 326 pp., Joan Hardjono (eds.) - Anke Niehof, Jan-Paul Dirkse, Development and social welfare; Indonesia’s experiences under the New Order, Leiden: KITLV Press, 1993, xi + 295 pp., Frans Hüsken, Mario Rutten (eds.) - Hetty Nooy-Palm, Michale C. Howard, Textiles of Southeast Asia; An annotated and illustrated bibliography. Bangkok: White Lotus, 1994, 212 pp. + 64 pp. pf photographs in colour. - Harry A. Poeze, Hans van Miert, Een koel hoofd en een warm hart; Nationalisme, Javanisme en jeugdbeweging in Nederlands-Indië, 1918-1930. Amsterdam: De Bataafsche Leeuw, 1995, 424 pp. - Ger P. Reesink, Jürg Wassmann, Historical atlas of ethnic and linguistic groups in Papua New Guinea, Volume 3, Part 4: New Britain; Part 5: New Ireland; Part 6: Bougainville, Basel: Wepf/University of Basel, Institute of Ethnology, 1995, ix + 185 pp, 30 maps. - Ger P. Reesink, Verena Keck, Historical atlas of ethnic and linguistic groups in Papua New Guinea, Volume 1, Part 3: Madang, Basel: Wepf/University of Basel, Institute of Ethnology, 1995, x + 399 pp, 10 maps. - K. Tauchmann, Reimar Schefold, Minahasa past and present; Tradition and transition in an outer island region of Indonesia, Leiden: Research School CNWS, 1995, 128 pp. - Reinout Vos, Barbara Watson Andaya, To live as brothers; Southeast Sumatra in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993, xvii + 324 pp.

Undertaking a careful examination of Malcolm Bradbury’s academic novel Eating People Is Wrong (1959) by drawing on Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization (1965) and on William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, this paper’s author argues that some individuals, capitalizing on the old-established connection between love and madness, choose to act insane to win others’ sympathy and affections and that their strategy may not always live up to their expectations. The strategy itself, it will be clear, is a reflection of their social superiors’ desire to punish or banish them, of the universal antipathy towards the mad, and of the proclivity for maltreating them. The author also aims to prove that madness is not always the inevitable result of unreciprocated love and that it may as well be brought about by a loveless life. The paper concludes that madness, be it real or sham, never ceases to preoccupy us and that no matter how hard we try to extend sympathy to the mad, they generally continue to occupy the bottom of the social hierarchy. In addition to the foregoing thematic pursuits, it is also hoped that the reader will be given a helpful insight into the academic novel subgenre, which deserves to gain more ascendancy in the literary scene.

-Sidney W. Mintz, Paget Henry ,C.L.R. James' Caribbean. Durham: Duke University Press, 1992. xvi + 287 pp., Paul Buhle (eds)-Allison Blakely, Jan M. van der Linde, Over Noach met zijn zonen: De Cham-ideologie en de leugens tegen Cham tot vandaag. Utrecht: Interuniversitair Instituut voor Missiologie en Oecumenica, 1993. 160 pp.-Helen I. Safa, Edna Acosta-Belén ,Researching women in Latin America and the Caribbean. Boulder CO: Westview, 1993. x + 201 pp., Christine E. Bose (eds)-Helen I. Safa, Janet H. Momsen, Women & change in the Caribbean: A Pan-Caribbean Perspective. Bloomington: Indiana University Press; Kingston: Ian Randle, 1993. x + 308 pp.-Paget Henry, Janet Higbie, Eugenia: The Caribbean's Iron Lady. London: Macmillan, 1993. 298 pp.-Kathleen E. McLuskie, Moira Ferguson, Subject to others: British women writers and Colonial Slavery 1670-1834. New York: Routledge, 1992. xii + 465 pp.-Samuel Martínez, Senaida Jansen ,Género, trabajo y etnia en los bateyes dominicanos. Santo Domingo: Instituto Tecnológico de Santo Domingo, Programa de Estudios se la Mujer, 1991. 195 pp., Cecilia Millán (eds)-Michiel Baud, Roberto Cassá, Movimiento obrero y lucha socialista en la República Dominicana (desde los orígenes hasta 1960). Santo Domingo: Fundación Cultural Dominicana, 1990. 620 pp.-Paul Farmer, Robert Lawless, Haiti's Bad Press. Rochester VT: Schenkman Press, 1992. xxvii + 261 pp.-Bill Maurer, Karen Fog Olwig, Global culture, Island identity: Continuity and change in the Afro-Caribbean Community of Nevis. Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1993. xi + 239 pp.-Viranjini Munasinghe, Kevin A. Yelvington, Trinidad Ethnicity. Knoxville: University of Tennesee Press, 1993. vii + 296 pp.-Kevin K. Birth, Christine Ho, Salt-water Trinnies: Afro-Trinidadian Immigrant Networks and Non-Assimilation in Los Angeles. New York: AMS Press, 1991. xvi + 237 pp.-Steven Gregory, Andrés Isidoro Pérez y Mena, Speaking with the dead: Development of Afro-Latin Religion among Puerto Ricans in the United States. A study into the Interpenetration of civilizations in the New World. New York: AMS Press, 1991. xvi + 273 pp.-Frank Jan van Dijk, Mihlawhdh Faristzaddi, Itations of Jamaica and I Rastafari (The Second Itation, the Revelation). Miami: Judah Anbesa Ihntahnah-shinahl, 1991.-Derwin S. Munroe, Nelson W. Keith ,The Social Origins of Democratic Socialism in Jamaica. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992. xxiv + 320 pp., Novella Z. Keith (eds)-Virginia Heyer Young, Errol Miller, Education for all: Caribbean Perspectives and Imperatives. Washington DC: Inter-American Development Bank, 1992. 267 pp.-Virginia R. Dominguez, Günter Böhm, Los sefardíes en los dominios holandeses de América del Sur y del Caribe, 1630-1750. Frankfurt: Vervuert, 1992. 243 pp.-Virginia R. Dominguez, Robert M. Levine, Tropical diaspora: The Jewish Experience in Cuba. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993. xvii + 398 pp.-Aline Helg, John L. Offner, An unwanted war: The diplomacy of the United States and Spain over Cuba, 1895-1898. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. xii + 306 pp.-David J. Carroll, Eliana Cardoso ,Cuba after Communism. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1992. xiii + 148 pp., Ann Helwege (eds)-Antoni Kapcia, Ian Isadore Smart, Nicolás Guillén: Popular Poet of the Caribbean. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990. 187 pp.-Sue N. Greene, Moira Ferguson, The Hart Sisters: Early African Caribbean Writers, Evangelicals, and Radicals. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993. xi + 214 pp.-Michael Craton, James A. Lewis, The final campaign of the American revolution: Rise and fall of the Spanish Bahamas. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991. xi + 149 pp.-David Geggus, Clarence J. Munford, The black ordeal of slavery and slave trading in the French West Indies, 1625-1715. Lewiston NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1991. 3 vols. xxii + 1054 pp.-Paul E. Sigmund, Timothy P. Wickham-Crowley, Guerillas and Revolution in Latin America: A comparative Study of Insurgents and Regimes since 1956. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. xx + 424 pp.-Robert E. Millette, Patrick A.M. Emmanuel, Elections and Party Systems in the Commonwealth Caribbean, 1944-1991. St. Michael, Barbados: Caribbean Development Research Services, 1992. viii + 111 pp.-Robert E. Millette, Donald C. Peters, The Democratic System in the Eastern Caribbean. Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1992. xiv + 242 pp.-Pedro A. Cabán, Arnold H. Liebowitz, Defining status: A comprehensive analysis of United States Territorial Relations. Boston & Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1989. xxii + 757 pp.-John O. Stewart, Stuart H. Surlin ,Mass media and the Caribbean. New York: Gordon & Breach, 1990. xviii + 471 pp., Walter C. Soderlund (eds)-William J. Meltzer, Antonio V. Menéndez Alarcón, Power and television in Latin America: The Dominican Case. Westport CT: Praeger, 1992. 199 pp.

Edward Aspinall, Islam and nation; Separatist rebellion in Aceh, Indonesia. (Gerry van Klinken) Greg Bankoff and Sandra Swart (with Peter Boomgaard, William Clarence-Smith, Bernice de Jong Boers and Dhiravat na Pombejra), Breeds of empire; The ‘invention’ of the horse in Southeast Asia and Southern Africa 1500–1950. (Susie Protschky) Peter Boomgaard, Dick Kooiman and Henk Schulte Nordholt (eds), Linking destinies; Trade, towns and kin in Asian history. (Hans Hägerdal) Carstens, Sharon A. Histories, cultures, identities; Studies in Malaysian Chinese worlds. (Kwee Hui Kian) T.P. Tunjanan; m.m.v. J. Veenman, Molukse jongeren en onderwijs: quick scan 2008. Germen Boelens, Een doel in mijn achterhoofd; Een verkennend onderzoek onder Molukse jongeren in het middelbaar beroepsonderwijs. E. Rinsampessy (ed.), Tussen adat en integratie; Vijf generaties Molukkers worstelen en dansen op de Nederlandse aarde. (Fridus Steijlen) Isaäc Groneman, The Javanese kris. (Dick van der Meij) Michael C. Howard, A world between the warps; Southeast Asia’s supplementary warp textiles. (Sandra Niessen) W.R. Hugenholtz, Het geheim van Paleis Kneuterdijk; De wekelijkse gesprekken van koning Willem II met zijn minister J.C. Baud over het koloniale beleid en de herziening van de grondwet 1841-1848. (Vincent Houben) J. Thomas Lindblad, Bridges to new business; The economic decolonization of Indonesia. (Shakila Yacob) Julian Millie, Splashed by the saint; Ritual reading and Islamic sanctity in West Java. (Suryadi) Graham Gerard Ong-Webb (ed.), Piracy, maritime terrorism and securing the Malacca Straits. (Karl Hack) Natasha Reichle, Violence and serenity; Late Buddhist sculpture from Indonesia. (Claudine Bautze-Picron, Arlo Griffiths) Garry Rodan, Kevin Hewison and Richard Robison (eds), The political economy of South-East Asia; Markets, power and contestation. (David Henley) James C. Scott, The art of not being governed; An anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia. (Guido Sprenger) Guido Sprenger, Die Männer, die den Geldbaum fällten; Konzepte von Austausch und Gesellschaft bei den Rmeet von Takheung, Laos. (Oliver Tappe) Review Essay Two books on East Timor. Carolyn Hughes, Dependent communities; Aid and politics in Cambodia and East Timor. David Mearns (ed.), Democratic governance in Timor-Leste; Reconciling the local and the national. (Helene van Klinken) Review Essay Two books on Islamic terror Zachary Abuza, Political Islam and violence in Indonesia. Noorhaidi Hasan, Laskar jihad; Islam, militancy, and the quest for identity in post-New Order Indonesia. (Gerry van Klinken) Korte Signaleringen Janneke van Dijk, Jaap de Jonge en Nico de Klerk, J.C. Lamster, een vroege filmer in Nederlands-Indië. Griselda Molemans en Armando Ello, Zwarte huid, oranje hart; Afrikaanse KNIL-nazaten in de diaspora. Reisgids Indonesië; Oorlogsplekken 1942-1949. Hilde Janssen, Schaamte en onschuld; Het verdrongen oorlogsverleden van troostmeisjes in Indonesië. Jan Banning, Comfort women/Troostmeisjes. (Harry Poeze)

The medical school at McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario) was conceived in 1965, and admitted the first class in 1969. John Evans became the founding Dean and he invited EJ Moran Campbell to be the first Chairman of the Department of Medicine. Moran Campbell, already a world figure in respiratory medicine and physiology, arrived at McMaster in September 1968, and he invited Norman Jones to be Coordinator of the Respiratory Programme.At that time, Hamilton had a population of 300,000, with two full-time respirologists, Robert Cornett at the Hamilton General Hospital and Michael Newhouse at St Joseph’s Hospital. From the clinical perspective, the aim of the Respiratory Programme was to develop a network approach to clinical problems among the five hospitals in the Hamilton region, with St Joseph’s Hospital serving as a regional referral centre, and each hospital developing its own focus: intensive care and burns units at the Hamilton General Hospital; cancer at the Henderson (later Juravinski) Hospital; tuberculosis and rehabilitation at the Chedoke Hospital; pediatrics and neonatal intensive care at the McMaster University Medical Centre; and community care at the Joseph Brant Hospital in Burlington. The network provided an ideal base for a specialty residency program. There was also the need to establish viable research.These objectives were achieved through collaboration, support of hospital administration, and recruitment of clinicians and faculty, mainly from our own trainees and research fellows. By the mid-1970s, the respiratory group numbered more than 25; outpatient clinic visits and research had grown beyond our initial expectations. The international impact of the group became reflected in the clinical and basic research endeavours.ASTHMA: Freddy Hargreave and Jerry Dolovich established methods to measure airway responsiveness to histamine and methacholine. Allergen inhalation was shown to increase airway responsiveness for several weeks, and the late response was shown to be an immunoglobulin E-mediated phenomenon. Paul O’Byrne and Gail Gauvreau showed that the prolonged allergen-induced responses were due to eosinophilic and basophilic airway inflammation and, with Judah Denburg, revealed upregulation of eosinophil/basophil progenitor production in bone marrow and airways. The Firestone Institute became the centre of studies identifying the inflammatory phenotype of patients with difficult-to-control asthma. Freddy Hargreave and others developed methods for sputum induction to identify persisting eosinophilic airway inflammation and documented its presence in the absence of asthma, and in patients with persistent cough. Parameswaran Nair has applied these techniques to the management of asthma in routine clinical practice. The Asthma Quality of Life Questionnaire and the Asthma Control Tests were developed by Liz Juniper and Gordon Guyatt. The first Canadian evidence-based clinical guidelines for asthma management in 1989 were coordinated by Freddy Hargreave, Jerry Dolovich and Michael Newhouse.DISTRIBUTION OF INHALED PARTICLES: Michael Newhouse and Myrna Dolovich used inhaled radiolabelled aerosols to study the distribution of inhaled particles and their clearance in normal subjects, smokers and patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. They developed the aerochamber, and were the first to radiolabel therapeutic aerosols to distinguish the effects of peripheral versus central deposition. Particle deposition and clearance were shown to be impaired in ciliary dyskinesia and cystic fibrosis.DYSPNEA: Moran Campbell and Kieran Killian measured psychophysical estimates of the sense of effort in breathing in studies of loaded breathing and exercise to show that dyspnea increased as a power function of both duration and intensity of respiratory muscle contraction, and in relation to reductions in respiratory muscle strength. These principles also applied to dyspnea in cardiorespiratory disorders.EXERCISE CAPACITY: Norman Jones and Moran Campbell developed a system for noninvasive cardiopulmonary exercise testing using an incremental exercise test, and more complex studies with measurement of mixed venousPCO2by rebreathing. The 6 min walk test was validated by Gordon Guyatt. Kieran Killian and Norman Jones introduced routine muscle strength measurements in clinical testing and symptom assessment in exercise testing. Muscle strength training improved exercise capacity in older subjects and patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.METABOLISM AND ACID-BASE CONTROL IN EXERCISE: After showing that imposed acidosis reduced, and alkalosis improved performance, Norman Jones, John Sutton and George Heigenhauser investigated the interactions between acid-base status and metabolism in exercise.HIGH-ALTITUDE MEDICINE: John Sutton and Peter Powles participated in high-altitude research on Mount Logan (Yukon), demonstrating sleep hypoxemia in acute mountain sickness and its reversal by acetazolamide, and participated in Operation Everest II.EPIDEMIOLOGY: David Pengelly and Tony Kerrigan followed children living in areas with differing air quality to show that lung development was adversely affected by pollution and maternal smoking. Malcolm Sears and Neil Johnstone showed that the ‘return to school’ asthma exacerbation epidemic was due mainly to rhinoviruses. David Muir investigated the effects of silica exposure in hard-rock miners, and mortality in the nickel industry.SUMMARY: The Respirology Division has grown to more than 50 physicians and PhD scientists, currently provides the busiest outpatient clinic in Hamilton, and has successful training and research programs.

The medical school at McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario) was conceived in 1965 and admitted the first class in 1969. John Evans became the founding Dean and he invited Moran Campbell to be the first Chairman of the Department of Medicine. Moran Campbell, already a world figure in respiratory medicine and physiology, arrived at McMaster in September 1968, and he invited Norman Jones to be Coordinator of the Respiratory Programme.At that time, Hamilton had a population of 300,000, with two full-time respirologists, Robert Cornett at the Hamilton General Hospital and Michael Newhouse at St Joseph’s Hospital. From the clinical perspective, the aim of the Respiratory Programme was to develop a network approach to clinical problems among the five hospitals in the Hamilton region, with St Joseph’s Hospital serving as a regional referral centre, and each hospital developing its own focus: intensive care and burns units at the Hamilton General Hospital; cancer at the Henderson (later Juravinski) Hospital; tuberculosis and rehabilitation at the Chedoke Hospital; pediatrics and neonatal intensive care at the McMaster University Medical Centre; and community care at the Joseph Brant Hospital in Burlington (Ontario). The network provided an ideal base for a specialty residency program. There was also the need to establish viable research.These objectives were achieved through collaboration, support of hospital administration, and recruitment of clinicians and faculty, mainly from our own trainees and research fellows. By the mid-1970s the respiratory group numbered more than 25; outpatient clinic visits and research had grown beyond our initial expectations. The international impact of the group became reflected in the clinical and basic research endeavours.ASTHMA: Freddy Hargreave and Jerry Dolovich established methods to measure airway responsiveness to histamine and methacholine. Allergen inhalation was shown to increase airway responsiveness for several weeks, and the late response was shown to be an immunoglobulin E-mediated phenomenon. Paul O’Byrne and Gail Gauvreau showed that the prolonged allergen-induced responses were due to eosinophilic and basophilic airway inflammation and, with Judah Denburg, revealed upregulation of eosinophil/basophil progenitor production in bone marrow and airways. The Firestone Institute became the centre of studies identifying the inflammatory pheno-type of patients with difficult-to-control asthma. Freddy Hargreave and others developed methods for sputum induction to identify persisting eosinophilic airway inflammation and documented its presence in the absence of asthma and in patients with persistent cough. Parameswaran Nair has applied these techniques to the management of asthma in routine clinical practice. The Asthma Quality of Life Questionnaire and the Asthma Control Tests were developed by Drs Liz Juniper and Gordon Guyatt. The first Canadian evidence-based clinical guidelines for asthma management in 1989 were coordinated by Freddy Hargreave, Jerry Dolovich and Michael Newhouse.DISTRIBUTION OF INHALED PARTICLES: Michael Newhouse and Myrna Dolovich used inhaled radiolabelled aerosols to study the distribution of inhaled particles and their clearance in normal subjects, smokers and patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. They developed the aerochamber, and were the first to radiolabel therapeutic aerosols to distinguish the effects of peripheral versus central deposition. Particle deposition and clearance were shown to be impaired in ciliary dyskinesia and cystic fibrosis.DYSPNEA: Moran Campbell and Kieran Killian measured psychophysical estimates of the sense of effort in breathing in studies of loaded breathing and exercise to show that dyspnea increased as a power function of both duration and intensity of respiratory muscle contraction, and in relation to reductions in respiratory muscle strength. These principles also applied to dyspnea in cardiorespiratory disorders.EXERCISE CAPACITY: Norman Jones and Moran Campbell developed a system for noninvasive cardiopulmonary exercise testing using an incremental exercise test, and more complex studies with measurement of mixed venousPCO2by rebreathing. The 6 min walk test was validated by Gordon Guyatt. Kieran Killian and Norman Jones introduced routine muscle strength measurements in clinical testing and symptom assessment in exercise testing. Muscle strength training improved exercise capacity in older subjects and patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.METABOLISM AND ACID-BASE CONTROL IN EXERCISE: After showing that imposed acidosis reduced, and alkalosis improved performance, Norman Jones, John Sutton and George Heigenhauser investigated the interactions between acid-base status and metabolism in exercise.HIGH-ALTITUDE MEDICINE: John Sutton and Peter Powles participated in high-altitude research on Mount Logan (Yukon), demonstrating sleep hypoxemia in acute mountain sickness and its reversal by acetazol-amide, and participated in Operation Everest II.EPIDEMIOLOGY: David Pengelly and Tony Kerrigan followed children living in areas with differing air quality to show that lung development was adversely affected by pollution and maternal smoking. Malcolm Sears and Neil Johnstone showed that the ‘return to school’ asthma exacerbation epidemic was due mainly to rhinoviruses. David Muir investigated the effects of silica exposure in hard-rock miners, and mortality in the nickel industry.SUMMARY: The Respirology Division has grown to more than 50 physicians and PhD scientists, and currently provides the busiest outpatient clinic in Hamilton, and has successful training and research programs.

-Louis Allaire, Samuel M. Wilson, Hispaniola: Caribbean chiefdoms in the age of Columbus. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990. xi + 170 pp.-Douglas Melvin Haynes, Philip D. Curtin, Death by migration: Europe's encounter with the tropical world in the nineteenth century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. xviii + 251 pp.-Dale Tomich, J.H. Galloway, The sugar cane industry: An historical geography from its origins to 1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. xii + 266 pp.-Myriam Cottias, Dale Tomich, Slavery in the circuit of sugar: Martinique and the world economy, 1830 -1848. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1990. xiv + 352 pp.-Robert Forster, Pierre Dessalles, La vie d'un colon à la Martinique au XIXe siècle. Pré-senté par Henri de Frémont. Courbevoie: s.n., 1984-1988, four volumes, 1310 pp.-Hilary Beckles, Douglas V. Armstrong, The old village and the great house: An archaeological and historical examination of Drax Hall Plantation, St Ann's Bay, Jamaica. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990. xiii + 393 pp.-John Stewart, John A. Lent, Caribbean popular culture. Bowling Green OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1990. 157 pp.-W. Marvin Will, Susanne Jonas ,Democracy in Latin America: Visions and realities. New York: Bergin & Garvey Publishers, 1990. viii + 224 pp., Nancy Stein (eds)-Forrest D. Colburn, Kathy McAfee, Storm signals: Structural adjustment and development alternatives in the Caribbean. London: Zed books, 1991. xii + 259 pp.-Derwin S. Munroe, Peggy Antrobus ,In the shadows of the sun: Caribbean development alternatives and U.S. policy. Carmen Diana Deere (coordinator), Peter Phillips, Marcia Rivera & Helen Safa. Boulder CO: Westview Press, 1990. xvii + 246 pp., Lynne Bolles, Edwin Melendez (eds)-William Roseberry, Louis A. Pérez, Jr., Lords of the mountain: Social banditry and peasant protest in Cuba, 1878-1918. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989. xvii + 267 pp.-William Roseberry, Rosalie Schwartz, Lawless liberators, political banditry and Cuban independence. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1989. x + 297 pp.-Robert L. Paquette, Robert M. Levine, Cuba in the 1850's: Through the lens of Charles DeForest Fredricks. Tampa: University of South Florida Press, 1990. xv + 86 pp.-José Sánchez-Boudy, Gustavo Pérez Firmat, The Cuban condition: Translation and identity in modern Cuban literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. viii + 185 pp.-Dick Parker, Jules R. Benjamin, The United States and the origins of the Cuban revolution: An empire of liberty in an age of national liberation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. xi + 235 pp.-George Irvin, Andrew Zimbalist ,The Cuban economy: Measurement and analysis of socialist performance. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1989. xiv + 220 pp., Claes Brundenius (eds)-Menno Vellinga, Frank T. Fitzgerald, Managing socialism: From old Cadres to new professionals in revolutionary Cuba. New York: Praeger, 1990. xiv + 161 pp.-Patricia R. Pessar, Eugenia Georges, The making of a transnational community: Migration, development, and cultural change in the Dominican republic. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. xi + 270 pp.-Lucía Désir, Maria Dolores Hajosy Benedetti, Earth and spirit: Healing lore and more from Puerto Rico. Maplewood NJ: Waterfront Press, 1989. xvii + 245 pp.-Thomas J. Spinner, Jr., Percy C. Hintzen, The costs of regime survival: Racial mobilization, elite domination and control of the state in Guyana and Trinidad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. x + 240 pp.-Judith Johnson, Morton Klass, Singing with the Sai Baba: The politics of revitalization in Trinidad. Boulder CO: Westview, 1991. xvi + 187 pp.-Aisha Khan, Selwyn Ryan, The Muslimeen grab for power: Race, religion and revolution in Trinidad and Tobago. Port of Spain: Inprint Caribbean, 1991. vii + 345 pp.-Drexel G. Woodson, Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, Haiti: The Breached Citadel. Boulder CO: Westview Press, 1990. xxi + 217 pp.-O. Nigel Bolland, Howard Johnson, The Bahamas in slavery and freedom. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle; London: James Currey, 1991. viii + 184 pp.-Keith F. Otterbein, Charles C. Foster, Conchtown USA: Bahamian fisherfolk in Riviera beach, Florida. (with folk songs and tales collected by Veronica Huss). Boca Raton: Florida Atlantic University Press, 1991. x + 176 pp.-Peter van Baarle, John P. Bennett ,Kabethechino: A correspondence on Arawak. Edited by Janette Forte. Georgetown: Demerara Publishers, 1991. vi + 271 pp., Richard Hart (eds)-Fabiola Jara, Joop Vernooij, Indianen en kerken in Suriname: identiteit en autonomie in het binnenland. Paramaribo: Stichting Wetenschappelijke Informatie (SWI), 1989. 178 pp.-Jay Edwards, C.L. Temminck Groll ,Curacao: Willemstad, city of monuments. R.G. Gill. The Hague: Gary Schwartz/SDU Publishers, 1990. 123 pp., W. van Alphen, R. Apell (eds)-Mineke Schipper, Maritza Coomans-Eustatia ,Drie Curacaose schrijvers in veelvoud. Zutphen: De Walburg Pers, 1991. 544 pp., H.E. Coomans, Wim Rutgers (eds)-Arie Boomert, P. Wagenaar Hummelinck, De rotstekeningen van Aruba/The prehistoric rock drawings of Aruba. Utrecht: Uitgeverij Presse-Papier, 1991. 228 pp.-J.K. Brandsma, Ruben S. Gowricharn, Economische transformatie en de staat: over agrarische modernisering en economische ontwikkeling in Suriname, 1930-1960. Den Haag: Uitgeverij Ruward, 1990. 208 pp.-Henk N. Hoogendonk, M. van Schaaijk, Een macro-model van een micro-economie. Den Haag: STUSECO, 1991. 359 pp.-Bim G. Mungra, Corstiaan van der Burg ,Hindostanen in Nederland. Leuven (Belgium)/ Apeldoorn (the Netherlands): Garant Publishers, 1990. 223 pp., Theo Damsteegt, Krishna Autar (eds)-Adrienne Bruyn, J. van Donselaar, Woordenboek van het Surinaams-Nederlands. Muiderberg: Dick Coutinho, 1989. 482 pp.-Wim S. Hoogbergen, Michiel Baud ,'Cultuur in beweging': creolisering en Afro-Caraïbische cultuur. Rotterdam: Bureau Studium Generale, 1989. 93 pp., Marianne C. Ketting (eds)

-Virginia R. Dominguez, Louis A. Pérez, Jr., On becoming Cuban: Identity, nationality, and culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. xiv + 579 pp.-Solimar Otero, Kali Argyriadis, La religión à la Havane: Actualités des représentations et des pratiques culturelles havanaises. Paris: Éditions des Archives Contemporaines,1999. 373 pp.-Jane Desmond, Jane Blocker, Where is Ana Mendieta?: Identity, performativity, and exile. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1999. xvi + 166 pp.-Richard Handler, Amílcar A. Barreto, Language, elites, and the state: Nationalism in Puerto Rico and Quebec. Westport CT: Praeger, 1998. x + 165 pp.-Juan Flores, Lillian Guerra, Popular expression and national identity in Puerto Rico: The struggle for self, community, and nation. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998. xi + 332 pp.-Eileen J. Findlay, Rafael L. Ramírez, What it means to be a man: Reflections on Puerto Rican masculinity. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999. xv + 139 pp.-Arlene Torres, Eileen J. Suárez Findlay, Imposing decency: The politics of sexuality and race in Puerto Rico, 1870-1920. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1999. xii + 316 pp.-Rita Giacalone, Humberto García Muñiz ,Fronteras en conflicto: Guerra contra las drogas, militarización y democracia en el Caribe, Puerto Rico y Vieques. San Juan: Red Caribeña de Geopolítica, Seguridad Regional y Relaciones Internacionales, afiliada al Proyecto AT-LANTEA, 1999. 211 pp., Jorge Rodríguez Beruff (eds)-Bonham C. Richardson, q , Polly Pattullo, Fire from the mountain: The tragedy of Monserrat and the betrayal of its people. London: Constable, 2000. xvii + 217 pp.-Aisha Khan, Gillon Aitken, Between father and son: Family letters. V.S. Naipaul. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. xi + 297 pp.-J. Michael Dash, Marie-Hélène Laforest, Diasporic encounters: Remapping the Caribbean. Naples Liguori, 2000. 271 pp.-Jeanne Garane, Renée Larrier, Francophone women writers of Africa and the Caribbean. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000. ix + 156 pp.-Julian Gerstin, Brenda F. Berrian, Awakening spaces: French Caribbean popular songs, music, and culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. xvi + 287 pp.-Halbert Barton, Steven Loza, Tito Puente and the making of Latin music. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. xvi + 258 pp.-Mark Moberg, Anne Sutherland, The making of Belize: Globalization in the margins. Westport CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1998. x + 203 pp.-Daniel A. Segal, Kevin K. Birth, 'Any time is Trinidad time' : Social meanings and temporal consciousness. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999. xiv + 190 pp.-Samuel Martínez, Michele Wucker, Why the cocks fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the struggle for Hispaniola. New York: Hill and Wang, 1999. xxi + 281 pp.-Paul E. Brodwin, Terry Rey, Our lady of class struggle: The cult of the virgin Mary in Haiti. Trenton NJ: Africa World Press, 1999. x + 362 pp.-Robert Fatton, Jr., Elizabeth D. Gibbons, Sanctions in Haiti: Human rights and democracy under assault. Westport CT: Praeger, with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington DC, 1999. xviii + 138 pp.-Robert Fatton, Jr., David M. Malone, Decision-making in the UN security council: The case of Haiti, 1990-1997. Oxford: Clarendon, 1998. xxi + 322 pp.-James Sanders, César J. Ayala, American sugar kingdom: The plantation economy of the Spanish Caribbean, 1898-1934. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. xii + 321 pp.-James Sanders, Alan Dye, Cuban sugar in the age of mass production: Technology and the economics of the sugar central, 1899-1929. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. xiii + 343 pp.-Linden Lewis, Richard Hart, Towards decolonisation: Political, labour and economic developments in Jamaica 1938-1945. Kingston: Canoe Press, 1999. xxii + 329 pp.-John Smolenski, John W. Pulis, Moving on: Black loyalists in the Afro-Atlantic world. New York: Garland, 1999. xxiv + 224 pp.-Rosemarijn Hoefte, Clem Seecharan, Bechu: 'Bound coolie' Radical in British Guiana 1894-1901. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 1999. x + 315 pp.-Bonno Thoden van Velzen, C.N. Dubelaar ,Het Afakaschrift van de Tapanahoni Rivier in Suriname. Utrecht: Thela Thesis, 1999. 183 pp., André R.M. Pakosie (eds)-Bonno Thoden van Velzen, André R.M. Pakosie, Gazon Matodja: Surinaams stamhoofd aan het einde van een tijdperk. Utrecht: Stichting Sabanapeti, 1999. 172 pp.-Geneviève Escure, Peter L. Patrick, Urban Jamaican Creole: Variation in the Mesolect. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1999. xx + 331 pp.

The neoliberal financial economy is for Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri a reaction to the struggles for democracy, identity and sustainability since the 1960’s in particular. For Hardt and Negri the task is then to not only analyze and criticize but to crack the neoliberal financial code. This process can take place by combining exodus on the micro level with antagonistic reformism and hegemonic struggle on the macro level.

CLARKSON, STEPHEN. Uncle Sam and US: Globalization, Neoconservatism, and the Canadian State. By W. Andy Knight 899WALLOT, JEAN-PIERRE, sous la direction de. La Commission Pepin-Robarts quelque vingt ans aprés. Le débat qui n'a pas eu lieu. Par Simon Langois 900MARTIN, MICHEL, dir. Andrée Ferretti : La passion de l'engagement. Discours et textes (1964-2001). Par Denyse Côté 902ABU-LABAN, YASMEEN and CHRISTINA GABRIEL. Selling Diversity: Immigration, Multiculturalism, Employment Equity, and Globalization. By Leslie A. Pal 905HALE, GEOFFREY, The Politics of Taxation in Canada. By Michael J. Prince 906NOLIN, PIERRE CLAUDE, Président. Le cannabis. Rapport du Comité spécial du Sénat sur les drogues illicites. Par Line Beauchesne 907TARDY, ÉVELYNE. Les femmes et les conseils municipaux du Québec. Par Jocelyne Praud 909PERL, ANTHONY. New Departures: Rethinking Rail Passenger Policy in the Twenty- First Century. By Dan Madar 912FREITAG, MICHEL, avec la collaboration d'Yves Bonny. L'oubli de la société : Pour une théorie critique de la postmodernité. Par Ulric Deschênes 913BERNSTEIN, STEVEN. The Compromise of Liberal Environmentalism. By Matthew Paterson 915LEISS, WILLIAM. In the Chamber of Risks: Understanding Risk Controversies. By James Tansey 916THÉRET, BRUNO. Protection sociale et fédéralisme. L'Europe dans le miroir de l'Amérique du Nord. Par Daniel Béland 917DELWIT, PASCAL, dir. Libéralismes et partis libéraux en Europe. Par Vincent Lemieux 920DRIVER, STEPHEN AND LUKE MARTELL. Blair's Britain. By Alexandra Dobrowolsky 921PALIER, BRUNO. Gouverner la Sécurité sociale. Par Jacinthe Michaud 922HOOK, GLENN D., JULIE GILSON, CHRISTOPHERW. HUGHES AND HUGO DOBSON. Japan's International Relations: Politics, Economics and Security. By Tsuyoshi Kawasaki 927CHAPPELL, LOUISE A. Gendering Government: Feminist Engagement with the State in Australia and Canada. By Jill Vickers 929BALDEZ, LISA. Why Women Protest: Women's Movements in Chile. By Susan Franceschet 930HAYES, MICHAEL T. The Limits of Policy Change: Incrementalism, Worldview, and the Rule of Law. By Andrea Migone 931GAGNON, BERNARD. La philosophie morale et politique de Charles Taylor. Par Benoît Dubreuil 933MOSCHONAS, GERASSIMOS, Trans. GREGORY ELLIOT. In the Name of Social Democracy: The Great Transformation: 1945 to the Present; and PIERSON, CHRISTOPHER. Hard Choices: Social Democracy in the 21st Century. By David Laycock 935STANKIEWICZ, W. J. The Essential Stankiewicz: On the Importance of Political Theory. By Herminio Meireles Teixeira 937BLATTBERG, CHARLES. From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics: Putting Practice First. By Simone Chambers 940JANARA, LAURA, Democracy Growing Up: Authority, Autonomy, and Passion in Tocqueville's Democracy in America. By Catherine A. Holland 941

Frank Adams was born in Woolwich on 5 November 1930. His home was in New Eltham, about ten miles east of the centre of London. Both his parents were graduates of King’s College London, which was where they had met. They had one other child - Frank’s younger brother Michael - who rose to the rank of Air Vice-Marshal in the Royal Air Force. In his creative gifts and practical sense, Frank took after his father, a civil engineer, who worked for the government on road building in peace-time and airfield construction in war-time. In his exceptional capacity for hard work, Frank took after his mother, who was a biologist active in the educational field. In 1939, at the outbreak of World War II, the Adams family was evacuated first to Devon, for a year, and then to Bedford, where Frank became a day pupil at Bedford School; one of a group of independent schools in that city. Those who recall him at school describe him as socially somewhat gauche and quite a daredevil; indeed there were traces of this even when he was much older. In 1946, at the end of the war, the rest of the family returned to London while Frank stayed on at school to take the usual examinations, including the Cambridge Entrance Scholarship examination at which he won an Open Scholarship to Trinity College. The Head of Mathematics at Bedford, L.H. Clarke, was a schoolmaster whose pupils won countless open awards, especially at Trinity.

In the 1960s, especially in the West, art that was revelatory and art that was revealing operated at opposite ends of the aesthetic spectrum. On the side of the revelatory we can think of encounters synonymous with modernism, in which an expressionist painting was revelatory of the Freudian unconscious, or a Barnett Newman the revelatory intensity of the sublime. By contrast, the impulse to reveal in 1960s art was rooted in post-Duchampian practice, implicating artists as different as Lynda Benglis and Richard Hamilton, who mined the potential of an art that was without essence. If revelatory art underscored modernism’s transcendental conviction, critically revealing work tested its discursive rules and institutional conventions. Of course, nothing in history happens as neatly as this suggests, but what is clear is how polarized the language of artistic revelation was throughout the 1960s. With the international spread of minimalism, pop art, and fluxus, provisional reveals eventually dominated art-historical discourse. Aesthetic conviction, with its spiritual undertones, was haunted by its demystification. In the words of Donald Judd: “a work needs only to be interesting” (184).That art galleries could be sites of timely socio-political issues, rather than timeless intuitions undersigned by medium specificity, is one of the more familiar origin stories of postmodernism. Few artists symbolize this shift more than Hans Haacke, whose 2019 exhibition All Connected, at the New Museum, New York, examined the legacy of his outward-looking work. Born in Germany in 1936, and a New Yorker since 1965, Haacke has been linked to the term “institutional critique” since the mid 1980s, after Mel Ramsden’s coining in 1975, and the increased recognition of kindred spirits such as Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Michael Asher, Martha Rosler, Robert Smithson, Daniel Buren, and Marcel Broodthaers. These artists have featured in books and essays by the likes of Benjamin Buchloh, Hal Foster, and Yve-Alain Bois, but they are also known for their own contributions to art discourse, producing hybrid conceptions of the intellectual postmodern artist as historian, critic and curator.Haacke was initially fascinated by kinetic sculpture in the early 1960s, taking inspiration from op art, systems art, and machine-oriented research collectives such as Zero (Germany), Gruppo N (Italy) and GRAV (France, an acronym of Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel). Towards the end of the decade he started to produce more overtly socio-political work, creating what would become a classic piece from this period, Gallery-Goers’ Birthplace and Residence Profile, Part 1 (1969). Here, in a solo exhibition at New York’s Howard Wise Gallery, the artist invited viewers to mark their birthplaces and places of residence on a map. Questioning the statistical demography of the Gallery’s avant-garde attendees, the exhibition anticipated the meticulous sociological character of much of his practice to come, grounding New York art – the centre of the art world – in local, social, and economic fabrics.In the forward to the catalogue of All Connected, New Museum Director Lisa Philips claims that Haacke’s survey exhibition provided a chance to reflect on the artist’s prescience, especially given the flourishing of art activism over the last five or so years. Philips pressed the issue of why no other American art institution had mounted a retrospective of his work in three decades, since his previous survey, Unfinished Business, at the New Museum in 1986, at its former, and much smaller, Soho digs (8). It suggests that other institutions have deemed Haacke’s work too risky, generating too much political heat for them to handle. It’s a reputation the artist has cultivated since the Guggenheim Museum famously cancelled his 1971 exhibition after learning his intended work, Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System as of May 1, 1971 (1971) involved research into dubious New York real estate dealings. Guggenheim director Thomas Messer defended the censorship at the time, going so far as to describe it as an “alien substance that had entered the art museum organism” (Haacke, Framing 138). Exposé was this substance Messer dare not name: art that was too revealing, too journalistic, too partisan, and too politically viscid. (Three years later, Haacke got his own back with Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Board of Trustees, 1974, exposing then Guggenheim board members’ connections to the copper industry in Chile, where socialist president Salvador Allende had just been overthrown with US backing.) All Connected foregrounded these institutional reveals from time past, at a moment in 2019 when the moral accountability of the art institution was on the art world’s collective mind. The exhibition followed high-profile protests at New York’s Whitney Museum and Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the Louvre, and the British Museum. These and other arts organisations have increasingly faced pressures, fostered by social media, to end ties with unethical donors, sponsors, and board members, with activist groups protesting institutional affiliations ranging from immigration detention centre management to opioid and teargas manufacturing. An awareness of the limits of individual agency and autonomy undoubtedly defines this era, with social media platforms intensifying the encumbrances of individual, group, and organisational identities. Hans Haacke, Gallery-Goers’ Birthplace and Residence Profile, Part 1, 1969 Hans Haacke, Gallery-Goers’ Birthplace and Residence Profile, Part 2, 1969-71Unfinished BusinessUnderscoring Haacke’s activist credentials, Philips describes him as “a model of how to live ethically and empathetically in the world today”, and as a beacon of light amidst the “extreme political and economic uncertainty” of the present, Trump-presidency-calamity moment (7). This was markedly different to how Haacke’s previous New York retrospective, Unfinished Business, was received, which bore the weight of being the artist’s first museum exhibition in New York following the Guggenheim controversy. In the catalogue to Haacke’s 1986 exhibition, then New Museum director Marcia Tucker introduced his work as a challenge, cautiously claiming that he poses “trenchant questions” and that the institution accepts “the difficulties and contradictions” inherent to any museum staging of his work (6).Philips’s and Tucker’s distinct perspectives on Haacke’s practice – one as heroically ethical, the other as a sobering critical challenge – exemplify broader shifts in the perception of institutional critique (the art of the socio-political reveal) over this thirty-year period. In the words of Pamela M. Lee, between 1986 and 2019 the art world has undergone a “seismic transformation”, becoming “a sphere of influence at once more rapacious, acquisitive, and overweening but arguably more democratizing and ecumenical with respect to new audiences and artists involved” (87). Haacke’s reputation over this period has taken a similar shift, from him being a controversial opponent of art’s autonomy (an erudite postmodern conceptualist) to a figurehead for moral integrity and cohesive artistic experimentation.As Rosalyn Deutsche pointed out in the catalogue to Haacke’s 1986 exhibition, a potential trap of such a retrospective is that, through biographical positioning, Haacke might be seen as an “exemplary political artist” (210). With this, the specific political issues motivating his work would be overshadowed by the perception of the “great artist” – someone who brings single-issue politics into the narrative of postmodern art, but at the expense of the issues themselves. This is exactly what Douglas Crimp discovered in Unfinished Business. In a 1987 reflection on the show, Crimp argued that, when compared with an AIDS-themed display, Homo Video, staged at the New Museum at the same time, reviewers of Haacke’s exhibition tended to analyse his politics “within the context of the individual artist’s body of work … . Political issues became secondary to the aesthetic strategies of the producer” (34). Crimp, whose activism would be at the forefront of his career in subsequent years, was surprised at how Homo Video and Unfinished Business spawned different readings. Whereas works in the former exhibition tended to be addressed in terms of the artists personal and partisan politics, Haacke’s prompted reflection on the aesthetics-politics juxtaposition itself. For Crimp, the fact that “there was no mediation between these two shows”, spoke volumes about the divisions between political and activist art at the time.New York Times critic Michael Brenson, reiterating a comment made by Fredric Jameson in the catalogue for Unfinished Business, describes the timeless appearance of Haacke’s work in 1986, which is “surprising for an artist whose work is in some way about ideology and history” (Brenson). The implication is that the artist gives a surprisingly long aesthetic afterlife to the politically specific – to ordinarily short shelf-life issues. In this mode of critical postmodernism in which we are unable to distinguish clearly between intervening in and merely reproducing the logic of the system, Haacke is seen as an astute director of an albeit ambiguous push and pull between political specificity and aesthetic irreducibility, political externality and the internalist mode of art about art. Jameson, while granting that Haacke’s work highlights the need to reinvent the role of the “ruling class” in the complex, globalised socio-economic situation of postmodernism, claims that it does so as representative of the “new intellectual problematic” of postmodernism. Haacke, according Jameson, stages postmodernism’s “crisis of ‘mapping’” whereby capitalism’s totalizing, systemic forms are “handled” (note that he avoids “critiqued” or “challenged”) by focusing on their manifestation through particular (“micro-public”) institutional means (49, 50).We can think of the above examples as constituting the postmodern version of Haacke, who frames very specific political issues on the one hand, and the limitless incorporative power of appropriative practice on the other. To say this another way, Haacke, circa 1986, points to specific sites of power struggle at the same time as revealing their generic absorption by an art-world system grown accustomed to its “duplicate anything” parameters. For all of his political intent, the artistic realm, totalised in accordance with the postmodern image, is ultimately where many thought his gestures remained. The philosopher turned art critic Arthur Danto, in a negative review of Haacke’s exhibition, portrayed institutional critique as part of an age-old business of purifying art, maintaining that Haacke’s “crude” and “heavy-handed” practice is blind to how art institutions have always relied on some form of critique in order for them to continue being respected “brokers of spirit”. This perception – of Haacke’s “external” critiques merely serving to “internally” strengthen existing art structures – was reiterated by Leo Steinberg. Supportively misconstruing the artist in the exhibition catalogue, Steinberg writes that Haacke’s “political message, by dint of dissonance, becomes grating and shrill – but shrill within the art context. And while its political effectiveness is probably minimal, its effect on Minimal art may well be profound” (15). Hans Haacke, MOMA Poll, 1970 All ConnectedSo, what do we make of the transformed reception of Haacke’s work since the late 1980s: from a postmodern ouroboros of “politicizing aesthetics and aestheticizing politics” to a revelatory exemplar of art’s moral power? At a period in the late 1980s when the culture wars were in full swing and yet activist groups remained on the margins of what would become a “mainstream” art world, Unfinished Business was, perhaps, blindingly relevant to its times. Unusually for a retrospective, it provided little historical distance for its subject, with Haacke becoming a victim of the era’s propensity to “compartmentalize the interpretive registers of inside and outside and the terms corresponding to such spatial­izing coordinates” (Lee 83).If commentary surrounding this 2019 retrospective is anything to go by, politics no longer performs such a parasitic, oppositional or even dialectical relation to art; no longer is the political regarded as a real-world intrusion into the formal, discerning, longue-durée field of aesthetics. The fact that protests inside the museum have become more visible and vociferous in recent years testifies to this shift. For Jason Farrago, in his review of All Connected for the New York Times, “the fact that no person and no artwork stands alone, that all of us are enmeshed in systems of economic and social power, is for anyone under 40 a statement of the obvious”. For Alyssa Battistoni, in Frieze magazine, “if institutional critique is a practice, it is hard to see where it is better embodied than in organizing a union, strike or boycott”.Some responders to All Connected, such as Ben Lewis, acknowledge how difficult it is to extract a single critical or political strategy from Haacke’s body of work; however, we can say that, in general, earlier postmodern questions concerning the aestheticisation of the socio-political reveal no longer dominates the reception of his practice. Today, rather than treating art and politics are two separate but related entities, like form is to content, better ideas circulate, such as those espoused by Bruno Latour and Jacques Rancière, for whom what counts as political is not determined by a specific program, medium or forum, but by the capacity of any actor-network to disrupt and change a normative social fabric. Compare Jameson’s claim that Haacke’s corporate and museological tropes are “dead forms” – through which “no subject-position speaks, not even in protest” (38) – with Battistoni’s, who, seeing Haacke’s activism as implicit, asks the reader: “how can we take the relationship between art and politics as seriously as Haacke has insisted we must?”Crimp’s concern that Unfinished Business perpetuated an image of the artist as distant from the “political stakes” of his work did not carry through to All Connected, whose respondents were less vexed about the relation between art and politics, with many noting its timeliness. The New Museum was, ironically, undergoing its own equity crisis in the months leading up to the exhibition, with newly unionised staff fighting with the Museum over workers’ salaries and healthcare even as it organised to build a new $89-million Rem Koolhaas-designed extension. Battistoni addressed these disputes at-length, claiming the protests “crystallize perfectly the changes that have shaped the world over the half-century of Haacke’s career, and especially over the 33 years since his last New Museum exhibition”. Of note is how little attention Battistoni pays to Haacke’s artistic methods when recounting his assumed solidarity with these disputes, suggesting that works such as Creating Consent (1981), Helmosboro Country (1990), and Standortkultur (Corporate Culture) (1997) – which pivot on art’s public image versus its corporate umbilical cord – do not convey some special aesthetico-political insight into a totalizing capitalist system. Instead, “he has simply been an astute and honest observer long enough to remind us that our current state of affairs has been in formation for decades”.Hans Haacke, News, 1969/2008 Hans Haacke, Wide White Flow, 1967/2008 Showing Systems Early on in the 1960s, Haacke was influenced by the American critic, artist, and curator Jack Burnham, who in a 1968 essay, “Systems Esthetics” for Artforum, inaugurated the loose conceptualist paradigm that would become known as “systems art”. Here, against Greenbergian formalism and what he saw as the “craft fetishism” of modernism, Burnham argues that “change emanates, not from things, but from the way things are done” (30). Burnham thought that emergent contemporary artists were intuitively aware of the importance of the systems approach: the significant artist in 1968 “strives to reduce the technical and psychical distance between his artistic output and the productive means of society”, and pays particular attention to relationships between organic and non-organic systems (31).As Michael Fried observed of minimalism in his now legendary 1967 essay Art and Objecthood, this shift in sixties art – signalled by the widespread interest in the systematic – entailed a turn towards the spatial, institutional, and societal contexts of receivership. For Burnham, art is not about “material entities” that beautify or modify the environment; rather, art exists “in relations between people and between people and the components of their environment” (31). At the forefront of his mind was land art, computer art, and research-driven conceptualist practice, which, against Fried, has “no contrived confines such as the theatre proscenium or picture frame” (32). In a 1969 lecture at the Guggenheim, Burnham confessed that his research concerned not just art as a distinct entity, but aesthetics in its broadest possible sense, declaring “as far as art is concerned, I’m not particularly interested in it. I believe that aesthetics exists in revelation” (Ragain).Working under the aegis of Burnham’s systems art, Haacke was shaken by the tumultuous and televised politics of late-1960s America – a time when, according to Joan Didion, a “demented and seductive vortical tension was building in the community” (41). Haacke cites Martin Luther King’s assassination as an “incident that made me understand that, in addition to what I had called physical and biological systems, there are also social systems and that art is an integral part of the universe of social systems” (Haacke, Conversation 222). Haacke created News (1969) in response to this awareness, comprising a (pre-Twitter) telex machine that endlessly spits out live news updates from wire services, piling up rolls and rolls of paper on the floor of the exhibition space over the course of its display. Echoing Burnham’s idea of the artist as a programmer whose job is to “prepare new codes and analyze data”, News nonetheless presents the museum as anything but immune from politics, and technological systems as anything but impersonal (32).This intensification of social responsibility in Haacke’s work sets him apart from other, arguably more reductive techno-scientific systems artists such as Sonia Sheridan and Les Levine. The gradual transformation of his ecological and quasi-scientific sculptural experiments from 1968 onwards could almost be seen as making a mockery of the anthropocentrism described in Fried’s 1967 critique. Here, Fried claims not only that the literalness of minimalist work amounts to an emphasis on shape and spatial presence over pictorial composition, but also, in this “theatricality of objecthood” literalness paradoxically mirrors (153). At times in Fried’s essay the minimalist art object reads as a mute form of sociality, the spatial presence filled by the conscious experience of looking – the theatrical relationship itself put on view. Fried thought that viewers of minimalism were presented with themselves in relation to the entire world as object, to which they were asked not to respond in an engaged formalist sense but (generically) to react. Pre-empting the rise of conceptual art and the sociological experiments of post-conceptualist practice, Fried, unapprovingly, argues that minimalist artists unleash an anthropomorphism that “must somehow confront the beholder” (154).Haacke, who admits he has “always been sympathetic to so-called Minimal art” (Haacke, A Conversation 26) embraced the human subject around the same time that Fried’s essay was published. While Fried would have viewed this move as further illustrating the minimalist tendency towards anthropomorphic confrontation, it would be more accurate to describe Haacke’s subsequent works as social-environmental barometers. Haacke began staging interactions which, however dry or administrative, framed the interplays of culture and nature, inside and outside, private and public spheres, expanding art’s definition by looking to the social circulation and economy that supported it.Haacke’s approach – which seems largely driven to show, to reveal – anticipates the viewer in a way that Fried would disapprove, for whom absorbed viewers, and the irreduction of gestalt to shape, are the by-products of assessments of aesthetic quality. For Donald Judd, the promotion of interest over conviction signalled scepticism about Clement Greenberg’s quality standards; it was a way of acknowledging the limitations of qualitative judgement, and, perhaps, of knowledge more generally. In this way, minimalism’s aesthetic relations are not framed so much as allowed to “go on and on” – the artists’ doubt about aesthetic value producing this ongoing temporal quality, which conviction supposedly lacks.In contrast to Unfinished Business, the placing of Haacke’s early sixties works adjacent to his later, more political works in All Connected revealed something other than the tensions between postmodern socio-political reveal and modernist-formalist revelation. The question of whether to intervene in an operating system – whether to let such a system go on and on – was raised throughout the exhibition, literally and metaphorically. To be faced with the interactions of physical, biological, and social systems (in Condensation Cube, 1963-67, and Wide White Flow, 1967/2008, but also in later works like MetroMobiltan, 1985) is to be faced with the question of change and one’s place in it. Framing systems in full swing, at their best, Haacke’s kinetic and environmental works suggest two things: 1. That the systems on display will be ongoing if their component parts aren’t altered; and 2. Any alteration will alter the system as a whole, in minor or significant ways. Applied to his practice more generally, what Haacke’s work hinges on is whether or not one perceives oneself as part of its systemic relations. To see oneself implicated is to see beyond the work’s literal forms and representations. Here, systemic imbrication equates to moral realisation: one’s capacity to alter the system as the question of what to do. Unlike the phenomenology-oriented minimalists, the viewer’s participation is not always assumed in Haacke’s work, who follows a more hermeneutic model. In fact, Haacke’s systems are often circular, highlighting participation as a conscious disruption of flow rather than an obligation that emanates from a particular work (148).This is a theatrical scenario as Fried describes it, but it is far from an abandonment of the issue of profound value. In fact, if we accept that Haacke’s work foregrounds intervention as a moral choice, it is closer to Fried’s own rallying cry for conviction in aesthetic judgement. As Rex Butler has argued, Fried’s advocacy of conviction over sceptical interest can be understood as dialectical in the Hegelian sense: conviction is the overcoming of scepticism, in a similar way that Geist, or spirit, for Hegel, is “the very split between subject and object, in which each makes the other possible” (Butler). What is advanced for Fried is the idea of “a scepticism that can be remarked only from the position of conviction and a conviction that can speak of itself only as this scepticism” (for instance, in his attempt to overcome his scepticism of literalist art on the basis of its scepticism). Strong and unequivocal feelings in Fried’s writing are informed by weak and indeterminate feeling, just as moral conviction in Haacke – the feeling that I, the viewer, should do something – emerges from an awareness that the system will continue to function fine without me. In other words, before being read as “a barometer of the changing and charged atmosphere of the public sphere” (Sutton 16), the impact of Haacke’s work depends upon an initial revelation. It is the realisation not just that one is embroiled in a series of “invisible but fundamental” relations greater than oneself, but that, in responding to seemingly sovereign social systems, the question of our involvement is a moral one, a claim for determination founded through an overcoming of the systemic (Fry 31).Haacke’s at once open and closed works suit the logic of our algorithmic age, where viewers have to shift constantly from a position of being targeted to one of finding for oneself. Peculiarly, when Haacke’s online digital polls in All Connected were hacked by activists (who randomized statistical responses in order to compel the Museum “to redress their continuing complacency in capitalism”) the culprits claimed they did it in sympathy with his work, not in spite of it: “we see our work as extending and conversing with Haacke’s, an artist and thinker who has been a source of inspiration to us both” (Hakim). This response – undermining done with veneration – is indicative of the complicated legacy of his work today. Haacke’s influence on artists such as Tania Bruguera, Sam Durant, Forensic Architecture, Laura Poitras, Carsten Höller, and Andrea Fraser has less to do with a particular political ideal than with his unique promotion of journalistic suspicion and moral revelation in forms of systems mapping. It suggests a coda be added to the sentiment of All Connected: all might not be revealed, but how we respond matters. Hans Haacke, Large Condensation Cube, 1963–67ReferencesBattistoni, Alyssa. “After a Contract Fight with Its Workers, the New Museum Opens Hans Haacke’s ‘All Connected’.” Frieze 208 (2019).Bishara, Hakim. “Hans Haacke Gets Hacked by Activists at the New Museum.” Hyperallergic 21 Jan. 2010. <https://hyperallergic.com/538413/hans-haacke-gets-hacked-by-activists-at-the-new-museum/>.Brenson, Michael. “Art: In Political Tone, Works by Hans Haacke.” New York Times 19 Dec. 1988. <https://www.nytimes.com/1986/12/19/arts/artin-political-tone-worksby-hans-haacke.html>.Buchloh, Benjamin. “Hans Haacke: Memory and Instrumental Reason.” Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry. Cambridge: MIT P, 2000.Burnham, Jack. “Systems Esthetics.” Artforum 7.1 (1968).Butler, Rex. “Art and Objecthood: Fried against Fried.” Nonsite 22 (2017). <https://nonsite.org/feature/art-and-objecthood>.Carrion-Murayari, Gary, and Massimiliano Gioni (eds.). Hans Haacke: All Connected. New York: Phaidon and New Museum, 2019.Crimp, Douglas. “Strategies of Public Address: Which Media, Which Publics?” In Hal Foster (ed.), Discussions in Contemporary Culture, no. 1. Washington: Bay P, 1987.Danto, Arthur C. “Hans Haacke and the Industry of Art.” In Gregg Horowitz and Tom Huhn (eds.), The Wake of Art: Criticism, Philosophy, and the Ends of Taste. London: Routledge, 1987/1998.Didion, Joan. The White Album. London: 4th Estate, 2019.Farago, Jason. “Hans Haacke, at the New Museum, Takes No Prisoners.” New York Times 31 Oct. 2019. <https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/31/arts/design/hans-haacke-review-new-museum.html>.Fried, Michael. “Art and Objecthood.” Artforum 5 (June 1967).Fry, Edward. “Introduction to the Work of Hans Haacke.” In Hans Haacke 1967. Cambridge: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2011.Glueck, Grace. “The Guggenheim Cancels Haacke’s Show.” New York Times 7 Apr. 1971.Gudel, Paul. “Michael Fried, Theatricality and the Threat of Skepticism.” Michael Fried and Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 2018.Haacke, Hans. Hans Haacke: Framing and Being Framed: 7 Works 1970-5. Halifax: P of the Nova Scotia College of Design and New York: New York UP, 1976.———. “Hans Haacke in Conversation with Gary Carrion-Murayari and Massimiliano Gioni.” Hans Haacke: All Connected. New York: Phaidon and New Museum, 2019.Haacke, Hans, et al. “A Conversation with Hans Haacke.” October 30 (1984).Haacke, Hans, and Brian Wallis (eds.). Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, Mass: MIT P, 1986.“Haacke’s ‘All Connected.’” Frieze 25 Oct. 2019. <https://frieze.com/article/after-contract-fight-its-workers-new-museum-opens-hans-haackes-all-connected>.Judd, Donald. “Specific Objects.” Complete Writings 1959–1975. Halifax: P of the Nova Scotia College of Design and New York: New York UP, 1965/1975.Lee, Pamela M. “Unfinished ‘Unfinished Business.’” Hans Haacke: All Connected. New York: Phaidon P Limited and New Museum, 2019.Ragain, Melissa. “Jack Burnham (1931–2019).” Artforum 19 Mar. 2019. <https://www.artforum.com/passages/melissa-ragain-on-jack-burnham-78935>.Sutton, Gloria. “Hans Haacke: Works of Art, 1963–72.” Hans Haacke: All Connected. New York: Phaidon P Limited and New Museum, 2019.Tucker, Marcia. “Director’s Forward.” Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, Mass: MIT P, 1986.

‘Artists are replicants who have found the secret of their obsolescence.’ (Brian Massumi) The critical reception to British writer Iain Sinclair’s most recent novel Dining on Stones (or, the Middle Ground) frequently focused on the British writer’s predilection for intertextual quotation and allusion, and more specifically, on his proclivity for integrating material from his own backlist. A survey of Dining on Stones reveals the following textual duplication: an entire short story, “View from My Window”, which was published in 2003; excerpts from a 2002 collection of poetry and prose, White Goods; material from his 1999 collaboration with artist Rachel Lichtenstein, Rodinsky’s Room; a paragraph lifted from Dark Lanthorns: Rodinsky’s A to Z, also from 1999; and scenes from 1971’s The Kodak Mantra Diaries. Moreover, the name of the narrator, Andrew Norton, is copied from an earlier Sinclair work, Slow Chocolate Autopsy. Of the six aforementioned inter-texts, only Rodinsky’s Room has had wide commercial release. The remainder are small press publications, often limited edition, difficult to find and read, which leads to the charge that Sinclair is relying on the inaccessibility of earlier texts to obscure his acts of autoplagiarism in the mass market Dining on Stones. Whatever Sinclair’s motives, his textual methodology locates a point of departure for an interrogation of textual doubling within the context of late era capitalism. At first approximation, Dining on Stones appears to belong to a postmodern literature which treats a text’s confluence, or dissonance of innumerable signifiers and systems of signification as axiomatic and intra-textually draws attention to this circumstance. Thematically, the heteroglot narrative of Dining on Stones frequently returns to the duplication of textual material. The book’s primary narrator is haunted by doubles, not least because Andrew Norton periodically functions as a textual doppelganger for Sinclair. Norton’s biography constitutes a cut-up of episodes copied from Sinclair’s personal history and experience as it is presented in his non-fiction and quasi-autobiographical poetry and prose like Lights Out for the Territory and London Orbital. Like his creator, Norton is ontologically troubled by a fetch, or two, who may or may not be the products of his writer’s imagination. He claims that someone is ‘stealing my material. He impersonated me with a flair I couldn’t hope to equal, this thief. Trickster.’ (218) A ‘disturbing’ encounter with ‘Grays’, an uncannily familiar short story by another writer Marina Fountain, reveals a second textual poacher copying Norton’s work. She hadn’t written it without help, obviously. The tone was masculine, sure of itself, its pretensions; grammatically suspect, lexicologically challenged, topographically slapdash. A slash-and-burn stylist. But haunted: by missing fathers – Bram Stoker, S. Freud and Joseph Conrad. Clunky hints… about writing and stalking, literary bloodsucking, gender, disguise. … But it was the Conrad aspect that pricked me. Fountain had somehow got wind of my researched (incomplete, unpublished) essay on Conrad in Hackney. Her exaggerated prose, its shotgun sarcasm, jump-cuts, psychotic syntax, was an offensive parody of a manner of composition I’d left behind. (167) When ‘Grays’ is later reprinted in full in the novel (141-65), it is a renamed double of a previous Sinclair piece, ‘In Train for the Estuary’ (Sinclair, White Goods, 57-75). This doubling is replicated with another Sinclair story ‘View from My Window’ also being attributed to Fountain (313-341). Neither the style, nor the content of Sinclair’s previous works have been discarded: they have been reproduced and incorporated in Dining on Stones’ retrospective of Sinclair’s earlier work. Thus, Norton’s review of Fountain’s writing as ‘a manner of composition I’d left behind’ doubles as Sinclair’s self-conscious recognition of the text as an artefact produced from diverse inter-texts – including his own. In contrast to Sinclair’s dialogic doubling, Fountain’s double is of a monologic disposition. It is mechanical ‘echopraxis,’ a neologism coined in Dining on Stones which is defined as the ‘mindless repetition of another person’s moves and gestures.’ (192) Its mercenary dimension, enacted without regard for the integrity of the inter-text, is underscored with the epithet ‘slash-and-burn stylist.’ The monologic double possesses the text, drains it of its vitality. It entails necrosis, mortification. Fountain’s appropriation of Norton’s story is close to Fredric Jameson’s characterisation of pastiche which, he says, shuts down communication between texts (202). For Jameson, pastiche is the exemplary postmodern literary ‘style’. It is inert, static, a textual aporia. Jameson’s verdict is harsh: pastiche is cannibalism, text devouring text with an appetite that corresponds to the cupidity of consumer culture. Textual cannibalism vanquishes dialogism. It is the negation of the textual Other because cannibalism is only possible when the Other no longer exists. So how does Sinclair distinguish his doubling of his own text from Fountain’s monologic doubling as it is depicted in the novel’s narrative? A clue can be detected in one of the stories stolen by Fountain. ‘In Train for the Estuary’ is a re-writing of Dracula, and takes its cue from Karl Marx’s famous analogy between capitalism and vampirism: ‘capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.’ (342) Sinclair’s vampire doubles as an academic (or is it the other way round?) who obsessively and compulsively stalks her quarry/object of study, Joseph Conrad. First, she had learnt Polish. Then she tracked down the letters and initiated the slow, painstaking, much-revised process of translation. She travelled. Validated herself. Being alone in an unknown city, visiting libraries, enduring and enjoying bureaucratic obfuscation, sitting in bars, going to the cinema, allowed her to try on a new identity. She initiated correspondence with people she never met. She lied. She stole from Conrad. (Sinclair, White Goods, 58) The woman’s identity is leeched from the work of Conrad. Sinclair describes unethical activity in appropriating text: lying, stealing, sucking the blood from the corpus of Conrad. A compulsive need to maintain the ‘validation’ of this poached identity emerges, manifesting itself as addiction. The addict is an extreme embodiment of the (ir)rationality of consumption: consumed by the need to consume. The woman’s lust for text is commensurate with the twin desires—blood and real estate—of her precursor, Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Sinclair’s narrative of addiction doubles as a meta-critique on the compulsive desire to reproduce text and image that characterizes postmodern textualities as well as the apparatuses that produce them. The textual doubling in Dining on Stones, which is published by the multinational Penguin, seems to enact a reterritorialisation of a deterritorialised minor literature. However, Sinclair’s allegorical rewriting of the vampire legend and its subsequent inclusion in the mainstream novel’s narrative, reveal that capitalism’s doubles are simulacra in the Aristotelian sense because they are copies for which there is no original. The ostensible ‘original’ is the product of different material conditions and thus cannot be duplicated by the machinery of capitalism. The capitalist reproduction of text produced within an alternative cultural economy is an uncanny double (with an infinite capacity to be doubled over and over again) whose existence, like that of Sinclair’s academic in White Goods, is parasitical. The capitalist simulacrum necessitates that the original be destroyed, or at the very least, theorised out of existence so that restrictions based on its own premise of individual property rights can be circumvented. Postmodernism’s attendant theory is an over-determined repetition of poststructuralist tenets such as the instability of texts, the polysemous signifier and the impossibility of self as empirical subject. Images and meaning are no longer anchored, and free to be reproduced. Paradoxically, this proliferation of signification has the effect of constricting the originary text, compressing it under the burden of competing meanings, so that it is almost undetectable. Writes Brian Massumi (doubling Jean Baudrillard), ‘postmodernism stutters. In the absence of any gravitational pull to ground them, images accelerate and tend to run together. They become interchangeable. Any term can be substituted for any other: utter indetermination.’ The postmodern project’s effacement of the centred subject and the self has as its consequence, according to Jameson, a ‘waning of affect’ which is superseded ‘by a peculiar kind of euphoria.’ (200) The euphoria to which Jameson refers is not that of the poststructuralist textasy. Instead, it is postmodernism’s return to the idealism of Hegelian dialects, a euphoria achieved from the fusion of contradictions. Postmodernism’s doubles are a utopian attempt to synthesize antinomy and unity in a simultaneity that assimilates the fragmentation of modernity and the modern subject, with the cohesion of the commodity and its closed system of cultural logic. As such, the postmodern double is a rejection of modernist engagements with technical reproducibility. Modernism’s literary assemblages are, in Victor Shlovsky’s words, the laying bare of the device, an exposition of the seams through techniques such as collage, bricolage and montage. These linguistic (and at times visual) conjunctures of disparate elements do not attempt to elide material and thematic disjuncture. As Walter Benjamin stresses, this type of textual methodology has the potential, through the disruption of spatial and temporal logic and the creation of anachrony, to rupture the linear representations and formations of order favoured by capitalist political economies (Benjamin, ‘On the concept of history’). Postmodernism, which doubles (following Jameson’s formulation) as the cultural logic of late capitalism, reiterates that texts can be undone, and then reassembled, rearticulated anew, rendered useful to a commodity culture over and over again. Consequently, postmodernism’s copies are analogous, at the level of cultural production, to capitalism’s ceaseless appropriation of discourse, practice, and production. This is the alchemical project of capitalism. It strives to transform everything that it has doubled into the gold of the commodity. The inherent dangers of unrestrained reproduction are for Jameson exemplified in the treatment of Van Gogh’s Pair of Shoes (1885): If this copiously reproduced image is not to sink to the level of sheer decoration, it requires us to reconstruct some initial situation out of which the finished work emerges. Unless that situation—which has vanished into the past—is somehow mentally restored, the painting will remain an inert object, a reified end-product, and be unable to be grasped as a symbolic act in its own right, as praxis and as production. (194) Jameson’s reading of Van Gogh’s shoes reminds us of the fate of Alberto Korda’s 1960 photograph of revolutionary Che Guevara. Appropriated by the media, inscribed on T-shirts, mugs, even door mats, Che’s portrait is an emblem of the degradation Jameson describes. Like Van Gogh’s painting, Korda’s photograph was once a ‘symbolic act in its own right, as praxis and as production,’ saturated with the potential and spirit of revolution. Over time, the iconic image has leaked meaning. The signifying chain that anchored it to its original significance is broken each time it is reproduced and decontextualised through the process of commodification, until Che’s image is unrecognisable, a mere ornament. Refuting Benjamin’s concerns in ‘The Work of Art in its Age of Technical Reproducibility’ postmodern theory argues that technologies enabling reproducibility have led to a democratisation of text and textual production, and by extension, have liberated the multitude from a hierarchy of value that privileges the singular. Mass reproduction and the accompanying pressure for texts to be accessible results in altered attitudes regarding the preservation of intellectual property rights and ‘fair use’. In an economy of signs where use-value has become synonymous with exchange-value, then the text which has no exchange value due to it being ‘freely’ available—‘free’ in its double sense, as something exempt from restriction, or cost—can be copied without economic or ethical restraint, without permission. The quotation marks can be scrapped. According to postmodern logic, the double is a transposition with a legitimacy equalling, even rivalling the original. Clearly, Jameson’s lament that postmodernism represents ‘the end of the distinctive individual brushstroke (as symbolized by the emergent primacy of mechanical reproduction)’ cannot escape an association with elitism because technical reproducibility indubitably enables greater access. However, the utility of technologies of reproduction to the capitalist empire of structures and signs cannot be underestimated. It enables the ceaseless reproduction of ideologemes inscribed with the logic of capitalism; in other words, it enables capitalism to reproduce itself relentlessly. Postmodern cultural production is self-aware; it acknowledges its role as commodity and reproduces the ideology of the commodity form in its material form. In this manner, it functions as an ideologeme. Sinclair’s doubles cannot be understood according to the schema of postmodernism because he subverts postmodernism’s political and aesthetic symbiosis with capitalism. Moreover, the double in Sinclair travels beyond rehearsing a self-conscious hyphology (Barthes, 39). He defies postmodernism’s occultation of the author through his reiteration of the author’s authority over their own work. In contrast to the reductive manner postmodern texts duplicate other texts, Sinclair’s texts propose a typology of the double which advocates a dialogic duplication. Sinclair’s doubling refuses postmodernism’s return to the idealism of Hegelian dialects, and its synthesis of contradictions in the service of its unified material and aesthetic program: the commodification of literature. Consequently, Dining on Stones’ textual doubling is a critique of the epistemic shift to the monologic double which Jameson claims typifies a large portion of contemporary textual duplication. References Barthes, Roland. “Theory of the Text.” Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader. Ed. Robert Young. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. Benjamin, Walter. “On the Concept of History.” Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938-1940. Trans. by Edmund Jephcott. Eds. Michael W.Jennings & Howard Eiland. Cambridge, Mass. & London, England: Belknap Press, 2003. ––– . “The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproducibility.” Selected Writings: Volume 3, 1935-1938. Trans. by Edmund Jephcott. Eds. Michael W.Jennings & Howard Eiland. Cambridge, Mass. & London, England: Belknap Press, 2003. Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” The Jameson Reader. Eds. Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Massumi, Brian. “Realer than Real: The Simulacrum According to Deleuze and Guattari.” 12 May 2005. http://www.anu.edu.au/HRC/first_and_last/works/realer.htm>. Marx, Karl. Capital, Volume 1. Trans. by Ben Fowkes. Vintage Books edition. New York: Random House, 1976. Sinclair, Iain. Dark Lanthorns: Rodinsky’s A-Z. ––– . Dining on Stones. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2004. ––– . Lights Out for the Territory. London: Granta 1997. ––– . London Orbital. London: Granta, 2002. ––– . Rodinsky’s Room. London: Granta, 1998. ––– . View from My Window. Tonbridge: Worple Press, 2003. ––– . White Goods. Uppingham: Goldmark, 2002. Sinclair, Iain, and Dave McKean. Slow Chocolate Autopsy. London: Phoenix, 1997. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Seale, Kirsten. "Doubling: Capitalism and Textual Duplication." M/C Journal 8.3 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0507/08-seale.php>. APA Style Seale, K. (Jul. 2005) "Doubling: Capitalism and Textual Duplication," M/C Journal, 8(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0507/08-seale.php>.

This paper on cultural loops will begin slightly off-track, drawing on lessons that can be learned from a very basic non-terminating program, written in basic programming language: 100 Print "an infinite loop is" 110 Goto 100 Run an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is ... The output will continue looping through this cycle ad infinitum. Suppose that somebody has entered this program into a computer and entered a "Run" command as illustrated above. This somebody has then left the room and we enter a moment later. What we appear to be looking at is, strictly speaking, an "infinite loop," a programming sequence that has no condition for termination except for activation of the self same sequence. The screen has been filled with seemingly endless repetitions of the same string: "an infinite loop is" (or is it "is an infinite loop," or "loop is an infinite," or "infinite loop is an"?). In any case, we do not know that the loop is endless, nor even that this is a loop. Perhaps we could imagine that after so many repetitions the output will change. Perhaps we imagine that our absent programmer is really hard up for ways to pass the time and has spent countless hours entering repetitions of the same string into just one single line of programming: 100 Print "infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is an infinite loop is ... After several hours, perhaps the programmer finally tired of the exercise and finished off: ... an infinite loop is really a finite loop that thinks it can last forever and ever amen." For this matter, we might also wonder, as we watch the text scrolling up the screen, whether all of the preceding text has followed this exact pattern. Perhaps we just happened to stumble into the room at that moment, reflected in the current output, when our absent programmer decided to interrupt typing up a treatise on infinite loops with a banal illustration of what might constitute a loop of this sort. Wait for just a second or two more and surely the output will be different. Of course, in the present instance, we will be waiting for a very long time for any kind of change to appear in the output—how long is infinity again, does anybody know? Perhaps there is folly in trying to second guess the next piece of output produced by a program, particularly when the evidence on the screen provides no genuine clues to the structure of the program for which it is the output. At this point I hear the cries of dissent. How can I possibly say that the output of this program provides no clues to the structure of the program? After all, are we not faced here with output that, at the very least, appears to be endlessly repetitive? Without being drawn into a detailed discussion about the phenomenology of repetition, it is fair to say that, yes, when faced with the output on the screen as we enter the room, a reasonable expectation is that this output is several repetitions of a non-terminating series of repetitions. As each string is preceded and followed by the same string, the evidence suggests that the strings running off both the top and bottom of the screen have been preceded by and will be followed by the same string, according to the pattern. Yet I maintain that we can never be absolutely certain that the next thing that will appear on the screen will be yet another repetition of the same string. We cannot know the mind of the creator with sufficient certainty to predict this with perfect accuracy. Certainly, anybody who presumes that the string of strings on the screen is part of some non-repeating body of text is less likely to be right than the person who sees the pattern and guesses that the program for which this text is the output is an infinitely looping one. We need only to stop the program and bring it up on the screen to confirm the latter's suspicions to be correct. With this very strategy, however, we also illustrate the correctness of the claim I have made. In order to know with certainty what the program will be likely to output next, at some point we are required to terminate it and look at the program itself rather than its output. In other words, we need to stop the output if we want to know what will be put out next. The irony of this situation is of course that we cannot know from any series of outputs within an infinite loop that the loop is in fact infinite (or even that it is a loop), without first terminating the loop to look beyond its repeating output. An infinite loop is indeed a finite loop that we think can last forever and ever, amen. Douglas Hofstadter makes a similar point about the relationship between infinity and the finite parameters of strange loops in Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979). Strange loop phenomena emerge "whenever, by moving upwards (or downwards) through the levels of some hierarchical system, we unexpectedly find ourselves right back where we started" (10). A sense of paradox is associated with strange loops because they bring our notions of the finite and the infinite into conflict. Some object (A) always seems to contain or be the root cause of some other object (B) in a finite relationship, yet B also seems to contain or be the root cause of A, a paradox of infinite indeterminacy. Yet the paradox emerges because we are blinded from looking beyond what appears to be a fully self-contained system of determinations, even if we are unable to resolve the paradox of whether A determines B or vice versa. As we move upwards or downwards through the hierarchies in the system, we presume that we will move closer to its limit in either direction, yet we find ourselves perpetually drawn to reproduce the same steps within the hierarchy. For this reason, Hofstadter also refers to strange loops as tangled hierarchies (passim). The tangle is what draws us to repeat the same system of determinations endlessly, but Hofstadter points out that any system includes a protected or "inviolate level" which always remains "unassailable by the rules on other levels, not matter how tangled their interactions may be among themselves" (688). In the work of M.C. Escher, in particular, Hofstadter finds the most powerful visual realisations of strange loop phenomena: in Ascending and Descending, monks walk up and down staircases that loop around to join each other; in Waterfall, water falls into a pool that leads to an aqueduct flowing down to the waterfall that empties into the same pool; and in Drawing Hands, there are two hands that appear to be drawing each other. In each of these cases, however, the resolution of the apparent paradox is in realising the hand of Escher at work beyond the hierarchy: [In Drawing Hands,] levels which ordinarily are seen as hierarchical—that which draws and that which is drawn—turn back on each other, creating a Tangled Hierarchy. But the theme ... is borne out, of course, since behind it all lurks the undrawn but drawing hand of M.C. Escher, creator of both LH and RH. (689) The non-terminating program with which I began this paper provides a variation on this theme, since the output provides evidence of an infinite loop lurking in the structure of the program. A termination of the loop to look beyond the output will confirm this. Yet beyond the program is of course the programmer and, not necessarily the same person, the person who entered the "run" command to execute the program. In other words, there are several inviolate levels to consider in dealing with computer programs. The program itself contains the inviolate rules determining repetitions in the output. Beyond the program is the programmer. We might also consider the programming language and limitations of the technology mediating between the programmer and the program that is written, but I want to press ahead expeditiously. Beyond the programmer, there is also an executor, somebody who activates the program, making possible the generation of output. Perhaps we could refer to these two inviolate levels as those of the creator and the generator. In his examination of the strange loop of Escher's Drawing Hands, Hofstadter points out the hand of the creator lurking within the inviolate level beyond the frame of the picture. We might add that as a work of art, the picture is not a free-floating object presented to us in any unmediated way. The image circulates within an array of cultural institutions and contexts, all of which mediates our access to it, and which might be thought of here as the conditions for the generation of the image. Consider, for example, that we had never seen Drawing Hands before reading Hofstadter's book. We would have to take Hofstadter's word on the matter, that this drawing had been done by this Dutchman named Escher. Hofstadter—or, to be more precise, the book which carries his name as its authorial signature—has made possible our access to the image. Furthermore, it is within the context of a discussion about strange loops and such matters that we are asked to look at the image. Now, suppose we were to put the book down and think little of it for some time, perhaps because we are not very mathematically minded and we sort of got muddled up a bit by some of the other parts of Hofstadter's book. Years later, we find ourselves in an art gallery, and there is a special exhibit of Escher's work. We stumble upon the original, stare at it for a moment, then realise that we have seen it before. Suddenly, Hofstadter's discussion springs to mind and we are reminded of strange loops and we think smugly, ah, this is no paradox, since the hand of Escher existing at an inviolate level has drawn both the left and right hands which appear to be drawing each other. This situation leads to a strange cultural loop, since our reception of an original artwork has been already shaped by something we have seen elsewhere, in this instance, a copy of that exact same artwork. The point is of course that cultural products circulate within precisely just these sorts of loops all of the time. Indeed, I maintain that such loops constitute culture. Allow me to explain. What makes an object an example of a culture is its capacity to resonate with features that it has in common with other objects created within the same culture. Words such as genre, movement, poetics or style (among others) refer to ways in which original works of art remain tied together within structures of repetition of core features. In a similar vein, archaeologists excavating a dig and finding numerous pots will look for repeated patterns, shapes, and techniques to determine cultural affiliations. The strange loop emerges around the vexed question of origins: is a culture made up of repeated patterns on pots, or does a culture determine repetitions of patterns on pots? At this point it should be pertinent to bring cultural theory into play. According to the theoretical anthropology developed by Clifford Geertz in The Interpretation of Cultures (1975), culture can be defined as "a stratified hierarchy of meaningful structures" (7). The ethnographic method that he calls "thick description" is designed to enable anthropologists to sort out these structures from the concrete complexes of behaviour that are observed in the field. He takes as a reference point a question posed by the philosopher Gilbert Ryle: when is the closing of one eyelid a wink and when is it a twitch? As Stephen Greenblatt summarises the point, the distinction is in the shared code, a distinction that "is secured by the element of volition that is not itself visibly manifest in the contraction of the eyelid; a thin description would miss it altogether" (Practicing 23). To compare this situation with the situation I described earlier, we can imagine thick description as a method for second guessing cultural output by moving from the perceived pattern to expectations about the mind and method of the creator. The thickness of the description inheres in its intent to take fuller account of the conditions for the generation of this cultural output. Yet in practice, the method sometimes seems to rigidify. For example, Greenblatt's own literary criticism—referred to most commonly as New Historicism, although he himself prefers the name Cultural Poetics—is often accused of flattening out culture. The method typically proceeds by considering together a literary text and the text of some contemporary domestic circumstance or event (a legal extract, a travel journal, a royal decree or such like), so as to find patterns pointing to the system of meanings underlining both texts. Being unable to terminate the infinite loop of cultural production, whereupon all texts echo all other texts in something akin to what Michel Foucault called the "fantasia of the library," the new historicist tries to work backward from the conventions of textual production to the cultural matrix beneath. While Greenblatt frequently argues that a cultural poetics recognises the agency of the individuals who produce these texts, the core issues of methodology have at base been recently defined in terms of the inviolability of the base level of determination—the archive: If every trace of a culture is part of a massive text, how can one identify the boundaries of these units? What is the appropriate scale? There are, we conclude, no abstract, purely theoretical answers to these questions. To a considerable extent the units are given by the archive itself—that is, we almost always receive works whose boundaries have already been defined by the technology and generic assumptions of the original makers. (Practicing 14) Here again the tension emerges between the infinite and the finite in the attempt to come to terms with unidentifiable boundaries of the units of culture. The resolution, curiously enough, is a loop at the core of Greenblatt's cultural poetics: the structure of the archive determines for us the units of perception within which we view traces of culture, to determine the structure of the archive. Thus, from the perspective of Greenblatt's cultural poetics, the stratified hierarchy of meaningful structures constituting culture is a tangled hierarchy. Lurking at the inviolate level is, of course, Greenblatt himself. Greenblatt, Geertz and many others who practice these methods for reading culture as a text recognise this inviolate level openly. In the introduction to his landmark work, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980), Greenblatt confesses, "the resonance and centrality we find in our small group of texts and their authors is our invention" (6). This confession leads me one step closer to my final point here. Even as the method of cultural poetics tends at times to flatten culture out to nodes of production arising from a single, static archive, and threatens to forget the agency of cultural producers, the method itself relies entirely on the creative and constitutive role of the observer. Greenblatt's literary and cultural criticism functions in a way that bears striking resemblance to the flights of fancy we undertook in the opening passages of this paper, looking at a pattern of output and trying to imagine what the structure of production would be like behind this output. Like the archaeologists staring at patterns on pots, cultural theorists could sometimes be forgiven for overlooking the question of agency altogether. One of the reasons for this is that we tend to think of agency in terms of a capacity to effect change, rather than in terms of the repetition of existing patterns and structures. "Structure" and "agency" might seem to be mutually opposed terms in discussions of cultural production. Yet the lesson we might be able to learn from these discussions of strange loops and cultural production is that agency is just as necessary to shaping the cultural matrix as it is to the realisation of this system in the production of culture. When we find patterns, we are exercising the wholly productive force of the imagination. Beyond creators, generators, programs, archives and so on, there is the observer whose capacity for making sense of texts is what ultimately gives to culture its contours, patterns and limits. Furthermore—what remains to be discussed in another forum—this constitutive capacity is something that is present in everyday practice, not simply in the realms of anthropology or cultural studies. The person sitting in front of the television, for example, is in much the same situation as when we stared at the computer screen waiting to see if the output would change. The decisions we make about whether we recognise patterns, locate meaningful structures and so on are similar to cultural reception or consumption, which I maintain is as productive as creation or generation. It is the decisions we make that insinuate infinity when we observe a loop. As we observed at the outset here, the infinity of the loop is not inherent in the structure of the output but in the way we choose to make sense of the patterns, what we imagined to have preceded the present text and to be likely to come after. To illustrate the comparison between observation of an infinite loop and agency in the field of cultural production, in conclusion, we need only to go back again to where we started here, but I leave that task up to the reader. References Foucault, Michel. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Trans. D.F.Bouchard and S.Simon. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977. Gallagher, Catherine and Stephen Greenblatt. Practicing New Historicism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. London: Hutchinson, 1975. Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. ---. Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992. Hofstadter, Douglas R. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. Sussex: Harvester Press, 1979. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Johnson, Laurie. "Agency" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.4 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/agency.php>. Chicago Style Johnson, Laurie, "Agency" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 4 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/agency.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Johnson, Laurie. (2002) Agency. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(4). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/agency.php> ([your date of access]).

When the National Trust was established in 1895 its founders, Canon Rawnsley, Sir Robert Hunter and Octavia Hill, were, as Cannadine notes, “primarily concerned with preserving open spaces of outstanding natural beauty which were threatened with development or spoliation.” This was because, like Ruskin, Morris and “many of their contemporaries, they believed that the essence of Englishness was to be found in the fields and hedgerows, not in the suburbs and slums” (Cannadine 227). It was important to protect these sites of beauty and historical interest from development not only for what they were but for what they purportedly represented—an irreplaceable repository of the nation’s “spiritual values”, and thus a vital antidote to the “base materialism” of the day. G.M. Trevelyan, who I am quoting here, noted in two pieces written on behalf of the Trust in the 1920s and 30s, that the “inexorable rise of bricks and mortar” and the “full development of motor traffic” were laying waste to the English countryside. In the face of this assault on England’s heartland, the National Trust provided “an ark of refuge” safeguarding the nation’s cherished physical heritage and preserving its human cargo from the rising waters of materialism and despair (qtd. in Cannadine 231-2).Despite the extension of the road network and increasing private ownership of cars (up from 200,000 registrations in 1918 to “well over one million” in 1930), physical distance and economic hardship denied the majority of the urban population access to the countryside (Taylor 217). For the urban working classes recently or distantly displaced from the land, the dream of a return to rural roots was never more than a fantasy. Ford Madox Ford observed that “the poor and working classes of the towns never really go back” (Ford 58).Through the later nineteenth century the rural nostalgia once most prevalent among the working classes was increasingly noted as a feature of middle class sensibility. Better educated, with more leisure time and money at their disposal, these sentimental ruralists furnished a ready market for a new consumer phenomenon—the commodification of the English countryside and the packaging of the values it notionally embodied. As Valentine Cunningham observes, this was not always an edifying spectacle. By the late 1920s, “the terrible sounds of ‘Ye Olde England’ can already be heard, just off-stage, knocking together its thatched wayside stall where plastic pixies, reproduction beer-mugs, relics of Shakespeare and corn-dollies would soon be on sale” (Cunningham 229). Alongside the standard tourist tat, and the fiction and poetry that romanticised the rural world, a new kind of travel writing emerged around the turn of the century. Through an analysis of early-twentieth century notions of Englishness, this paper considers how the north struggled to find a place in H.V. Morton’s In Search of England (1927).In Haunts of Ancient Peace (1901), the Poet Laureate, Alfred Austin, described a journey through “Old England” as a cultural pilgrimage in quest of surviving vestiges of the nation’s essential identity, “or so much of it as is left” (Austin 18). Austin’s was an early example of what had, by the 1920s and 30s become a “boom market … in books about the national character, traditions and antiquities, usually to be found in the country” (Wiener 73). Longmans began its “English Heritage” series in 1929, introduced by the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, with volumes on “English humour, folk song and dance, the public school, the parish church, [and] wild life”. A year later Batsford launched its series of books on “English Life” with volumes featuring “the countryside, Old English household life, inns, villages, and cottages” (Wiener 73). There was an outpouring of books with an overtly conservationist agenda celebrating journeys through or periods of residence in the countryside, many of them written by “soldiers like Henry Williamson and Edmund Blunden, who returned from the First War determined to preserve the rural England they’d known” (Cunningham 229; Blunden, Face, England; Roberts, Pilgrim, Gone ; Williamson). In turn, these books engendered an efflorescence of critical analyses of the construction of England (Hamilton; Haddow; Keith; Cavaliero; Gervais; Giles and Middleton; Westall and Gardiner).By the 1920s it was clear that a great many people thought they knew what England was, where it might be found, and if threatened, which parts of it needed to be rescued in order to safeguard the survival of its essential identity. By the same point, there were large numbers who felt, in Patrick Wright’s words, that “Some areas of the nation had been lost forever and in these no one should expect to find the traditional nation at all” (Wright 87).A key guide to the nation’s sacred sites in this period, an inventory of their relics, and an illustration of how its lost regions might be rescued for or erased from its cultural map, was provided in H.V. Morton’s In Search of England (1927). Initially published as a series of articles in the Daily Express in 1926, In Search of England went through nine editions in the two and a half years after its appearance in book form in 1927. With sales in excess of a million copies, as John Brannigan notes, the book went through a further twenty editions by 1943, and has remained continuously in print since (Brannigan).In his introduction Morton proposes In Search of England is simply “the record of a motor-car journey round England … written without deliberation by the roadside, on farmyard walls, in cathedrals, in little churchyards, on the washstands of country inns, and in many another inconvenient place” (Morton vii). As C.R. Perry notes, “This is a happy image, but also a misleading one” (Perry 434) for there was nothing arbitrary about Morton’s progress. Even a cursory glance at the map of his journey confirms, the England that Morton went in search of was overwhelmingly rural or coastal, and embodied in the historic villages and ancient towns of the Midlands or South.Morton’s biographer, Michael Bartholomew suggests that the “nodal points” of Morton’s journey are the “cathedral cities” (Bartholomew 105).Despite claims to the contrary, his book was written with deliberation and according to a specific cultural objective. Morton’s purpose was not to discover his homeland but to confirm a vision that he and millions of others cherished. He was not in search of England so much as reassuring himself and his readers that in spite of the depredations of the factory and the motor vehicle, it was still out there. These aims determined Morton’s journey; how long he spent in differing parts, what he recorded, and how he presented landscapes, buildings, people and material culture.Morton’s determination to celebrate England as rural and ancient needed to negotiate the journey north into an industrial landscape better known for its manufacturing cities, mining and mill towns, and the densely packed streets of the poor and working classes. Unable to either avoid or ignore this north, Morton needed to settle upon a strategy of passing through it without disturbing his vision of the rural idyll. Narratively, Morton’s touring through the south and west of the country is conducted at a gentle pace. In my 1930 edition of the text, it takes 185 of the book’s 280 pages to bring him from London via the South Coast, Cornwall, the Cotswolds and the Welsh marches, to Chester. The instant Morton crosses the Lancashire border, his bull-nosed Morris accelerates through the extensive northern counties in a mere thirty pages: Warrington to Carlisle (with a side trip to Gretna Green), Carlisle to Durham, and Durham to Lincoln. The final sixty-five pages return to the more leisurely pace of the south and west through Norfolk and the East Midlands, before the journey is completed in an unnamed village somewhere between Stratford upon Avon and Warwick. Morton spends 89 per cent of the text in the South and Midlands (66 per cent and 23 per cent respectively) with only 11 per cent given over to his time in the north.If, as Genette has pointed out, narrative deceleration results in the descriptive pause, it is no coincidence that this is the recurring set piece of Morton’s treatment of the south and west as opposed to the north. His explorations take dwelling moments on river banks and hill tops, in cathedral closes and castle ruins to honour the genius loci and imagine earlier times. On Plymouth Hoe he sees, in his mind’s eye, Sir Walter Raleigh’s fleet set sail to take on the Armada; at Tintagel it is Arthur, wild and Celtic, scaling the cliffs, spear in hand; at Buckler’s Hard amid the rotting slipways he imagines the “stout oak-built ships which helped to found the British Empire”, setting out on their journeys of conquest (Morton 39). At the other extreme, Genette observes, that narrative acceleration produces ellipsis, where details are omitted in order to render a more compact and striking expression. It is the principle of ellipsis, of selective omission, which compresses the geography of Morton’s journey through the north with the effect of shaping reader experiences. Morton hurries past the north’s industrial areas—shuddering at the sight of smoke or chimneys and averting his gaze from factory and slum.As he crosses the border from Cheshire into Lancashire, Morton reflects that “the traveller enters Industrial England”—not that you would know it from his account (Morton 185). Heading north towards the Lake District, he steers a determined path between “red smoke stacks” rising on one side and an “ominous grey haze” on the other, holding to a narrow corridor of rural land where, to his relief, he observes men “raking hay in a field within gunshot of factory chimneys” (Morton 185-6). These redolent, though isolated, farmhands are of greater cultural moment than the citadels of industry towering on either side of them. While the chimneys might symbolise the nation’s economic potency, the farmhands embody the survival of its essential cultural and moral qualities. In an allusion to the Israelites’ passage through the Red Sea from the Book of Exodus, the land that the workers tend holds back the polluted tide of industry, furnishing relief from the factory and the slum, granting Morton safe passage through the perils of modernity and into the Promised Land–or at least the Lake District. In Morton’s view this green belt is not only more essentially English than trade and industry, it is also expresses a nobler and more authentic Englishness.The “great industrial new-rich cities of northern England—vast and mighty as they are,” Morton observes, “fall into perspective as mere black specks against the mighty background of history and the great green expanse of fine country which is the real North of England” (Morton 208). Thus, the rural land between Manchester and Liverpool expands into a sea of green as the great cities shrink on the horizon, and the north is returned to its origins.What Morton cannot speed past or ignore, what he is compelled or chooses to confront, he transforms, through the agency of history, into something that he and England can bear to own. Tempted into Wigan by its reputation as a comic nowhere-land, a place whose name conjured a thousand music hall gags, Morton confesses that he had expected to find there another kind of cliché, “the apex of the world’s pyramid of gloom … dreary streets and stagnant canals and white-faced Wigonians dragging their weary steps along dull streets haunted by the horror of the place in which they are condemned to live” (Morton 187).In the process of naming what he dreads, Morton does not describe Wigan: he exorcises his deepest fears about what it might hold and offers an incantation intended to hold them at bay. He “discovers” Wigan is not the industrial slum but “a place which still bears all the signs of an old-fashioned country town” (Morton 188). Morton makes no effort to describe Wigan as it is, any more than he describes the north as a whole: he simply overlays them with a vision of them as they should be—he invents the Wigan and the north that he and England need.Having surveyed parks and gardens, historical monuments and the half-timbered mock-Tudor High Street, Morton returns to his car and the road where, with an audible sigh of relief, he finds: “Within five minutes of notorious Wigan we were in the depth of the country,” and that “on either side were fields in which men were making hay” (Morton 189).In little more than three pages he passes from one set of haymakers, south of town, to another on its north. The green world has all but smoothed over the industrial eyesore, and the reader, carefully chaperoned by Morton, can pass on to the Lake District having barely glimpsed the realities of industry and urbanism, reassured that if this is the worst that the north has to show then the rural heartland and the essential identity it sustains are safe. Paradoxically, instead of invalidating his account, Morton’s self-evident exclusions and omissions seem only to have fuelled its popularity.For readers of the Daily Express in the months leading up to and immediately after the General Strike of 1926, the myth of England that Morton proffered, of an unspoilt village where old values and traditional hierarchies still held true, was preferable to the violently polarised urban battlefields that the strike had revealed. As the century progressed and the nation suffered depression, war, and a steady decline in its international standing, as industry, suburban sprawl and the irresistible spread of motorways and traffic blighted the land, Morton’s England offered an imagined refuge, a real England that somehow, magically resisted the march of time.Yet if it was Morton’s triumph to provide England with a vision of its ideal spiritual home, it was his tragedy that this portrait of it hastened the devastation of the cultural survivals he celebrated and sought to preserve: “Even as the sense of idyll and peace was maintained, the forces pulling in another direction had to be acknowledged” (Taylor 74).In his introduction to the 1930 edition of In Search of England Morton approvingly acknowledged that a new enthusiasm for the nation’s history and heritage was abroad and that “never before have so many people been searching for England.” In the next sentence he goes on to laud the “remarkable system of motor-coach services which now penetrates every part of the country [and] has thrown open to ordinary people regions which even after the coming of the railways were remote and inaccessible” (Morton vii).Astonishingly, as the waiting charabancs roared their engines and the village greens of England enjoyed the last hours of their tranquillity, Morton somehow failed to make the obvious connection between these unique cultural and social phenomena or take any measure of their potential consequences. His “motoring pastoral” did more than alert the barbarians to the existence of the nation’s hidden treasures, as David Matless notes it provided them with a route map, itinerary and behavioural guide for their pillages (Matless 64; Peach; Batsford).Yet while cultural preservationists wrung their hands in horror at the advent of the day-tripper slouching towards Barnstaple, for Morton this was never a cause for concern. The nature of his journey and the form of its representation demonstrate that the England he worshipped was more an imaginary than a physical space, an ideal whose precise location no chart could fix and no touring party defile. ReferencesAustin, Alfred. Haunts of Ancient Peace. London: Macmillan, 1902.Bartholomew, Michael. In Search of H.V. Morton. London: Methuen, 2004.Batsford, Harry. How to See the Country. London: B.T. Batsford, 1940.Blunden, Edmund. The Face of England: In a Series of Occasional Sketches. London: Longmans, 1932.———. English Villages. London: Collins, 1942.Brannigan, John. “‘England Am I …’ Eugenics, Devolution and Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts.” The Palgrave Macmillan Literature of an Independent England: Revisions of England, Englishness and English Literature. Eds. Claire Westall and Michael Gardiner. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.Cannadine, David. In Churchill’s Shadow: Confronting the Past in Modern Britain. London: Penguin, 2002.Cavaliero, Glen. The Rural Tradition in the English Novel 1900-1939. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977.Cunningham, Valentine. British Writers of the Thirties. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.Ford, Ford Madox. The Heart of the Country: A Survey of a Modern Land. London: Alston Rivers, 1906.Gervais, David. Literary Englands. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.Giles, J., and T. Middleton, eds. Writing Englishness. London: Routledge, 1995.Haddow, Elizabeth. “The Novel of English Country Life, 1900-1930.” Dissertation. London: University of London, 1957.Hamilton, Robert. W.H. Hudson: The Vision of Earth. New York: Kennikat Press, 1946.Keith, W.J. Richard Jefferies: A Critical Study. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1965.Lewis, Roy, and Angus Maude. The English Middle Classes. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1949.Matless, David. Landscape and Englishness. London: Reaktion Books, 1998.Morris, Margaret. The General Strike. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.Morton, H.V. In Search of England. London: Methuen, 1927.Peach, H. Let Us Tidy Up. Leicester: The Dryad Press, 1930.Perry, C.R. “In Search of H.V. Morton: Travel Writing and Cultural Values in the First Age of British Democracy.” Twentieth Century British History 10.4 (1999): 431-56.Roberts, Cecil. Pilgrim Cottage. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1933.———. Gone Rustic. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1934.Taylor, A.J.P. England 1914-1945. The Oxford History of England XV. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.Taylor, John. War Photography: Realism in the British Press. London: Routledge, 1991.Wiener, Martin. English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.Williamson, Henry. The Village Book. London: Jonathan Cape, 1930.Wright, Patrick. A Journey through Ruins: A Keyhole Portrait of British Postwar Life and Culture. London: Flamingo, 1992.

Michael Haneke’s film Caché tells the story of a bourgeois family in peril. The comfortable lives of the Laurents—husband Georges (Daniel Auteuil), wife Anne (Juliette Binoche), and teenage son Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky)—are disrupted when surveillance tapes of their home and private conversations are delivered to them anonymously. Ostensibly Caché sits in a familiar generic framework: the thriller narrative of a family under threat is reminiscent of films such as The Desperate Hours (1955), Cape Fear (1962), and Straw Dogs (1971). The weight of outside forces causes tension within the family dynamic and Georges spends much of the film playing detective (unravelling clues from the tapes and from his past). This framing draws us in; it is presumed that the mystery of the family’s harassment will finally be solved, and yet Haneke’s treatment of this material undermines viewer expectations. This paper examines the process of suspicious reading when applied to a film that encourages such a method, only to thwart the viewer’s attempts to come to a definitive meaning. I argue that Caché plays with generic expectations in order to critique the interpretive process, and consider what implications this has for suspicious readers. Caché positions us as detective. Throughout the film we follow Georges’s investigation to unravel the film’s central enigma: Who is sending the tapes? The answer to this, however, is never revealed. Instead viewers are left with more questions than answers; it seems that for every explanation there is a circumventing intricacy. This lack of narrative closure within the surface framework of a psychological thriller has proven fertile ground for critics, scholars, and home viewers alike as they painstakingly try to ascertain the elusive culprit. Character motives are scrutinised, performances are analysed, specific shots are dissected, and various theories have been canvassed. The viewer becomes ensnared in the hermeneutics of suspicion, a critical reading strategy that literary theorist Rita Felski has compared to the hard-boiled crime story, a scenario in which critic becomes detective, and text becomes criminal suspect to be “scrutinized, interrogated, and made to yield its hidden secrets” (224). Like Georges, the viewer becomes investigator, sifting through the available evidence in the vain hope that with scrupulous attention the film will surrender its mystery.Of course, Haneke is not unique in his withholding of a film’s enigma. David Lynch’s surreal neo-noir Lost Highway (1997) and Mulholland Drive (2001) have garnered a similar response and continue to be debated. Film scholar Mark Cousins compares Caché’s reception at Cannes to other landmark film and television examples:Where Dallas made people ask ‘who?’, Twin Peaks ‘what?’, the genre-bending films of the last decade ‘how?’ and The Crying Game was about the implications of the answer, Caché’s conversational buzz was more circular. Yes, we asked ‘who?’ Then, when it was clear this question was not answered by the film, we considered why it was not answered. (225–6)Felski’s meditation on the hermeneutics of suspicion touches on this issue, considering literary texts as preemptive of our mistrust. Extending Felski’s reasoning here as applicable to other forms of cultural expression, I would like to argue that Caché is a film that “matches and exceeds the critic’s own vigilance” for it is already involved in “subverting the self-evident, challenging the commonplace, [and] relentlessly questioning idées fixes and idées recus” (Felski 217). Caché challenges fixed and received ideas pertaining to audience expectations of the thriller film, subverting generic conventions that traditionally see the enigma resolved, the culprit apprehended, and order restored. More than simply refusing closure, Caché casts doubt on the very clues it offers up as evidence. Such a text performs “a meta-commentary on the traps of interpretation, a knowing anticipation and exposure of all possible hermeneutic blunders” (Felski 217). Throughout her essay, Felski highlights the lures and pitfalls of suspicious reading practices. Felski warns that attempts to gain mastery over texts by drawing to light purportedly obscured meanings are often as concerned with self-congratulatory demonstrations of skill in drawing hitherto unmade connections as they are with the texts themselves (230). While I do not wish to endorse suspicious reading as an unproblematic approach, the present paper considers what happens when readers encounter a text that seemingly cannot be approached in any other way. Unlike the realist literary narratives and mystery stories drawn on by Felski, Caché resists a manifest meaning in both form and content, making it nearly impossible for viewers not to search for latent meaning.So where are suspicious readers left when the texts interrogated refuse to bend to the demands placed on them? This is the question I will be examining in the remainder of this paper through the questions Caché poses and the care it takes in ensuring its enigmatic quality. I will proceed by breaking down what I believe to be the three possible avenues of response—Caché as impossible puzzle, inconclusive puzzle, or wrong puzzle—and their implications.I The Impossible Puzzle Caché opens with a static frame long take of a Parisian residential street. This could be mistaken for a still image until a pedestrian bustles past. A woman leaves her house centre frame. A cyclist turns the corner. “Well?” a male voice intones. “Nothing,” a female replies. The voices come from off-screen, and soon after the image is interrupted by fast forward lines, revealing that what we have been watching is not an image of the present moment but a video cassette of time already elapsed; the voices belong to our protagonists, Georges and Anne, commenting on its content and manipulating its playback. From the opening moments it becomes clear that we cannot be certain of what we are seeing or when we are seeing it.This presents an intriguing tension between form and content that complicates our attempts to gather evidence. Haneke pares back style in a manner reminiscent of the films of Robert Bresson or the work of the Italian neo-realists. Caché’s long takes, naturalistic lighting, and emphasis on the everyday suggest a realist aesthetic; the viewer can invest faith in these images because they ascribe to a familiar paradigm, one in which artifice is apparently minimal. This notion that a realist aesthetic equates to straightforward images is at odds, however, with both the thriller narrative (in which solutions must be concealed before they can be uncovered) and Haneke’s constant undermining of the ontology of the image; throughout the film, viewers will be disoriented by Haneke’s manipulation of time and space with unclear or retroactive distinctions between past, present, video, dream, memory, and reality.An additional contention might be the seemingly impossible placement of the hidden camera. In the same tape, Georges leaves the house and walks towards the camera, unaware of it. The shot indicates the camera must be elevated in the street, and at one point it appears that Georges is looking right at it. A later recording takes place in the apartment of Georges’s suspect, Majid. Viewers are given ample opportunity to scour the mise en scène to find what apparently is not there. Perhaps the camera is just too well hidden. But if this is not the case and we can neither locate nor conceive of the camera’s placement because it simply cannot be there, this would seem to break the rules of the game. If we are to formulate theories as to the culprit at large, what good is our evidence if it is unreliable? Viewers could stop here and conclude that a puzzle without a solution amounts to a film without a point. “Well?” Georges asks in the film’s opening. “Nothing,” Anne replies. Case closed. Short of giving up on a solution, one might conclude (as Antoine Doinel has) that those looking within the film for a perpetrator are looking in the wrong place. When the motives or opportunities of on-screen characters do not add up, perhaps it is Haneke one should turn to. Those familiar with Haneke’s earlier film Funny Games (1997) will know he is not afraid to break the tacit rules by which we suspend our disbelief if there is a point to be made. Film scholar David Sorfa concludes it is in fact the audience who send the tapes; Caché’s narrative is fuelled by the desire of viewers who want to see a film (102). Tempting though these solutions might be (Georges does not see the camera because he is a fictional character in a film unaware of its creator), as critic Roger Ebert has pointed out, such theories render both the film’s content, and any analysis of it, without purpose: It introduces a wild card. It essentially means that no analysis of the film is relevant, because nothing need make sense and no character actions need be significant. Therefore, the film would have the appearance of a whodunit but with no who and no dunnit. (“Caché: A Riddle”)The Caché as impossible puzzle avenue leaves the suspicious reader without reason to engage. If there can be no reward for our efforts, we are left without incentive. Alternately, if we conclude that Haneke is but the puppet master sadistically toying with his characters, we are left at a similar juncture; our critical enquiry has all the consequence of the trite “but it was all a dream…” scenario. “Well?” “Nothing.” I suspect there is more to Caché than that. A film so explicit in its stimulation of suspicious reading seems to merit our engagement. However, this is not to say that our attention will be satisfied with the neatly tied up solution we might expect. II The Inconclusive Puzzle When, one evening, Pierrot does not come home as expected, Georges and Anne conclude the boy has been kidnapped. They interpret their son’s absence as an escalation in the “campaign of terror” that had hitherto consisted of surveillance videos, odd phone calls, and childlike but portent drawings. With police assistance, Georges goes to confront his suspect, Majid. An Algerian boy from his childhood, now middle aged and disadvantaged because of lies Georges told as a child, Majid has already (quite convincingly) denied any knowledge of the tapes. At the door they meet Majid’s son who is equally perplexed at the accusation of kidnapping. The pair are arrested and an exhausted Georges returns home to explain the situation to his wife:Georges: So now they’re both in the cage for the night.Anne: And then?Georges: Then they’ll let them go. If there’s no proof, they have to. There’s suspicion, nothing more.The next day a sullen Pierrot returns home, having stayed the night at a friend’s without notifying his parents. His clear disdain for his mother is revealed as he rejects her affection and accuses her of having an affair. Pierrot likewise treats his father with disinterest, raising viewer suspicion that he might have a motive for tormenting his parents with the videotapes. Pierrot is just one cog in the family’s internal mechanism of suspicion, however. Whether or not Anne is actually having an affair can only be speculated; she denies it, but other scenes open the way to our suspicion. Anne is rightly suspicious of Georges’s reluctance to be open about his past as his proclivity to lie is gradually revealed. In short, Haneke deliberately layers the film with complexity and ambiguity; numerous characters could be implicated, and many questions are raised but few are answered.This suggests that suspicious readers might have recourse to Haneke as author of the text. Haneke, however, celebrates Caché’s ambiguity and his decision to leave the film open: “The truth is always hidden…that’s how it is in the real world. We never, ever know what the truth is. There are a thousand versions of the truth. It depends on your point of view” (Haneke). In interview, Haneke’s language also raises suspicion. At times he speaks knowingly (refusing to reveal important dialogue that occurs in the film’s final shot—an extreme long shot, the characters too distant to be heard), and at other times he seems as uncertain as his viewers (commenting on Anne’s denial of an affair, Haneke remarks “I believe her because she plays it very seriously. But you never know”) (Haneke).Despite this reluctance to offer explanations, Haneke’s status as an auteur with recurring concerns and an ever-developing vision prompts suspicious readers to evaluate Caché in light of his greater oeuvre. Those suspecting Pierrot of wanting to punish his parents might find their theory bolstered by Benny’s Video (1992), Haneke’s film about a teenage boy who murders a friend and then turns in his parents to the police for helping him cover it up. Furthermore, Das Weiße Band (The White Ribbon, 2009) is set in a small German village on the eve of World War One and the narrative strongly suggests the town’s children are responsible for a series of malicious crimes. Whilst malign children in Haneke’s other works cannot explain Caché’s mystery, his oeuvre provides a greater context in which to consider the film, and regenerates discussion as viewers look for patterns in the subject matter Haneke chooses to explore. Regarding Caché as an inconclusive puzzle shifts the emphasis from a neatly packaged solution to a renewable process of discovery. To suggest that there is an answer to be found in the text, a culprit who escapes apprehension but is at least present to be caught, gives suspicious readers cause to engage and re-engage. It is to assume that the film is not without a point. Close attention may reward us with meaningful nuances that colour our interpretation. Haneke’s obsessive attention to detail also seems to suggest that nothing on screen is accidental or arbitrary, that our concentration is warranted, and that active viewing is a necessity even if our expectations and desires for closure may not be granted.Caché ends without revealing its secret. Georges’s suspect Majid has committed suicide (perhaps due to the trauma dredged up by Georges’s accusations), Majid’s son has confronted Georges at his work place (“I wondered how it feels, a man’s life on your conscience?”), and Georges has refused any responsibility for his actions in the distant and recent past. Of the film’s conclusion, cinema theorist Martine Beugnet writes:In the end […] we watch him draw the curtains, take a sleeping pill and go to bed: an emphatic way of signifying the closure of an episode, the return to normality—the conclusion of the film. Yet the images ‘refuse’ to comply: behind the closing credits, the questioning gaze not only persists but affirms its capacity to reinvent itself. (230)The images Beugnet is referring to are the two final shots, which are both static long takes. The first is an extreme long shot, taken from the darkness of a barn into the bright courtyard of the family estate of Georges’s childhood. A child (Majid) is forcibly removed from the home and taken away in a car (presumably to an orphanage due to the lies told by a jealous Georges). This shot is followed by the film’s closing shot, another extreme long shot, this time of the front steps of Pierrot’s school. The frame is cluttered with children and parents, and our eyes are not directed anywhere in particular. Some viewers will notice Pierrot chatting with Majid’s son (a potentially revealing conversation that cannot be heard), others will not see the two young men hidden in the crowd. Eventually the credits roll over this image.Georges’s attempts to shut out the world seem undermined by these images, as Beugnet writes they “‘refuse’ to comply” to this notion of conclusion. Instead of bringing closure to the narrative, they raise more questions. What and when are they? One cannot be sure. The first shot may be a dream or a memory; its placement after a shot of Georges going to bed might encourage us to connect the two. The second shot at the school could be more surveillance footage, or possibly another dream. It might imply the boys have conspired together. It might imply Majid’s son is confronting Pierrot with information about his father. It could be interpreted as the end of the narrative, but it could also be the beginning. Some read it as threatening, others as hopeful. It might imply so many things. However, this “questioning gaze” that persists and reinvents itself is not just the gaze of the film. It is also the gaze of the suspicious reader. From the initial hype upon the film’s Cannes release in 2005, to the various theories circulating in online forums, to Ebert’s scrupulous re-evaluation of the film’s enigma in 2010, to the ever developing body of scholarly work on Haneke’s films, it seems Caché’s mileage for suspicious readers is still running strong, not least because “whodunit?” may be the wrong question.III The Wrong PuzzleOliver C. Speck has remarked that Caché is “Haneke’s most accessible film, but also the most densely layered,” leading the viewer “on a search for clues that always ends in frustration” (97). For Ebert, the film’s lack of resolution leaves the viewer “feeling as the characters feel, uneasy, violated, spied upon, surrounded by faceless observers” (“Caché”). Cousins likewise comments on the process Caché instigates: The film structures our experience in a generically gripping way but then the structure melts away at the moment when it should most cohere, requiring us to look back along its length (the structure’s length and the film’s) to work out where we went wrong. But we did not go wrong. We went where we were told to go, we took the hand of the narrative that, in the final stages, slipped away, leaving us without co-ordinates. (226)The "whodunit” of Caché cannot be definitively proven. Ultimately, viewers can have suspicion, nothing more. So where are we left as suspicious readers when texts such as Caché surpass our own critical vigilance? We can throw in the towel and claim that an impossible puzzle does not deserve our efforts. We can accept that the text has out-played us; it is an inconclusive but compelling puzzle that does not provide enough links in the hermeneutic chain for us to find the closure we seek. Alternately, when the answer is not forthcoming, we can hypothesise that perhaps we have been asking the wrong question; whodunit is beside the point, simply a Hitchcockian MacGuffin (the object or objective that the protagonists seek) introduced to bait us into confronting much more important questions. Perhaps instead we should be asking what Caché can tell us about colonial histories, guilt, vision, or the ontology of cinema itself.This is the avenue many scholars have taken, and the avenue Haneke (rather than his film necessarily) would have us take. The “who did what, when, why, and how” might be regarded as beside the point. In an interview with Andrew O’Hehir, Haneke is quoted:These superficial questions are the glue that holds the spectator in place, and they allow me to raise underlying questions that they have to grapple with. It’s relatively unimportant who sent the tapes, but by engaging with that the viewer must engage questions that are far less banal.Catherine Wheatley agrees, arguing Caché’s open ending renders the epistemological questions of the guilty party and their motives irrelevant, giving preference to questions raised by how this chain of events affect Georges, and by extension the viewer (163–4). By refusing to divulge its secrets, Caché both incites and critiques the interpretive process, encouraging us to take up the role of detective only to anticipate and exceed our investigative efforts. Caché’s subversion of the self-evident is as much a means to launch its thriller narrative as it is a way of calling into question our very understanding of what “self-evident” means. Where Felski describes suspicious interpretations of realist texts (those that attempt to unmask the ideologies concealed behind an illusion of transparency and totality), from its opening moments, Caché is already and constantly unmasking itself. The film’s resistance of a superficial reading seems to make suspicious interpretation inevitable. Wherever viewer suspicion is directed, however, it relies on engagement. Without reason to engage, viewers are left with an impossible puzzle where critical involvement and attention is of no consequence. “Who is sending the tapes?” may be an unimportant or unanswerable question, but it must always be a valid one. It is this query that incites and fuels the interpretive process. As there can only ever be suspicion, nothing more, perhaps it is the question rather than “the answer” that is of utmost significance.Works CitedBeugnet, Martine. “Blind Spot.” Screen 48.2 (2007): 227–31.Benny’s Video. Dir. Michael Haneke. Madman, 1992.Caché (Hidden). Dir. Michael Haneke. Sony Pictures Classics, 2005. Cape Fear. Dir. J. Lee Thompson. Universal, 1962.Cousins, Mark. “After the End: Word of Mouth and Caché.” Screen 48.2 (2007): 223–6.Desperate Hours, The. Dir. William Wyler. Paramount, 1955.Doinel, Antoine. “(Un)hidden Camera: The ‘Real’ Sender of the Tapes.” Mubi.com. Mubi. n.d. 10 Apr. 2011. ‹http://mubi.com/topics/461›. Ebert, Roger. “Caché.” Roger Ebert.com. Chicago Sun-Times. 13 Jan. 2006. 25 Feb. 2011. ‹http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060112/REVIEWS/51220007›.---. “Caché: A Riddle, Wrapped in a Mystery, Inside an Enigma [Response to Readers].” Roger Ebert’s Journal. Chicago Sun-Times. 18 Jan. 2010. 2 Apr. 2011. ‹http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/01/a_riddle_wrapped_in_a_mystery.html›.Felski, Rita. “Suspicious Minds.” Poetics Today 32.2 (2011): 215–34.Funny Games. Dir. Michael Haneke. Madman, 1997.Haneke, Michael. “Hidden: Interview with Michael Haneke by Serge Toubiana.” DVD Special Features. Hidden (Caché). Dir. Michael Haneke. Madman, 2005.Lost Highway. Dir. David Lynch. Universal, 1997.Mulholland Drive. Dir. David Lynch. Reel, 2001.O’Hehir, Andrew. “Michael Haneke’s ‘White Ribbon.’” Salon.com. Salon. 2 Jan. 2010. 2 Apr. 2011. ‹http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/andrew_ohehir/2010/01/02/haneke›.Sorfa, David. “Uneasy Domesticity in the Films of Michael Haneke.” Studies in European Cinema 3.2 (2006): 93–104.Speck, Oliver C. Funny Frames: The Filmic Concepts of Michael Haneke. New York: Continuum, 2010.Straw Dogs. Dir. Sam Peckinpah. MRA, 1971.Wheatley, Catherine. Michael Haneke’s Cinema: The Ethic of the Image. New York: Berghahn Books, 2009.White Ribbon, The (Das Weiße Band). Dir. Michael Haneke. Artificial Eye, 2009.

I. The early twentieth century may seem, at first glance, a strange place to begin a survey of attitudes towards deafness. At this point, the American Deaf community was just forming, American Sign Language was not yet recognised as a language, and most Americans who did consider deafness thought of it as a disability, an affliction to be pitied. As I will demonstrate, however, modernist writers actually had a great deal of insight into issues central to the experience of many deaf people: physical and visual language. While these writers were not thinking of such language in relation to deafness, their experimentations into the merging of the body and language can offer us fresh perspectives on the potential of manual languages to impact mainstream society today. In the early decades of the twentieth century deafness was becoming visible in new ways, due in large part to the rapid expansion of schools for the deaf. This increased visibility led to increased representation in popular culture. Unfortunately, as Trent Batson and Eugene Bergman point out, these literal portrayals of deafness were predictable and clichéd. According to them, deaf characters in literature functioned almost exclusively “to heighten interest, to represent the plight of the individual in a technocratic society, or simply to express a sense of the absurd” (140). In all of these cases, such characters were presented as pitiable. In the least derogatory accounts, like Isabel Adams’ 1928 Heart of the Woods, characters stoically overcome their “disability,” usually by displaying miraculous proficiency with lip-reading and the ability to assimilate into hearing society. Other texts portray deaf people as grotesques, as in Mary Roberts Rinehart’s 1919 “God’s fool,” or as the butts of jokes, as in Anatole France’s 1926 The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife, a Comedy in Two Acts. Constructed as pathetic and disgusting, deaf characters were used thematically to invoke a sense of revulsion at the unknowable other, at those perceived as languageless and therefore cut off from full access to humanity. Literature was not the only medium in which representations of deaf people were appearing with greater frequency. Early filmmakers also demonstrated a fascination with the idea of deafness. But as John S. Schuchman points out in Hollywood Speaks, as in literature, these portrayals were nearly always one-dimensional. Depicted as mutes, fakers, comically clueless, and deeply unhappy individuals, with few exceptions these characters created a very negative image of deafness. In Siege (1925), for example, a deaf character is driven to suicide by cruel mockery. In The Silent Voice (1915), another deaf character contemplates suicide. In the 1932 version of The Man Who Played God, a deaf character falls into a deep depression, sends away his fiancé, and declares “I am not a man. I am just an empty shell…I am only an animal now” (qtd. in Schuchman 48). Without the solidarity of Deaf culture, community, or pride, these characters become morbidly depressed and alienated; they experience their hearing loss as a subject of shame, and it was this image of deafness that was presented to the public. Despite these unpromising literal references to deafness, however, the early twentieth century does in fact offer intriguing and productive ideas about how we might understand deafness today. In the years separating the beginning of the last century from this one, public perceptions of deafness have undergone a significant shift. Buoyed by developments in American Sign Language research and the political activism of the Deaf President Now movement (1988), Deaf people are increasingly viewed as a linguistic minority with a distinct and valuable cultural identity and history, whose communicative differences have much to teach us about how we all interact with language. Deafness (the capital D signaling the distinction between Deafness as a culture and deafness as an audiological condition) is now understood in many circles as a linguistic difference, rather than as a deficiency. And hearing modernist writers had very interesting things to say about the value of linguistic and communicative difference. Modernists’ interest in communication emerged in large part because the same cultural movement toward linguistic homogenisation that led to the denigration of sign language and the exclusive focus on speech and lip-reading in American deaf education also sought to draw a line around the kinds of language considered acceptable for usage in writing. Many of modernism’s formal innovations developed as responses to the push for conformity that we see evidenced in the thinking behind the Oxford English Dictionary, which was completed between the 1880s and the 1920s—notably the period during which most modernist writers were born and began publishing. The 1858 proposal for the dictionary was, in fact, one of the first instances in which the term “standard language” was used (North 12). A desire to establish “standard language” usage was also the goal of the American Academy of Arts, established in 1916 and dedicated to maintaining the integrity of English. Such projects strove to consolidate American national identity around the standardised use of the English language, thereby eliminating spaces for linguistic and communicative diversity within the national body politic. Within literary circles, many rebelled against both the political and aesthetic underpinnings of this movement by experimenting in increasingly dramatic ways with how written language could represent the fragmentation many associated with modern life. As part of their experimentation, some of these writers attempted to develop the idea of embodied language. While they were ignorant of the actual manual languages used by the deaf, the ways they were thinking outside the box in relation to communication can give us both a new perspective on manual languages and new insights into their relevance to mainstream society today. II. One writer whose poems engaged such themes was the poet Hart Crane. Though he worked during the period we think of as high modernist, publishing major volumes of verse in 1926 and 1930, his work challenges our definitions of modernist poetry. Unlike the sparse language and cynicism of his contemporaries, Crane’s poems were decadent and lush. As Eliza New has noted, “Hart Crane is the American poet of Awe” (184); his work reflected his belief in the power of the written word to change the world. Crane viewed poets as inheritors of an ecstatic tradition of prophesy, to which he hoped his own poems would contribute. It is because of this overflowing of sentiment that Crane frequently found both himself and his work mocked. He was accused of overreaching and falling short of his goals, of being nothing more than what Edward Brunner termed a “splendid failure” in the title of his 1985 book. Critics and ordinary readers alike were frustrated with Crane’s arcane language and convoluted syntax, as well as the fact that each word, each image, in his poems was packed with multiple meanings that made the works impossible to summarise. Far from constituting a failure, however, this tangled web of language was Crane’s way of experimenting with a new form of communication, one that would allow him to access the transformative power of poetry. What makes Crane instructive for our purposes is that he repeatedly linked this new conception of language with embodiment. Driven in part by his sense of feeling, as a gay man, a cultural outsider, he attempted to find at the intersection of words and bodies a new site for both personal and cultural expression, one in which he could play a central role. In “General Aim and Theories,” Crane explains his desire to imagine a new kind of language in response to the conditions of modernity. “It is a terrific problem that faces the poet today—a world that is so in transition from a decayed culture toward a reorganization of human evaluations that there are few common terms, general denominators of speech that are solid enough or that ring with any vibration or spiritual conviction” (218). Later in the same essay, Crane stresses that these new common terms could not be expressed in conventional ways, but would need to constitute “a new word, never before spoken and impossible to actually enunciate” (221). For Crane, such words were “impossible to enunciate” because they were not actually spoken through the mouth, but rather expressed in other ways through the body. In “Voyages,” a six-part poem that appeared in his first book, The White Building, Crane explores the potential of these embodied words. Drawing in the influence of Walt Whitman, the work is an extended meditation on the intersection of languages, bodies, and love. The poem was inspired by his relationship with the merchant seaman Emil Oppfer. In it, embodied language appears as a privileged site of connection between individuals and the world. The first section of “Voyages,” which Crane had originally titled “Poster,” predated the composition of the rest of the poem by several years. It opens with a scene on a beach, “bright striped urchins” (I. 2) playing in the sand with their dog, “flay[ing] each other with sand” (I. 2). The speaker observes them on the border between land and sea. He attempts to communicate to them his sense of the sea’s danger, but is unsuccessful. And in answer to their treble interjectionsThe sun beats lightning on the waves,The waves fold thunder on the sand;And could they hear me I would tell them: O brilliant kids, frisk with your dog,Fondle your shells and sticks, bleachedBy time and the elements; but there is a lineYou must not cross nor ever trust beyond itSpry cordage of your bodies to caressesToo lichen-faithful from too wide a breast.The bottom of the sea is cruel. (I. 6-16) The speaker’s warning is incomprehensible to the children, not because they cannot literally hear him, but because he is unable to present his previous experience with the sea in a way that makes sense to the them. As Evelyn J. Hintz notes, “the child’s mode of communication is alogical and nonsyntactical—‘treble interjections.’ To tell them one would have to speak their language” (323). In the first section of the poem, the speaker is unable to do this, unable to get beyond linear verbal speech or to conceive of alternative modes of conveying his message. This frustrated communication in the first section gives rise to the need for the remaining five, as the poet explores what such alternatives might look like. In sections II through VI, the language becomes more difficult to follow as Crane breaks away from linearity in an attempt to present his newly conceived language on the page. The shift is apparent in the stanza immediately following the first section. –And yet this great wink of eternity,Of rimless floods, unfettered leewardings,Samite sheeted and processioned whereHer undinal vast belly moonward bendsLaughing the wrapt inflections of our love; (II. 1-5). It is not only that Crane’s diction has become more difficult and archaic, which it has, but also that he creates words that exist between two known meanings. “Wrapt,” for example, both visually and aurally calls to mind ‘wrapped’ as well as ‘rapt.’ “Leewardings” points both toward ships and something positioned away from the wind. What it means to be unrestrained or “unfettered” in this position, Crane leaves unclear. Throughout the remainder of the poem, he repeatedly employs these counterintuitive word pairings. Words are often connected not through logic, but through a kind of intuitive leap. As Brian Reed describes it, “the verse can…be said to progress ‘madly…logically,’ satisfying a reader’s intuition, perhaps, but rarely satisfying her or his rage for order” (115). The lines move according to what Crane called a “logic of metaphor” (General 63). Like his curving syntax, which draws the reader into the beautiful melody before pulling back, withholding definitive meaning like the sea’s waves lapping and teasing, Crane’s metaphoric associations endlessly defer definitive meaning. In “Voyages,” Crane associates this proliferation of meaning and lack of linear progression with physicality, with a language more corporeal and visceral that transcends the restrictions of everyday speech. In a letter to Waldo Frank describing the romantic relationship that inspired the poem, Crane declared “I have seen the Word made Flesh. I mean nothing less, and I know now that there is such a thing as indestructibility” (O 186). Throughout “Voyages,” Crane highlights such words made flesh. The sea with whom the speaker seeks to communicate is embodied, given “eyes and lips” (III.12), a “vast belly” (II. 4-5), “shoulders” (II. 16), and “veins” (II. 15). What’s more, it is precisely through the body that communication occurs. “Adagios of islands, O my Prodigal, / Complete the dark confessions her veins spell” (II. 14-15, emphasis mine), the poet entreats. He describes the sea’s “Portending eyes and lips” IV. 12), her “dialogue with eyes” (VI. 23), and declares that “In signature of the incarnate word / The harbor shoulders to resign in mingling / Mutual blood, transpiring as foreknown” (IV. 17-19, emphasis mine). It is only through this wordless communication that the kind of sublime meaning Crane seeks can be transmitted. For him, this “imaged Word” (VI.29) permits access to knowledge that conventional language obscures, knowledge that can only be transmitted through manual connection, as the speaker asks the sea to “Permit me voyage, love, into your hands…” (III.19). Crane saw the proliferation of meanings that he believed accompanied such embodied language as a response against the movement toward a standardisation of language that threatened to edit out modes of communication and identities that did not fit within its confines. As Thomas Yingling notes, “meaning, such as it occurs in Crane, is a process of indeterminacy, is constituted precisely in the abrupt disfigurements and dislocations, in the sudden clarities and semantic possibilities” (30). It was in large part these “semantic possibilities,” these indeterminate and multiple meanings that refused to line up, which led critics to characterise Crane’s work as a “poetics of failure” (Riddel). As later research into sign languages has revealed, however, far from representing a failure of poetic vision, Crane was actually incredibly forward thinking in associating embodied languages with a non-linear construction. Conventional spoken and written languages, those Crane was attempting to complicate, are necessarily linear. Letters and sounds must proceed one after another in order for an utterance to make sense. Manual languages, however, are not bound by this linearity. As Margalit Fox explained nearly a century later in Talking Hands, Because the human visual system is better than the auditory system at processing simultaneous information, a language in the visual mode can exploit this potential and encode its signals simultaneously. This is exactly what all signed languages do. Whereas words are linear strings, signs are compact bundles of data, in which multiple unites of code—handshapes, location and movement—are conveyed in virtually the same moment. (101) Such accounts of actual embodied languages help to explain the frustrating density that attends Crane’s words. Morphologically rich physical languages like the kind Crane was trying to imagine possess the ability for an increased layering of meaning. While limited by the page on which he writes, Crane attempted to create this layered affect through convoluted syntax and deliberately difficult vocabulary which led readers away from both a sense of fixed meaning and from normative standards usually applied to written words. Understanding this rebellion against standardisation is key to the turn in “Voyages.” It is when the speaker figures the sea’s language in conventional terms, when he returns to the more straightforward communication that failed in the first section, that the spell is broken. “What words / Can strangle this deaf moonlight?” (V. 8-9), he asks, and is almost instantly answered when the sea’s language switches for the first time into dialogue. Rather than the passionate and revelatory interaction it had been before, the language becomes banal, an imitation of tired words exchanged by lovers throughout history: “‘There’s // Nothing like this in the world,’ you say” (V. 13-14). “ ‘—And never to quite understand!’” (V. 18). There is “Nothing so flagless as this piracy” (V.20), this loss of meaningful communication, and the speaker bemoans the “Slow tyranny of moonlight, moonlight loved / And changed…” (V. 12-13). With the reversion to conventional language comes the loss of any intimate knowledge of both the sea and the lover. The speaker’s projection of verbal speech onto the sea causes it to “Draw in your head… / Your eyes already in the slant of drifting foam; / Your breath sealed by the ghosts I do not know” (V. 22-24). The imposition of normative language marks the end of the speaker’s experiment with new communicative modes. III. As he demonstrates by situating it in opposition to the enforced standardisation of language, for Crane embodied language—with its non-linear syntax and layered meanings—represented the future in terms of linguistic development. He saw such non-normative languages as having the potential to drastically change the ways human relationality was structured, specifically by creating a new level of intimacy through a merging of the semantic and the physical. In this way, he offers us productive new ways to think about the potential of manual languages, or any other non-normative means of human expression, to fundamentally impact society by challenging our assumptions about how we all relate to one another through language. When asked to define deafness, most people’s first response is to think of levels of hearing loss, of deficiency, or disability. By contrast, Crane’s approach presents a more constructive understanding of what communicative difference can mean. His poem provides an intense mediation on the possibilities of communication through the body, one that subsequent research into signed languages allows us to push even further. Crane believed that communicative diversity was necessary to move language into the next century. From this perspective, embodied language becomes not “merely” the concern of a “disabled” minority but, rather, integral to our understanding of language itself. References Batson, Trent, and Eugene Bergman, eds. Angels and Outcasts: An Anthology of Deaf Characters in Literature. 3rd ed. Washington DC: Gallaudet UP, 1985. Brunner, Edward J. Splendid Failure: Hart Crane and the Making of The Bridge. Champaign: U of Illinois P, 1985. Crane, Hart. “Voyages.” The Complete Poems of Hart Crane: The Centennial Edition. New York: Liveright, 2001. ———. “General Aims and Theories.” Hart Crane: Complete Poems and Selected Letters. Ed. Langdon Hammer. New York: The Library of America, 2006. 160-164. ———. O My Land, My Friends: The Selected Letters of Hart Crane. Eds. Langdon Hammer and Brom Weber. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1997. Fox, Margalit. Talking Hands. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007. Hinz, Evelyn J. “Hart Crane’s ‘Voyages’ Reconsidered.” Contemporary Literature 13.3 (1972): 315-333. New, Elisa. “Hand of Fire: Crane.” The Regenerate Lyric: Theology and Innovation in American Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. 182-263. North, Michael. The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994. Reed, Brian M. Hart Crane: After His Lights. Tuscaloosa, AL: U of Alabama P, 2006. Riddel, Joseph. “Hart Crane’s Poetics of Failure.” ELH 33.4 (1966): 473-496. Schuchman, John S. Hollywood Speaks: Deafness and the Film Entertainment Industry. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988. Yingling, Thomas. Hart Crane and the Homosexual Text: New Thresholds, New Anatomies. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990.

Introduction: The Creative Arts and Regional Well-BeingThe relationship between regionalism, well-being, and the creative arts has enjoined significant attention from community activists, commercial entrepreneurs, policy analysts, artists, and researchers over recent years (Australia Council for the Arts, “Living Culture”; Australia Council for the Arts, “The Arts in Regional Australia;” Drummond, Keane, and West; Elg; Warren, and West; Woodward, Bremner, and Cahalan). Underpinning most of the activity and research in this area is the understanding (occasionally bordering on an un-critical presumption) that the creative arts make a positive contribution to regional well-being. Commenting on the Live. Love. Life. creative-arts wellness festival in Daylesford, Victoria, Mary-Anne Thomas (Member of Parliament for the state seat of Macedon) stated that the festival will “reinforce Daylesford and the Macedon Ranges’ status as one of the nation’s leading wellness destinations” (Elg). For Thomas, it would appear that the linkage of the creative arts to regional well-being is never in doubt; which is to say, always already available for reinforcement. According to university-based researchers Margaret Woodward, Craig Bremner, and Anthony Cahalan, writing in a more scholarly and critical register, “there is a growing body of research which shows that thriving creative industries and cultural activities are crucial for the health and vitality of a region and its communities” (3). Qualifying this, they add that: “Achieving high levels of community well being through thriving creative activity is not however without its challenges in regional Australia” (3). Similarly, Rozaline Drummond, Jondi Keane, and Patrick West present their work as a test of the efficacy of the creative arts in aiding regional well-being: The opportunity to work collaboratively with a community like the one at Lake Bolac [Victoria] provided an occasion to gauge our discerning and initiating skills within creative-arts research and to test the argument that the combination of our different approaches adds to community and individual well-being. Our approach is informed by Gilles Deleuze’s ethical proposition that the health of a community is directly influenced by the richness of the composition of its parts. (n.p.)Deleuzean philosophy aside, quantitative data indicates that people in regional Australia are increasingly optimistic about the positive impact of the creative arts on their well-being. In 2016, 57% believed the arts impacted their sense of well-being and happiness, up from 52% in 2013 (Australia Council for the Arts, “The Arts in Regional Australia”). Given this article’s emphasis on place and well-being in relation to located creative-arts production, it is worth citing another dataset from the same Australia Council for the Arts publication, which details the “Location of Professional Artists”:There continues to be a concentration of artists in urban areas. Three quarters (74%) live in cities, compared to two thirds of the Australian population. This urban concentration […] may in part be related to concentration of cultural infrastructure in cities.1 in 6 Australian artists live in regional cities or towns (16%) and around 1 in 10 live in rural, remote or very remote areas (11%). (n.p.)Regional artists are a minority voice in the Australian creative arts. But the ways in which a minority voice is constructed, and the (potential) impact a minoritarian position has within the wider debate about regional well-being and the creative arts, requires careful unpacking. Ironically, creative artists themselves have been relatively neglected actors in this space. Working with Tony Birch’s short story, “The Red House”, as a neglected text of regionalism, this article exposes oversights in current understandings of the connection between well-being and regionalism. The Voice of the Regional Artist and “Resistant Speech” It is important to recognise that the “concentration of artists in urban areas” may sometimes lead to situations where non-regional artists, in the undoubtedly well-meaning pursuit of regional well-being, drown out the voices of regional artists in regional places (Australia Council for the Arts, “The Arts in Regional Australia”). Drummond, Keane, and West, all city-based artists, show sensitivity to this problem in their observation that: “It is not for the artists to presume that they can empower a [regional] community.” Certainly, regional artists and communities should take the lead in the development of regional well-being through the creative arts. The problem of (not) speaking for the other is, however, not so easily dealt with (Spivak). While urban artists might adopt the strategy of consciously allowing regional artists a voice, making such allowance could itself be viewed as a play of privilege and power by the city-based practitioner, resourced by their greater “concentration of cultural infrastructure” (Australia Council for the Arts, “The Arts in Regional Australia”). It is notoriously difficult to give the slip to the relatively invisible operations of entitlement. Furthermore, even if the regional artist is given a voice, there are many different ways of being heard or not heard. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s distinction between “speaking” and “talking” is useful here. Discussing “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in an interview with Bulan Lahiri, Spivak notes that: “It was not about talking. It was about: when the subaltern speaks there is not enough infrastructure for people to recognise it as resistant speech. That’s what it means.” In this crucial move, Spivak refines understanding of the issues at stake around the minoritarian position of regional artists. It is not enough for regional artists merely to “talk”; rather, they must be heard with the full impact of “resistant speech” (Lahiri). Obviously, what Spivak means by the “infrastructure” of “resistant speech” differs from the meaning the word “infrastructure” has in the Australia Council for the Arts publication referred to above, which employs the term as part of a governmental and technocratic discourse (“The Arts in Regional Australia”). The distance separating these two usages of “infrastructure” indicates the difference between the quantitative and the qualitative. Working with Spivak, this article’s focus is on the gap or failing in the infrastructure of qualitative research that has led to the relative neglect of Tony Birch’s short story “The Red House” as a significant text of regionalism. The Australia Council for the Arts, with its quantitative and empirical methodology, would not count Birch as a regional writer (to the best of the author’s knowledge, Birch lives and works in Melbourne). Its definition of a regional artist undermines the possibilities of a qualitative research infrastructure. However, recognizing the powerful regional concerns within a text by a primarily city-based writer like Birch is a key move, not only in expanding the definition of who counts as a minoritarian regional writer, but in giving voice to the “resistant speech” of women and children, subalterns on Spivak’s terms, within the regional-urban flux (Lahiri). The aim of this article is to give voice to Tony Birch as a regional writer, at least insofar as he is the author of “The Red House”, while also addressing the issue of well-being (as linked to the curse of domestic violence), through attention to Birch’s artistic re-creation of regionalism. In this way, working with Spivak’s reference to “infrastructure,” the aim is to nurture the growth of a research infrastructure open to a more productive engagement with regionalism, which begins by nuancing the definition of regional. It is not that regional artists, defined either by their demography or (as with Birch) by their creative concerns, are not “talking” rather, what they are saying is not being recognised in Spivak’s strong sense of “speaking”. Indeed, the very fact that Birch is not a regional writer in an empirical sense, and that, as will be explored later in this article, “The Red House” is not even primarily set in a regional location, has at least one important consequence. Potentially, it increases the value of Birch’s short story to an engagement with regionalism, given that “The Red House” unfolds regionalism as a concept always already in productive dialogue with other frameworks of place (such as the urban and the international). To the extent that Birch is a city-based writer of regionalism, and thus on the (urban) margin of the (regional) margin, he enlivens an exquisite position of minoritarian power. Furthermore, “The Red House” contains a diversity of acute insights into the nexus of regionalism and well-being that, to date, critics have overlooked. “The Red House” and the Well-Being of Places Comparatively little scholarly attention has been paid to creative work that itself dramatises and interrogates the issue of regional well-being. Tony Birch’s short story “The Red House” (2006), from his collection of linked stories (which is sometimes referred to as a novel) Shadowboxing, is a particularly interesting candidate to fill this gap in the literature, given how delicately it ranges across, and problematises, the division between the urban and the regional.“The Red House” is the opening story of Shadowboxing. Covering a period of close to a decade, loosely overlapping with the 1960s, and set in different parts of Victoria and Melbourne, it is told in the voice of Michael, who recounts the story of a peripatetic family under stress and struggling to survive. The first sentence reads: “We moved to the red house in the winter after my younger sister, May, died of meningitis” (1). The first page also establishes the place-based coordinates of the story: “In the weeks following our move from Clunes back to Fitzroy, our new house was almost submerged by a rising flood” (1). Birch’s interrogation of regionalism will henceforth operate largely along the Clunes-Fitzroy axis. Fitzroy is an inner-city suburb of Melbourne while Clunes is a small regional town (present population: approximately 2000) about 140 kilometres north-west of Melbourne (Clunes). A flashback section of three pages or so, early on in the story, fills in the events leading up to the return to Melbourne after May’s death in Clunes. Apart from this, the story has a linear structure. The various spatial shifts of “The Red House”, both within Melbourne and between Clunes and Melbourne, are all triggered by threats against, or the pursuit of, multiple modes of well-being. The first move reflects the promise of a fresh romantic union: “It was only after he [Michael’s father] had met my mother and moved with her to my [maternal] grandmother’s house over in Carlton that he had left Fitzroy for the first time in his life” (4–5). This move from Fitzroy to Carlton is followed by a much bigger one: Carlton to Clunes. Implicated in this move are at least two modes of well-being: “The eventual move to the bush had come on the advice of a doctor at the public hospital. He said that the fresh air would help my dad recover from [his] asthma” (5); however, “My grandmother told me years later that the move did not really have all that much to do with his asthma. It was the drink” (5). The context is the husband’s assault of “his six months’ pregnant wife” with “a straight right on the end of her nose” (5). The decision to move to Clunes is made by Michael’s mother: “He fought with her so much that my mother eventually decided that she would have to move away from her mother’s house, for both their sakes. Clunes was a drastic move. But it worked, for a time […]. They appeared happy” (6). This part of “The Red House” unpacks the complexities of how well-being and (physical and mental) health are linked in a social matrix; a physical ailment (asthma) elides an addiction to alcohol, until a doctor’s discourse (validated by the authority of a medical establishment) is subverted by the subalternate voice of Michael’s grandmother. This passage also dramatises the abject scenario of a victim (Michael’s mother) attending to the well-being of her persecutor (Michael’s father) by moving to Clunes “for both their sakes” (6).Subsequently, May is born in Clunes, “a ‘special baby’. She was magical even…” (6). Indeed, “My father’s habit of explosive anger melted before May. He was truly besotted with her” (6). Just before what would have been her second birthday, May dies. “My father wanted to bring May back to Melbourne for burial, but my mother stood up to him and demanded that she be buried in the town where she was born” (6). This is the most powerful enduring connection of Michael’s family to regional Clunes. Significantly, well-being (in the sense of survival and the rebuilding of happiness after the tragic death of a daughter) is dispersed differently, through place, by mother and father, along gendered lines. While the mother wants her daughter’s birthplace and place of death to coincide, the father wants to possess his daughter, almost as if she were an object, by returning her to the city for burial. (Space restrictions preclude further exploration here of the many issues raised by May’s death, including those around the gendered nexus between well-being [happiness] and the proximity or otherwise to a child’s burial place.) After May’s death, Michael’s father’s behaviour deteriorates once more. The domestic violence continues: “It was difficult for my mother to find anything safe to say to him […]. She tried to talk about May with him several times, but he either responded with silence, or swore and yelled at her uncontrollably. He also found his way back to the pubs” (7). The decision to return to Melbourne is made by Michael’s father, against his wife’s wishes: And then one night after he had walked in from the pub he sat down at the table and just said to her, ‘Fuck all this fresh-air bullshit, we’re going back to Melbourne.’ She tried persuading him to stay, talked about his job and my school, but he would not listen. He got sick of her talking and slammed a fist into his heavy palm. ‘We’re fucken going. That’s it. We’re going.’ And that was it.She looked across the table that night and saw once again the man she had married six years earlier, the man who she had deceived herself had faded and eventually disappeared with the move away from the city. (7)In this passage, well-being (even if only imagined rather than real) is explicitly linked to place. Shortly afterwards, the family moves into the red house, where they will remain. The flashback section of the text has already sketched out the chain of events that leads to the return to the city, while also commenting on the agency Michael’s mother exercises in dealing with what, to her, is an unwelcome situation: “Mum […] had argued against coming back to the city. She sensed the looming danger in my father moving back both to his old streets and his old habits. But on realising that she had no real say in the matter, she was determined to ensure that she at least have some say in the house she was moving into” (4). Specifically, Michael’s mother turns her Fitzroy house into the regional house left behind in Clunes. Under her influence, “It wasn’t long before the inside of the house came to life and began to resemble the old place at Clunes” (11). Again: she brings a portrait of May, along with assorted baby belongings, into the Fitzroy house, keeping this secret from her husband. Thus, Michael’s mother infiltrates regional place into urban place as a strategy of (subalternate) well-being. In summary, “The Red House” unpacks well-being as an expansive category shaped by domestic violence, in a negative sense, but also more positively by the actuality or promise of happiness. It also interrogates the fine-grained links between well-being in its incarnations as medical and emotional health. At the same time, it maps the rise and fall of well-being against a human geography of regional and urban places, refusing any simplistic connection of place to well-being (more faintly, there is even the problematising presence of international place, in the character of the Italian landlord, Mr Carboni, and the reference to “the local Italian community [2]). Thus, the text’s regionalism suggests a strategic model, reliant on human intervention in the (re-)creation of place; this is most evident in Michael’s mother’s actions. “The Red House” rewards interpretation as a text of how regional place (Clunes) is re-made in urban place (Fitzroy) through the rehabilitation of a house in the interests of well-being. Well-Being and Domestic Violence across Places It is hard to imagine a greater threat to the well-being of women and children than domestic violence. This makes it all the more surprising that “The Red House” is one of relatively few texts (to the author’s knowledge) to offer a detailed outline of the territory of well-being, in its many forms stretching from the health-based to the emotional, while also including a direct and unflinching consideration of domestic violence. (One cognate text is Kathryn Heyman’s novel The Breaking, which merges medical disability and domestic violence within a broader consideration of regional well-being.) Even more unusual is the way Birch’s story of well-being and domestic violence is mapped in relation to regional and non-regional places. “The Red House” is rare and valuable for its triangulation of well-being, domestic violence, and place; above all, in its refusal to resort to any comforting notion that regional places have essential qualities that make them necessarily better for well-being than the experience of cities. This is perhaps the meaning of the colour of the red house, a colour Michael’s father hates. According to a local know-all, Emu Bailey, the red was originally a form of protest by Ettie Rogers, “‘some sort of communist’” (10). “‘Most everyone around here back then was DLP [Democratic Labour Party]. Still is, some of them. Ettie wasn’t in agreement with the others in the street, so she let them know all about it. Redone it every summer too, the same colour, red’” (10). When Michael’s mother responds to her husband’s injunction to re-paint the house “‘any colour but that fucken red’” (13) by preparing to re-paint it, subversively, “a deep red splash of colour” (19) it is not difficult to discern a silent protest, passed down from woman to woman, against the domestic violence suffered by Michael and his mother. Indeed, Birch comes very close to describing the red of the house as blood-like, labelling it “a rich congealed red” (2). “Congealed” is often used to describe blood. In this way, through a colour that evokes the body, a house becomes a visible and metaphorical protest against the bodily violence (but also emotional and mental torment) that is domestic violence. As Meg Mundell argues, “the body is integral to how literary sense of place is produced” (8). This bodily, coloured protest folds back into the special sort of place the Fitzroy home becomes. If Michael’s mother cannot keep living in Clunes, she can at least paint her city house red. Perhaps attesting to the success of this female protest, there is, towards the end of “The Red House”, a fascinating moment when, as if influenced by the domestic circumstances of transplanted place (from regional Clunes) created by Michael’s mother, domestic violence threatens, but is thwarted. Michael’s mother has just told her husband that she is going to have another baby: “He spun around and moved towards her. I thought that maybe he was going to hit her. But he didn’t. He stopped in front of her. They were toe to toe” (17). Place and (pregnant) body, in an intensified combination (or even, to riff on Spivak’s terminology, as an “infrastructure”), allow the subaltern to “speak” against her oppression. Conclusion: Re-Defining Regionalism through the Literary Creative Arts Tony Birch’s “The Red House” re-creates the regional as something other than a pre-determined place. Regionalism is “activated,” in a strategic mode, within the flux of the urban and the regional. This is particularly evident in the actions of Michael’s mother. She preserves her well-being (located in Clunes, as it were, where her daughter is buried) even after she is forced by her husband to return to Melbourne (the place she left to escape from his domestic violence). The picture of May acts as a talisman of well-being (aptly, given Clunes is described by Michael as “a town where old superstitions held sway over logic” [6]), which Michael’s mother smuggles from regional Clunes into her Melbourne house. “The Red House” is thus a vital literary rejoinder to the conceptualisation of well-being, and regional areas employed by government bodies and commercial entities, which instrumentalizes a binary opposition of the regional/non-regional. By extension, it contests the naïve linkage of regional place to well-being through a nuanced investigation into the complex links between place (regional, urban, even international) and multi-faceted well-being. Birch’s story is a valuable, fine-grained creative analysis of well-being (extending from happiness, comfort and security through to what might be called the “ill-being” of domestic violence), which is matched to an equally fine-grained engagement with multiple modalities of place. It challenges the reader to creatively re-think how regionalism and well-being might align. References Australia Council for the Arts. “Living Culture: First Nations Arts Participation and Wellbeing.” Sydney: Australia Council for the Arts, 2017. 10 Mar. 2019 <https://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/research/living-culture/>.———. “The Arts in Regional Australia: A Research Summary.” Sydney: Australia Council for the Arts, 2017. 10 Mar. 2019 <https://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/research/regional-arts-summary/>.Birch, Tony. “The Red House.” Shadowboxing. Melbourne: Scribe, 2006. 1–19. Clunes, Victoria. Wikipedia. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clunes,_Victoria>.Drummond, Rozalind, Jondi Keane, and Patrick West. “Zones of Practice: Embodiment and Creative Arts Research.” M/C Journal 15.4 (2012). 1 Mar. 2019 <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/528>.Elg, Hayley. “New Wellness Festival for Daylesford.” The Advocate 22 Jan. 2018. 1 Mar. 2019 <https://www.hepburnadvocate.com.au/story/5182322/the-live-love-life-festival-is-coming-to-daylesford-this-november/>.Heyman, Kathryn. “When I First Wrote about Domestic Violence, No One Talked about It. Now the Shame has Lifted.” The Guardian. 21 May 2017. 10 Mar. 2019 <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/21/when-i-first-wrote-about-domestic-violence-no-one-talked-about-it-now-the-shame-has-lifted>.Lahiri, Bulan. “In Conversation: Speaking to Spivak.” The Hindu 5 Feb. 2011. 1 Mar. 2019 <https://www.thehindu.com/books/In-Conversation-Speaking-to-Spivak/article15130635.ece>.Mundell, Meg. “Crafting ‘Literary Sense of Place’: The Generative Work of Literary Place-Making.” JASAL: Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 18.1 (2018): 1–17. 10 Mar. 2019 <https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/index.php/JASAL/article/view/12375>.Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993: 66–111. Warren, Brad, and Patrick West. “From Ecological Creativity to an Ecology of Well-Being: ‘Flows & Catchments’ as a Case Study of NVivo.” Landscapes: The Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language 5.2 (2013): 1–15. 1 Mar. 2019 <https://ro.ecu.edu.au/landscapes/vol5/iss2/21/>.Woodward, Margaret, Craig Bremner, and Anthony Cahalan. “Defining the Geography of Creativity in a Regional Australian University.” Proceedings of the 2012 Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools (ACUADS) Conference: Region and Isolation: The Changing Function of Art & Design Education within Diasporic Cultures and Borderless Communities. Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools (ACUADS) Conference 2012. Perth: Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools (ACUADS), 2012: 1–13. 1 Mar. 2019 <https://acuads.com.au/conference/article/defining-the-geography-of-creativity-in-a-regional-australian-university/>.

Michael Smith, the Martian of Robert Heinlein's 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land is having a lot of difficulty in understanding what makes up that strange creature he has just encountered for the first time, the "human." A trip to the local zoo and a cage of monkeys provides the answer for him. There, a peanut is thrown to a small monkey who takes it eagerly. This monkey is immediately bowled over by a larger monkey, and the peanut is stolen from him. The small monkey runs away howling, until it tracks down an even smaller monkey to beat the daylights out of. The rest of the monkeys choose to ignore the entire incident altogether. At this, Michael begins to laugh uncontrollably, so hard that he is unable to stop for hours. A revelatory moment, at last the Martian has understood (in his idiolect, he has "grokked") that fundamental secret of what it is to be human: "I've found out why people laugh. They laugh because it hurts-because it's the only thing that'll make it stop hurting-of course it wasn't funny; it was tragic. That's why I had to laugh. I looked at a cage full of monkeys and suddenly I saw all the mean and cruel and utterly unexplainable things I've seen and heard and read about - and suddenly it hurt so much I found myself laughing" (Heinlein 289). Slovoj Zizek's Lacanian psychoanalytic writings are often based around this same fundamental insight into the human condition: that one should remain aware of the utterly strange and paradoxical chasm that lies at the centre of our psychic make-up. Zizek would consider Michael's laughter at the monkeys an example of concealment of primal trauma via the safety gauge of laughter, for this act of jouissance, as Flieger puts is (taking her cue from Freud): "breaks laws and re-establishes them simultaneously, but avoids tragic conflict by re-routing deadly hostile impulses along a route of substitutive conciliation" (Flieger 65). Behind this jouissance lies the Real,which must be understood as that crucial X factor behind existence, that chaotic "inruption of non-sense" (as Eagleton paraphrases) into the carefully-constructed orders of the Symbolic and the Imaginary (42). At this point, then, we might suppose that laughter is a purely beneficial and therapeutic act, halting probable psychosis. This perhaps explains why Zizek is so interested in the cynical strain he has identified as one of modern society's greatest afflictions, which he identifies as a kind of jouissance without the Real. Cynicism is one of the recurring bugbears of Zizek's recent work,stretching back to his first major work in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989). His theory is grounded in Peter Sloterdijk's Critique of Cynical Reason (first published in 1983), in which cynicism is defined as "enlightened false consciousness. It is that modernised, unhappy consciousness, on which Enlightenment has laboured-well-off and miserable at the same time" (5). Sloterdijk interprets the period of the Enlightenment as the formative period for the development of our modern subjectivity, and Zizek adds (following Lacan) that this is because this period saw the birth of the Cartesian "subject". The performative act of becoming a subject, Zizek indicates, is another way of evading the Real: "subjectivization is a way to elude the void which "is" the subject, it is ultimately a defense mechanism against the subject" (Enjoy 186). The historicity of this cynical attitude is a point that Zizek continually reiterates-the "false consciousness" of cynicism developed because "the Enlightenment project has gone wrong" (136). Such a historicist view points to the finitude of the cynical split. The optimistic obverse of this focus on the past is that one day there may be the possibility for suture. But as for contemporary society, Zizek negates the paranoiac Adornian conclusion that our modern age is a post-ideological one. Instead, he asserts that we are in fact so entrenched in ideology that it is difficult to even distinguish its parameters. There is a breakdown in the relationship between the 'knowledge' and the 'act': "the cynical subject is quite aware of the distance between the ideological mask and the social reality, but he nonetheless still insists upon the mask" (Subject 29). A problem is still raised, for while emphasising that cynicism is a much more insidious kind of masked ideology, he also emphasises the absolute necessity of every ideological foundation. The danger lies because the "true" face is kept hidden from view: "the illusion is not on the side of knowledge, it is already on the side of reality itself, of what the people are doing. What they do not know is that their social reality itself, their activity, is guided by an illusion, by a fetishistic inversion. What they [i.e. cynical people] overlook, what they misrecognise, is not the reality but the illusion which is structuring their reality, their real social activity" (Subject 32) One of the strategies of cynical consciousness is the "kynical", the attitude to constantly critique society, coined by Sloterdijk) (Subject 29). In recent comedy, one of the chief examplars of "kynical", understated, humour would have to be Jerry Seinfeld's observational style of standup comedy that become so popular during the nineties (i.e. "what's the deal with-airports/queues/etc."). Seinfeld avoids the overtly political in his comedy, but his usual focus on the banalities of the quotidian (as he calls it, the "minutiae") can be interpreted as an attack on aspects of Western consumer culture. The very act of asking the question "what's the deal?" implies a certain dissatisfaction with the status quo of consumer culture, it poses the question "why is our society so strange?" In response to such a question, the audience laughs because it recognises the particular aspect of society that Seinfeld aims to deconstruct. At the same time, an economy of desire is constructed around the act of the laughter itself. For Zizek, cynicism is a self-gratifying gesture that follows the fetishistic logic of "I know very well the truth of this statement, but in the meantime." There is jouissance in the act of recognition (or false consciousness), which of course deflects the original impulse that we presume to be social critique. This "kynicism" performs the opposite effect of Victor Shklovsky's concept of ostraneniye, the method of "making strange" the symbolic language, which Zizek would interpret as the "philosophical experience of 'wondering'" Enjoy 53). Seinfeld's comedy skips over that moment of comprehension, that breakdown to the shock of the Real. In other words, Seinfeld's cynicism yada yada yadas over the point de capiton. Therefore, cynicism is another attempt to reposition the symbolic as the primary level of experience, to usurp the Real with "reality."However, in the turbulent days that followed September 11, we find a counter at least to this "kynical" style of humour (the kind of comedy exemplified in Australia by such TV shows as The Glass House and the now-defunct Good News Week). The satirical show Politically Incorrect was pulled from the air on the American ABC network, after its host, Bill Maher, disputed President Bush's statement that the World Trade Centre terrorists were "cowardly." On the show airing on the seventeenth of September, Maher made the following statement: "we have been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from two thousand miles away. That's cowardly-staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it's not cowardly. " Au contraire to the show's title, this was perhaps one of the most politically correct statements ever made on American television, and it cost Maher his television show. Politically Incorrect was immediately pulled from the air in many American states (including Washington DC), and the show, crippled by public criticism and the loss of advertising money, was axed soon after. Maher normally utilised a "kynical" standpoint to throw stones at the big Other (i.e. the US political system), and as we have already seen with the example of Seinfeld, the jolting "Real" moment of the humour never seems to happen. Was Maher's September 11 comment one of the sublime instances of the letter "reaching its destination" to the American public? The jolting ostraneniye of this comedy is precisely that here there is no joke, no consoling sedative of jouissance, and the shock that followed in this humour deficit was one of denial and anger. One may argue that this instance provided a more "Real" moment for the American public than the media spectacle surrounding September 11 itself. Zizek writes in "Welcome to the Desert of the Real" (posted on the internet on the same day as that episode of Politically Incorrect), that Americans have libidinally invested in images of catastrophe for years. Catastrophe is one of the healthiest signs of the persistence of the symbolic order. By saying "we are the cowards!", Maher was essentially telling his public "we are the enemy!" or "we are the Symbolic!", and for a short time he dissolved the force of the non-existent Big Other. It is no wonder that he was ejected from this symbolic order at lightning speed. Here, I can't help being reminded of Guy Debord's axiom in The Society of the Spectacle, that "in a world which really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the false". In Zizek's cynical society, it seems to be strange but true that when the joke isn't funny anymore is really when it breaks the most societal taboos. Works Cited Eagleton, Terry. "Enjoy!" Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory 24:2 (2001), pp.40-52. Flieger, Jerry Aline. "Has Oedipus Signed Off (or Struck Out)?: Zizek, Lacan and the Field of Cyberspace." Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory 24:2 (2001), pp.53-77. Heinlein, Robert. Stranger in a Strange Land. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1982 (1961). Maher, Bill. "Politically Incorrect." Screened September 17th, 2001. Sloterdijk, Peter. The Critique of Cynical Reason. Translated by M.Eldred. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987 (1983). Zizek, Slavoj. Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. New York: Routledge, 2001 (1992). ---. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1999 (1989). Links http://de.indymedia.org/2001/09/7659.shtml http://www.millionflagmarch.com/bill/moreinfo.htm http://www.abc.net.au/glasshouse/ Citation reference for this article MLA Style Blackwood, Gemma. "That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0311/3-blackwood-that-joke.php>. APA Style Blackwood, G. (2003, Nov 10). That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0311/3-blackwood-that-joke.php>

Michael Smith, the Martian of Robert Heinlein's 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land is having a lot of difficulty in understanding what makes up that strange creature he has just encountered for the first time, the "human." A trip to the local zoo and a cage of monkeys provides the answer for him. There, a peanut is thrown to a small monkey who takes it eagerly. This monkey is immediately bowled over by a larger monkey, and the peanut is stolen from him. The small monkey runs away howling, until it tracks down an even smaller monkey to beat the daylights out of. The rest of the monkeys choose to ignore the entire incident altogether. At this, Michael begins to laugh uncontrollably, so hard that he is unable to stop for hours. A revelatory moment, at last the Martian has understood (in his idiolect, he has "grokked") that fundamental secret of what it is to be human: "I've found out why people laugh. They laugh because it hurts-because it's the only thing that'll make it stop hurting-of course it wasn't funny; it was tragic. That's why I had to laugh. I looked at a cage full of monkeys and suddenly I saw all the mean and cruel and utterly unexplainable things I've seen and heard and read about - and suddenly it hurt so much I found myself laughing" (Heinlein 289). Slovoj Zizek's Lacanian psychoanalytic writings are often based around this same fundamental insight into the human condition: that one should remain aware of the utterly strange and paradoxical chasm that lies at the centre of our psychic make-up. Zizek would consider Michael's laughter at the monkeys an example of concealment of primal trauma via the safety gauge of laughter, for this act of jouissance, as Flieger puts is (taking her cue from Freud): "breaks laws and re-establishes them simultaneously, but avoids tragic conflict by re-routing deadly hostile impulses along a route of substitutive conciliation" (Flieger 65). Behind this jouissance lies the Real,which must be understood as that crucial X factor behind existence, that chaotic "inruption of non-sense" (as Eagleton paraphrases) into the carefully-constructed orders of the Symbolic and the Imaginary (42). At this point, then, we might suppose that laughter is a purely beneficial and therapeutic act, halting probable psychosis. This perhaps explains why Zizek is so interested in the cynical strain he has identified as one of modern society's greatest afflictions, which he identifies as a kind of jouissance without the Real. Cynicism is one of the recurring bugbears of Zizek's recent work,stretching back to his first major work in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989). His theory is grounded in Peter Sloterdijk's Critique of Cynical Reason (first published in 1983), in which cynicism is defined as "enlightened false consciousness. It is that modernised, unhappy consciousness, on which Enlightenment has laboured-well-off and miserable at the same time" (5). Sloterdijk interprets the period of the Enlightenment as the formative period for the development of our modern subjectivity, and Zizek adds (following Lacan) that this is because this period saw the birth of the Cartesian "subject". The performative act of becoming a subject, Zizek indicates, is another way of evading the Real: "subjectivization is a way to elude the void which "is" the subject, it is ultimately a defense mechanism against the subject" (Enjoy 186). The historicity of this cynical attitude is a point that Zizek continually reiterates-the "false consciousness" of cynicism developed because "the Enlightenment project has gone wrong" (136). Such a historicist view points to the finitude of the cynical split. The optimistic obverse of this focus on the past is that one day there may be the possibility for suture. But as for contemporary society, Zizek negates the paranoiac Adornian conclusion that our modern age is a post-ideological one. Instead, he asserts that we are in fact so entrenched in ideology that it is difficult to even distinguish its parameters. There is a breakdown in the relationship between the 'knowledge' and the 'act': "the cynical subject is quite aware of the distance between the ideological mask and the social reality, but he nonetheless still insists upon the mask" (Subject 29). A problem is still raised, for while emphasising that cynicism is a much more insidious kind of masked ideology, he also emphasises the absolute necessity of every ideological foundation. The danger lies because the "true" face is kept hidden from view: "the illusion is not on the side of knowledge, it is already on the side of reality itself, of what the people are doing. What they do not know is that their social reality itself, their activity, is guided by an illusion, by a fetishistic inversion. What they [i.e. cynical people] overlook, what they misrecognise, is not the reality but the illusion which is structuring their reality, their real social activity" (Subject 32) One of the strategies of cynical consciousness is the "kynical", the attitude to constantly critique society, coined by Sloterdijk) (Subject 29). In recent comedy, one of the chief examplars of "kynical", understated, humour would have to be Jerry Seinfeld's observational style of standup comedy that become so popular during the nineties (i.e. "what's the deal with-airports/queues/etc."). Seinfeld avoids the overtly political in his comedy, but his usual focus on the banalities of the quotidian (as he calls it, the "minutiae") can be interpreted as an attack on aspects of Western consumer culture. The very act of asking the question "what's the deal?" implies a certain dissatisfaction with the status quo of consumer culture, it poses the question "why is our society so strange?" In response to such a question, the audience laughs because it recognises the particular aspect of society that Seinfeld aims to deconstruct. At the same time, an economy of desire is constructed around the act of the laughter itself. For Zizek, cynicism is a self-gratifying gesture that follows the fetishistic logic of "I know very well the truth of this statement, but in the meantime." There is jouissance in the act of recognition (or false consciousness), which of course deflects the original impulse that we presume to be social critique. This "kynicism" performs the opposite effect of Victor Shklovsky's concept of ostraneniye, the method of "making strange" the symbolic language, which Zizek would interpret as the "philosophical experience of 'wondering'" Enjoy 53). Seinfeld's comedy skips over that moment of comprehension, that breakdown to the shock of the Real. In other words, Seinfeld's cynicism yada yada yadas over the point de capiton. Therefore, cynicism is another attempt to reposition the symbolic as the primary level of experience, to usurp the Real with "reality."However, in the turbulent days that followed September 11, we find a counter at least to this "kynical" style of humour (the kind of comedy exemplified in Australia by such TV shows as The Glass House and the now-defunct Good News Week). The satirical show Politically Incorrect was pulled from the air on the American ABC network, after its host, Bill Maher, disputed President Bush's statement that the World Trade Centre terrorists were "cowardly." On the show airing on the seventeenth of September, Maher made the following statement: "we have been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from two thousand miles away. That's cowardly-staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it's not cowardly. " Au contraire to the show's title, this was perhaps one of the most politically correct statements ever made on American television, and it cost Maher his television show. Politically Incorrect was immediately pulled from the air in many American states (including Washington DC), and the show, crippled by public criticism and the loss of advertising money, was axed soon after. Maher normally utilised a "kynical" standpoint to throw stones at the big Other (i.e. the US political system), and as we have already seen with the example of Seinfeld, the jolting "Real" moment of the humour never seems to happen. Was Maher's September 11 comment one of the sublime instances of the letter "reaching its destination" to the American public? The jolting ostraneniye of this comedy is precisely that here there is no joke, no consoling sedative of jouissance, and the shock that followed in this humour deficit was one of denial and anger. One may argue that this instance provided a more "Real" moment for the American public than the media spectacle surrounding September 11 itself. Zizek writes in "Welcome to the Desert of the Real" (posted on the internet on the same day as that episode of Politically Incorrect), that Americans have libidinally invested in images of catastrophe for years. Catastrophe is one of the healthiest signs of the persistence of the symbolic order. By saying "we are the cowards!", Maher was essentially telling his public "we are the enemy!" or "we are the Symbolic!", and for a short time he dissolved the force of the non-existent Big Other. It is no wonder that he was ejected from this symbolic order at lightning speed. Here, I can't help being reminded of Guy Debord's axiom in The Society of the Spectacle, that "in a world which really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the false". In Zizek's cynical society, it seems to be strange but true that when the joke isn't funny anymore is really when it breaks the most societal taboos. Works Cited Eagleton, Terry. "Enjoy!" Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory 24:2 (2001), pp.40-52. Flieger, Jerry Aline. "Has Oedipus Signed Off (or Struck Out)?: Zizek, Lacan and the Field of Cyberspace." Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory 24:2 (2001), pp.53-77. Heinlein, Robert. Stranger in a Strange Land. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1982 (1961). Maher, Bill. "Politically Incorrect." Screened September 17th, 2001. Sloterdijk, Peter. The Critique of Cynical Reason. Translated by M.Eldred. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987 (1983). Zizek, Slavoj. Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. New York: Routledge, 2001 (1992). ---. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1999 (1989). Links http://de.indymedia.org/2001/09/7659.shtml http://www.millionflagmarch.com/bill/moreinfo.htm http://www.abc.net.au/glasshouse/ Citation reference for this article MLA Style Blackwood, Gemma. "That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0311/3-blackwood-that-joke.php>. APA Style Blackwood, G. (2003, Nov 10). That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0311/3-blackwood-that-joke.php>

In recent years, the US television landscape has been flooded with reboots, remakes, and revivals of “classic” nineties television series, such as Full/er House (1987-1995, 2016-present), Will & Grace (1998-2006, 2017-present), Roseanne (1988-1977, 2018), and Charmed (1998-2006, 2018-present). The term “reboot” is often used as a catchall for different kinds of revivals and remakes. “Remakes” are derivations or reimaginings of known properties with new characters, cast, and stories (Loock; Lavigne). “Revivals” bring back an existing property in the form of a continuation with the same cast and/or setting. “Revivals” and “remakes” both seek to capitalise on nostalgia for a specific notion of the past and access the (presumed) existing audience of the earlier series (Mittell; Rebecca Williams; Johnson).Reboots operate around two key pleasures. First, there is the pleasure of revisiting and/or reimagining characters that are “known” to audiences. Whether continuations or remakes, reboots are invested in the audience’s desire to see familiar characters. Second, there is the desire to “fix” and/or recuperate an earlier series. Some reboots, such as the Charmed remake attempt to recuperate the whiteness of the original series, whereas others such as Gilmore Girls: A Life in the Year (2017) set out to fix the ending of the original series by giving audiences a new “official” conclusion.The Roseanne reboot is invested in both these pleasures. It reunites the original cast for a short-lived, but impactful nine-episode tenth season. There is pleasure in seeing Roseanne (Roseanne Barr), Dan (John Goodman), Jackie (Laurie Metcalf), Becky (Lecy Goranson [seasons one to six, ten], Sarah Chalke [seasons six to nine]), Darlene (Sara Gilbert), and DJ (Michael Fishman) back in the Conner house with the same well-worn couch and afghan. The (attempted) recuperation is of author-star Barr, whose recent politics are in stark contrast to the working-class second-wave feminist politics of her nineties’ persona. This article is particularly interested in the second pleasure, because both the original series and the reboot situate the voice of Barr as central to the series’ narrative and politics.Despite achieving the highest ratings of any US sitcom in the past three years (O’Connell), on 29 May 2018, ABC announced that it was cancelling the Roseanne reboot. This decision came about in the wake of a racist tweet, where Barr compared a black woman (high-ranking Obama aide Valerie Jarrett) to an ape. Barr’s tweet and the cancellation of Roseanne, highlight the limits of nostalgia and Roseanne/Barr’s particular brand of white feminism. While whiteness and a lack of racial awareness are (and always have been) at the centre of Barr’s performance of feminism, the political landscape has shifted since the 1990s, with the rise of third and fourth-wave feminisms and intersectional activism. As such in the contemporary landscape, there is the expectation that white feminist figures take on and endorse anti-racist stances.This article argues that the reboot’s attempt to capitalise on nineties nostalgia exposes the limits of Roseanne/Barr’s feminism, as well as the limits of nostalgia. The feminist legacy of nineties-era Roseanne cannot and does not recuperate Barr’s star-persona. Also, the reboot and its subsequent cancellation highlight how the feminism of the series is embodied by Barr and her whiteness. This article will situate Roseanne and Barr within a feminist tradition on US television, before exploring how the reboot operates and circulates differently to the original series.From Roseanne (1988-1997) to Roseanne (2018)In its original form, Roseanne holds the distinction of being one of the most highly discussed and canonised feminist-leaning television series of all time, alongside The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-1977), Cagney and Lacey (1981-1988), and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2004). Roseanne also enabled and informed many popular feminist-leaning contemporary series, including Girls (2012-2017), Mom (2013-present), Better Things (2016-present), and Dietland (2018). Although it may seem anachronistic today, Roseanne and Barr helped define what it means to be a feminist and speak feminist politics on US television.Roseanne depicts the lives of the Conner family, headed by parents Roseanne and Dan. They live in the fictional blue-collar town of Lanford, Illinois with their three children Becky, Darlene, and DJ. Both Roseanne and Dan experience precarious employment and embark on numerous (mostly failed) business ventures throughout the series’ run. The reboot catches up with the Conner family in 2018, after Roseanne has experienced a health scare and single mom Darlene has moved into her parents’ house with her two children Harris (Emma Kenney) and Mark (Ames McNamara). In the new season, Roseanne and Dan’s children are experiencing similar working conditions to their parents in the 1990s. Becky works at a Mexican restaurant and is eager to act as surrogate mother to earn $50,000, Darlene is recently unemployed and looking for work, and DJ has just returned from military service.A stated objective of reviving Roseanne was to address the contentious US political landscape after the election of President Donald J. Trump (VanDerWerff). Barr is a vocal supporter of President Trump, as is her character in the reboot. The election plays a key role in the new season’s premise. The first episode of season 10 establishes that the titular Roseanne has not spoken to her sister Jackie (who is a Hillary Clinton supporter) in over a year. In both its nineties and 2018 incarnations, Roseanne makes apparent the extent to which feminist politics are indebted to and spoken through the author-star. The series is based on a character that Barr created and is grounded in her life experience. Barr and her character Roseanne are icons of nineties televisual feminism. While the other members of the Conner family are richly drawn and compelling, Roseanne is the centre of the series. It is her voice and perspective that drives the series and gives it its political resonance. Roseanne’s power in the text is authorised by Barr’s stardom. As Melissa Williams writes: “For nearly a decade, Barr was one of the most powerful women in Hollywood” (180).In the late 1980s and into the 1990s, Roseanne (and Barr) represented a new kind of feminist voice on US television, which at that stage (and still today) was dominated by middle-class women. Unlike Mary Richards (Mary Tyler Moore), Claire Huxtable (Phylicia Rashad), or Murphy Brown (Candice Bergen), Roseanne did not have a stable job and her family’s economic situation was often precarious. Roseanne/Barr adopted and used a feminism of personality popularised on television by Mary Tyler Moore and Lucille Ball. Unlike her foremothers, though, Roseanne/Barr was not slender, feminine, or interested in being likeable to men. Roseanne did not choose to work outside of the home, which marked her as different from many of US television’s other second-wave feminists and/or mothers. As Rachael Horowitz writes: “Roseanne’s feminism was for women who have to work because bills must get paid, who assert their role as head of the house despite the degrading work they often do during the day to pay for their kids’ food and clothes” (9).According to Kathleen Rowe, Barr is part of a long line of “female grotesques” whose defining features are excess and looseness (2-3). Rowe links Barr’s fatness or physical excess with her refusal to shut up and subversive speech. The feminism of Roseanne is contained within and expressed through Barr’s unruly white body (and voice). Barr’s unruliness and her unwillingness to follow the social conventions of politeness and decorum are tied to her (perceived) feminist politics.Understandings of Barr’s stardom, however, have shifted considerably in the years since the publication of Rowe’s analysis. While Barr is still “unruly,” her unruliness is no longer located in her body (which has been transformed to meet more conventional standards of western beauty), but rather in her Twitter presence, which is pro-Israel, pro-Trump, and anti-immigration. As Roxane Gay writes of the reboot: “Whatever charm and intelligence she [Barr] brought to the first nine seasons of her show, a show I very much loved, are absolutely absent in her current persona, particularly as it manifests on Twitter.”Feminist Voice and Stardom on US TVRoseanne performs what Julie D’Acci calls “explicit general feminism,” which is defined by “dialogue and scenes that straightforwardly addressed discrimination against women in both public and private spheres, stories structured around topical feminist causes, and the use of unequivocal feminist language and slogans” (147). However, the feminist politics of Roseanne and Barr are (and never were) straightforward or uncomplicated.Studies of feminism on US television have primarily focused on comedies that feature female television stars who function as advocates for feminism and women’s issues (Spigel; Rabinovitz; D’Acci). Much of the critical discussion of feminist voice in US female-led television identifies the feminist intervention as taking place at the level of performance (Dow; Spigel; Spangler). Comedic series such as I Love Lucy (1951-1957), Murphy Brown (1988-1998, 2018-present), and Grace Under Fire (1993-1998), and dramatic series’, such as Cagney and Lacey and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, privilege the articulation of feminist ideas through performance and character.Roseanne is not a series that derives its comedy from a clash of different perspectives or a series where politics are debated and explored in a nuanced a complex way. Roseanne promotes a distinct singular perspective – that of Roseanne Barr. In seasons one to nine, the character Roseanne is rarely persuaded to think differently about an issue or situation or depicted as “wrong.” The series centres Roseanne’s pain and distress when Becky elopes with Mark (Glenn Quinn), or when Jackie is abused by her boyfriend Fisher (Matt Roth), or when Darlene accidently gets pregnant. Although those storylines are about other characters, Roseanne’s emotions are central. Roseanne/Barr’s perspective (as fictional character and media personality) informs the narrative, sensibility, and tone. Roseanne is not designed to contain multiple perspectives.Roseanne is acutely aware of its place in the history of feminist voice and representations of women on US television. Television is central to the series’ articulation of feminism and feminist voice. In season seven episode “All About Rosey,” the series breaks the fourth wall (as it does many times throughout its run), taking the audience behind the scenes where some of US television’s most well-known (and traditional) mothers are cleaning the Conner’s kitchen. June Cleaver (Barbara Billingsley) from Leave It to Beaver (1957-1963), Joan Nash (Pat Crowley) from Please Don’t Eat the Daisies (1965-1967), Ruth Martin (June Lockhart) from Lassie (1958-1964), Norma Arnold (Alley Mills) from The Wonder Years (1988-1993), and Louise Jefferson (Isabel Sanford) from The Jeffersons (1975-1985) at first sit in judgment of Barr and her character Roseanne, claiming she presents “wrong image” for a TV mother. However, Roseanne/Barr eventually wins over the TV mothers, declaring “the important thing is on my show, I’m the boss and father knows squat” (7.19). It is in contrast to more traditional television mothers that Roseanne/Barr’s feminist voice comes into focus.In the ninth and final season of Roseanne’s initial run, the series (arguably) becomes a parody of its former self. By this point in the series, “Barr was seen as the sole cause of the show’s demise, as a woman who was ‘imploding,’ ‘losing the plot,’ or ‘out of control’” (White 234). White argues that depicting the working-class Conners’ social and economic ascension to upper-class diminishes the distinction between Barr and her character (243). White writes that in the series’ finale, the “line between performer and character is irrevocably blurred; it is unclear whether the voice we are hearing is that of Roseanne Conner or Roseanne Barr” (244). This blurring between Roseanne and Barr becomes particularly contentious in season 10.Rebooting Roseanne: Season 10Season 10 redacts and erases most of the events of season nine, which itself was a fantasy, as revealed in the season nine finale. As such, the reboot is not a simple continuation, because in the season nine finale it is revealed that Dan suffered a fatal heart attack a year earlier. The final monologue (delivered in voice-over by Barr) “reveals” that Roseanne has been writing and editing her experiences into a digestible story. The “Conners winning the lottery” storyline that dominated season nine was imagined by Roseanne as an elaborate coping strategy after Dan’s death. Yet in the season 10 reboot, Dan is revealed to be alive, as is Darlene and David’s (Johnny Galecki) daughter Harris, who was born during the events of season nine.The limits of Roseanne/Barr’s feminism within the contemporary political landscape come into focus around issues of race. This is partly because the incident that incited ABC to cancel the reboot of Roseanne was racially motivated, and partly because Roseanne/Barr’s feminism has always relied on whiteness. Between 1997 and 2018, Barr’s unruliness has become less associated with empowering working-class women and more with railing against minorities and immigrants. In redacting and erasing the events of season nine, the reboot attempts to step back the conflation between Roseanne and Barr with little success.In the first episode of season 10, “Twenty Years to Life”, Roseanne is positioned as the loud-mouthed victim of circumstance and systemic inequality – similar to her nineties-persona. Yet in 2018, Roseanne mocks same things that nineties’ Roseanne took seriously, including collective action, community building, and labour conditions. Roseanne claims: “It is not my fault that I just happen to be a charismatic person that’s right about everything” (10.01). Here, the series attempts to make light of a now-outdated understanding of Barr’s persona, but it comes off as tone-deaf and lacking self-awareness.Roseanne has bigoted tendencies in both the 1990s and in 2018, but the political resonance of those tendencies and their relationships to feminisms and nostalgia differs greatly from the original series to the reboot. This is best illustrated by comparing season seven episode “White Men Can’t Kiss” and season 10 episode “Go Cubs.” In the former, Roseanne is appalled that she may have raised a racist son and insists DJ must kiss his black classmate Geena (Rae’Ven Larrymore Kelly) in the school play. Towards the end of this episode, Geena’s father comes by the restaurant where Roseanne and Jackie are closing up. When the tall black man knocks on the locked door, Roseanne refuses to let him inside. She appears visibly afraid. Once Roseanne knows he is Geena’s father, she lets him in and he confronts her about her racist attitude. Roseanne (and the audience) is forced to sit in the discomfort of having her bigotry exposed. While there are no material consequences for Roseanne or DJ’s racism, within the context of the less intersectional 1990s, this interaction does not call into question Roseanne or Barr’s feminist credentials.In season 10, Roseanne tackles similar issues around race, ignorance, and bigotry, but it plays out very differently. In the reboot’s seventh episode, Roseanne suspects her Muslim refugee neighbours Fatima (Anne Bedian) and Samir (Alain Washnevky) are terrorists. Although Roseanne is proven wrong, she is not forced to reckon with her bigotry. Instead, she is positioned as a “hero” later in the episode, when she berates a supermarket cashier for her racist treatment of Fatima. Given what audiences know about Barr’s off-screen politics, this does not counteract the impression of racism, but compounds it. It also highlights the whiteness of the politics embodied by Roseanne/Barr both on-screen and off. Although these are two very different racial configurations (anti-blackness and Islamophobia), these episodes underline the shifting reception and resonance of the feminism Roseanne/Barr embodies.ConclusionIn June 2018, shortly after the cancellation of the Roseanne reboot, ABC announced that it was developing a spin-off without Barr called The Conners (2018-present). In the spin-off Roseanne is dead and her family is dealing with life after Roseanne/Roseanne (Crucchiola). Here, Roseanne suffers the same fate as Dan in season nine (she dies off-screen), but now it is Barr who is fictionally buried. While The Conners attempts to rewrite the story of the Conner family by rejecting Barr’s racist views and removing her financial and creative stake in their stories, Barr cannot be erased or redacted from Roseanne or the story of the Conner family, because it is her story.The reboot and its cancellation illuminate how Barr and Roseanne’s feminist voice has not evolved past its white second-wave roots. The feminism of Roseanne is embodied by Barr in all her unruliness and whiteness. Roseanne/Barr/Roseanne has not taken on the third and fourth-wave critiques of second-wave feminisms, which emphasise the limits of white feminisms. The failure of the Roseanne reboot reveals that the pleasure and nostalgia of seeing the Conner family back together is not enough. Ultimately, Roseanne is without intersectionality, and thus cannot (and should not) be recognised as feminist in the contemporary political landscape.ReferencesBetter Things. Cr. Pamela Adlon and Louis C.K. 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This essay combines life writing with meditations on the significance of walking as integral to the ritual practice of pilgrimage, where the individual improves her soul or health through the act of walking to a shrine containing healing relics of a saint. Braiding together insights from medieval literature, contemporary ecocriticism, and memory studies, I reflect on my own pilgrimage practice as it impacts the land itself. Canterbury, England serves as the central shrine for four pilgrimages over decades: 1966, 1994, 1997, and 2003.The act of memory was not invented in the Anthropocene. Rather, the nonhuman world has taught humans how to remember. From ice-core samples retaining the history of Europe’s weather to rocks embedded with fossilized extinct species, nonhuman actors literally petrifying or freezing the past—from geologic sites to frozen water—become exposed through the process of anthropocentric discovery and human interference. The very act of human uncovery and analysis threatens to eliminate the nonhuman actor which has hospitably shared its own experience. How can humans script nonhuman memory?As for the history of memory studies itself, a new phase is arguably beginning, shifting from “the transnational, transcultural, or global to the planetary; from recorded to deep history; from the human to the nonhuman” (Craps et al. 3). Memory studies for the Anthropocene can “focus on the terrestrialized significance of (the historicized) forms of remembrance but also on the positioning of who is remembering and, ultimately, which ‘Anthropocene’ is remembered” (Craps et al. 5). In this era of the “self-conscious Anthropocene” (Craps et al. 6), narrative itself can focus on “the place of nonhuman beings in human stories of origins, identity, and futures point to a possible opening for the methods of memory studies” (Craps et al. 8). The nonhuman on the paths of this essay range from the dirt on the path to the rock used to build the sacred shrine, the ultimate goal. How they intersect with human actors reveals how the “human subject is no longer the one forming the world, but does indeed constitute itself through its relation to and dependence on the object world” (Marcussen 14, qtd. in Rodriguez 378). Incorporating “nonhuman species as objects, if not subjects, of memory [...] memory critics could begin by extending their objects to include the memory of nonhuman species,” linking both humans and nonhumans in “an expanded multispecies frame of remembrance” (Craps et al. 9). My narrative—from diaries recording sacred journey to a novel structured by pilgrimage—propels motion, but also secures in memory events from the past, including memories of those nonhuman beings I interact with.Childhood PilgrimageThe little girl with brown curls sat crying softly, whimpering, by the side of the road in lush grass. The mother with her soft brown bangs and an underflip to her hair told the story of a little girl, sitting by the side of the road in lush grass.The story book girl had forgotten her Black Watch plaid raincoat at the picnic spot where she had lunched with her parents and two older brothers. Ponchos spread out, the family had eaten their fresh yeasty rolls, hard cheese, apples, and macaroons. The tin clink of the canteen hit their teeth as they gulped metallic water, still icy cold from the taps of the ancient inn that morning. The father cut slices of Edam with his Swiss army knife, parsing them out to each child to make his or her own little sandwich. The father then lay back for his daily nap, while the boys played chess. The portable wooden chess set had inlaid squares, each piece no taller than a fingernail paring. The girl read a Junior Puffin book, while the mother silently perused Agatha Christie. The boy who lost at chess had to play his younger sister, a fitting punishment for the less able player. She cheerfully played with either brother. Once the father awakened, they packed up their gear into their rucksacks, and continued the pilgrimage to Canterbury.Only the little Black Watch plaid raincoat was left behind.The real mother told the real girl that the story book family continued to walk, forgetting the raincoat until it began to rain. The men pulled on their ponchos and the mother her raincoat, when the little girl discovered her raincoat missing. The story book men walked two miles back while the story book mother and girl sat under the dripping canopy of leaves provided by a welcoming tree.And there, the real mother continued, the storybook girl cried and whimpered, until a magic taxi cab in which the father and boys sat suddenly appeared out of the mist to drive the little girl and her mother to their hotel.The real girl’s eyes shone. “Did that actually happen?” she asked, perking up in expectation.“Oh, yes,” said the real mother, kissing her on the brow. The girl’s tears dried. Only the plops of rain made her face moist. The little girl, now filled with hope, cuddled with her mother as they huddled together.Without warning, out of the mist, drove up a real magic taxi cab in which the real men sat. For magic taxi cabs really exist, even in the tangible world—especially in England. At the very least, in the England of little Susie’s imagination.Narrative and PilgrimageMy mother’s tale suggests how this story echoes in yet another pilgrimage story, maintaining a long tradition of pilgrimage stories embedded within frame tales as far back as the Middle Ages.The Christian pilgrim’s walk parallels Christ’s own pilgrimage to Emmaus. The blisters we suffer echo faintly the lash Christ endured. The social relations of the pilgrim are “diachronic” (Alworth 98), linking figures (Christ) from the past to the now (us, or, during the Middle Ages, William Langland’s Piers Plowman or Chaucer’s band who set out from Southwark). We embody the frame of the vera icon, the true image, thus “conjur[ing] a site of simultaneity or a plane of immanence where the actors of the past [...] meet those of the future” (Alworth 99). Our quotidian walk frames the true essence or meaning of our ambulatory travail.In 1966, my parents took my two older brothers and me on the Pilgrims’ Way—not the route from London to Canterbury that Chaucer’s pilgrims would have taken starting south of London in Southwark, rather the ancient trek from Winchester to Canterbury, famously chronicled in The Old Road by Hilaire Belloc. The route follows along the south side of the Downs, where the muddy path was dried by what sun there was. My parents first undertook the walk in the early 1950s. Slides from that pilgrimage depict my mother, voluptuous in her cashmere twinset and tweed skirt, as my father crosses a stile. My parents, inspired by Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, decided to walk along the traditional Pilgrims’ Way to Canterbury. Story intersects with material traversal over earth on dirt-laden paths.By the time we children came along, the memories of that earlier pilgrimage resonated with my parents, inspiring them to take us on the same journey. We all carried our own rucksacks and walked five or six miles a day. Concerning our pilgrimage when I was seven, my mother wrote in her diary:As good pilgrims should, we’ve been telling tales along the way. Yesterday Jimmy told the whole (detailed) story of That Darn Cat, a Disney movie. Today I told about Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey, which first inspired me to think of walking trips and everyone noted the resemblance between Stevenson’s lovable, but balky, donkey and our sweet Sue. (We hadn’t planned to tell tales, but they just happened along the way.)I don’t know how sweet I was; perhaps I was “balky” because the road was so hard. Landscape certainly shaped my experience.As I wrote about the pilgrimage in my diary then, “We went to another Hotel and walked. We went and had lunch at the Boggly [booglie] place. We went to a nother hotel called The Swan with fether Quits [quilts]. We went to the Queens head. We went to the Gest house. We went to aother Hotle called Srping wells and my tooth came out. We saw some taekeys [turkeys].” The repetition suggests how pilgrimage combines various aspects of life, from the emotional to the physical, the quotidian (walking and especially resting—in hotels with quilts) with the extraordinary (newly sprung tooth or the appearance of turkeys). “[W]ayfaring abilities depend on an emotional connection to the environment” (Easterlin 261), whether that environment is modified by humans or even manmade, inhabited by human or nonhuman actors. How can one model an “ecological relationship between humans and nonhumans” in narrative (Rodriguez 368)? Rodriguez proposes a “model of reading as encounter [...] encountering fictional story worlds as potential models” (Rodriguez 368), just as my mother did with the Magic Taxi Cab story.Taxis proliferate in my childhood pilgrimage. My mother writes in 1966 in her diary of journeying along the Pilgrims’ Way to St. Martha’s on the Hill. “Susie was moaning and groaning under her pack and at one desperate uphill moment gasped out, ‘Let’s take a taxi!’ – our highborn lady as we call her. But we finally made it.” “Martha’s”, as I later learned, is a corruption of “Martyrs”, a natural linguistic decay that developed over the medieval period. Just as the vernacular textures pilgrimage poems in the fourteeth century, the common tongue in all its glorious variety seeps into even the quotidian modern pilgrim’s journey.Part of the delight of pilgrimage lies in the characters one meets and the languages they speak. In 1994, the only time my husband and I cheated on a strictly ambulatory sacred journey occurred when we opted to ride a bus for ten miles where walking would have been dangerous. When I ask the bus driver if a stop were ours, he replied, “I'll give you a shout, love.” As though in a P. G. Wodehouse novel, when our stop finally came, he cried out, “Cheerio, love” to me and “Cheerio, mate” to Jim.Language changes. Which is a good thing. If it didn’t, it would be dead, like those martyrs of old. Like Latin itself. Disentangling pilgrimage from language proves impossible. The healthy ecopoetics of languages meshes with the sustainable vibrancy of the land we traverse.“Nettles of remorse…”: Derek Walcott, The Bounty Once my father had to carry me past a particularly tough patch of nettles. As my mother tells it, we “went through orchards and along narrow woodland path with face-high nettles. Susie put a scarf over her face and I wore a poncho though it was sunny and we survived almost unscathed.” Certain moments get preserved by the camera. At age seven in a field outside of Wye, I am captured in my father’s slides surrounded by grain. At age thirty-five, I am captured in film by my husband in the same spot, in the identical pose, though now quite a bit taller than the grain. Three years later, as a mother, I in turn snap him with a backpack containing baby Sarah, grumpily gazing off over the fields.When I was seven, we took off from Detling. My mother writes, “set off along old Pilgrims’ Way. Road is paved now, but much the same as fifteen years ago. Saw sheep, lambs, and enjoyed lovely scenery. Sudden shower sent us all to a lunch spot under trees near Thurnham Court, where we huddled under ponchos and ate happily, watching the weather move across the valley. When the sun came to us, we continued on our way which was lovely, past sheep, etc., but all on hard paved road, alas. Susie was a good little walker, but moaned from time to time.”I seem to whimper and groan a lot on pilgrimage. One thing is clear: the physical aspects of walking for days affected my phenomenological response to our pilgrimage which we’d undertaken both as historical ritual, touristic nature hike, and what Wendell Berry calls a “secular pilgrimage” (402), where the walker seeks “the world of the Creation” (403) in a “return to the wilderness in order to be restored” (416). The materiality of my experience was key to how I perceived this journey as a spiritual, somatic, and emotional event. The link between pilgrimage and memory, between pilgrimage poetics and memorial methods, occupies my thoughts on pilgrimage. As Nancy Easterlin’s work on “cognitive ecocriticism” (“Cognitive” 257) contends, environmental knowledge is intimately tied in with memory (“Cognitive” 260). She writes: “The advantage of extensive environmental knowledge most surely precipitates the evolution of memory, necessary to sustain vast knowledge” (“Cognitive” 260). Even today I can recall snatches of moments from that trip when I was a child, including the telling of tales.Landscape not only changes the writer, but writing transforms the landscape and our interaction with it. As Valerie Allen suggests, “If the subject acts upon the environment, so does the environment upon the subject” (“When Things Break” 82). Indeed, we can understand the “road as a strategic point of interaction between human and environment” (Allen and Evans 26; see also Oram)—even, or especially, when that interaction causes pain and inflames blisters. My relationship with moleskin on my blasted and blistered toes made me intimately conscious of my body with every step taken on the pilgrimage route.As an adult, my boots on the way from Winchester to Canterbury pinched and squeezed, packed dirt acting upon them and, in turn, my feet. After taking the train home and upon arrival in London, we walked through Bloomsbury to our flat on Russell Square, passing by what I saw as a new, less religious, but no less beckoning shrine: The London Foot Hospital at Fitzroy Square.Now, sadly, it is closed. Where do pilgrims go for sole—and soul—care?Slow Walking as WayfindingAll pilgrimages come to an end, just as, in 1966, my mother writes of our our arrival at last in Canterbury:On into Canterbury past nice grassy cricket field, where we sat and ate chocolate bars while we watched white-flannelled cricketers at play. Past town gates to our Queen’s Head Inn, where we have the smallest, slantingest room in the world. Everything is askew and we’re planning to use our extra pillows to brace our feet so we won’t slide out of bed. Children have nice big room with 3 beds and are busy playing store with pounds and shillings [that’s very hard mathematics!]. After dinner, walked over to cathedral, where evensong was just ending. Walked back to hotel and into bed where we are now.Up to early breakfast, dashed to cathedral and looked up, up, up. After our sins were forgiven, we picked up our rucksacks and headed into London by train.This experience in 1966 varies slightly from the one in 1994. Jim and I walk through a long walkway of tall, slim trees arching over us, a green, lush and silent cloister, finally gaining our first view of Canterbury with me in a similar photo to one taken almost thirty years before. We make our way into the city through the West Gate, first passing by St. Dunstan’s Church where Henry II had put on penitential garb and later Sir Thomas More’s head was buried. Canterbury is like Coney Island in the Middle Ages and still is: men with dreadlocks and slinky didjeridoos, fire tossers, mobs of people, tourists. We go to Mercery Lane as all good pilgrims should and under the gate festooned with the green statue of Christ, arriving just in time for evensong.Imagining a medieval woman arriving here and listening to the service, I pray to God my gratefulness for us having arrived safely. I can understand the fifteenth-century pilgrim, Margery Kempe, screaming emotionally—maybe her feet hurt like mine. I’m on the verge of tears during the ceremony: so glad to be here safe, finally got here, my favorite service, my beloved husband. After the service, we pass on through the Quire to the spot where St. Thomas’s relic sanctuary was. People stare at a lit candle commemorating it. Tears well up in my eyes.I suppose some things have changed since the Middle Ages. One Friday in Canterbury with my children in 2003 has some parallels with earlier iterations. Seven-year-old Sarah and I go to evensong at the Cathedral. I tell her she has to be absolutely quiet or the Archbishop will chop off her head.She still has her head.Though the road has been paved, the view has remained virtually unaltered. Some aspects seem eternal—sheep, lambs, and stiles dotting the landscape. The grinding down of the pilgrimage path, reflecting the “slowness of flat ontology” (Yates 207), occurs over vast expanses of time. Similarly, Easterlin reflects on human and more than human vitalism: “Although an understanding of humans as wayfinders suggests a complex and dynamic interest on the part of humans in the environment, the surround itself is complex and dynamic and is frequently in a state of change as the individual or group moves through it” (Easterlin “Cognitive” 261). An image of my mother in the 1970s by a shady tree along the Pilgrims’ Way in England shows that the path is lower by 6 inches than the neighboring verge (Bright 4). We don’t see dirt evolving, because its changes occur so slowly. Only big time allows us to see transformative change.Memorial PilgrimageOddly, the erasure of self through duplication with a precursor occurred for me while reading W.G. Sebald’s pilgrimage novel, The Rings of Saturn. I had experienced my own pilgrimage to many of these same locations he immortalizes. I, too, had gone to Somerleyton Hall with my elderly mother, husband, and two children. My memories, sacred shrines pooling in familial history, are infused with synchronic reflection, medieval to contemporary—my parents’ periodic sojourns in Suffolk for years, leading me to love the very landscape Sebald treks across; sadness at my parents’ decline; hope in my children’s coming to add on to their memory palimpsest a layer devoted to this land, to this history, to this family.Then, the oddest coincidence from my reading pilgrimage. After visiting Dunwich Heath, Sebald comes to his friend, Michael, whose wife Anne relays a story about a local man hired as a pallbearer by the local undertaker in Westleton. This man, whose memory was famously bad, nevertheless reveled in the few lines allotted him in an outdoor performance of King Lear. After her relating this story, Sebald asks for a taxi (Sebald 188-9).This might all seem unremarkable to the average reader. Yet, “human wayfinders are richly aware of and responsive to environment, meaning both physical places and living beings, often at a level below consciousness” (Easterlin “Cognitive” 265). For me, with a connection to this area, I startled with recollection emerging from my subconscience. The pallbearer’s name in Sebald’s story was Mr Squirrel, the very same name of the taxi driver my parents—and we—had driven with many times. The same Mr Squirrel? How many Mr Squirrels can there be in this small part of Suffolk? Surely it must be the same family, related in a genetic encoding of memory. I run to my archives. And there, in my mother’s address book—itself a palimpsest of time with names and addressed scored through; pasted-in cards, names, and numbers; and looseleaf memoranda—there, on the first page under “S”, “Mr. Squirrel” in my mother’s unmistakable scribble. She also had inscribed his phone number and the village Saxmundum, seven miles from Westleton. His name had been crossed out. Had he died? Retired? I don’t know. Yet quick look online tells me Squirrell’s Taxis still exists, as it does in my memory.Making KinAfter accompanying a class on a bucolic section of England’s Pilgrims’ Way, seven miles from Wye to Charing, we ended up at a pub drinking a pint, with which all good pilgrimages should conclude. There, students asked me why I became a medievalist who studies pilgrimage. Only after the publication of my first book on women pilgrims did I realize that the origin of my scholarly, long fascination with pilgrimage, blossoming into my professional career, began when I was seven years old along the way to Canterbury. The seeds of that pilgrimage when I was so young bore fruit and flowers decades later.One story illustrates Michel Serres’s point that we should not aim to appropriate the world, but merely act as temporary tenants (Serres 72-3). On pilgrimage in 1966 as a child, I had a penchant for ant spiders. That was not the only insect who took my heart. My mother shares how “Susie found a beetle up on the hill today and put him in the cheese box. Jimmy put holes in the top for him. She named him Alexander Beetle and really became very fond of him. After supper, we set him free in the garden here, with appropriate ceremony and a few over-dramatic tears of farewell.” He clearly made a great impression on me. I yearn for him today, that beetle in the cheese box. Though I tried to smuggle nature as contraband, I ultimately had to set him free.Passing through cities, landscape, forests, over seas and on roads, wandering by fields and vegetable patches, under a sky lit both by sun and moon, the pilgrim—even when in a group of fellow pilgrims—in her lonesome exercise endeavors to realize Serres’ ideal of the tenant inhabitant of earth. Nevertheless, we, as physical pilgrims, inevitably leave our traces through photos immortalizing the journey, trash left by the wayside, even excretions discretely deposited behind a convenient bush. Or a beetle who can tell the story of his adventure—or terror—at being ensconced for a time in a cheese box.On one notorious day of painful feet, my husband and I arrived in Otford, only to find the pub was still closed. Finally, it became time for dinner. We sat outside, me with feet ensconced in shoes blessedly inert and unmoving, as the server brought out our salads. The salad cream, white and viscous, was presented in an elegantly curved silver dish. Then Jim began to pick at the salad cream with his fork. Patiently, tenderly, he endeavored to assist a little bug who had gotten trapped in the gooey sauce. Every attempt seemed doomed to failure. The tiny creature kept falling back into the gloppy substance. Undaunted, Jim compassionately ministered to our companion. Finally, the little insect flew off, free to continue its own pilgrimage, which had intersected with ours in a tiny moment of affinity. Such moments of “making kin” work, according to Donna Haraway, as “life-saving strateg[ies] for the Anthropocene” (Oppermann 3, qtd. in Haraway 160).How can narrative avoid the anthropocentric centre of writing, which is inevitable given the human generator of such a piece? While words are a human invention, nonhuman entities vitally enact memory. The very Downs we walked along were created in the Cretaceous period at least seventy million years ago. The petrol propelling the magic taxi cab was distilled from organic bodies dating back millions of years. Jurassic limestone from the Bathonian Age almost two hundred million years ago constitutes the Caen stone quarried for building Canterbury Cathedral, while its Purbeck marble from Dorset dates from the Cretaceous period. Walking on pilgrimage propels me through a past millions—billions—of eons into the past, dwarfing my speck of existence. Yet, “if we wish to cross the darkness which separates us from [the past] we must lay down a little plank of words and step delicately over it” (Barfield 23). Elias Amidon asks us to consider how “the ground we dig into and walk upon is sacred. It is sacred because it makes us neighbors to each other, whether we like it or not. Tell this story” (Amidon 42). And, so, I have.We are winding down. Time has passed since that first pilgrimage of mine at seven years old. Yet now, here, I still put on my red plaid wollen jumper and jacket, crisp white button-up shirt, grey knee socks, and stout red walking shoes. Slinging on my rucksack, I take my mother’s hand.I’m ready to take my first step.We continue our pilgrimage, together.ReferencesAllen, Valerie. “When Things Break: Mending Rroads, Being Social.” Roadworks: Medieval Britain, Medieval Roads. Eds. Valerie Allen and Ruth Evans. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2016.———, and Ruth Evans. Introduction. Roadworks: Medieval Britain, Medieval Roads. Eds. Valerie Allen and Ruth Evans. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2016.Alworth, David J. Site Reading: Fiction, Art, Social Form. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2016.Amidon, Elias. “Digging In.” Dirt: A Love Story. Ed. Barbara Richardson. Lebanon, NH: ForeEdge, 2015.Barfield, Owen. History in English Words. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1967.Berry, Wendell. “A Secular Pilgrimage.” The Hudson Review 23.3 (1970): 401-424.Bright, Derek. “The Pilgrims’ Way Revisited: The Use of the North Downs Main Trackway and the Medway Crossings by Medieval Travelers.” Kent Archaeological Society eArticle (2010): 4-32.Craps, Stef, Rick Crownshaw, Jennifer Wenzel, Rosanne Kennedy, Claire Colebrook, and Vin Nardizzi. “Memory Studies and the Anthropocene: A Roundtable.” Memory Studies 11.4 (2017) 1-18.Easterlin, Nancy. A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2012.———. “Cognitive Ecocriticism: Human Wayfinding, Sociality, and Literary Interpretation.” Introduction to Cognitive Studies. Ed. Lisa Zunshine. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2010. 257-274.Haraway, Donna. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin.” Environmental Humanities 6 (2015): 159-65.James, Erin, and Eric Morel. “Ecocriticism and Narrative Theory: An Introduction.” English Studies 99.4 (2018): 355-365.Marcussen, Marlene. Reading for Space: An Encounter between Narratology and New Materialism in the Works of Virgina Woolf and Georges Perec. PhD diss. University of Southern Denmark, 2016.Oppermann, Serpil. “Introducing Migrant Ecologies in an (Un)Bordered World.” ISLE 24.2 (2017): 243–256.Oram, Richard. “Trackless, Impenetrable, and Underdeveloped? Roads, Colonization and Environmental Transformation in the Anglo-Scottish Border Zone, c. 1100 to c. 1300.” Roadworks: Medieval Britain, Medieval Roads. Eds. Valerie Allen and Ruth Evans. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2016.Rodriquez, David. “Narratorhood in the Anthropocene: Strange Stranger as Narrator-Figure in The Road and Here.” English Studies 99.4 (2018): 366-382.Savory, Elaine. “Toward a Caribbean Ecopoetics: Derek Walcott’s Language of Plants.” Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment. Eds. Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. 80-96.Sebald, W.G. The Rings of Saturn. Trans. Michael Hulse. New York: New Directions, 1998.Serres, Michel. Malfeasance: Appropriating through Pollution? Trans. Anne-Marie Feenberg-Dibon. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2011.Walcott, Derek. Selected Poems. Ed. Edward Baugh. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997. 3-16.Yates, Julian. “Sheep Tracks—A Multi-Species Impression.” Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects. Ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Washington, D.C.: Oliphaunt Books, 2012.

The impetus for this issue dates from a symposium on Embodied Knowledges held at Edith Cowan University in Perth in 2011. The Symposium arose from the shared interests of a diverse group, many of them practice-led researchers, and should have been a clue that the call for papers for this issue would attract different conceptions of the body. Nevertheless we were surprised by the many kinds of bodies implied in the 17 papers received and are pleased to offer a selection in the 'embody' issue of M/C Journal.Part of the difficulty of talking about the body as a source of knowledge, and also as a product of culture and history, is the backdrop of unproblematic representation of the body in popular culture. The linkage of the body to the brain, and by implication the mind, is particularly hard to escape. Through a scientific/medical lens, viewers of medical documentaries like The Human Body have learned to interpret representations of the brain. “Slices” of the brain are instantly recognisable through technologies such as Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scans. The metaphor of the brain lighting up due to thought and activity, derived from mediated brain imaging technology, has entered common usage. Such images are understood even by non-scientists as different parts of the brain at work, running the body. Brains, bodies and thinking seem well connected in popular culture.In the academic realm, the relationship of the brain to the mind is contested, as is the place of the body. In Western culture a dualist mind/body division has contributed to a particular understanding of the body, and of knowledge making, in which objective, propositional knowledge has been privileged. An alternative monist view has variously been used by theorists of the body from Nietsche to Deleuze but also by contemporary neurophysiologists such as Damasio. Using these philosophical positions, the body is either the weaker side of a partnership, or subsumed into a whole which does not acknowledge the specificity of actual bodies, or their potential as sites of knowledge making.Merleau-Ponty posited the body as both object and subject and that access to knowledge could only be obtained by the lived experience of the body. He suggested that we can only know other objects and perceive space and time through our own bodies. The phenomenological approaches resulting from this stance have, to some extent, recovered the status of bodily knowledge. Psychoanalytical thought has contributed to the extension of what we consider to be the boundaries of the body and blurred the articulation of mind through concepts like body image and body schema (see Weiss) and later neural maps (e.g. Damasio). However, Elizabeth Grosz went further when she issued a challenge in the early 90s “that all the significant facets and complexities of subjects, can be as adequately explained using the subject’s corporeality as a framework as it would be using consciousness or the unconscious” (vii). The body has been shown to be plastic when considered within lived physical and cultural spaces (Giblett; Grosz). Regardless of where one positions the body on a continuum from pure nature to a surface overwritten by culture and history, it seems foolish to disregard it as a source of knowledge.The authors of the papers presented in this issue attempt to show that knowledge resides in, can be acquired through, and flows out from, the body. Many of them see a connection between how and what can be known and their practice as artists, performers, researchers and writers. This way of knowing – through the thinking body – is connected to a developing family of methodologies called practice-based or practice-led research. It is research that aims to add to knowledge and understanding by carrying out an original investigation “in and through the acts of creating and performing” (Borgdorff 46). While many art practices clearly involve the body, Mercer and Robson point out that practice-led researchers often put the body at the centre of the inquiry and that “corporeal attention and information completes an otherwise insufficient way of theorising and philosophising” (18).Jo Taylor’s feature article on embodied trauma traverses 118 years between Jean-Martin Charcot and Robert Scaer. It captures both the problem of separating mind and body and the importance to recovery, of acknowledging knowledge held in the body. In the accounts of two physicians working in different times, cultures and places of access to scientific knowledge, it is the knowledge available through their patients’ bodies that is common. The image of the body arched in hysteria, the experience of trauma locked inside, will perhaps ensure that the body is not lost in this selection of writings.Ffion Murphy and Richard Nile also address trauma but with respect to the lost body in relation to an imagined community. Both the personal trauma of war and the communal experience of war can be sensed in the lost literature of the First World War. These attempts to represent or resurrect the war dead through writing can be considered acts of grief for embodiment. Karina Quinn and Kirsten Hudson ignore the spectre of the hysterical in examining maternal embodiment. Quinn takes up Julia Kristeva’s challenge to write from the body, providing a visceral account. Hudson also writes her lived experience, and offers her embodied art practice as site of resistance to cultural expectations of Australian motherhood.The bodily experience of art by the viewer is addressed by Prue Gibson, while Roz Drummond, Jondi Keane and Patrick West consider the interaction between embodiment and place from three different artistic practices. Chaim Noy’s detailed discussion conveys the kinaesthetic skill of the martial arts practitioner within a community of practice. His autoethnographic narrative highlights the knowledge of the body-in-motion against his written reflection.Vanessa Bradshaw, Cynthia Witney, Lelia Green and Leesa Costello show that embodied knowledge can be shared in a community even when that community is a virtual one. Whilst being diagnosed and treated within a dominant scientific/medical discourse, which prescribes one way of knowing breast cancer, women’s embodied experiences can be exchanged through an online support site to provide an alternative source of knowledge. Re-enactment and embodiment of cultural memory is explored by Michaela Callaghan in her work on the carnival dances of the displaced campesinos of the Andes. Within an urban setting, the campesinos collectively dance into being their ancestral place using physical memory. Her description of the body within place implies movement, perhaps showing that writing need not take us away from the body.The bodies represented in this issue feel like living bodies, they are not the bodies without organs of Deleuze and Guattari or the flesh of later Merleau-Ponty. They are bodies of sexual difference, bodies interacting with, and reacting to, other bodies, within particular spaces. Even the ghostly dead bodies of the war poetry, reported by Murphy and Nile, exert a powerful influence over the living.In using the term embodied knowledge we affirm that knowledge making includes the body. This 'embody' issue of M/C Journal is not about rejecting the mind in favour of the body. It is about the richness of knowledge and practice, grounded in our bodies-in-the world. As Grosz (vii) would have it: “Bodies have all the explanatory power of minds”.ReferencesBorgdorff, Henk. “The Production of Knowledge in Artistic Research”. The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts. Eds. Michael Biggs and Henrik Karlsson. London: Routledge, 2010. 44-63.Damasio, Antonio. Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain. London: Vintage, 2004.Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.Giblett, Rodney. The Body of Nature and Culture. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1994.Kristeva, Julia, and Arthur Goldhammer (Trans.). "Stabat Mater." Poetics Today 6.1-2 (1985): 133-52.Mercer, Leah, and Julie Robson. “The Backbone of Live Research: A Synthesis of Method in Performance Based Inquiry”. Live Research: Methods of Practice-led Inquiry in Performance. Eds. Leah Mercer, Julie Robson and David Fenton. Nerang, QLD: Ladyfinger, 2012. 11-19.Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962.---. The Visible and the Invisible. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968.The Human Body. Prod/Dir. Richard Dale. BBC, 1998.Weiss, Gail. Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality. New York and London: Routledge, 1999.

Property as both an idea and a practice has been interpreted through the prism of a liberal, law and economics paradigm since at least the 18th century. This dominant (and domineering) perspective stresses the primacy of individualism, the power of exclusion, and the values of private commodity. By contrast, concepts of property that evolved out of the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s challenged this hegemony. Countercultural, or Aquarian, ideas of property stressed pre-liberal, long forgotten property norms such as sociability, community, inclusion and personhood, and contested a private uniformity that seemed “totalizing and universalizing” (Blomley, Unsettling 102). This paper situates what it terms “Aquarian property” in the context of emergent property theory in the 1960s and 1970s, and the propertied practices these new theories engendered. Importantly, this paper also grounds Aquarian ideas of property to location. As legal geographers observe, the law inexorably occurs in place as well as time. “Nearly every aspect of law is located, takes place, is in motion, or has some spatial frame of reference” (Braverman et al. 1). Property’s radical yet simultaneously ancient alter-narrative found fertile soil where the countercultural experiment flourished. In Australia, one such place was the green, sub-tropical landscape of the New South Wales Northern Rivers, home of the 1973 Australian Union of Student’s Aquarius Festival at Nimbin. The Counterculture and Property Theory Well before the “Age of Aquarius” entered western youth consciousness (Munro-Clark 56), and 19 years before the Nimbin Aquarius Festival, US legal scholar Felix Cohen defined property in seminally private and exclusionary terms. To the world: Keep off X unless you have my permission, which I may grant or withhold.Signed: Private citizenEndorsed: The state. (374) Cohen’s formula was private property at its 1950s apogee, an unambiguous expression of its centrality to post-war materialism. William Blackstone’s famous trope of property as “that sole and despotic dominion” had become self-fulfilling (Rose, Canons). Why had this occurred? What had made property so narrow and instrumentalist to a private end? Several property theorists identify the enclosure period in the 17th and 18th centuries as seminal to this change (Blomley, Law; Graham). The enclosures, and their discourse of improvement and modernity, saw ancient common rights swept away in favour of the liberal private right. Property diversity was supplanted by monotony, group rights by the individual, and inclusion by exclusion. Common property rights were rights of shared use, traditionally agrarian incidents enjoyed through community membership. However, for the proponents of enclosure, common rights stood in the way of progress. Thus, what was once a vested right (such as the common right to glean) became a “mere practice”, condemned by its “universal promiscuity” and perceptions of vagrancy (Buck 17-8). What was once sited to context, to village and parish, evolved into abstraction. And what had meaning for person and place, “a sense of self; […] a part of a tribe’ (Neeson 180), became a tradable commodity, detached and indifferent to the consequences of its adverse use (Leopold). These were the transformed ideas of property exported to so-called “settler” societies, where colonialists demanded the secure property rights denied to them at home. In the common law tradition, a very modern yet selective amnesia took hold, a collective forgetting of property’s shared and sociable past (McLaren). Yet, property as commodity proved to be a narrow, one-sided account of property, an unsatisfactory “half right” explanation (Alexander 2) that omits inconvenient links between ownership on the one hand, and self and place on the other. Pioneering US conservationist Aldo Leopold detected as much a few years before Felix Cohen’s defining statement of private dominance. In Leopold’s iconic A Sand County Almanac, he wrote presciently of the curious phenomenon of hardheaded farmers replanting selected paddocks with native wildflowers. As if foreseeing what the next few decades may bring, Leopold describes a growing resistance to the dominant property paradigm: I call it Revolt – revolt against the tedium of the merely economic attitude towards land. We assume that because we had to subjugate the land to live on it, the best farm is therefore the one most completely tamed. These […] farmers have learned from experience that the wholly tamed farm offers not only a slender livelihood but a constricted life. (188)By the early 1960s, frustrations over the constrictions of post-war life were given voice in dissenting property literature. Affirming that property is a social institution, emerging ideas of property conformed to the contours of changing values (Singer), and the countercultural zeitgeist sweeping America’s universities (Miller). Thus, in 1964, Charles Reich saw property as the vanguard for a new civic compact, an ambitious “New Property” that would transform “government largess” into a property right to address social inequity. For Joseph Sax, property scholar and author of a groundbreaking citizen’s manifesto, the assertion of public property rights were critical to the protection of the environment (174). And in 1972, to Christopher Stone, it seemed a natural property incident that trees should enjoy equivalent standing to legal persons. In an age when “progress” was measured by the installation of plastic trees in Los Angeles median strips (Tribe), jurists aspired to new ideas of property with social justice and environmental resonance. Theirs was a scholarly “Revolt” against the tedium of property as commodity, an act of resistance to the centuries-old conformity of the enclosures (Blomley, Law). Aquarian Theory in Propertied Practice Imagining new property ideas in theory yielded in practice a diverse Aquarian tenure. In the emerging communes and intentional communities of the late 1960s and early 1970s, common property norms were unwittingly absorbed into their ethos and legal structure (Zablocki; Page). As a “way out of a dead-end future” (Smith and Crossley), a generation of young, mostly university-educated people sought new ways to relate to land. Yet, as Benjamin Zablocki observed at the time, “there is surprisingly little awareness among present-day communitarians of their historical forebears” (43). The alchemy that was property and the counterculture was given form and substance by place, time, geography, climate, culture, and social history. Unlike the dominant private paradigm that was placeless and universal, the tenurial experiments of the counter-culture were contextual and diverse. Hence, to generalise is to invite the problematic. Nonetheless, three broad themes of Aquarian property are discernible. First, property ceased being a vehicle for the acquisition of private wealth; rather it invested self-meaning within a communitarian context, “a sense of self [as] a part of a tribe.” Second, the “back to the land” movement signified a return to the country, an interregnum in the otherwise unidirectional post-enclosure drift to the city. Third, Aquarian property was premised on obligation, recognising that ownership was more than a bundle of autonomous rights, but rights imbricated with a corresponding duty to land health. Like common property and its practices of sustained yield, Aquarian owners were environmental stewards, with inter-connected responsibilities to others and the earth (Page). The counterculture was a journey in self-fulfillment, a search for personal identity amidst the empowerment of community. Property’s role in the counterculture was to affirm the under-regarded notion of property as propriety; where ownership fostered well lived and capacious lives in flourishing communities (Alexander). As Margaret Munro-Clark observed of the early 1970s, “the enrichment of individual identity or selfhood [is] the distinguishing mark of the current wave of communitarianism” (33). Or, as another 1970s settler remarked twenty years later, “our ownership means that we can’t liquefy our assets and move on with any appreciable amount of capital. This arrangement has many advantages; we don’t waste time wondering if we would be better off living somewhere else, so we have commitment to place and community” (Metcalf 52). In personhood terms, property became “who we are, how we live” (Lismore Regional Gallery), not a measure of commoditised worth. Personhood also took legal form, manifested in early title-holding structures, where consensus-based co-operatives (in which capital gain was precluded) were favoured ideologically over the capitalist, majority-rules corporation (Munro-Clark). As noted, Aquarian property was also predominantly rural. For many communitarians, the way out of a soulless urban life was to abandon its difficulties for the yearnings of a simpler rural idyll (Smith and Crossley). The 1970s saw an extraordinary return to the physicality of land, measured by a willingness to get “earth under the nails” (Farran). In Australia, communities proliferated on the NSW Northern Rivers, in Western Australia’s southwest, and in the rural hinterlands behind Queensland’s Sunshine Coast and Cairns. In New Zealand, intentional communities appeared on the rural Coromandel Peninsula, east of Auckland, and in the Golden Bay region on the remote northwestern tip of the South Island. In all these localities, land was plentiful, the climate seemed sunny, and the landscape soulful. Aquarians “bought cheap land in beautiful places in which to opt out and live a simpler life [...] in remote backwaters, up mountains, in steep valleys, or on the shorelines of wild coastal districts” (Sargisson and Sargent 117). Their “hard won freedom” was to escape from city life, suffused by a belief that “the city is hardly needed, life should spring out of the country” (Jones and Baker 5). Aquarian property likewise instilled environmental ethics into the notion of land ownership. Michael Metzger, writing in 1975 in the barely minted Ecology Law Quarterly, observed that humankind had forgotten three basic ecological laws, that “everything is connected to everything else”, that “everything must go somewhere”, and that “nature knows best” (797). With an ever-increasing focus on abstraction, the language of private property: enabled us to create separate realities, and to remove ourselves from the natural world in which we live to a cerebral world of our own creation. When we act in accord with our artificial world, the disastrous impact of our fantasies upon the natural world in which we live is ignored. (796)By contrast, Aquarian property was intrinsically contextual. It revolved around the owner as environmental steward, whose duty it was “to repair the ravages of previous land use battles, and to live in accord with the natural environment” (Aquarian Archives). Reflecting ancient common rights, Aquarian property rights internalised norms of prudence, proportionality and moderation of resource use (Rose, Futures). Simply, an ecological view of land ownership was necessary for survival. As Dr. Moss Cass, the Federal environment minister wrote in the preface to The Way Out: Radical Alternatives in Australia, ‘”there is a common conviction that something is rotten at the core of conventional human existence.” Across the Tasman, the sense of latent environmental crisis was equally palpable, “we are surrounded by glistening surfaces and rotten centres” (Jones and Baker 5). Property and Countercultural Place and Time In the emerging discipline of legal geography, the law and its institutions (such as property) are explained through the prism of spatiotemporal context. What even more recent law and geography scholarship argues is that space is privileged as “theoretically interesting” while “temporality is reduced to empirical history” (Braverman et al. 53). This part seeks to consider the intersection of property, the counterculture, and time and place without privileging either the spatial or temporal dimensions. It considers simply the place of Nimbin, New South Wales, in early May 1973, and how property conformed to the exigencies of both. Legal geographers also see property through the theory of performance. Through this view, property is a “relational effect, not a prior ground, that is brought into being by the very act of performance” (Blomley, Performing 13). In other words, doing does not merely describe or represent property, but it enacts, such that property becomes a reality through its performance. In short, property is because it does. Performance theory is liberating (Page et al) because it concentrates not on property’s arcane rules and doctrines, nor on the legal geographer’s alleged privileging of place over time, but on its simple doing. Thus, Nicholas Blomley sees private property as a series of constant and reiterative performances: paying rates, building fences, registering titles, and so on. Adopting this approach, Aquarian property is described as a series of performances, seen through the prism of the legal practitioner, and its countercultural participants. The intersection of counterculture and property law implicated my family in its performative narrative. My father had been a solicitor in Nimbin since 1948; his modest legal practice was conducted from the side annexe of the School of Arts. Equipped with a battered leather briefcase and a trusty portable typewriter, like clockwork, he drove the 20 miles from Lismore to Nimbin every Saturday morning. I often accompanied him on his weekly visits. Forty-one years ago, in early May 1973, we drove into town to an extraordinary sight. Seen through ten-year old eyes, surreal scenes of energy, colour, and longhaired, bare-footed young people remain vivid. At almost the exact halfway point in my father’s legal career, new ways of thinking about property rushed headlong and irrevocably into his working life. After May 1973, dinnertime conversations became very different. Gone was the mundane monopoly of mortgages, subdivisions, and cottage conveyancing. The topics now ranged to hippies, communes, co-operatives and shared ownerships. Property was no longer a dull transactional monochrome, a lifeless file bound in pink legal tape. It became an idea replete with diversity and innovation, a concept populated with interesting characters and entertaining, often quirky stories. If property is a narrative (Rose, Persuasion), then the micro-story of property on the NSW Northern Rivers became infinitely more compelling and interesting in the years after Aquarius. For the practitioner, Aquarian property involved new practices and skills: the registration of co-operatives, the drafting of shareholder deeds that regulated the use of common lands, the settling of idealistic trusts, and the ever-increasing frequency of visits to the Nimbin School of Arts every working Saturday. For the 1970s settler in Nimbin, performing Aquarian property took more direct and lived forms. It may have started by reading the open letter that festival co-organiser Graeme Dunstan wrote to the Federal Minister for Urban Affairs, Tom Uren, inviting him to Nimbin as a “holiday rather than a political duty”, and seeking his support for “a community group of 100-200 people to hold a lease dedicated to building a self-sufficient community [...] whose central design principles are creative living and ecological survival” (1). It lay in the performances at the Festival’s Learning Exchange, where ideas of philosophy, organic farming, alternative technology, and law reform were debated in free and unstructured form, the key topics of the latter being abortion and land. And as the Festival came to its conclusion, it was the gathering at the showground, titled “After Nimbin What?—How will the social and environmental experiment at Nimbin effect the setting up of alternative communities, not only in the North Coast, but generally in Australia” (Richmond River Historical Society). In the days and months after Aquarius, it was the founding of new communities such as Co-ordination Co-operative at Tuntable Creek, described by co-founder Terry McGee in 1973 as “a radical experiment in a new way of life. The people who join us […] have to be prepared to jump off the cliff with the certainty that when they get to the bottom, they will be all right” (Munro-Clark 126; Cock 121). The image of jumping off a cliff is a metaphorical performance that supposes a leap into the unknown. While orthodox concepts of property in land were left behind, discarded at the top, the Aquarian leap was not so much into the unknown, but the long forgotten. The success of those communities that survived lay in the innovative and adaptive ways in which common forms of property fitted into registered land title, a system otherwise premised on individual ownership. Achieved through the use of outside private shells—title-holding co-operatives or companies (Page)—inside the shell, the norms and practices of common property were inclusively facilitated and performed (McLaren; Rose, Futures). In 2014, the performance of Aquarian property endures, in the dozens of intentional communities in the Nimbin environs that remain a witness to the zeal and spirit of the times and its countercultural ideals. Conclusion The Aquarian idea of property had profound meaning for self, community, and the environment. It was simultaneously new and old, radical as well as ancient. It re-invented a pre-liberal, pre-enclosure idea of property. For property theory, its legacy is its imaginings of diversity, the idea that property can take pluralistic forms and assert multiple values, a defiant challenge to the dominant paradigm. Aquarian property offers rich pickings compared to the pauperised private monotone. Over 41 years ago, in the legal geography that was Nimbin, New South Wales, the imaginings of property escaped the conformity of enclosure. The Aquarian age represented a moment in “thickened time” (Braverman et al 53), when dissenting theory became practice, and the idea of property indelibly changed for a handful of serendipitous actors, the unscripted performers of a countercultural narrative faithful to its time and place. References Alexander, Gregory. Commodity & Propriety: Competing Visions of Property in American Legal Thought 1776-1970. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. Aquarian Archives. "Report into Facilitation of a Rural Intentional Community." Lismore, NSW: Southern Cross University. Blomley, Nicholas. Law, Space, and the Geographies of Power. New York: Guildford Press, 1994. Blomley, Nicholas. Unsettling the City: Urban Land and the Politics of Property. New York: Routledge, 2004. Blomley, Nicholas. “Performing Property, Making the World.” Social Studies Research Network 2053656. 5 Aug. 2013 ‹http://ssrn.com/abstract=2053656›. Braverman, Irus, Nicholas Blomley, David Delaney, and Sandy Kedar. The Expanding Spaces of Law: A Timely Legal Geography. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2014. Buck, Andrew. The Making of Australian Property Law. Sydney: Federation Press, 2006. Cock, Peter. Alternative Australia: Communities of the Future. London: Quartet Books, 1979. Cohen, Felix. “Dialogue on Private Property.” Rutgers Law Review 9 (1954): 357-387. Dunstan, Graeme. “A Beginning Rather than an End.” The Nimbin Good Times 27 Mar. 1973: 1. Farran, Sue. “Earth under the Nails: The Extraordinary Return to the Land.” Modern Studies in Property Law. Ed. Nicholas Hopkins. 7th edition. Oxford: Hart, 2013. 173-191. Graham, Nicole. Lawscape: Property, Environment, Law. Abingdon: Routledge, 2011. Jones, Tim, and Ian Baker. A Hard Won Freedom: Alternative Communities in New Zealand. Auckland: Hodder & Staughton, 1975. Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac with Other Essays on Conservation from Round River. New York: Ballantine Books, 1966. Lismore Regional Gallery. “Not Quite Square: The Story of Northern Rivers Architecture.” Exhibition, 13 Apr. to 2 June 2013. McLaren, John. “The Canadian Doukhobors and the Land Question: Religious Communalists in a Fee Simple World.” Land and Freedom: Law Property Rights and the British Diaspora. Eds. Andrew Buck, John McLaren and Nancy Wright. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2001. 135-168. Metcalf, Bill. Co-operative Lifestyles in Australia: From Utopian Dreaming to Communal Reality. Sydney: UNSW Press, 1995. Miller, Timothy. The 60s Communes: Hippies and Beyond. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1999. Munro-Clark, Margaret. Communes in Rural Australia: The Movement since 1970. Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1986. Neeson, Jeanette M. Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700-1820. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. 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IntroductionIn 2008, researchers at New York University’s Computational Neuroimaging Laboratory challenged our contemporary understanding of audience with an alternative approach to engaging some of the most essential questions regarding film consumption. The study itself used a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner during the “free viewing of films” allowing researchers the opportunity to see which sections of the brain are activated during certain parts of the viewing (Hasson et al. 2). In an effort to overcome limitations of fMRI imaging, the researchers further utilized an inter-subjective correlation (ISC) technique to validate their findings. Simply put, ISC looks at the similar effects in neuroimaging across a range of viewers for the same rhetorical artifact; the higher the similarity, the more confident the researchers are that the impact of the film is the same for most or all viewers. This impact is said to “control” the viewers mental and emotional state in that they can be a reliable way to predict a viewer’s “emotions, thoughts, [and] attitudes” (Hasson et al. 2). The researchers termed their work “neurocinematics” and concluded that this new approach could “contribute to the cognitive movement in film theory, analogous to contributions that neuroscience has made to cognitive and social psychology.” (Hasson et al. 21).Since the publication of this research, there have been over a dozen academic essays published, including additional work in the hard sciences, and contributions from psychology and literary and film studies (see Cohen, Shavalian and Rube; Loschky et al.; Erincin; Kauttonen, Hlushchuk and Tikka; Christoforou et al.). Many seem to be responding to the original authors’ calls for neurocinematics to be “a new interdisciplinary field” between “cognitive neuroscience and film studies” that is “part of a larger endeavor that looks for connections between neuroscience and art” (Hasson et al. 1, 21). Noticeably missing from their call for an inter-disciplinary approach, however, is one that includes rhetorical studies. In fact, to date, there has only been a single publication referring to neurocinematics in communication studies – an essay that was not specific to film nor audience, and that limited its discussion to the effectiveness of fMRI imaging (see Weber, Mangus and Huskey). It is the argument of this essay that rhetorical studies should be included in neurocinematics for two reasons: first, rhetorical studies can provide an alternative theoretical understanding of narrative that should prove to be enlightening for this emerging field; and second, rhetorical studies can provide the necessary ethical positioning for this emerging field.The Rhetorical Studies AlternativeThe first justification for the inclusion of rhetorical studies in neurocinematics is the alternative theoretical approach to narrative that rhetoricians can provide. The original neurocinematics research found that structured stories provided a much higher degree of ISC than open-ended, unstructured “real life” depictions. The researchers showed 10 minutes of Sergio Leone’s film, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly and a 10-minute stable shot of a Saturday afternoon in Washington Square Park that represented an unstructured, real-life event. The researchers concluded that, “a mere mechanical reproduction of reality, with no directorial intention or intervention, is not sufficient by itself for controlling viewer’s brain activity” (Hasson et al. 8). That the “slice of real life” didn’t have the same predictive functions as the “intentional construction of the film’s sequence through aesthetic means” has important implications for rhetorical studies (Hasson et al. 9). It’s not cinematic imagery alone that corresponds to brain activations, but the construction of story and the aesthetic elements of narrative presentations (that is to say, the creation of rhetoric) that has predictive functions. In A Grammar of Motives, Kenneth Burke notes that dramatism “invites one to consider the matter of motives in a perspective that, being developed from the analysis of drama, treats language and thought primarily as modes of action” (xxii). For Burke, all of our stories are the product of thought, whether it be conscious or unconscious, and this thought belies how we view the world of symbols in which we live. Michael Overington contends that dramatismaddresses the empirical questions of how persons explain their actions to themselves and others, what the cultural and social structural influences on these interpretations might be, and what effect connotational links among the explanatory (motivational) terms might have on these explanations and hence, on action itself. (133)Language is the vehicle for human behaviour and represents how we describe the world to ourselves and to others so that “a rhetor’s language can be used to discover motive” (Foss, Foss and Trapp 200). Film is nothing short of a dramatistic explanation that allows us the opportunity to dissect it with more detail to determine the worldview not only of the auteur, but of the spectator as well. Although film studies has its own theories on story and structure, a “systematic application” of Burke’s dramatism “enables an observer to reconstruct various perspectives of ‘reality’” (Stewart, Smith, and Denton 168). When compared to film studies, as an academic discipline, rhetorical studies offers an alternative understanding of narrative. Film studies asks us to apply a structural model to a narrative, while rhetorical studies asks us to apply a systems model that unmasks a narrative. As an example, film studies might examine a film’s structure, looking at the rising action of subplot B as it corresponds in the third reel to the declining action of the subplot A before denouement. As an alternative example, rhetorical studies could offer a dramatistic reading to examine the motivations of scenic ratios between the two subplots as it defines cinematic reality for the audience. Although neurocinematics may help predict the affective impact of the subplots for an audience, it is currently rooted in a structural assumption of audience and narrative, which fails to provide a full account of the spectator’s experience as it relates to the filmmaker’s rhetorical motivation. The addition of rhetorical studies to the conversation can provide an alternative approach and give an additional richness to our understandings of audience.While film studies may engage the ideological function of films, rhetorical studies amplifies their findings. In “The Storyteller,” Walter Benjamin writes,the storytelling that thrives for a long time in the milieu of work … is itself an artisanal form of communication, as it were. It does not aim to convey the pure ‘in itself’ or gist of a thing, like information or a report. It submerges the thing into the life of the story-teller, in order to bring it out of him again. (149)For Benjamin, the storyteller is an artisan that exists external to the rhetorical artifact itself, which, of course, means that the structural focus of film studies falls inevitably short. Further, Benjamin argues that there is an ideological component to both narrative and its medium. He writes, “Just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical periods, so too does their mode of perception. The way in which human perception is organized – the medium in which it occurs – is conditioned not only by nature but by history” (Benjamin "Reproducibility" 255, emphasis in original). The oral tradition of storytelling is different, as is the storytelling of the novel, film, and so on. Indeed, it is the goal of neurocinematics to illustrate how the rhetoric of film is distinct from other forms of narrative discourse, which necessarily demands an inter-disciplinary focus that allows for an interrogation of the ideological functions that exist both within and without the text, which is what Burke’s dramatism provides.Further, Walter Fisher’s work with narrative extends the role of rhetorical theory into what should be discussed in neurocinematics. Fisher contends that the narrative form is something that is unique to humans, but something that all humans engage in; for him, “stories are fundamental to communication because they provide structure for our experience as humans and because they influence people to live in communities that share common explanations and understandings” (Burgchardt 239). As noted earlier, neurocinematics argues that there is a coherence in cinematic narratives that don’t exist in “slice of life” filmic images. Similarly, Walter Fisher contends that this “coherence” is inborn in the narrative being (his homo narran) “their inherent awareness of narrative probability, what constitutes a coherent story, and their constant habit of testing narrative fidelity, whether the stories they experience ring true with the stories they know to be true in their lives” (8). The neurocinematics researchers conclude that, “the ISC analysis of brain activity can also serve as a measurement of systematic differences in how various groups of individuals … respond to the same film” (Hasson et al. 20). Fisher notes that the philosophical foundation of the rational world paradigm (which he sets opposite his narrative paradigm) “is epistemology. Its linguistic materials are self-evident propositions, demonstrations, and proofs, the verbal expressions of certain and probably knowing” (4). The danger with neurocinematics rooted in pure rationality is that it co-opts the narrative function, makes the spectator as agent and film as object separate from one another (when ISC begs that they interact), and brackets off questions such as ethics. Fisher concludes, “With knowledge of agents, we can hope to find that which is reliable or trustworthy; with knowledge of objects, we can hope to discover that which has the quality of veracity. The world requires both kinds of knowledge” (18). Of course, this question demands a discussion of ethics, which the current approach to neurocinematics explicitly denies as a subject of inquiry. The authors write, different filmmakers differ in the level of control they choose to impose on viewers, and out methods are not designed to judge this, but rather to measure the effect of a given film on different target groups. Thus the critical evaluation of each film is outside the domain of this research. (Hasson et al. 21-2)This is the danger Fisher warns of. The assumption that neurocinematics can be a purely descriptive project is not only unfeasible, but also unconscionable. Unlike researchers who deny the place of ideology and ethics, “rhetorical critics, of course, have long recognized the centrality of ideology to persuasive discourse” (Burgchardt 451). To illustrate why this is a vital issue for neurocinematics, let’s take its existing descriptive project to its logical conclusion. Theoretically, researchers could reach a point where there was a 100% ISC, meaning that there existed a cinematic formula that would impact every audience member the same way and would “control” their emotional and mental states – for neurocinematics this would constitute the “perfect” film. This “perfect” film, however, wouldn’t exist in a research vacuum, but in a morass of culture, politics, and ideology. Cultural critic Slavoj Žižek notes the impact that Nine-Eleven had on film:the ultimate twist in this link between Hollywood and the ‘war on terrorism’ occurred when the Pentagon decided to solicit the help of Hollywood: … at the beginning of November 2001, there was a series of meetings between White House advisors and senior Hollywood executives with the aim of co-ordinating the war effort and establishing how Hollywood could help in the war effort and establishing how Hollywood could help in the ‘war against terrorism’ by getting the right ideological meaning across not only to Americans, but to the Hollywood public around the globe – the ultimate empirical proof that Hollywood does in fact function as an ‘ideological state apparatus’. (16)The ethical implications are overwhelming: propaganda films are nothing new, but neurocinematics has the potential to usher in a whole new type of propaganda cinema, under the guise of entertainment, that is 100% effective. The original neurocinematic research argued that “the ISC measurement should probably not be used to evaluate the aesthetic, artistic, social, or political value of movies” (Hasson et al. 21). Conversely, rhetorical studies demands that criticism and scholarship not only comment on texts, but ethical considerations “will not be averted either by ignoring it or placing it beyond our provence” (Wander 18).Further, the very goal of neurocinematics demands the critical reaction that current rhetorical theory is prepared to provide. The stated end-game for neurocinematics is to determine how films discursively interact with a viewer’s mental state and, therefore, their affective response to an aesthetic experience. Raymie McKerrow notes that critical rhetorical theory must examine “the manner in which discourse insinuates itself in the fabric of social power, and thereby ‘effects’ the status of knowledge among the members of the social group” (92). Michael Calvin McGee argues, “We do not ‘observe’ objects and human actions … we construct these phenomena through rational acts of ‘selecting,’ ‘coordinating,’ ‘interpreting,’ and ‘applying’ sensory data” (48). There is no potential for a non-normative descriptive project inside of these parameters; there is no neutral observation by the spectator, the filmic experience is one that is constructed internally. Neurocinematics notes that there are interactions between brain spheres (e.g. neocortex and the amygdala) that create an intersubjective experience (which is quantitatively described with the ISC), but to explain, even descriptively, what is occurring in these viewers requires determining what the audience “knows” and how the discursive impact of the film effects them neurologically. The field of neurocinematics is not morally neutral, though it insists on presenting itself that way. At its most basic level, the researchers are not separate from the ethical and ideological functions of their studies: they make normative claims about which films are “worthy” of study, they manufacture inter-subjective reality with their critical reactions to the artifacts, and their communicative reporting in the essay itself provides agency to the film while simultaneously denying agency to the viewers. Further, when neurocinematics is taken to its logical conclusion (the ability to manufacture the descriptively “perfect” film – one with a 100% ISC), the ethical concerns are overwhelming. With Hollywood films operating more and more as a part of the ideological state apparatus, the potential for highly effective propaganda films becomes more and more real, and more and more frightening. If the conclusions by these researchers is true, that these films “control” our mental states, then the power of such propaganda films could be devastating.ConclusionThis essay has argued that rhetorical scholars have not only a unique opportunity, but an ethical obligation, to insert ourselves into one of the most innovative inter-disciplinary fields to emerge in recent history. Neurocinematics has the potential to transform cognitive neuroscience and film studies both and it is imperative that rhetoricians insert themselves into this dialogue. First, the work that rhetorical studies has done on storytelling, narrative, and dramatism provides unique perspectives that have been overlooked by the structural models of film studies. Further, the scientists driving neurocinematics forward deny the need for political and value claims to be assessed to their work. Rhetorical studies has the opportunity to challenge these illusions of neutrality and help neuroscientists to understand that their work is, indeed, ideological, and that the dangers of ideology manifest themselves when these perspectives are pushed to the side under the guise of neutrality. ReferencesBenjamin, Walter. "The Storyteller." Trans. Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland, and others. Selected Writings Volume 3, 1935-1938. Eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. ———. "Work of Art in the Age of Reproducibility." Trans. Edmund Jephcott and others. Selected Writings Volume 4, 1938-1940. Eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. Burgchardt, Carl, ed. Readings in Rhetorical Criticism. Third ed. State College: Strata Publishing, 2005. Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1945. Christoforou, Christoforos, Spyros Christou-Champi, Fofi Constantinidou, and Maria Theodorou. "From the Eyes and the Heart: A Novel Eye-Gaze Metric That Predicts Video Preferences of a Large Audience." Frontiers in Psychology 6 (2015): 1-11. Cohen, Anna-Lisa, Elliot Shavalian, and Moshe Rube. "The Power of the Picture: How Narrative Film Captures Attention and Disrupts Goal Pursuit." PLoS ONE 10.12 (2015): 1-8. Erincin, Serap. "Dance in Translation: Subjectivity, Failed Spectatorship and Tolerance." Word & Text: A Journal of Literary Studies & Linguistics 2.2 (2012): 156-70. Fisher, Walter. "Narration as a Human Communication Paradigm: The Case of Public Moral Argument." Communication Monographs 51.1 (1984): 1-22. Foss, Sonja K., Karen A. Foss, and Robert Trapp. Contemporary Perspectives on Rhetoric. Third ed. Prospect Heights: Waveland Press, 2002. Hasson, Uri, Ohad Landesman, Barbara Knappmeyer, Ignacio Vallines, Nava Rubin, and David J. Heeger. "Neurocinematics: The Neuroscience of Film." Projections 2.1 (2008): 1-26. Kauttonen, Janne, Yevhen Hlushchuk, and Pia Tikka. "Optimizing Methods for Linking Cinematic Features to fMRI Data." NeuroImage 110 (2015): 136-48. Loschky, Lester C., Adam M. Larson, Joseph P. Magliano, and Tim J. Smith. "What Would Jaws Do? The Tyranny of Film and the Relationship between Gaze and Higher-Level Narrative Film Comprehension." PLoS ONE 10.11 (2015): 1-23. McKerrow, Raymie E. "Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis." Communication Monographs 56.2 (1989): 91. Overington, Michael A. "Kenneth Burke and the Method of Dramatism." Theory & Society 4.1 (1977): 131. Stewart, Charles J., Craig Allen Smith, and Robert E. Denton Jr. Persuasion and Social Movements. Prospect Heights: Waveland Press, 1994. Wander, Philip C. "The Ideological Turn in Modern Criticism." Central States Speech Journal 34 (1983): 1-18. Weber, René, J. Michael Mangus, and Richard Huskey. "Brain Imaging in Communication Research: A Practical Guide to Understanding and Evaluating fMRI Studies." Communication Methods & Measures 9.1/2 (2015): 5-29. Žižek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates. New York: Verso, 2002.

One of the greatest joys in watching Foxtel is to see all the crazy people who run talk shows. Judgement, ridicule and generalisations slip from their tongues like overcooked lamb off a bone. From Oprah to Rikki, from Jerry to Mother Love, the posterior of pop culture claims a world-wide audience. Recently, a new talk diva was added to the pay television stable. Dr Laura Schlessinger, the Mother of Morals, prowls the soundstage. attacking 'selfish acts' such as divorce, de facto relationships and voting Democrat. On April 11, 2001, a show aired in Australia that added a new demon to the decadence of the age. Dr Laura had been told that a disgusting video clip, called 'Rock DJ', had been televised at 2:30pm on MTV. Children could have been watching. The footage that so troubled our doyenne of daytime featured the British performer Robbie Williams not only stripping in front of disinterested women, but then removing skin, muscle and tissue in a desperate attempt to claim their gaze. This was too much for Dr Laura. She was horrified: her strident tone became piercing. She screeched, "this is si-ee-ck." . My paper is drawn to this sick masculinity, not to judge - but to laugh and theorise. Robbie Williams, the deity of levity, holds a pivotal role in theorising the contemporary 'crisis' of manhood. To paraphrase Austin Powers, Williams returned the ger to singer. But Williams also triumphed in a captivatingly original way. He is one of the few members of a boy band who created a successful solo career without regurgitating the middle of the road mantras of boys, girls, love, loss and whining about it. Williams' journey through post-war popular music, encompassing influences from both Sinatra and Sonique, forms a functional collage, rather than patchwork, of masculinity. He has been prepared to not only age in public, but to discuss the crevices and cracks in the facade. He strips, smokes, plays football, wears interesting underwear and drinks too much. My short paper trails behind this combustible masculinity, focussing on his sorties with both masculine modalities and the rock discourse. My words attack the gap between text and readership, beat and ear, music and men. The aim is to reveal how this 'sick masculinity' problematises the conservative rendering of men's crisis. Come follow me I'm an honorary Sean Connery, born '74 There's only one of me … Press be asking do I care for sodomy I don't know, yeah, probably I've been looking for serial monogamy Not some bird that looks like Billy Connolly But for now I'm down for ornithology Grab your binoculars, come follow me. 'Kids,' Robbie Williams Robbie Williams is a man for our age. Between dating supermodels and Geri 'Lost Spice' Halliwell [1], he has time to "love … his mum and a pint," (Ansen 85) but also subvert the Oasis cock(rock)tail by frocking up for a television appearance. Williams is important to theories of masculine representation. As a masculinity to think with, he creates popular culture with a history. In an era where Madonna practices yoga and wears cowboy boots, it is no surprise that by June 2000, Robbie Williams was voted the world's sexist man [2]. A few months later, in the October edition of Vogue, he posed in a British flag bikini. It is reassuring in an era where a 12 year old boy states that "You aren't a man until you shoot at something," (Issac in Mendel 19) that positive male role models exist who are prepared to both wear a frock and strip on national television. Reading Robbie Williams is like dipping into the most convincing but draining of intellectual texts. He is masculinity in motion, conveying foreignness, transgression and corruption, bartering in the polymorphous economies of sex, colonialism, race, gender and nation. His career has spanned the boy bands, try-hard rock, video star and hybrid pop performer. There are obvious resonances between the changes to Williams and alterations in masculinity. In 1988, Suzanne Moore described (the artist still known as) Prince as "the pimp of postmodernism." (165-166) Over a decade later, the simulacra has a new tour guide. Williams revels in the potency of representation. He rarely sings about love or romance, as was his sonic fodder in Take That. Instead, his performance is fixated on becoming a better man, glancing an analytical eye over other modes of masculinity. Notions of masculine crisis and sickness have punctuated this era. Men's studies is a boom area of cultural studies, dislodging the assumed structures of popular culture [3]. William Pollack's Real Boys has created a culture of changing expectations for men. The greater question arising from his concerns is why these problems, traumas and difficulties are emerging in our present. Pollack's argument is that boys and young men invest energy and time "disguising their deepest and most vulnerable feelings." (15) This masking is difficult to discern within dance and popular music. Through lyrics and dancing, videos and choreography, masculinity is revealed as convoluted, complex and fragmented. While rock music is legitimised by dominant ideologies, marginalised groups frequently use disempowered genres - like country, dance and rap genres - to present oppositional messages. These competing representations expose seamless interpretations of competent masculinity. Particular skills are necessary to rip the metaphoric pacifier out of the masculine mouth of popular culture. Patriarchal pop revels in the paradoxes of everyday life. Frequently these are nostalgic visions, which Kimmel described as a "retreat to a bygone era." (87) It is the recognition of a shared, simpler past that provides reinforcement to heteronormativity. Williams, as a gaffer tape masculinity, pulls apart the gaps and crevices in representation. Theorists must open the interpretative space encircling popular culture, disrupting normalising criteria. Multiple nodes of assessment allow a ranking of competent masculinity. From sport to business, drinking to sex, masculinity is transformed into a wired site of ranking, judgement and determination. Popular music swims in the spectacle of maleness. From David Lee Roth's skied splits to Eminem's beanie, young men are interpellated as subjects in patriarchy. Robbie Williams is a history lesson in post war masculinity. This nostalgia is conservative in nature. The ironic pastiche within his music videos features motor racing, heavy metal and Bond films. 'Rock DJ', the 'sick text' that vexed Doctor Laura, is Williams' most elaborate video. Set in a rollerdrome with female skaters encircling a central podium, the object of fascination and fetish is a male stripper. This strip is different though, as it disrupts the power held by men in phallocentralism. After being confronted by Williams' naked body, the observing women are both bored and disappointed at the lack-lustre deployment of masculine genitalia. After this display, Williams appears embarrassed, confused and humiliated. As Buchbinder realised, "No actual penis could every really measure up to the imagined sexual potency and social or magical power of the phallus." (49) To render this banal experience of male nudity ridiculous, Williams then proceeds to remove skin and muscle. He finally becomes an object of attraction for the female DJ only in skeletal form. By 'going all the way,' the strip confirms the predictability of masculinity and the ordinariness of the male body. For literate listeners though, a higher level of connotation is revealed. The song itself is based on Barry White's melody for 'It's ecstasy (when you lay down next to me).' Such intertextuality accesses the meta-racist excesses of a licentious black male sexuality. A white boy dancer must deliver an impotent, but ironic, rendering of White's (love unlimited) orchestration of potent sexuality. Williams' iconography and soundtrack is refreshing, emerging from an era of "men who cling … tightly to their illusions." (Faludi 14) When the ideological drapery is cut away, the male body is a major disappointment. Masculinity is an anxious performance. Fascinatingly, this deconstructive video has been demeaned through its labelling as pornography [4]. Oddly, a man who is prepared to - literally - shave the skin of masculinity is rendered offensive. Men's studies, like feminism, has been defrocking masculinity for some time. Robinson for example, expressed little sympathy for "whiny men jumping on the victimisation bandwagon or playing cowboys and Indians at warrior weekends and beating drums in sweat lodges." (6) By grating men's identity back to the body, the link between surface and depth - or identity and self - is forged. 'Rock DJ' attacks the new subjectivities of the male body by not only generating self-surveillance, but humour through the removal of clothes, skin and muscle. He continues this play with the symbols of masculine performance throughout the album Sing when you're winning. Featuring soccer photographs of players, coaches and fans, closer inspection of the images reveal that Robbie Williams is actually every character, in every role. His live show also enfolds diverse performances. Singing a version of 'My Way,' with cigarette in tow, he remixes Frank Sinatra into a replaying and recutting of masculine fabric. He follows one dominating masculinity with another: the Bond-inspired 'Millennium.' Some say that we are players Some say that we are pawns But we've been making money Since the day we were born Robbie Williams is comfortably located in a long history of post-Sinatra popular music. He mocks the rock ethos by combining guitars and drums with a gleaming brass section, hailing the lounge act of Dean Martin, while also using rap and dance samples. Although carrying fifty year's of crooner baggage, the spicy scent of homosexuality has also danced around Robbie Williams' career. Much of this ideology can be traced back to the Take That years. As Gary Barlow and Jason Orange commented at the time, Jason: So the rumour is we're all gay now are we? Gary: Am I gay? I am? Why? Oh good. Just as long as we know. Howard: Does anyone think I'm gay? Jason: No, you're the only one people think is straight. Howard: Why aren't I gay? What's wrong with me? Jason: It's because you're such a fine figure of macho manhood.(Kadis 17) For those not literate in the Take That discourse, it should come as no surprise that Howard was the TT equivalent of The Beatle's Ringo Starr or Duran Duran's Andy Taylor. Every boy band requires the ugly, shy member to make the others appear taller and more attractive. The inference of this dialogue is that the other members of the group are simply too handsome to be heterosexual. This ambiguous sexuality has followed Williams into his solo career, becoming fodder for those lads too unappealing to be homosexual: Oasis. Born to be mild I seem to spend my life Just waiting for the chorus 'Cause the verse is never nearly Good enough Robbie Williams "Singing for the lonely." Robbie Williams accesses a bigger, brighter and bolder future than Britpop. While the Gallagher brothers emulate and worship the icons of 1960s British music - from the Beatles' haircuts to the Stones' psychedelia - Williams' songs, videos and persona are chattering in a broader cultural field. From Noel Cowardesque allusions to the ordinariness of pub culture, Williams is much more than a pretty-boy singer. He has become an icon of English masculinity, enclosing all the complexity that these two terms convey. Williams' solo success from 1999-2001 occurred at the time of much parochial concern that British acts were not performing well in the American charts. It is bemusing to read Billboard over this period. The obvious quality of Britney Spears is seen to dwarf the mediocrity of British performers. The calibre of Fatboy Slim, carrying a smiley backpack stuffed with reflexive dance culture, is neither admitted nor discussed. It is becoming increasing strange to monitor the excessive fame of Williams in Britain, Europe, Asia and the Pacific when compared to his patchy career in the United States. Even some American magazines are trying to grasp the disparity. The swaggering king of Britpop sold a relatively measly 600,000 copies of his U.S. debut album, The ego has landed … Maybe Americans didn't appreciate his songs about being famous. (Ask Dr. Hip 72) In the first few years of the 2000s, it has been difficult to discuss a unified Anglo-American musical formation. Divergent discursive frameworks have emerged through this British evasion. There is no longer an agreed centre to the musical model. Throughout 1990s Britain, blackness jutted out of dance floor mixes, from reggae to dub, jazz and jungle. Plied with the coldness of techno was an almost too hot hip hop. Yet both were alternate trajectories to Cool Britannia. London once more became swinging, or as Vanity Fair declared, "the nerve centre of pop's most cohesive scene since the Pacific Northwest grunge explosion of 1991." (Kamp 102) Through Britpop, the clock turned back to the 1960s, a simpler time before race became 'a problem' for the nation. An affiliation was made between a New Labour, formed by the 1997 British election, and the rebirth of a Swinging London [5]. This style-driven empire supposedly - again - made London the centre of the world. Britpop was itself a misnaming. It was a strong sense of Englishness that permeated the lyrics, iconography and accent. Englishness requires a Britishness to invoke a sense of bigness and greatness. The contradictions and excesses of Blur, Oasis and Pulp resonate in the gap between centre and periphery, imperial core and colonised other. Slicing through the arrogance and anger of the Gallaghers is a yearning for colonial simplicity, when the pink portions of the map were the stable subjects of geography lessons, rather than the volatile embodiment of postcolonial theory. Simon Gikandi argues that "the central moments of English cultural identity were driven by doubts and disputes about the perimeters of the values that defined Englishness." (x) The reason that Britpop could not 'make it big' in the United States is because it was recycling an exhausted colonial dreaming. Two old Englands were duelling for ascendancy: the Oasis-inflected Manchester working class fought Blur-inspired London art school chic. This insular understanding of difference had serious social and cultural consequences. The only possible representation of white, British youth was a tabloidisation of Oasis's behaviour through swearing, drug excess and violence. Simon Reynolds realised that by returning to the three minute pop tune that the milkman can whistle, reinvoking parochial England with no black people, Britpop has turned its back defiantly on the future. (members.aol.com/blissout/Britpop.html) Fortunately, another future had already happened. The beats per minute were pulsating with an urgent affirmation of change, hybridity and difference. Hip hop and techno mapped a careful cartography of race. While rock was colonialisation by other means, hip hop enacted a decolonial imperative. Electronic dance music provided a unique rendering of identity throughout the 1990s. It was a mode of musical communication that moved across national and linguistic boundaries, far beyond Britpop or Stateside rock music. While the Anglo American military alliance was matched and shadowed by postwar popular culture, Brit-pop signalled the end of this hegemonic formation. From this point, English pop and American rock would not sail as smoothly over the Atlantic. While 1995 was the year of Wonderwall, by 1996 the Britpop bubble corroded the faces of the Gallagher brothers. Oasis was unable to complete the American tour. Yet other cultural forces were already active. 1996 was also the year of Trainspotting, with "Born Slippy" being the soundtrack for a blissful journey under the radar. This was a cultural force that no longer required America as a reference point [6]. Robbie Williams was able to integrate the histories of Britpop and dance culture, instigating a complex dialogue between the two. Still, concern peppered music and entertainment journals that British performers were not accessing 'America.' As Sharon Swart stated Britpop acts, on the other hand, are finding it less easy to crack the U.S. market. The Spice Girls may have made some early headway, but fellow purveyors of pop, such as Robbie Williams, can't seem to get satisfaction from American fans. (35 British performers had numerous cultural forces working against them. Flat global sales, the strength of the sterling and the slow response to the new technological opportunities of DVD, all caused problems. While Britpop "cleaned house," (Boehm 89) it was uncertain which cultural formation would replace this colonising force. Because of the complex dialogues between the rock discourse and dance culture, time and space were unable to align into a unified market. American critics simply could not grasp Robbie Williams' history, motives or iconography. It's Robbie's world, we just buy tickets for it. Unless, of course you're American and you don't know jack about soccer. That's the first mistake Williams makes - if indeed one of his goals is to break big in the U.S. (and I can't believe someone so ambitious would settle for less.) … Americans, it seems, are most fascinated by British pop when it presents a mirror image of American pop. (Woods 98 There is little sense that an entirely different musical economy now circulates, where making it big in the United States is not the singular marker of credibility. Williams' demonstrates commitment to the international market, focussing on MTV Asia, MTV online, New Zealand and Australian audiences [7]. The Gallagher brothers spent much of the 1990s trying to be John Lennon. While Noel, at times, knocked at the door of rock legends through "Wonderwall," he snubbed Williams' penchant for pop glory, describing him as a "fat dancer." (Gallagher in Orecklin 101) Dancing should not be decried so summarily. It conveys subtle nodes of bodily knowledge about men, women, sex and desire. While men are validated for bodily movement through sport, women's dancing remains a performance of voyeuristic attention. Such a divide is highly repressive of men who dance, with gayness infiltrating the metaphoric masculine dancefloor [8]. Too often the binary of male and female is enmeshed into the divide of rock and dance. Actually, these categories slide elegantly over each other. The male pop singers are located in a significant semiotic space. Robbie Williams carries these contradictions and controversy. NO! Robbie didn't go on NME's cover in a 'desperate' attempt to seduce nine-year old knickerwetters … YES! He used to be teenybopper fodder. SO WHAT?! So did the Beatles the Stones, the Who, the Kinks, etc blah blah pseudohistoricalrockbollocks. NO! Making music that gurlz like is NOT a crime! (Wells 62) There remains an uncertainty in his performance of masculinity and at times, a deliberate ambivalence. He grafts subversiveness into a specific lineage of English pop music. The aim for critics of popular music is to find a way to create a rhythm of resistance, rather than melody of credible meanings. In summoning an archaeology of the archive, we begin to write a popular music history. Suzanne Moore asked why men should "be interested in a sexual politics based on the frightfully old-fashioned ideas of truth, identity and history?" (175) The reason is now obvious. Femininity is no longer alone on the simulacra. It is impossible to separate real men from the representations of masculinity that dress the corporeal form. Popular music is pivotal, not for collapsing the representation into the real, but for making the space between these states livable, and pleasurable. Like all semiotic sicknesses, the damaged, beaten and bandaged masculinity of contemporary music swaddles a healing pedagogic formation. Robbie Williams enables the writing of a critical history of post Anglo-American music [9]. Popular music captures such stories of place and identity. Significantly though, it also opens out spaces of knowing. There is an investment in rhythm that transgresses national histories of music. While Williams has produced albums, singles, video and endless newspaper copy, his most important revelations are volatile and ephemeral in their impact. He increases the popular cultural vocabulary of masculinity. [1] The fame of both Williams and Halliwell was at such a level that it was reported in the generally conservative, pages of Marketing. The piece was titled "Will Geri's fling lose its fizz?" Marketing, August 2000: 17. [2] For poll results, please refer to "Winners and Losers," Time International, Vol. 155, Issue 23, June 12, 2000, 9 [3] For a discussion of this growth in academic discourse on masculinity, please refer to Paul Smith's "Introduction," in P. Smith (ed.), Boys: Masculinity in contemporary culture. Colorado: Westview Press, 1996. [4] Steve Futterman described Rock DJ as the "least alluring porn video on MTV," in "The best and worst: honour roll," Entertainment Weekly 574-575 (December 22-December 29 2000): 146. [5] Michael Bracewell stated that "pop provides an unofficial cartography of its host culture, charting the national mood, marking the crossroads between the major social trends and the tunnels of the zeitgeist," in "Britpop's coming home, it's coming home." New Statesman .(February 21 1997): 36. [6] It is important to make my point clear. The 'America' that I am summoning here is a popular cultural formation, which possesses little connection with the territory, institution or defence initiatives of the United States. Simon Frith made this distinction clear, when he stated that "the question becomes whether 'America' can continue to be the mythical locale of popular culture as it has been through most of this century. As I've suggested, there are reasons now to suppose that 'America' itself, as a pop cultural myth, no longer bears much resemblance to the USA as a real place even in the myth." This statement was made in "Anglo-America and its discontents," Cultural Studies 5 1991: 268. [7] To observe the scale of attention paid to the Asian and Pacific markets, please refer to http://robbiewilliams.com/july13scroll.html, http://robbiewilliams.com/july19scroll.html and http://robbiewilliams.com/july24scroll.html, accessed on March 3, 2001 [8] At its most naïve, J. Michael Bailey and Michael Oberschneider asked, "Why are gay men so motivated to dance? One hypothesis is that gay men dance in order to be feminine. In other words, gay men dance because women do. An alternative hypothesis is that gay men and women share a common factor in their emotional make-up that makes dancing especially enjoyable," from "Sexual orientation in professional dance," Archives of Sexual Behaviour. 26.4 (August 1997). Such an interpretation is particularly ludicrous when considering the pre-rock and roll masculine dancing rituals in the jive, Charleston and jitterbug. Once more, the history of rock music is obscuring the history of dance both before the mid 1950s and after acid house. [9] Women, gay men and black communities through much of the twentieth century have used these popular spaces. For example, Lynne Segal, in Slow Motion. London: Virago, 1990, stated that "through dancing, athletic and erotic performance, but most powerfully through music, Black men could express something about the body and its physicality, about emotions and their cosmic reach, rarely found in white culture - least of all in white male culture,": 191 References Ansen, D., Giles, J., Kroll, J., Gates, D. and Schoemer, K. "What's a handsome lad to do?" Newsweek 133.19 (May 10, 1999): 85. "Ask Dr. Hip." U.S. News and World Report 129.16 (October 23, 2000): 72. Bailey, J. Michael., and Oberschneider, Michael. "Sexual orientation in professional dance." Archives of Sexual Behaviour. 26.4 (August 1997):expanded academic database [fulltext]. Boehm, E. "Pop will beat itself up." Variety 373.5 (December 14, 1998): 89. Bracewell, Michael. "Britpop's coming home, it's coming home." New Statesman.(February 21 1997): 36. Buchbinder, David. Performance Anxieties .Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1998. Faludi, Susan. Stiffed. London: Chatto and Windus, 1999. Frith, Simon. "Anglo-America and its discontents." Cultural Studies. 5 1991. Futterman, Steve. "The best and worst: honour roll." Entertainment Weekly, 574-575 (December 22-December 29 2000): 146. Gikandi, Simon. Maps of Englishness. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Kadis, Alex. Take That: In private. London: Virgin Books, 1994. Kamp, D. "London Swings! Again!" Vanity Fair ( March 1997): 102. Kimmel, Michael. Manhood in America. New York: The Free Press, 1996. Mendell, Adrienne. How men think. New York: Fawcett, 1996. Moore, Susan. "Getting a bit of the other - the pimps of postmodernism." In Rowena Chapman and Jonathan Rutherford (ed.) Male Order .London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988. 165-175. Orecklin, Michele. "People." Time. 155.10 (March 13, 2000): 101. Pollack, William. Real boys. Melbourne: Scribe Publications, 1999. Reynolds, Simon. members.aol.com/blissout/britpop.html. Accessed on April 15, 2001. Robinson, David. No less a man. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University, 1994. Segal, Lynne. Slow Motion. London: Virago, 1990. Smith, Paul. "Introduction" in P. Smith (ed.), Boys: Masculinity in contemporary culture. Colorado: Westview Press, 1996. Swart, S. "U.K. Showbiz" Variety.(December 11-17, 2000): 35. Sexton, Paul and Masson, Gordon. "Tips for Brits who want U.S. success" Billboard .(September 9 2000): 1. Wells, Steven. "Angst." NME.(November 21 1998): 62. "Will Geri's fling lose its fizz?" Marketing.(August 2000): 17. Woods, S. "Robbie Williams Sing when you're winning" The Village Voice. 45.52. (January 2, 2001): 98.

IntroductionThe 2009 American film Trash Humpers, directed by Harmony Korine, was released at a time when the hipster had become a ubiquitous concept, entering into the common vernacular of numerous cultures throughout the world, and gaining significant press, social media and academic attention (see Žižek; Arsel and Thompson; Greif et al.; Stahl; Ouellette; Reeve; Schiermer; Maly and Varis). Trash Humpers emerged soon after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis triggered Occupy movements in numerous cities, aided by social media platforms, reported on by blogs such as Gawker, and stylized by multi-national youth-subculture brands such as Vice, American Apparel, Urban Outfitters and a plethora of localised variants.Korine’s film, which is made to resemble found VHS footage of old-aged vandals, epitomises the ironic, retro stylizations and “counterculture-meets-kitsch” aesthetics so familiar to hipster culture. As a creative stereotype from 1940s and ‘50s jazz and beatnik subcultures, the hipster re-emerged in the twenty-first century as a negative embodiment of alternative culture in the age of the Internet. As well as plumbing the recent past for things not yet incorporated into contemporary marketing mechanisms, the hipster also signifies the blurring of irony and authenticity. Such “outsiderness as insiderness” postures can be regarded as a continuation of the marginality-from-the-centre logic of cool capitalism that emerged after World War Two. Particularly between 2007 and 2015, the post-postmodern concept of the hipster was a resonant cultural trope in Western and non-Western cultures alike, coinciding with the normalisation of the new digital terrain and the establishment of mobile social media as an integral aspect of many people’s daily lives. While Korine’s 79-minute feature could be thought of as following in the schlocky footsteps of the likes of Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects (2006), it is decidedly more arthouse, and more attuned to the influence of contemporary alternative media brands and independent film history alike – as if the love child of Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963) and Vice Video, the latter having been labelled as “devil-may-care hipsterism” (Carr). Upon release, Trash Humpers was described by Gene McHugh as “a mildly hip take on Jackass”; by Mike D’Angelo as “an empty hipster pose”; and by Aaron Hillis as either “the work of an insincere hipster or an eccentric provocateur”. Lacking any semblance of a conventional plot, Trash Humpers essentially revolves around four elderly-looking protagonists – three men and a woman – who document themselves with a low-quality video camera as they go about behaving badly in the suburbs of Nashville, Tennessee, where Korine still lives. They cackle eerily to themselves as they try to stave off boredom, masturbating frantically on rubbish bins, defecating and drinking alcohol in public, fellating foliage, smashing televisions, playing ten-pin bowling, lighting firecrackers and telling gay “hate” jokes to camera with no punchlines. In one purposefully undramatic scene half-way through the film, the humpers are shown in the aftermath of an attack on a man wearing a French maid’s outfit; he lies dead in a pool of blood on their kitchen floor with a hammer at his feet. The humpers are consummate “bad” performers in every sense of the term, and they are joined by a range of other, apparently lower-class, misfits with whom they stage tap dance routines and repetitively sing nursery-rhyme-styled raps such as: “make it, make it, don’t break it; make it, make it, don’t fake it; make it, make it, don’t take it”, which acts as a surrogate theme song for the film. Korine sometimes depicts his main characters on crutches or in a wheelchair, and a baby doll is never too far away from the action, as a silent and Surrealist witness to their weird, sinister and sometimes very funny exploits. The film cuts from scene to scene as if edited on a video recorder, utilising in-house VHS titling sequences, audio glitches and video static to create the sense that one is engaging voyeuristically with a found video document rather than a scripted movie. Mainstream AlternativesAs a viewer of Trash Humpers, one has to try hard to suspend disbelief if one is to see the humpers as genuine geriatric peeping Toms rather than as hipsters in old-man masks trying to be rebellious. However, as Korine’s earlier films such as Gummo (1997) attest, he clearly delights in blurring the line between failure and transcendence, or, in this case, between pretentious art-school bravado and authentic redneck ennui. As noted in a review by Jeannette Catsoulis, writing for the New York Times: “Much of this is just so much juvenile posturing, but every so often the screen freezes into something approximating beauty: a blurry, spaced-out, yellow-green landscape, as alien as an ancient photograph”. Korine has made a career out of generating this wavering uncertainty in his work, polarising audiences with a mix of critical, cinema-verité styles and cynical exploitations. His work has consistently revelled in ethical ambiguities, creating environments where teenagers take Ritalin for kicks, kill cats, wage war with their families and engage in acts of sexual deviancy – all of which are depicted with a photographer’s eye for the uncanny.The elusive and contradictory aspects of Korine’s work – at once ugly and beautiful, abstract and commercial, pessimistic and nostalgic – are evident not just in films such as Gummo, Julien Donkey Boy (1999) and Mister Lonely (2007) but also in his screenplay for Kids (1995), his performance-like appearances on The Tonight Show with David Letterman (1993-2015) and in publications such as A Crackup at the Race Riots (1998) and Pass the Bitch Chicken (2001). As well as these outputs, Korine is also a painter who is represented by Gagosian Gallery – one of the world’s leading art galleries – and he has directed numerous music videos, documentaries and commercials throughout his career. More than just update of the traditional figure of the auteur, Korine, instead, resembles a contemporary media artist whose avant-garde and grotesque treatments of Americana permeate almost everything he does. Korine wrote the screenplay for Kids when he was just 19, and subsequently built his reputation on the paradoxical mainstreaming of alternative culture in the 1990s. This is exemplified by the establishment of music and film genres such “alternative” and “independent”; the popularity of the slacker ethos attributed to Generation X; the increased visibility of alternative press zines; the birth of grunge in fashion and music; and the coining of “cool hunting” – a bottom-up market research phenomenon that aimed to discover new trends in urban subcultures for the purpose of mass marketing. Key to “alternative culture”, and its related categories such as “indie” and “arthouse”, is the idea of evoking artistic authenticity while covertly maintaining a parasitic relationship with the mainstream. As Holly Kruse notes in her account of the indie music scenes of the 1990s, which gained tremendous popularity in the wake of grunge bands such as Nirvana: without dominant, mainstream musics against which to react, independent music cannot be independent. Its existence depends upon dominant music structures and practices against which to define itself. Indie music has therefore been continually engaged in an economic and ideological struggle in which its ‘outsider’ status is re-examined, re-defined, and re-articulated to sets of musical practices. (Kruse 149)Alternative culture follows a similar, highly contentious, logic, appearing as a nebulous, authentic and artistic “other” whose exponents risk being entirely defined by the mainstream markets they profess to oppose. Kids was directed by the artist cum indie-director Larry Clark, who discovered Korine riding his skateboard with a group of friends in New York’s Washington Square in the early 1990s, before commissioning him to write a script. The then subcultural community of skating – which gained prominence in the 1990s amidst the increased visibility of “alternative sports” – provides an important backdrop to the film, which documents a group of disaffected New York teenagers at a time of the Aids crisis in America. Korine has been active in promoting the DIY ethos, creativity and anti-authoritarian branding of skate culture since this time – an industry that, in its attempts to maintain a non-mainstream profile while also being highly branded, has become emblematic of the category of “alternative culture”. Korine has undertaken commercial projects with an array skate-wear brands, but he is particularly associated with Supreme, a so-called “guerrilla fashion” label originating in 1994 that credits Clark and other 1990s indie darlings, and Korine cohorts, Chloë Sevigny and Terry Richardson, as former models and collaborators (Williams). The company is well known for its designer skateboard decks, its collaborations with prominent contemporary visual artists, its hip-hop branding and “inscrutable” web videos. It is also well known for its limited runs of new clothing lines, which help to stoke demand through one-offs – blending street-wear accessibility with the restricted-market and anti-authoritarian sensibility of avant-garde art.Of course, “alternative culture” poses a notorious conundrum for analysis, involving highly subjective demarcations of “mainstream” from “subversive” culture, not to mention “genuine subversion” from mere “corporate alternatives”. As Pierre Bourdieu has argued, the roots of alternative culture lie in the Western tradition of the avant-garde and the “aesthetic gaze” that developed in the nineteenth century (Field 36). In analysing the modernist notion of advanced cultural practice – where art is presented as an alternative to bourgeois academic taste and to the common realm of cultural commodities – Bourdieu proposed a distinction between two types of “fields”, or logics of cultural production. Alternative culture follows what Bourdieu called “the field of restricted production”, which adheres to “art for art’s sake” ideals, where audiences are targeted as if like-minded peers (Field 50). In contrast, the “field of large-scale production” reflects the commercial imperatives of mainstream culture, in which goods are produced for the general public at large. The latter field of large-scale production tends to service pre-established markets, operating in response to public demand. Furthermore, whereas success in the field of restricted production is often indirect, and latent – involving artists who create niche markets without making any concessions to those markets – success in the field of large-scale production is typically more immediate and quantifiable (Field 39). Here we can see that central to the branding of “alternative culture” is the perceived refusal to conform to popular taste and the logic of capitalism more generally is. As Supreme founder James Jebbia stated about his brand in a rare interview: “The less known the better” (Williams). On this, Bourdieu states that, in the field of restricted production, the fundamental principles of all ordinary economies are inversed to create a “loser wins” scenario (Field 39). Profit and cultural esteem become detrimental attributes in this context, potentially tainting the integrity and marginalisation on which alternative products depend. As one ironic hipster t-shirt puts it: “Nothing is any good if other people like it” (Diesel Sweeties).Trash HipstersIn abandoning linear narrative for rough assemblages of vignettes – or “moments” – recorded with an unsteady handheld camera, Trash Humpers positions itself in ironic opposition to mainstream filmmaking, refusing the narrative arcs and unwritten rules of Hollywood film, save for its opening and closing credits. Given Korine’s much publicized appreciation of cinema pioneers, we can understand Trash Humpers as paying homage to independent and DIY film history, including Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, William Eggleston’s Stranded in Canton (1973), Andy Warhol’s and Paul Morrissey’s Lonesome Cowboys (1967) and Trash (1970), and John Waters’s Pink Flamingos (1972), all of which jubilantly embraced the “bad” aesthetic of home movies. Posed as fantasized substitutions for mainstream movie-making, such works were also underwritten by the legitimacy of camp as a form of counter-culture critique, blurring parody and documentary to give voice to an array of non-mainstream and counter-cultural identities. The employment of camp in postmodern culture became known not merely as an aesthetic subversion of cultural mores but also as “a gesture of self-legitimation” (Derrida 290), its “failed seriousness” regarded as a critical response to the specific historical problem of being a “culturally over-saturated” subject (Sontag 288).The significant difference between Korine’s film and those of his 1970s-era forbears is precisely the attention he pays to the formal aspects of his medium, revelling in analogue editing glitches to the point of fetishism, in some cases lasting as long as the scenes themselves. Consciously working out-of-step with the media of his day, Trash Humpers in imbued with nostalgia from its very beginning. Whereas Smith, Eggleston, Warhol, Morrissey and Waters blurred fantasy and documentary in ways that raised the social and political identities of their subjects, Korine seems much more interested in “trash” as an aesthetic trope. In following this interest, he rightfully pays homage to the tropes of queer cinema, however, he conveniently leaves behind their underlying commentaries about (hetero-) normative culture. A sequence where the trash humpers visit a whorehouse and amuse themselves by smoking cigars and slapping the ample bottoms of prostitutes in G-strings confirms the heterosexual tenor of the film, which is reiterated throughout by numerous deadpan gay jokes and slurs.Trash Humpers can be understood precisely in terms of Korine’s desire to maintain the aesthetic imperatives of alternative culture, where formal experimentation and the subverting of mainstream genres can provide a certain amount of freedom from explicated meaning, and, in particular, from socio-political commentary. Bourdieu rightly points out how the pleasures of the aesthetic gaze often manifest themselves curiously as form of “deferred pleasure” (353) or “pleasure without enjoyment” (495), which corresponds to Immanuel Kant’s notion of the disinterested nature of aesthetic judgement. Aesthetic dispositions posed in the negative – as in the avant-garde artists who mined primitive and ugly cultural stereotypes – typically use as reference points “facile” or “vulgar” (393) working-class tropes that refer negatively to sensuous pleasure as their major criterion of judgment. For Bourdieu, the pleasures provided by the aesthetic gaze in such instances are not sensual pleasures so much as the pleasures of social distinction – signifying the author’s distance from taste as a form of gratification. Here, it is easy to see how the orgiastic central characters in Trash Humpers might be employed by Korine for a similar end-result. As noted by Jeremiah Kipp in a review of the film: “You don't ‘like’ a movie like Trash Humpers, but I’m very happy such films exist”. Propelled by aesthetic, rather than by social, questions of value, those that “get” the obscure works of alternative culture have a tendency to legitimize them on the basis of the high-degree of formal analysis skills they require. For Bourdieu, this obscures the fact that one’s aesthetic “‘eye’ is a product of history reproduced by education” – a privileged mode of looking, estranged from those unfamiliar with the internal logic of decoding presupposed by the very notion of “aesthetic enjoyment” (2).The rhetorical priority of alternative culture is, in Bourdieu’s terms, the “autonomous” perfection of the form rather than the “heteronomous” attempt to monopolise on it (Field 40). However, such distinctions are, in actuality, more nuanced than Bourdieu sometimes assumed. This is especially true in the context of global digital culture, which makes explicit how the same cultural signs can have vastly different meanings and motivations across different social contexts. This has arguably resulted in the destabilisation of prescriptive analyses of cultural taste, and has contributed to recent “post-critical” advances, in which academics such as Bruno Latour and Rita Felski advocate for cultural analyses and practices that promote relationality and attachment rather than suspicious (critical) dispositions towards marginal and popular subjects alike. Latour’s call for a move away from the “sledge hammer” of critique applies as much to cultural practice as it does to written analysis. Rather than maintaining hierarchical oppositions between authentic versus inauthentic taste, Latour understands culture – and the material world more generally – as having agency alongside, and with, that of the social world.Hipsters with No AlternativeIf, as Karl Spracklen suggests, alternativism is thought of “as a political project of resistance to capitalism, with communicative oppositionality as its defining feature” (254), it is clear that there has been a progressive waning in relevance of the category of “alternative culture” in the age of the Internet, which coincides with the triumph of so-called “neoliberal individualism” (258). To this end, Korine has lost some of his artistic credibility over the course of the 2000s. If viewed negatively, icons of 1990s alternative culture such as Korine can be seen as merely exploiting Dada-like techniques of mimetic exacerbation and symbolic détournement for the purpose of alternative, “arty” branding rather than pertaining to a counter-hegemonic cultural movement (Foster 31). It is within this context of heightened scepticism surrounding alternative culture that the hipster stereotype emerged in cultures throughout the world, as if a contested symbol of the aesthetic gaze in an era of neoliberal identity politics. Whatever the psychological motivations underpinning one’s use of the term, to call someone a hipster is typically to point out that their distinctive alternative or “arty” status appears overstated; their creative decisions considered as if a type of bathos. For detractors of alternative cultural producers such as Korine, he is trying too hard to be different, using the stylised codes of “alternative” to conceal what is essentially his cultural and political immaturity. The hipster – who is rarely ever self-identified – re-emerged in the 2000s to operate as a scapegoat for inauthentic markers of alternative culture, associated with men and women who appear to embrace Realpolitik, sincerity and authentic expressions of identity while remaining tethered to irony, autonomous aesthetics and self-design. Perhaps the real irony of the hipster is the pervasiveness of irony in contemporary culture. R. J Magill Jnr. has argued that “a certain cultural bitterness legitimated through trenchant disbelief” (xi) has come to define the dominant mode of political engagement in many societies since the early 2000s, in response to mass digital information, twenty-four-hour news cycles, and the climate of suspicion produced by information about terrorism threats. He analyses the prominence of political irony in American TV shows including The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Simpsons, South Park, The Chappelle Show and The Colbert Report but he also notes its pervasiveness as a twenty-first-century worldview – a distancing that “paradoxically and secretly preserves the ideals of sincerity, honesty and authenticity by momentarily belying its own appearance” (x). Crucially, then, the utterance “hipster” has come to signify instances when irony and aesthetic distance are perceived to have been taken too far, generating the most disdain from those for whom irony, aesthetic discernment and cultural connoisseurship still provide much-needed moments of disconnection from capitalist cultures drowning in commercial hyperbole and grave news hype. Korine himself has acknowledged that Spring Breakers (2013) – his follow-up feature film to Trash Humpers – was created in response to the notion that “alternative culture”, once a legitimate challenge to mainstream taste, had lost its oppositional power with the decentralization of digital culture. He states that he made Spring Breakers at a moment “when there’s no such thing as high or low, it’s all been exploded. There is no underground or above-ground, there’s nothing that’s alternative. We’re at a point of post-everything, so it’s all about finding the spirit inside, and the logic, and making your own connections” (Hawker). In this context, we can understand Trash Humpers as the last of the Korine films to be branded with the authenticity of alternative culture. In Spring Breakers Korine moved from the gritty low-fi sensibility of his previous films and adopted a more digital, light-filled and pastel-coloured palette. Focussing more conventionally on plot than ever before, Spring Breakers follows four college girls who hold up a restaurant in order to fund their spring break vacation. Critic Michael Chaiken noted that the film marks a shift in Korine’s career, from the alternative stylings of the pre-Internet generation to “the cultural heirs [of] the doomed protagonists of Kids: nineties babies, who grew up with the Internet, whose sensibilities have been shaped by the sweeping technological changes that have taken place in the interval between the Clinton and Obama eras” (33).By the end of the 2000s, an entire generation came of age having not experienced a time when the obscure films, music or art of the past took more effort to track down. Having been a key participant in the branding of alternative culture, Korine is in a good position to recall a different, pre-YouTube time – when cultural discernment was still caught up in the authenticity of artistic identity, and when one’s cultural tastes could still operate with a certain amount of freedom from sociological scrutiny. Such ideas seem a long way away from today’s cultural environments, which have been shaped not only by digital media’s promotion of cultural interconnection and mass information, but also by social media’s emphasis on mobilization and ethical awareness. ConclusionI should reiterate here that is not Korine’s lack of seriousness, or irony, alone that marks Trash Humpers as a response to the scepticism surrounding alternative culture symbolised by the figure of the hipster. It is, rather, that Korine’s mock-documentary about juvenile geriatrics works too hard to obscure its implicit social commentary, appearing driven to condemn contemporary capitalism’s exploitations of youthfulness only to divert such “uncool” critical commentaries through unsubtle formal distractions, visual poetics and “bad boy” avant-garde signifiers of authenticity. Before being bludgeoned to death, the unnamed man in the French maid’s outfit recites a poem on a bridge amidst a barrage of fire crackers let off by a nearby humper in a wheelchair. Although easily overlooked, it could, in fact, be a pivotal scene in the film. Spoken with mock high-art pretentions, the final lines of the poem are: So what? Why, I ask, why? Why castigate these creatures whose angelic features are bumping and grinding on trash? Are they not spawned by our greed? Are they not our true seed? Are they not what we’ve bought for our cash? We’ve created this lot, of the ooze and the rot, deliberately and unabashed. Whose orgiastic elation and one mission in creation is to savagely fornicate TRASH!Here, the character’s warning of capitalist overabundance is drowned out by the (aesthetic) shocks of the fire crackers, just as the stereotypical hipster’s ethical ideals are drowned out by their aesthetic excess. The scene also functions as a metaphor for the humpers themselves, whose elderly masks – embodiments of nostalgia – temporarily suspend their real socio-political identities for the sake of role-play. It is in this sense that Trash Humpers is too enamoured with its own artifices – including its anonymous “boys club” mentality – to suggest anything other than the aesthetic distance that has come to mark the failings of the “alternative culture” category. In such instances, alternative taste appears as a rhetorical posture, with Korine asking us to gawk knowingly at the hedonistic and destructive pleasures pursued by the humpers while factoring in, and accepting, our likely disapproval.ReferencesArsel, Zeynep, and Craig J. Thompson. “Demythologizing Consumption Practices: How Consumers Protect Their Field-Dependent Identity Investments from Devaluing Marketplace Myths.” Journal of Consumer Research 37.5 (2011): 791-806.Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984.Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production Essays on Art and Literature. Edited by Randal Johnson. London: Polity Press, 1993.Carr, David. “Its Edge Intact, Vice Is Chasing Hard News.” New York Times 24 Aug. 2014. 12 Nov. 2016 <https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/25/business/media/its-edge-intact-vice-is-chasing-hard-news-.html>.Catsoulis, Jeannette. “Geriatric Delinquents, Rampaging through Suburbia.” New York Times 6 May 2010. 1` Nov. 2016 <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/movies/07trash.html>.Chaiken, Michael. “The Dream Life.” Film Comment (Mar./Apr. 2013): 30-33.D’Angelo, Mike. “Trash Humpers.” Not Coming 18 Sep. 2009. 12 Nov. 2016 <http://www.notcoming.com/reviews/trashhumpers>.Derrida, Jacques. Positions. London: Athlone, 1981.Diesel Sweeties. 1 Nov. 2016 <https://store.dieselsweeties.com/products/nothing-is-any-good-if-other-people-like-it-shirt>.Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.Greif, Mark. What Was the Hipster? A Sociological Investigation. New York: n+1 Foundation, 2010.Hawker, Philippa. “Telling Tales Out of School.” Sydney Morning Herald 4 May 2013. 12 Nov. 2016 <http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/telling-tales-out-of-school-20130503-2ixc3.html>.Hillis, Aaron. “Harmony Korine on Trash Humpers.” IFC 6 May 2009. 12 Nov. 2016 <http://www.ifc.com/2010/05/harmony-korine-2>.Jay Magill Jr., R. Chic Ironic Bitterness. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007.Kipp, Jeremiah. “Clean Off the Dirt, Scrape Off the Blood: An Interview with Trash Humpers Director Harmony Korine.” Slant Magazine 18 Mar. 2011. 1 Nov. 2016 <http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/article/clean-off-the-dirt-scrape-off-the-blood-an-interview-with-trash-humpers-director-harmony-korine>.Latour, Bruno. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (2004): 225-248.Maly, Ico, and Varis, Piia. “The 21st-Century Hipster: On Micro-Populations in Times of Superdiversity.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 19.6 (2016): 637–653.McHugh, Gene. “Monday May 10th 2010.” Post Internet. New York: Lulu Press, 2010.Ouellette, Marc. “‘I Know It When I See It’: Style, Simulation and the ‘Short-Circuit Sign’.” Semiotic Review 3 (2013): 1–15.Reeve, Michael. “The Hipster as the Postmodern Dandy: Towards an Extensive Study.” 2013. 12 Nov. 2016. <http://www.academia.edu/3589528/The_hipster_as_the_postmodern_dandy_towards_an_extensive_study>.Schiermer, Bjørn. “Late-Modern Hipsters: New Tendencies in Popular Culture.” Acta Sociologica 57.2 (2014): 167–181.Sontag, Susan. “Notes on Camp.” Against Interpretation. New York: Octagon, 1964/1982. 275-92. Stahl, Geoff. “Mile-End Hipsters and the Unmasking of Montreal’s Proletaroid Intelligentsia; Or How a Bohemia Becomes BOHO.” Adam Art Gallery, Apr. 2010. 12 May 2015 <http://www.adamartgallery.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/adamartgallery_vuwsalecture_geoffstahl.pdf>.Williams, Alex. “Guerrilla Fashion: The Story of Supreme.” New York Times 21 Nov. 2012. 1 Nov. 2016 <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/22/fashion/guerrilla-fashion-the-story-of-supreme.html>.Žižek, Slavoj. “L’Etat d’Hipster.” Rhinocerotique. Trans. Henry Brulard. Sep. 2009. 3-10.

This paper explores South African hip-hop activist Emile YX?'s work to suggest that he presents an alternative take on mainstream US and South African hip-hop. While it is arguable that a great deal of mainstream hip-hop is commercially co-opted, it is clear that a significant amount of US hip-hop (by Angel Haze or Talib Kweli, for example) and hip-hop beyond the US (by Positive Black Soul, Godessa, Black Noise or Prophets of da City, for example) present alternatives to its co-option. Emile YX? pushes for an alternative to mainstream hip-hop's aesthetics and politics. Foregoing what Prophets of da City call “mindless topics” (Prophets of da City “Cape Crusader”), he employs hip-hop to engage audiences critically about social and political issues, including language and racial identity politics. Significantly, he embraces AfriKaaps, which is a challenge to the hegemonic speech variety of Afrikaans. From Emile's perspective, AfriKaaps preceded Afrikaans because it was spoken by slaves during the Cape colonial era and was later culturally appropriated by Afrikaner Nationalists in the apartheid era to construct white, Afrikaner identity as pure and bounded. AfriKaaps in hip-hop therefore presents an alternative to mainstream US-centric hip-hop in South Africa (via AKA or Cassper Nyovest, for example) as well as Afrikaner Nationalist representations of Afrikaans and race by promoting multilingual hip-hop aesthetics, which was initially advanced by Prophets of da City in the early '90s.Pursuing Alternative TrajectoriesEmile YX?, a former school teacher, started out with the Black Consciousness-aligned hip-hop crew, Black Noise, as a b-boy in the late 1980s before becoming an MC. Black Noise went through a number of iterations, eventually being led by YX? (aka Emile Jansen) after he persuaded the crew not to pursue a mainstream record deal in favour of plotting a career path as independent artists. The crew’s strategy has been to fund the production and distribution of their albums independently and to combine their work as recording and performing artists with their activism. They therefore arranged community workshops at schools and, initially, their local library in the township, Grassy Park, before touring nationally and internationally. By the late 1990s, Jansen established an NGO, Heal the Hood, in order to facilitate collaborative projects with European and South African partners. These partnerships, not only allowed Black Noise crew members to continue working as hip-hip activists, but also created a network through which they could distribute their music and secure further bookings for performances locally and internationally.Jansen’s solo work continued along this trajectory and he has gone on to work on collaborative projects, such as the hip-hop theatre show Afrikaaps, which looks critically at the history of Afrikaans and identity politics, and Mixed Mense, a b-boy show that celebrates African dance traditions and performed at One Mic Festival at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC in 2014 (48 Hours). This artist’s decision not to pursue a mainstream record deal in the early 1990s probably saved Black Noise from being a short-lived pop sensation in favour of pursuing a route that ensured that Cape hip-hop retained its alternative, Black Consciousness-inspired subcultural edge.The activism of Black Noise and Heal the Hood is an example of activists’ efforts to employ hip-hop as a means of engaging youth critically about social and political issues (Haupt, Stealing Empire 158-165). Hence, despite arguments that the seeds for subcultures’ commercial co-option lie in the fact that they speak through commodities (Hebdige 95; Haupt, Stealing Empire 144–45), there is evidence of agency despite the global reach of US cultural imperialism. H. Samy Alim’s concept of translocal style communities is useful in this regard. The concept focuses on the “transportability of mobile matrices – sets of styles, aesthetics, knowledges, and ideologies that travel across localities and cross-cut modalities” (Alim 104-105). Alim makes the case for agency when he contends, “Although global style communities may indeed grow out of particular sociohistoric originating moments, or moments in which cultural agents take on the project of creating ‘an origin’ (in this case, Afrodiasporic youth in the United States in the 1970s), it is important to note that a global style community is far from a threatening, homogenizing force” (Alim 107).Drawing on Arjun Appadurai’s concepts of ethnoscapes, financescapes, ideoscapes and mediascapes, Alim argues that the “persistent dialectical interplay between the local and the global gives rise to the creative linguistic styles that are central to the formation of translocal style communities, and leads into theorizing about glocal stylizations and style as glocal distinctiveness” (Appadurai; Alim 107). His view of globalisation thus accommodates considerations of the extent to which subjects on both the local and global levels are able to exercise agency to produce new or alternative meanings and stylistic practices.Hip-Hop's Translanguaging Challenge to HegemonyJansen’s “Mix en Meng It Op” [“Mix and Blend It / Mix It Up”] offers an example of translocal style by employing translanguaging, code mixing and codeswitching practices. The song’s first verse speaks to the politics of race and language by challenging apartheid-era thinking about purity and mixing:In South Africa is ek coloured and African means black raceFace it, all mense kom van Africa in the first placeErase all trace of race and our tribal divisionEk’s siek en sat van all our land’s racist decisionsMy mission’s om te expose onse behoort aan een rasHou vas, ras is las, watch hoe ons die bubble barsPlus the mixture that mixed here is not fixed, sirStir daai potjie want ons wietie wattie mixtures wereThis illusion of race and tribe is rotten to the coreWhat’s more the lie of purity shouldn’t exist anymoreLook at Shaka Zulu, who mixed all those tribes togetherMixed conquered tribes now Amazulu foreverHave you ever considered all this mixture before?Xhosa comes from Khoe khoe, do you wanna know more?Xhosa means angry looking man in Khoe KhoeSoe hulle moet gemix het om daai clicks to employ(Emile YX? “Mix en Meng It Op”; my emphasis)[In South Africa I am coloured and African means black raceFace it, all people come from Africa in the first placeErase all trace of race and our tribal divisionI’m sick and tired of all our land’s racist decisionsMy mission’s to expose the fact that we belong top one raceHold on, race is a burden, watch as we burst the bubble Plus the mixture that mixed here is not fixed, sirStir that pot because we don’t know what the mixtures wereThis illusion of race and tribe is rotten to the coreWhat’s more the lie of purity shouldn’t exist anymoreLook at Shaka Zulu, who mixed all those tribes togetherMixed conquered tribes now Amazulu foreverHave you ever considered all this mixture before?Xhosa comes from Khoe khoe, do you wanna know more?Xhosa means angry looking man in Khoe KhoeSo they must have mixed to employ those clicks]The MC does more than codeswitch or code mix in this verse. The syntax switches from that of English to Afrikaans interchangeably and he is doing more than merely borrowing words and phrases from one language and incorporating it into the other language. In certain instances, he opts to pronounce certain English words and phrases as if they were Afrikaans (for example, “My” and “land’s”). Suresh Canagarajah explains that codeswitching was traditionally “distinguished from code mixing” because it was assumed that codeswitching required “bilingual competence” in order to “switch between [the languages] in fairly contextually appropriate ways with rhetorical and social significance”, while code mixing merely involved “borrowings which are appropriated into one’s language so that using them doesn't require bilingual competence” (Canagarajah, Translingual Practice 10). However, he argues that both of these translingual practices do not require “full or perfect competence” in the languages being mixed and that “these models of hybridity can be socially and rhetorically significant” (Canagarajah, Translingual Practice 10). However, the artist is clearly competent in both English and Afrikaans; in fact, he is also departing from the hegemonic speech varieties of English and Afrikaans in attempts to affirm black modes of speech, which have been negated during apartheid (cf. Haupt “Black Thing”).What the artist seems to be doing is closer to translanguaging, which Canagarajah defines as “the ability of multilingual speakers to shuttle between languages, treating the diverse languages that form their repertoire as an integrated system” (Canagarajah, “Codemeshing in Academic Writing” 401). The mix or blend of English and Afrikaans syntax become integrated, thereby performing the very point that Jansen makes about what he calls “the lie of purity” by asserting that the “mixture that mixed here is not fixed, sir” (Emile XY? “Mix en Meng It Op”). This approach is significant because Canagarajah points out that while research shows that translanguaging is “a naturally occurring phenomenon”, it “occurs surreptitiously behind the backs of the teachers in classes that proscribe language mixing” (Canagarajah, “Codemeshing in Academic Writing” 401). Jansen’s performance of translanguaging and challenge to notions of linguistic and racial purity should be read in relation to South Africa’s history of racial segregation during apartheid. Remixing Race/ism and Notions of PurityLegislated apartheid relied on biologically essentialist understandings of race as bounded and fixed and, hence, the categories black and white were treated as polar opposites with those classified as coloured being seen as racially mixed and, therefore, defiled – marked with the shame of miscegenation (Erasmus 16; Haupt, “Black Thing” 176-178). Apart from the negative political and economic consequences of being classified as either black or coloured by the apartheid state (Salo 363; McDonald 11), the internalisation of processes of racial interpellation was arguably damaging to the psyche of black subjects (in the broad inclusive sense) (cf. Fanon; Du Bois). The work of early hip-hop artists like Black Noise and Prophets of da City (POC) was therefore crucial to pointing to alternative modes of speech and self-conception for young people of colour – regardless of whether they self-identified as black or coloured. In the early 1990s, POC lead the way by embracing black modes of speech that employed codeswitching, code mixing and translanguaging as a precursor to the emergence of music genres, such as kwaito, which mixed urban black speech varieties with elements of house music and hip-hop. POC called their performances of Cape Flats speech varieties of English and Afrikaans gamtaal [gam language], which is an appropriation of the term gam, a reference to the curse of Ham and justifications for slavery (Adhikari 95; Haupt Stealing Empire 237). POC’s appropriation of the term gam in celebration of Cape Flats speech varieties challenge the shame attached to coloured identity and the linguistic practices of subjects classified as coloured. On a track called “Gamtaal” off Phunk Phlow, the crew samples an assortment of recordings from Cape Flats speech communities and capture ordinary people speaking in public and domestic spaces (Prophets of da City “Gamtaal”). In one audio snippet we hear an older woman saying apologetically, “Onse praatie suiwer Afrikaan nie. Onse praat kombius Afrikaans” (Prophets of da City “Gamtaal”).It is this shame for black modes of speech that POC challenges on this celebratory track and Jansen takes this further by both making an argument against notions of racial and linguistic purity and performing an example of translanguaging. This is important in light of research that suggests that dominant research on the creole history of Afrikaans – specifically, the Cape Muslim contribution to Afrikaans – has been overlooked (Davids 15). This oversight effectively amounted to cultural appropriation as the construction of Afrikaans as a ‘pure’ language with Dutch origins served the Afrikaner Nationalist project when the National Party came into power in 1948 and began to justify its plans to implement legislated apartheid. POC’s act of appropriating the denigrated term gamtaal in service of a Black Consciousness-inspired affirmation of colouredness, which they position as part of the black experience, thus points to alternative ways in which people of colour cand both express and define themselves in defiance of apartheid.Jansen’s work with the hip-hop theater project Afrikaaps reconceptualised gamtaal as Afrikaaps, a combination of the term Afrikaans and Kaaps. Kaaps means from the Cape – as in Cape Town (the city) or the Cape Flats, which is where many people classified as coloured were forcibly relocated under the Group Areas Act under apartheid (cf. McDonald; Salo; Alim and Haupt). Taking its cue from POC and Brasse vannie Kaap’s Mr FAT, who asserted that “gamtaal is legal” (Haupt, “Black Thing” 176), the Afrikaaps cast sang, “Afrikaaps is legal” (Afrikaaps). Conclusion: Agency and the Transportability of Mobile MatricesJansen pursues this line of thought by contending that the construction of Shaka Zulu’s kingdom involved mixing many tribes (Emile YX? “Mix en Meng It Op”), thereby alluding to arguments that narratives about Shaka Zulu were developed in service of Zulu nationalism to construct Zulu identity as bounded and fixed (Harries 105). Such constructions were essential to the apartheid state's justifications for establishing Bantustans, separate homelands established along the lines of clearly defined and differentiated ethnic identities (Harries 105). Writing about the use of myths and symbols during apartheid, Patrick Harries argues that in Kwazulu, “the governing Inkatha Freedom Party ... created a vivid and sophisticated vision of the Zulu past” (Harries 105). Likewise, Emile YX? contends that isiXhosa’s clicks come from the Khoi (Emile YX? “Mix en Meng It Op”; Afrikaaps). Hence, the idea of the Khoi San’s lineage and history as being separate from that of other African communities in Southern Africa is challenged. He thus challenges the idea of pure Zulu or Xhosa identities and drives the point home by sampling traditional Zulu music, as opposed to conventional hip-hop beats.Effectively, colonial strategies of tribalisation as a divide and rule strategy through the reification of linguistic and cultural practices are challenged, thereby reminding us of the “transportability of mobile matrices” and “fluidity of identities” (Alim 104, 105). In short, identities as well as cultural and linguistic practices were never bounded and static, but always-already hybrid, being constantly made and remade in a series of negotiations. This perspective is in line with research that demonstrates that race is socially and politically constructed and discredits biologically essentialist understandings of race (Yudell 13-14; Tattersall and De Salle 3). This is not to ignore the asymmetrical relations of power that enable cultural appropriation and racism (Hart 138), be it in the context of legislated apartheid, colonialism or in the age of corporate globalisation or Empire (cf. Haupt, Static; Hardt & Negri). But, even here, as Alim suggests, one should not underestimate the agency of subjects on the local level to produce alternative forms of expression and self-representation.ReferencesAdhikari, Mohamed. "The Sons of Ham: Slavery and the Making of Coloured Identity." South African Historical Journal 27.1 (1992): 95-112.Alim, H. Samy “Translocal Style Communities: Hip Hop Youth as Cultural Theorists of Style, Language and Globalization”. Pragmatics 19.1 (2009):103-127. Alim, H. Samy, and Adam Haupt. “Reviving Soul(s): Hip Hop as Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy in the U.S. & South Africa”. Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Educational Justice. Ed. Django Paris and H. Samy Alim. New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University, 2017 (forthcoming). Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Modernity. London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.Canagarajah, Suresh. Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations. London & New York: Routledge, 2013.Canagarajah, Suresh. “Codemeshing in Academic Writing: Identifying Teachable Strategies of Translanguaging”. The Modern Language Journal 95.3 (2011): 401-417.Creese, Angela, and Adrian Blackledge. “Translanguaging in the Bilingual Classroom: A Pedagogy for Learning and Teaching?” The Modern Language Journal 94.1 (2010): 103-115. Davids, Achmat. The Afrikaans of the Cape Muslims. Pretoria: Protea Book House, 2011.Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. Journal of Pan African Studies, 1963, 2009 (eBook).Erasmus, Zimitri. “Introduction.” Coloured by History, Shaped by Place. Ed. Zimitri Erasmus. Cape Town: Kwela Books & SA History Online, 2001.Fanon, Frantz. “The Fact of Blackness”. Black Skins, White Masks. London: Pluto Press: London, 1986. 48 Hours. “Black Noise to Perform at Kennedy Center in the USA”. 11 Mar. 2014. <http://48hours.co.za/2014/03/11/black-noise-to-perform-at-kennedy-center-in-the-usa/>. Haupt, Adam. Static: Race & Representation in Post-Apartheid Music, Media & Film. Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2012.———. Stealing Empire: P2P, Intellectual Property and Hip-Hop Subversion. Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2008. ———. “Black Thing: Hip-Hop Nationalism, ‘Race’ and Gender in Prophets of da City and Brasse vannie Kaap.” Coloured by History, Shaped by Place. Ed. Zimitri Erasmus. Cape Town: Kwela Books & SA History Online, 2001.Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. London & Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000.Hart, J. “Translating and Resisting Empire: Cultural Appropriation and Postcolonial Studies”. Borrowed Power: Essays on Cultural Appropriation. Eds. B. Ziff and P.V. Roa. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997.Harries, Patrick. “Imagery, Symbolism and Tradition in a South African Bantustan: Mangosuthu Buthelezi, Inkatha, and Zulu History”. History and Theory 32.4, Beiheft 32: History Making in Africa (1993): 105-125. Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge, 1979.MacDonald, Michael. Why Race Matters in South Africa. University of Kwazulu-Natal Press: Scottsville, 2006.Salo, Elaine. “Negotiating Gender and Personhood in the New South Africa: Adolescent Women and Gangsters in Manenberg Township on the Cape Flats.” Journal of European Cultural Studies 6.3 (2003): 345–65.Tattersall, Ian, and Rob De Salle. Race? Debunking a Scientific Myth. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2011.TheatreAfrikaaps. Afrikaaps. The Glasshouse, 2011.FilmsValley, Dylan, dir. Afrikaaps. Plexus Films, 2010. MusicProphets of da City. “Gamtaal.” Phunk Phlow. South Africa: Ku Shu Shu, 1995.Prophets of da City. “Cape Crusader.” Ghetto Code. South Africa: Ku Shu Shu & Ghetto Ruff, 1997.YX?, Emile. “Mix En Meng It Op.” Take Our Power Back. Cape Town: Cape Flats Uprising Records, 2015.

The two companions scurry off when they hear a noise at the door. It was only a noise, but it was also a message, a bit of information producing panic: an interruption, a corruption, a rupture of communication. Was the noise really a message? Wasn’t it, rather, static, a parasite? Michael Serres, 1982. Since, ordinarily, channels have a certain amount of noise, and therefore a finite capacity, exact transmission is impossible. Claude Shannon, 1948. Reading Information At their most simplistic, there are two means for shifting information around – analogue and digital. Analogue movement depends on analogy to perform computations; it is continuous and the relationships between numbers are keyed as a continuous ordinal set. The digital set is discrete; moving one finger at a time results in a one-to-one correspondence. Nevertheless, analogue and digital are like the two companions in Serres’ tale. Each suffers the relationship of noise to information as internal rupture and external interference. In their examination of historical constructions of information, Hobart and Schiffman locate the noise of the analogue within its physical materials; they write, “All analogue machines harbour a certain amount of vagueness, known technically as ‘noise’. Which describes the disturbing influences of the machine’s physical materials on its calculations” (208). These “certain amounts of vagueness” are essential to Claude Shannon’s articulation of a theory for information transfer that forms the basis for this paper. In transforming the structures and materials through which it travels, information has left its traces in digital art installation. These traces are located in installation’s systems, structures and materials. The usefulness of information theory as a tool to understand these relationships has until recently been overlooked by a tradition of media art history that has grouped artworks according to the properties of the artwork and/or tied them into the histories of representation and perception in art theory. Throughout this essay I use the productive dual positioning of noise and information to address the errors and impurity inherent within the viewing experiences of digital installation. Information and Noise It is not hard to see why the fractured spaces of digital installation are haunted by histories of information science. In his 1948 essay “The Mathematical Theory of Communication” Claude Shannon developed a new model for communications technologies that articulated informational feedback processes. Discussions of information transmission through phone lines were occurring alongside the development of technology capable of computing multiple discrete and variable packets of information: that is, the digital computer. And, like art, information science remains concerned with the material spaces of transmission – whether conceptual, social or critical. In the context of art something is made to be seen, understood, viewed, or presented as a series of relationships that might be established between individuals, groups, environments, and sensations. Understood this way art is an aesthetic relationship between differing material bodies, images, representations, and spaces. It is an event. Shannon was adamant that information must not be confused with meaning. To increase efficiency he insisted that the message be separated from its components; in particular, those aspects that were predictable were not to be considered information (Hansen 79). The problem that Shannon had to contend with was noise. Unwanted and disruptive, noise became symbolic of the struggle to control the growth of systems. The more complex the system, the more noise needed to be addressed. Noise is both the material from which information is constructed, as well as being the matter which information resists. Weaver (Shannon’s first commentator) writes: In the process of being transmitted, it is unfortunately characteristic that certain things are added to the signal which were not intended by the information source. These unwanted additions may be distortions of sound (in telephony, for example) or static (in radio), or distortions in shape or shading of picture (television), or errors in transmission (telegraphy or facsimile), etc. All of these changes in the transmitted signal are called noise. (4). To enable more efficient message transmission, Shannon designed systems that repressed as much noise as possible, while also acknowledging that without some noise information could not be transmitted. Shannon’s conception of information meant that information would not change if the context changed. This was crucial if a general theory of information transmission was to be plausible and meant that a methodology for noise management could be foregrounded (Pask 123). Without meaning, information became a quantity, a yes or no decision, that Shannon called a “bit” (1). Shannon’s emphasis on separating signal or message from both predicability and external noise appeared to give information an identity where it could float free of a material substance and be treated independently of context. However, for this to occur information would have to become fixed and understood as an entity. Shannon went to pains to demonstrate that the separation of meaning and information was actually to enable the reverse. A fluidity of information and the possibilities for encoding it would mean that information, although measurable, did not have a finite form. Tied into the paradox of this equation is the crucial role of noise or error. In Shannon’s communication model information is not only complicit with noise; it is totally dependant upon it for understanding. Without noise, either encoded within the original message or present from sources outside the channel, information cannot get through. The model of sender-encoder-channel-signal (message)-decoder-receiver that Shannon constructed has an arrow inserting noise. Visually and schematically this noise is a disruption pointing up and inserting itself in the nice clean lines of the message. This does not mean that noise was a last minute consideration; rather noise was the very thing Shannon was working with (and against). It is present in every image we have of information. A source, message, transmitter, receiver and their attendant noises are all material infrastructures that serve to contextualise the information they transmit, receive, and disrupt. Figure 1. Claude Shannon “The Mathematical Theory of Communication” 1948. In his analytical discussion of the diagram, Shannon actually locates noise in two crucial places. The first position accorded noise is external, marked by the arrow that demonstrates how noise is introduced to the message channel whilst in transit. External noise confuses the purity of the message whilst equivocally adding new information. External noise has a particular materiality and enters the equation as unexplained variation and random error. This is disruptive presence rather than entropic coded pattern. Shannon offers this equivocal definition of noise to be everything that is outside the linear model of sender-channel-receiver; hence, anything can be noise if it enters a channel where it is unwelcome. Secondly, noise was defined as unpredictability or entropy found and encoded within the message itself. This for Shannon was an essential and, in some ways, positive role. Entropic forces invited continual reorganisation and (when engaging the laws of redundancy) assisted with the removal of repetition enabling faster message transmission (Shannon 48). Weaver calls this shifting relationship between entropy and message “equivocation” (11). Weaver identified equivocation as central to the manner in which noise and information operated. A process of equivocation identified the receiver’s knowledge. For Shannon, a process of equivocation mediated between useful information and noise, as both were “measured in the same units” (Hayles, Chaos 55). To eliminate noise completely is to sacrifice information. Information understood in this way is also about relationships between differing material bodies, representations, and spaces, connected together for the purposes of transmission. It, like the artwork, is an event. This would appear to suggest a correlation between information transmission and viewing in galleries. Far from it. Although, the contemporary information channel is essentially a tube with fixed walls, (it is still constrained by physical properties, bandwidth and so on) and despite the implicit spatialisation of information models, I am not proposing a direct correlation between information channels and installation spaces. This is because I am not interested in ‘reading’ the information of either environment. What I am suggesting is that both environments share this material of noise. Noise is present in four places. Firstly noise is within the media errors of transmission, and secondly, it is within the media of the installation, (neither of which are one way flows). Thirdly, the viewer or listener introduces noise as interference, and lastly, it is present in the very materials thorough which it travels. Noise layered on noise. Redundancy and Modulation So far in this paper I have discussed the relationship of information to noise. For the remainder, I want to address some particular processes or manifestations of noise in New Zealand artists’ collective, et al.’s maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5 (2006, exhibited as part of the SCAPE Biennal of Art in Public Space, Christchurch Art Gallery). The installation occupies a small alcove that is partially blocked by a military-style portable table stacked with newspapers. Inside the space are three grey wooden chairs, some headphones, and a modified data projection of Google Earth. It is not immediately clear if the viewer is allowed within the spaces of the alcove to listen to the headphones as monotonous voices fill the whole space intoning political, social, and religious platitudes. The headphones might be a tool to block out the noise. In the installation it is as if multiple messages have been sent but their source, channel, and transmitter are unintelligible to the receiver. All that is left is information divorced from meaning. As other works by et al. have demonstrated, social solidarity is not a fundamentalism with directed positions and singular leaders. For example, in rapture (2004) noise disrupts all presence as a portable shed quivers in response to underground nuclear explosions 40,000km away. In the fundamental practice (2005) the viewer is left attempting to decode the un-encoded, as again sound and large steel barriers control and determine only certain movements (see http://www.etal.name/ for some documentation of these projects) . maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5 is a development of the fundamental practice. To enter its spaces viewers slip around the table and find themselves extremely close to the projection screen. Despite the provision of copious media the viewer cannot control any aspect of the environment. On screen, and apparently integral to the Google Earth imagery, are five animated and imposing dark grey monolith forms. Because of their connection to the monotonous voices in the headphones, the monoliths seem to map the imposition of narrative, power, and force in various disputed territories. Like their sudden arrival in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) it is the contradiction of the visibility and improbability of the monoliths that renders them believable. On the video landscape the five monoliths apparently house the dispassionate voices of many different media and political authorities. Their presence is both redundant and essential as they modulate the layering of media forces – and in between, error slips in. In a broad discussion of information Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari highlight the necessary role of redundancy commenting that: redundancy has two forms, frequency and resonance; the first concerns the significance of information, the second (I=I) concerns the subjectivity of communication. It becomes apparent that information and communication, and even significance and subjectification, are subordinate to redundancy (79). In maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5 patterns of frequency highlight the necessary role of entropy where it is coded into gaps in the vocal transmission. Frequency is a structuring of information tied to meaningful communication. Resonance, like the stack of un-decodable newspapers on the portable table, is the carrier of redundancy. It is in the gaps between the recorded voices that connections between the monoliths and the texts are made, and these two forms of redundancy emerge. As Shannon says, redundancy is a problem of language. This is because redundancy and modulation do not equate with relationship of signal to noise. Signal to noise is a representational relationship; frequency and resonance are not representational but relational. This means that an image that might be “real-time” interrupts our understanding that the real comes first with representation always trailing second (Virilio 65). In maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5 the monoliths occupy a fixed spatial ground, imposed over the shifting navigation of Google Earth (this is not to mistake Google Earth with the ‘real’ earth). Together they form a visual counterpoint to the texts reciting in the viewer’s ears, which themselves might present as real but again, they aren’t. As Shannon contended, information cannot be tied to meaning. Instead, in the race for authority and thus authenticity we find interlopers, noisy digital images that suggest the presence of real-time perception. The spaces of maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5 meld representation and information together through the materiality of noise. And across all the different modalities employed, the appearance of noise is not through formation, but through error, accident, or surprise. This is the last step in a movement away from the mimetic obedience of information and its adherence to meaning-making or representational systems. In maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5 we are forced to align real time with virtual spaces and suspend our disbelief in the temporal truths that we see on the screen before us. This brief introduction to the work has returned us to the relationship between analogue and digital materials. Signal to noise is an analogue relationship of presence and absence. No signal equals a break in transmission. On the other hand, a digital system, due to its basis in discrete bits, transmits through probability (that is, the transmission occurs through pattern and randomness, rather than presence and absence (Hayles, How We Became 25). In his use of Shannon’s theory for the study of information transmission, Schwartz comments that the shift in information theory from analogue to digital is a shift from an analogue relationship of signal to noise to one of the probability of error (318). As I have argued in this paper, if it is measured as a quantity, noise is productive; it adds information. In both digital and analogue systems it is predictability and repetition that do not contribute information. Von Neumann makes the distinction clear saying that to some extent the “precision” of the digital machine “is absolute.” Even though, error as a matter of normal operation and not solely … as an accident attributable to some definite breakdown, nevertheless creeps in (294). Error creeps in. In maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5, et al. disrupts signal transmission by layering ambiguities into the installation. Gaps are left for viewers to introduce misreadings of scale, space, and apprehension. Rather than selecting meaning out of information within nontechnical contexts, a viewer finds herself in the same sphere as information. Noise imbricates both information and viewer within a larger open system. When asked about the relationship with the viewer in her work, et al. collaborator p.mule writes: To answer the 1st question, communication is important, clarity of concept. To answer the 2nd question, we are all receivers of information, how we process is individual. To answer the 3rd question, the work is accessible if you receive the information. But the question remains: how do we receive the information? In maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5 the system dominates. Despite the use of sound engineering and sophisticated Google Earth mapping technologies, the work appears to be constructed from discarded technologies both analogue and digital. The ominous hovering monoliths suggest answers: that somewhere within this work are methodologies to confront the materialising forces of digital error. To don the headphones is to invite a position that operates as a filtering of power. The parameters for this power are in a constant state of flux. This means that whilst mapping these forces the work does not locate them. Sound is encountered and constructed. Furthermore, the work does not oppose digital and analogue, for as von Neumann comments “the real importance of the digital procedure lies in its ability to reduce the computational noise level to an extent which is completely unobtainable by any other (analogy) procedure” (295). maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5 shows how digital and analogue come together through the productive errors of modulation and redundancy. et al.’s research constantly turns to representational and meaning making systems. As one instance, maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5 demonstrates how the digital has challenged the logics of the binary in the traditions of information theory. Digital logics are modulated by redundancies and accidents. In maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5 it is not possible to have information without noise. If, as I have argued here, digital installation operates between noise and information, then, in a constant disruption of the legacies of representation, immersion, and interaction, it is possible to open up material languages for the digital. Furthermore, an engagement with noise and error results in a blurring of the structures of information, generating a position from which we can discuss the viewer as immersed within the system – not as receiver or meaning making actant, but as an essential material within the open system of the artwork. References Barr, Jim, and Mary Barr. “L. Budd et al.” Toi Toi Toi: Three Generations of Artists from New Zealand. Ed. Rene Block. Kassel: Museum Fridericianum, 1999. 123. Burke, Gregory, and Natasha Conland, eds. et al. the fundamental practice. Wellington: Creative New Zealand, 2005. Burke, Gregory, and Natasha Conland, eds. Venice Document. et al. the fundamental practice. Wellington: Creative New Zealand, 2006. Daly-Peoples, John. Urban Myths and the et al. Legend. 21 Aug. 2004. The Big Idea (reprint) http://www.thebigidea.co.nz/print.php?sid=2234>. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. London: The Athlone Press, 1996. Hansen, Mark. New Philosophy for New Media. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2004. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1999. Hayles, N. Katherine. Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science. Ithaca and London: Cornell University, 1990. Hobart, Michael, and Zachary Schiffman. Information Ages: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Computer Revolution. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998. p.mule, et al. 2007. 2 Jul. 2007 http://www.etal.name/index.htm>. Pask, Gordon. An Approach to Cybernetics. London: Hutchinson, 1961. Paulson, William. The Noise of Culture: Literary Texts in a World of Information. Ithaca and London: Cornell University, 1988. Schwartz, Mischa. Information Transmission, Modulation, and Noise: A Unified Approach to Communication Systems. 3rd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980. Serres, Michel. The Parasite. Trans. Lawrence R. Schehr. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1982. Shannon, Claude. A Mathematical Theory of Communication. July, October 1948. Online PDF. 27: 379-423, 623-656 (reprinted with corrections). 13 Jul. 2004 http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/paper.html>. Virilio, Paul. The Vision Machine. Trans. Julie Rose. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, British Film Institute, 1994. Von Neumann, John. “The General and Logical Theory of Automata.” Collected Works. Ed. A. H. Taub. Vol. 5. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1963. Weaver, Warren. “Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication.” The Mathematical Theory of Commnunication. Eds. Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver. paperback, 1963 ed. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1949. 1-16. Work Discussed et al. maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5 2006. Installation, Google Earth feed, newspapers, sound. Exhibited in SCAPE 2006 Biennial of Art in Public Space Christchurch Art Gallery, Christchurch, September 30-November 12. Images reproduced with the permission of et al. Photographs by Lee Cunliffe. Acknowledgments Research for this paper was conducted with the support of an Otago Polytechnic Resaerch Grant. Photographs of et al. maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5 by Lee Cunliffe. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Ballard, Su. "Information, Noise and et al." M/C Journal 10.5 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/02-ballard.php>. APA Style Ballard, S. (Oct. 2007) "Information, Noise and et al.," M/C Journal, 10(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/02-ballard.php>.

The labyrinth is probably the most universal trope of complexity. Deriving from pre-Greek labyrinthos, a word denoting “maze, large building with intricate underground passages”, and possibly related to Lydian labrys, which signifies “double-edged axe,” symbol of royal power, the notion of the labyrinth primarily evokes the Minoan Palace in Crete and the myth of the Minotaur. According to this myth, the Minotaur, a monster with the body of a man and the head of a bull, was born to Pesiphae, king Minos’s wife, who mated with a bull when the king of Crete was besieging Athens. Upon his return, Minos commanded the artist Daedalus to construct a monumental building of inter-connected rooms and passages, at the center of which the King sought to imprison the monstrous sign of his disgrace. The Minotaur required human sacrifice every couple of years, until it was defeated by the Athenian prince Theuseus, who managed to extricate himself from the maze by means of a clue of thread, given to him by Minos’s enamored daughter, Ariadne (Parandowski 238-43). If the Cretan myth establishes the labyrinth as a trope of complexity, this very complexity associates labyrinthine design not only with disorientation but also with superb artistry. As pointed out by Penelope Reed Doob, the labyrinth is an inherently ambiguous construct (39-63). It presumes a double perspective: those imprisoned inside, whose vision ahead and behind is severely constricted, are disoriented and terrified; whereas those who view it from outside or from above – as a diagram – admire its structural sophistication. Labyrinths thus simultaneously embody order and chaos, clarity and confusion, unity (a single structure) and multiplicity (many paths). Whereas the modern, reductive view equates the maze with confusion and disorientation, the labyrinth is actually a signifier with two contradictory signifieds. Not only are all labyrinths intrinsically double, they also fall into two distinct, though related, types. The paradigm represented by the Cretan maze is mainly derived from literature and myth. It is a multicursal model, consisting of a series of forking paths, each bifurcation requiring new choice. The second type is the unicursal maze. Found mainly in the visual arts, such as rock carvings or coin ornamentation, its structural basis is a single path, twisting and turning, but entailing no bifurcations. Although not equally bewildering, both paradigms are equally threatening: in the multicursal construct the maze-walker may be entrapped in a repetitious pattern of wrong choices, whereas in the unicursal model the traveler may die of exhaustion before reaching the desired end, the heart of the labyrinth. In spite of their differences, the basic similarities between the two paradigms may explain why they were both included in the same linguistic category. The labyrinth represents a road-model, and as such it is essentially teleological. Most labyrinths of antiquity and of the Middle Ages were designed with the thought of reaching the center. But the fact that each labyrinth has a center does not necessarily mean that the maze-walker is aware of its existence. Moreover, reaching the center is not always to be desired (in case it conceals a lurking Minotaur), and once the center is reached, the maze-walker may never find the way back. Besides signifying complexity and ambiguity, labyrinths thus also symbolically evoke the danger of eternal imprisonment, of inextricability. This sinister aspect is intensified by the recursive aspect of labyrinthine design, by the mirroring effect of the paths. In reflecting on the etymology of the word ‘maze’ (rather than the Greek/Latin labyrinthos/labyrinthus), Irwin observes that it derives from the Swedish masa, signifying “to dream, to muse,” and suggests that the inherent recursion of labyrinthine design offers an apt metaphor for the uniquely human faculty of self-reflexitivity, of thought turning upon itself (95). Because of its intriguing aspect and wealth of potential implications, the labyrinth has become a category that is not only formal, but also conceptual and symbolic. The ambiguity of the maze, its conflation of overt complexity with underlying order and simplicity, was explored in ideological systems rooted in a dualistic world-view. In the early Christian era, the labyrinth was traditionally presented as a metaphor for the universe: divine creation based on a perfect design, perceived as chaotic due to the shortcomings of human comprehension. In the Middle-Ages, the labyrinthine attributes of imprisonment and limited perception were reflected in the view of life as a journey inside a moral maze, in which man’s vision was constricted because of his fallen nature (Cazenave 348-350). The maze was equally conceptualized in dynamic terms and used as a metaphor for mental processes. More specifically, the labyrinth has come to signify intellectual confusion, and has therefore become most pertinent in literary contexts that valorize rational thought. And the rationalistic genre par excellence is detective fiction. The labyrinth may serve as an apt metaphor for the world of detective fiction because it accurately conveys the tacit assumptions of the genre – the belief in the existence of order, causality and reason underneath the chaos of perceived phenomena. Such optimistic belief is ardently espoused by the putative detective in Paul Auster’s metafictional novella City of Glass: He had always imagined that the key to good detective work was a close observation of details. The more accurate the scrutiny, the more successful the results. The implication was that human behavior could be understood, that beneath the infinite façade of gestures, tics and silences there was finally a coherence, an order, a source of motivation. (67) In this brief but eloquent passage Auster conveys, through the mind of his sleuth, the central tenets of classical detective fiction. These tenets are both ontological and epistemological. The ontological aspect is subsumed in man’s hopeful reliance on “a coherence, an order, a source of motivation” underlying the messiness and blood of the violent deed. The epistemological aspect is aptly formulated by Michael Holquist, who argues that the fictional world of detective stories is rooted in the Scholastic principle of adequatio rei et intellectus, the adequation of mind to things (157). And if both human reality and phenomenal reality are governed by reason, the mind, given enough time, can understand everything. The mind’s representative is the detective. He is the embodiment of inquisitive intellect, and his superior powers of observation and deduction transform an apparent mystery into an incontestable solution. The detective sifts through the evidence, assesses the relevance of data and the reliability of witnesses. But, first of foremost, he follows clues – and the clue, the most salient element of the detective story, links the genre with the myth of the Cretan labyrinth. For in its now obsolete spelling, the word ‘clew’ denotes a ball of thread, and thus foregrounds the similarity between the mental process of unraveling a crime mystery and the traveler’s progress inside the maze (Irwin 179). The chief attributes of the maze – circuitousness, enclosure, and inextricability – associate it with another convention of detective fiction, the trope of the locked room. This convention, introduced in Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” a text traditionally regarded as the first analytic detective story, establishes the locked room as the ultimate affront to reason: a hermetically sealed space which no one could have penetrated or exited and in which a brutal crime has nevertheless been committed. But the affront to reason is only apparent. In Poe’s ur-text of the genre, the violent deed is committed by an orangutan, a brutal and abused beast that enters and escapes from the seemingly locked room through a half-closed window. As accurately observed by Holquist, in the world of detective fiction “there are no mysteries, there is only incorrect reasoning” (157). And the correct reasoning, dubbed by Poe “ratiocination”, is the process of logical deduction. Deduction is an enchainment of syllogisms, in which a conclusion inevitably follows from two valid premises; as Dupin elegantly puts it, “the deductions are the sole proper ones and … the suspicion arises inevitably from them as a single result” (Poe 89). Applying this rigorous mental process, the detective re-arranges the pieces of the puzzle into a coherent and meaningful sequence of events. In other words – he creates a narrative. This brings us back to Irwin’s observation about the recursive aspect of the maze. Like the labyrinth, detective fiction is self-reflexive. It is a narrative form which foregrounds narrativity, for the construction of a meaningful narrative is the protagonist’s and the reader’s principal task. Logical deduction, the main activity of the fictional sleuth, does not allow for ambiguity. In classical detective fiction, the labyrinth is associated with the messiness and violence of crime and contrasted with the clarity of the solution (the inverse is true of postmodernist detective mysteries). The heart of the labyrinth is the solution, the vision of truth. This is perhaps the most important aspect of the detective genre: the premise that truth exists and that it can be known. In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the initially insoluble puzzle is eventually transformed into a coherent narrative, in which a frantic orangutan runs into the street escaping the abuse of its master, climbs a rod and seeks refuge in a room inhabited by two women, brutally slashes them in confusion, and then flees the room in the same way he penetrated it. The sequence of events reconstructed by Dupin is linear, unequivocal, and logically satisfying. This is not the case with the ‘hard boiled’, American variant of the detective genre, which influenced the inception of film noir. Although the novels of Hammett, Chandler or Cain are structured around crime mysteries, these works problematize most of the tacit premises of analytic detective fiction and re-define its narrative form. For one, ‘hard boiled’ fiction obliterates the dualism between overt chaos and underlying order, between the perceived messiness of crime and its underlying logic. Chaos becomes all-encompassing, engulfing the sleuth as well as the reader. No longer the epitome of a superior, detached intellect, the detective becomes implicated in the mystery he investigates, enmeshed in a labyrinthine sequence of events whose unraveling does not necessarily produce meaning. As accurately observed by Telotte, “whether [the] characters are trying to manipulate others, or simply hoping to figure out how their plans went wrong, they invariably find that things do not make sense” (7). Both ‘hard-boiled’ fiction and its cinematic progeny implicitly portray the dissolution of social order. In film noir, this thematic pursuit finds a formal equivalent in the disruption of traditional narrative paradigm. As noted by Bordwell and Telotte, among others, the paradigm underpinning classical Hollywood cinema in the years 1917-1960 is characterized by a seemingly objective point of view, adherence to cause-effect logic, use of goal-oriented characters and a progression toward narrative closure (Bordwell 157, Telotte 3). In noir films, on the other hand, the devices of flashback and voice-over implicitly challenge conventionally linear narratives, while the use of the subjective camera shatters the illusion of objective truth (Telotte 3, 20). To revert to the central concern of the present paper, in noir cinema the form coincides with the content. The fictional worlds projected by the ‘hard boiled’ genre and its noir cinematic descendent offer no hidden realm of meaning underneath the chaos of perceived phenomena, and the trope of the labyrinth is stripped of its transcendental, comforting dimension. The labyrinth is the controlling visual metaphor of the Coen Brothers’ neo-noir film The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001). The film’s title refers to its main protagonist: a poker-faced, taciturn barber, by the name of Ed Crane. The entire film is narrated by Ed, incarcerated in a prison cell. He is writing his life story, at the commission of a men’s magazine whose editor wants to probe the feelings of a convict facing death. Ed says he is not unhappy to die. Exonerated of a crime he committed and convicted of a crime he did not, Ed feels his life is a labyrinth. He does not understand it, but he hopes that death will provide the answer. Ed’s final vision of life as a bewildering maze, and his hope of seeing the master-plan after death, ostensibly refer to the inherent dualism of the labyrinth, the notion of underlying order manifest through overt chaos. They offer the flicker of an optimistic closure, which subscribes to the traditional Christian view of the universe as a perfect design, perceived as chaos due to the shortcomings of human comprehension. But this interpretation is belied by the film’s final scene. Shot in blindingly white light, suggesting the protagonist’s revelation, the screen is perfectly empty, except for the electric chair in the center. And when Ed slowly walks towards the site of his execution, he has a sudden fantasy of the overhead lights as the round saucers of UFOs. The film’s visual metaphors ironically subvert Ed’s metaphysical optimism. They cast a view of human life as a maze of emptiness, to borrow the title of one of Borges’s best-known stories. The only center of this maze is death, the electric chair; the only transcendence, faith in God and in after life, makes as much sense as the belief in flying saucers. The Coen Brothers thus simultaneously construct and deconstruct the traditional symbolism of the labyrinth, evoking (through Ed’s innocent hope) its promise of underlying order, and subverting this promise through the images that dominate the screen. The transcendental dimension of the trope of the labyrinth, its promise of a hidden realm of meaning and value, is consistently subverted throughout the film. On the level of plot, the film presents a crisscrossed pattern of misguided intentions and tragi-comic misinterpretations. The film’s protagonist, Ed Crane, is estranged from his own life; neither content nor unhappy, he is passive, taking things as they come. Thus he condones Doris’s, his wife’s, affair with her employer, Big Dave, reacting only when he perceives an opportunity to profit from their liason. This opportunity presents itself in the form of Creighton Tolliver, a garrulous client, who shares with Ed his fail-proof scheme of making big money from the new invention of dry cleaning. All he needs to carry out his plan, confesses Creighton, is an investment of ten thousand dollars. The barber decides to take advantage of this accidental encounter in order to change his life. He writes an anonymous extortion letter to Big Dave, threatening to expose his romance with Doris and wreck his marriage and his financial position (Dave’s wife, a rich heiress, owns the store that Dave runs). Dave confides in Ed about the letter; he suspects the blackmailer is a con man that tried to engage him in a dry-cleaning scheme. Although reluctant to part with the money, which he has been saving to open a new store to be managed by Doris, Big Dave eventually gives in. Obviously, although unbeknownst to Big Dave, it is Ed who collects the money and passes it to Creighton, so as to become a silent partner in the dry cleaning enterprise. But things do not work out as planned. Big Dave, who believes Creighton to be his blackmailer, follows him to his apartment in an effort to retrieve the ten thousand dollars. A fight ensues, in which Creighton gets killed, not before revealing to Dave Ed’s implication in his dry-cleaning scheme. Furious, Dave summons Ed, confronts him with Creighton’s story and physically attacks him. Ed grabs a knife that is lying about and accidentally kills Big Dave. The following day, two policemen arrive at the barbershop. Ed is certain they came to arrest him, but they have come to arrest Doris. The police have discovered that she has been embezzling from Dave’s store (Doris is an accountant), and they suspect her of Dave’s murder. Ed hires Freddy Riedenschneider, the best and most expensive criminal attorney, to defend his wife. The attorney is not interested in truth; he is looking for a version that will introduce a reasonable doubt in the minds of the jury. At some point, Ed confesses that it is he who killed Dave, but Riedenschneider dismisses his confession as an inadequate attempt to save Doris’s neck. He concocts a version of his own, but does not get the chance to win the trial; the case is dismissed, as Doris is found hanged in her cell. After his wife’s death, Ed gets lonely. He takes interest in Birdy, the young daughter of the town lawyer (whom he initially approached for Doris’s defense). Birdy plays the piano; Ed believes she is a prodigy, and wants to become her agent. He takes her for an audition to a French master pianist, who decides that the girl is nothing special. Disenchanted, they drive back home. Birdy tells Ed, not for the first time, that she doesn’t really want to be a pianist. She hasn’t been thinking of a career; if at all, she would like to be a vet. But she is very grateful. As a token of her gratitude, she tries to perform oral sex on Ed. The car veers; they have an accident. When he comes to, Ed faces two policemen, who tell him he is arrested for the murder of Creighton Tolliver. The philosophical purport of the labyrinth metaphor is suggested in a scene preceding Doris’s trial, in which her cocky attorney justifies his defense strategy. To support his argument, he has recourse to the theory of some German scientist, called either Fritz or Werner, who claimed that truth changes with the eye of the beholder. Science has determined that there is no objective truth, says Riedenschneider; consequently, the question of what really happened is irrelevant. All a good attorney can do, he concludes, is present a plausible narrative to the jury. Freddy Riedenschneider’s seemingly nonchalant exposition is a tongue-in-cheek reference to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Succinctly put, the principle postulates that the more precisely the position of a subatomic particle is determined, the less precisely its momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa. What follows is that concepts such as orbits of electrons do not exist in nature unless and until we measure them; or, in Heisenberg’s words, “the ‘path’ comes into existence only when we observe it” (qtd. in Cassidy). Heisenberg’s discovery had momentous scientific and philosophical implications. For one, it challenged the notion of causality in nature. The law of causality assumes that if we know the present exactly, we can calculate the future; in this formulation, suggests Heisenberg, “it is not the conclusion that is wrong, but the premises” (qtd. in Cassidy). In other words, we can never know the present exactly, and on the basis of this exact knowledge, predict the future. More importantly, the uncertainty principle seems to collapse the distinction between subjective and objective reality, between consciousness and the world of phenomena, suggesting that the act of perception changes the reality perceived (Hofstadter 239). In spite of its light tone, the attorney’s confused allusion to quantum theory conveys the film’s central theme: the precarious nature of truth. In terms of plot, this theme is suggested by the characters’ constant misinterpretation: Big Dave believes he is blackmailed by Creighton Tolliver; Ed thinks Birdy is a genius, Birdy thinks that Ed expects sex from her, and Ann, Dave’s wife, puts her faith in UFOs. When the characters do not misjudge their reality, they lie about it: Big Dave bluffs about his war exploits, Doris cheats on Ed and Big Dave cheats on his wife and embezzles from her. And when the characters are honest and tell the truth, they are neither believed nor rewarded: Ed confesses his crime, but his confession is impatiently dismissed, Doris keeps her accounts straight but is framed for fraud and murder; Ed’s brother in law and partner loyally supports him, and as a result, goes bankrupt. If truth cannot be known, or does not exist, neither does justice. Throughout the film, the wires of innocence and guilt are constantly crossed; the innocent are punished (Doris, Creighton Tolliver), the guilty are exonerated of crimes they committed (Ed of killing Dave) and convicted of crimes they did not (Ed of killing Tolliver). In this world devoid of a metaphysical dimension, the mindless processes of nature constitute the only reality. They are represented by the incessant, pointless growth of hair. Ed is a barber; he deals with hair and is fascinated by hair. He wonders how hair is a part of us and we throw it to dust; he is amazed by the fact that hair continues to grow even after death. At the beginning of the film we see him docilely shave his wife’s legs. In a mirroring scene towards the end, the camera zooms in on Ed’s own legs, shaved before his electrocution. The leitmotif of hair, the image of the electric chair, the recurring motif of UFOs – all these metaphoric elements convey the Coen Brothers’ view of the human condition and build up to Ed’s final vision of life as a labyrinth. Life is a labyrinth because there is no necessary connection between cause and effect; because crime is dissociated from accountability and punishment; because what happened can never be ascertained and human knowledge consists only of a maze of conflicting, or overlapping, versions. The center of the existential labyrinth is death, and the exit, the belief in an after-life, is no more real than the belief in aliens. The labyrinth is an inherently ambiguous construct. Its structural attributes of doubling, recursion and inextricability yield a wealth of ontological and epistemological implications. Traditionally used as an emblem of overt complexity concealing underlying order and symmetry, the maze may aptly illustrate the tacit premises of the analytic detective genre. But this purport of the maze symbolism is ironically inverted in noir and neo-noir films. As suggested by its title, the Coen Brothers’ movie is marked by absence, and the absence of the man who wasn’t there evokes a more disturbing void. That void is the center of the existential labyrinth. References Auster, Paul. City of Glass. The New York Trilogy. London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1990. 1-132. Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: Wisconsin UP, 1985. Cassidy, David. “Quantum Mechanics, 1925-1927.” Werner Heisenberg (1901-1978). American Institute of Physics, 1998. 5 June 2007 http://www.aip.org/history/heisenberg/p08c.htm>. Cazenave, Michel, ed. Encyclopédie des Symboles. Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1996. Coen, Joel, and Ethan Coen, dirs. The Man Who Wasn’t There. 2001. Doob, Penelope Reed. The Idea of the Labyrinth. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992. Hofstadter, Douglas. I Am a Strange Loop. New York: Basic Books, 2007. Holquist, Michael. “Whodunit and Other Questions: Metaphysical Detective Stories in Post-War Fiction.” The Poetics of Murder. Eds. Glenn W. Most and William W. Stowe. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. 149-174. Irwin, John T. The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges and the Analytic Detective Story. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994. Parandowski, Jan. Mitologia. Warszawa: Czytelnik, 1960. Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Edgar Allan Poe: The Complete Illustrated Stories and Poems. London: Chancellor Press, 1994. 103-114. Telotte, J.P. Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir. Urbana: Illinois UP, 1989. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Shiloh, Ilana. "A Vision of Complex Symmetry: The Labyrinth in The Man Who Wasn’t There." M/C Journal 10.3 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/09-shiloh.php>. APA Style Shiloh, I. (Jun. 2007) "A Vision of Complex Symmetry: The Labyrinth in The Man Who Wasn’t There," M/C Journal, 10(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/09-shiloh.php>.

Welcome to the world of pop. Even to announce this issue in such a way seems like a quaint anachronism, a mild nostalgia; the expression echoes the voices of countless TV presenters on Top of the Pops, Beat Club, Countdown, or whatever your local variety was. This association demonstrates that pop has been historically located in the arts and in popular culture as something connected to the 1960s: not so much to the politicisation of musical intent that embodied the late sixties, but to the current of the three-minute-or-less love song, the early Beatles, the vacant but loving repeat of Andy Warhol and his images. The Archies kept it going into the late sixties along with the Monkees and the 1910 Fruitgum Company's beautiful pop bubble "Yummy Yummy Yummy I've Got Love in My Tummy". What pop implied retrospectively was a clear sentiment of unity even as it set up binarisms that separated the serious and significant in popular culture from the ephemera and the momentary, with the perishable products of pop apparently placed quite clearly on the lighter side. This is why there is a nostalgic association between pop and the world: pop implies a simpler unity of the world that is carried momentarily by the pleasure of the song, the image, the dance. It is also why we associate pop with the transitional moments in our lives: it is the music of preteendom, the images of early youth and the moment of unselfconscious dancing to and in front of this aural and visual landscape provided by the very core of the transnational (read "world") culture industries. Those affective connections to cultural products is what pop art plays with and makes the viewer ponder. At the same time, pop styles also move beyond the preteen stage, grow up and change: within the space of a decade, "Yummy Yummy Yummy" mutated to The Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star"; within a similar space of years, a suntanned, mirrorshaded George Michael in Wham! became a Sony-battling (mis)user of public toilets; and eventually, even the once united quintamfeminate of Spice World seems inevitably on the course towards diadochal wars. As much as we may look back on personal and public memories with fondness, pop isn't forever caught in a static McHappyland, where nothing ever changes. Or perhaps that is to say that these (and other) pop styles aren't: beyond the stylistic formations, there seems to be a deeper kind of pop, a kind of primordial soup of popness from which a particular species of pop evolves every once in a while, matures, mutates, and discovers whether it is capable of survival even once it's left home. The momentary pleasure of pop is never completely compartmentalised into an historical moment, however much British popular music documentaries try to produce that effect, or however much the postwar generation venerate their particular liminal moments of the 1960s as the most significant. Pop is regenerative. Just when one thinks that the various strands of popular culture have organised themselves completely into niche markets we have the will-to- worldpop, with something like Spice World or Aqua's Barbie Girl. The term 'pop sensibility' -- sensibility to an underlying 'popness' which doesn't equate with any particular style of pop, but pervades all of them -- is useful here, and it informs some of the articles in this issue. Pop sensibility is an understanding of the pleasure generated by popular culture, and recognises that in some ways they point to complex relationships between people and cultural forms. It is difficult to explain why one of our editors (David) enjoys a hit by the boygroup Five while the other (Axel) has serious difficulties telling one boygroup from another, or from many of the more forgettable members of the Stock/Aitken/Waterman stable of the early 80s; but it is partly connected to seeing through the various generations of musical style a pop sensibility that has something to do with accessibility and the pleasure generated by that complex simplicity. Pop engages us with what Fiske described as the "art of making do" and thereby is a conduit to the operations of contemporary culture, industrially and culturally. The 'pop' issue of M/C explores this pop sensibility or, in some cases, a pop sensitivity through a variety of channels that should onomatopoeically "pop" into your thinking processes. Martin Laba's feature article "Picking through the Trash" provides the pin to burst cultural studies' reading of the popular bubble, by identifying and then working through the meaning of the supposed detritus of popular culture that doesn't possess the cultural cache of either 'marginal' or 'hip' status. His inspiration remains Don DeLillo's White Noise for its celebration and lament of the popular as it is organised through consumer culture and the various uses made of the apparent ephemera of contemporary culture. Pop, from Laba's perspective, remains the source for understanding the deep structure of the contemporary, and through detailed investigation in the tradition of DeLillo we can unearth the organisation of cultural value. Sean Smith also dances in the light of consumer culture in his tragicomic "Ya Bloody Cappie!", through his sudden realisation that his hard-working consumption practices had been appropriated as a popular culture practice and demographically defined in a way that made them seem as contrived and deplorable as those of the 1980s yuppie. The identification of the cappie, the Face-designed acronym for Consumer of Alternative Pricey Products, presents a crisis of persona for Smith, and leads to a perceptive reading of this shift as evidence of a new "class formation" through a shifted organisation of the self via a form of exclusive cultural capital. Such media stereotyping gone wrong may be partly behind the atrocities committed by members of the often-quoted "trenchcoat mafia" at Littleton, Colorado, but the media have turned a predictably blind eye to their own complicity in the shootings. In "Seen But Not Heard: Pop Culture Scapegoats and the Media Discourse Hierarchy", Nick Caldwell investigates the incredibly repetitive media patterning of establishing cause and effect relationships between outbreaks of youth violence and the usual suspects of cultural artefacts: 'satanic' popular music and grossly violent and antisocial computer games. Caldwell's article finds the discursive proliferation sadly familiar as the media looks to popular culture to stitch together its neverending narrative without the requisite sideways glance at the cultural context of violence. Benign or malignant, media power is also evident in the excitement leading up to and surrounding the release of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, and we simply couldn't pass by this major artefact of current pop culture in this issue. In many ways, Tara Brabazon's "A Red Light Sabre to Go and Other Histories of the Present" is a process of excavation of popular cultural memory. In an elaborate reclamation program, Brabazon establishes Star Wars as a generational benchmark for a certain affectivity or -- in our terms -- pop sensibility that intersects with how cultural experiences are received by that same generation. Linking the Star Wars generation with Generation X (and her academic/pop self), Brabazon weaves a shifted tapestry of the significance of cultural memory in working out contemporary engagements with culture, and thereby presents whole new territories for the investigation of what Raymond Williams called "the structure of feeling". Cultural studies academics unimpressed with George Lucas's storytelling abilities have plenty of other fields to cover, too, though. Diane Railton's "Justify My Love: Popular Culture and the Academy" provides an invigilating examination of where academics have engaged with popular culture. Her critique is with what may be called new Bourdieuian 'distinctions', where popular music is reintegrated into cultural judgments of taste and thereby simply recategorised with shifted monikers of high (legitimate) and low (illegitimate) designations. Railton calls for a realisation of the political nature of academic work on popular culture that moves beyond this new and shifted constitution of cultural elitism. One of the key divides in research into popular music is about authenticity, which often gets reorganised into new categorisations of cultural value. In "Seeing Sound, Hearing Image: 'Remixing' Authenticity in Popular Music Studies" Steve Jones has provided a map through the debates in popular music studies on how the authentic is deployed by scholars. Jones situates the significance of affect in understanding the pop aesthetic and provides some material for how new technologies are shifting the ground on which popular music's authenticity has been built. Two of the remaining articles in this issue also deal with authenticity in various ways, if not necessarily as the term is used by Jones. In the first of these, "Painting Out Pop: 'Andy Warhol' as a Character in 90s Films", Julie Turnock traces more or less authentic portrayals of Andy Warhol (what would a 'pop' issue be without him?) in recent movies. She uncovers how Andy Warhol's blank visage sits uncomfortably with the narrative and content of three films that need the richness of a normative biography. In the process, the films cannot deal with the conceptualisation of pop that Warhol embodied as an artist, where content disappears to surface and repetition. The celebrity persona of Warhol in its contentlessness is Warhol's ultimate canvas, but the films miss this completely. Where Warhol's celebrity refuses its biopic, David Riddell discovers that sports god Wayne Gretzky's retirement reproduces naturally and seamlessly the spectacle of ice hockey into a movie narrative. Riddell's "Wayne's World: The Making of a Hockey Movie" is a close textual reading of Wayne Gretzky's last game in terms of heavily pre- planned causation which transforms the pleasures of the unexpected that are part of watching any sporting event into the constructed celebrity spectacle, throwing into doubt its authenticity as a sports contest. The blur of speed and spontaneity that is ice hockey becomes the blur of celebrity where fact and fabrication are melted together. Warhol and Gretzky (there's an unexpected pairing!) as media superstars both represent the way pop is defined by the cultural industries in all its crassness and oversimplification; frequently, though, the media's attention is self- centred, in a continuous desire to rate their popularity and measure it against those of their rivals. Axel Bruns's "What's Pop, and What's Not? Measuring Popularity in the Many-to-Many Age" questions the meaningfulness of these ratings, and debates the significance of the ways the Internet determines popularity (for example through the ubiquitous counters). Playing against the need to construct an audience to sell to someone (and advertisers are of course always welcome at the bustling M/C site itself) is the manner in which the Internet is constructed, used and abused by its surfers. The mythic models of measuring the television audience prove to be inadequate to describe the forms of interactions and sideward hypertext movements on the contemporary Web. Nevertheless, the counting goes on.... Finally, we turn to myths of a different kind. There is a certain pop sensitivity that Adam Dodd's article, "Making It Unpopular: The CIA and UFOs in Popular Culture" identifies in 1950s America. Dodd's provocatively argued piece indicates that a fear of mass hysteria motivated moves by the CIA and other government agencies to debunk through apparent explanation any possibility that UFOs actually existed and were seen. The desire to believe was so strong in the popular will that the American agencies felt compelled to work in propagandistic techniques to manipulate that belief. Although we may never know with the amount of propaganda and misinformation masquerading as fact, Dodd presents an interesting case study in the government control and movement of information about a popular cultural phenomenon. From "Yummy Yummy Yummy" to White Noise, from Warhol to Gretzky, from satanic music to academically accepted 'pop', from Star Wars to 'real' UFOs, the scope of this issue of M/C demonstrates the wide reach and diversity of 'the popular'. As issue editors, we hope it will also prove popular with our readers (a pun which had to be made eventually), and won't leave the shallow aftertaste of so much average pop. Much rather, we'd like you to remember once again those 60s pop music shows and agree that "it's a hit!" (And feel free to hit M/C's pages frequently and repeatedly.) P. David Marshall Axel Bruns 'Pop' Issue Editors Citation reference for this article MLA style: P. David Marshall, Axel Bruns. "Editorial: 'Pop'." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.4 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/edit.php>. Chicago style: P. David Marshall, Axel Bruns, "Editorial: 'Pop'," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 4 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/edit.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: P. David Marshall, Axel Bruns. (1999) Editorial: 'Pop'. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(4). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/edit.php> ([your date of access]).

Introduction The accelerometer seems, at first, both advanced and dated, both too complex and not complex enough. It sits in our video game controllers and our smartphones allowing us to move beyond mere button presses into immersive experiences where the motion of the hand is directly translated into the motion on the screen, where our flesh is transformed into the flesh of a superhero. Or at least that was the promise in 2005. Since then, motion control has moved from a promised revitalization of the video game industry to a not-quite-good-enough gimmick that all games use but none use well. Rogers describes the diffusion of innovation, as an invention or technology comes to market, in five phases: First, innovators will take risks with a new invention. Second, early adopters will establish a market and lead opinion. Third, the early majority shows that the product has wide appeal and application. Fourth, the late majority adopt the technology only after their skepticism has been allayed. Finally the laggards adopt the technology only when no other options are present (62). Not every technology makes it through the diffusion, however, and there are many who have never warmed to the accelerometer-controlled video game. Once an innovation has moved into the mainstream, additional waves of innovation may take place, when innovators or early adopters may find new uses for existing technology, and bring these uses into the majority. This is the case with the accelerometer that began as an airbag trigger and today is used for measuring and augmenting human motion, from dance to health (Walter 84). In many ways, gestural control of video games, an augmentation technology, was an interlude in the advancement of motion control. History In the early 1920s, bulky proofs-of-concept were produced that manipulated electrical voltage levels based on the movement of a probe, many related to early pressure or force sensors. The relationships between pressure, force, velocity and acceleration are well understood, but development of a tool that could measure one and infer the others was a many-fronted activity. Each of these individual sensors has its own specific application and many are still in use today, as pressure triggers, reaction devices, or other sensor-based interactivity, such as video games (Latulipe et al. 2995) and dance (Chu et al. 184). Over the years, the probes and devices became smaller and more accurate, and eventually migrated to the semiconductor, allowing the measurement of acceleration to take place within an almost inconsequential form-factor. Today, accelerometer chips are in many consumer devices and athletes wear battery-powered wireless accelerometer bracelets that report their every movement in real-time, a concept unimaginable only 20 years ago. One of the significant initial uses for accelerometers was as a sensor for the deployment of airbags in automobiles (Varat and Husher 1). The sensor was placed in the front bumper, detecting quick changes in speed that would indicate a crash. The system was a significant advance in the safety of automobiles, and followed Rogers’ diffusion through to the point where all new cars have airbags as a standard component. Airbags, and the accelerometers which allow them to function fast enough to save lives, are a ubiquitous, commoditized technology that most people take for granted, and served as the primary motivating factor for the mass-production of silicon-based accelerometer chips. On 14 September 2005, a device was introduced which would fundamentally alter the principal market for accelerometer microchips. The accelerometer was the ADXL335, a small, low-power, 3-Axis device capable of measuring up to 3g (1g is the acceleration due to gravity), and the device that used this accelerometer was the Wii remote, also called the Wiimote. Developed by Nintendo and its holding companies, the Wii remote was to be a defining feature of Nintendo’s 7th-generation video game console, in direct competition with the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3. The Wii remote was so successful that both Microsoft and Sony added motion control to their platforms, in the form of the accelerometer-based “dual shock” controller for the Playstation, and later the Playstation Move controller; as well as an integrated accelerometer in the Xbox 360 controller and the later release of the Microsoft Kinect 3D motion sensing camera. Simultaneously, computer manufacturing companies saw a different, more pedantic use of the accelerometer. The primary storage medium in most computers today is the Hard Disk Drive (HDD), a set of spinning platters of electro-magnetically stored information. Much like a record player, the HDD contains a “head” which sweeps back and forth across the platter, reading and writing data. As computers changed from desktops to laptops, people moved their computers more often, and a problem arose. If the HDD inside a laptop was active when the laptop was moved, the read head might touch the surface of the disk, damaging the HDD and destroying information. Two solutions were implemented: vibration dampening in the manufacturing process, and the use of an accelerometer to detect motion. When the laptop is bumped, or dropped, the hard disk will sense the motion and immediately park the head, saving the disk and the valuable data inside. As a consequence of laptop computers and Wii remotes using accelerometers, the market for these devices began to swing from their use within car airbag systems toward their use in computer systems. And with an accelerometer in every computer, it wasn’t long before clever programmers began to make use of the information coming from the accelerometer for more than just protecting the hard drive. Programs began to appear that would use the accelerometer within a laptop to “lock” it when the user was away, invoking a loud noise like a car alarm to alert passers-by to any potential theft. Other programmers began to use the accelerometer as a gaming input, and this was the beginning of gesture control and the augmentation of human motion. Like laptops, most smartphones and tablets today have accelerometers included among their sensor suite (Brezmes et al. 796). These accelerometers strictly a user-interface tool, allowing the phone to re-orient its interface based on how the user is holding it, and allowing the user to play games and track health information using the phone. Many other consumer electronic devices use accelerometers, such as digital cameras for image stabilization and landscape/portrait orientation. Allowing a device to know its relative orientation and motion provides a wide range of augmentation possibilities. The Language of Measuring Motion When studying accelerometers, their function, and applications, a critical first step is to examine the language used to describe these devices. As the name implies, the accelerometer is a device which measures acceleration, however, our everyday connotation of this term is problematic at best. In colloquial language, we say “accelerate” when we mean “speed up”, but this is, in fact, two connotations removed from the physical property being measured by the device, and we must unwrap these layers of meaning before we can understand what is being measured. Physicists use the term “accelerate” to mean any change in velocity. It is worth reminding ourselves that velocity (to the physicists) is actually a pair of quantities: a speed coupled with a direction. Given this definition, when an object changes velocity (accelerates), it can be changing its speed, its direction, or both. So a car can be said to be accelerating when speeding up, slowing down, or even turning while maintaining a speed. This is why the accelerometer could be used as an airbag sensor in the first place. The airbags should deploy when a car suddenly changes velocity in any direction, including getting faster (due to being hit from behind), getting slower (from a front impact crash) or changing direction (being hit from the side). It is because of this ability to measure changes in velocity that accelerometers have come into common usage for laptop drop sensors and video game motion controllers. But even this understanding of accelerometers is incomplete. Because of the way that accelerometers are constructed, they actually measure “proper acceleration” within the context of a relativistic frame of reference. Discussing general relativity is beyond the scope of this paper, but it is sufficient to describe a relativistic frame of reference as one in which no forces are felt. A familiar example is being in orbit around the planet, when astronauts (and their equipment) float freely in space. A state of “free-fall” is one in which no forces are felt, and this is the only situation in which an accelerometer reads 0 acceleration. Since most of us are not in free-fall most of the time, any accelerometers in devices in normal use do not experience 0 proper acceleration, even when apparently sitting still. This is, of course, because of the force due to gravity. An accelerometer sitting on a table experiences 1g of force from the table, acting against the gravitational acceleration. This non-zero reading for a stationary object is the reason that accelerometers can serve a second (and, today, much more common) use: measuring orientation with respect to gravity. Gravity and Tilt Accelerometers typically measure forces with respect to three linear dimensions, labeled x, y, and z. These three directions orient along the axes of the accelerometer chip itself, with x and y normally orienting along the long faces of the device, and the z direction often pointing through the face of the device. Relative motion within a gravity field can easily be inferred assuming that the only force acting on the device is gravity. In this case, the single force is distributed among the three axes depending on the orientation of the device. This is how personal smartphones and video game controllers are able to use “tilt” control. When held in a natural position, the software extracts the relative value on all three axes and uses that as a reference point. When the user tilts the device, the new direction of the gravitational acceleration is then compared to the reference value and used to infer the tilt. This can be done hundreds of times a second and can be used to control and augment any aspect of the user experience. If, however, gravity is not the only force present, it becomes more difficult to infer orientation. Another common use for accelerometers is to measure physical activity like walking steps. In this case, it is the forces on the accelerometer from each footfall that are interpreted to measure fitness features. Tilt is unreliable in this circumstance because both gravity and the forces from the footfall are measured by the accelerometer, and it is impossible to separate the two forces from a single measurement. Velocity and Position A second common assumption with accelerometers is that since they can measure acceleration (rate of change of velocity), it should be possible to infer the velocity. If the device begins at rest, then any measured acceleration can be interpreted as changes to the velocity in some direction, thus inferring the new velocity. Although this is theoretically possible, real-world factors come in to play which prevent this from being realized. First, the assumption of beginning from a state of rest is not always reasonable. Further, if we don’t know whether the device is moving or not, knowing its acceleration at any moment will not help us to determine it’s new speed or position. The most important real-world problem, however, is that accelerometers typically show small variations even when the object is at rest. This is because of inaccuracies in the way that the accelerometer itself is interpreted. In normal operation, these small changes are ignored, but when trying to infer velocity or position, these little errors will quickly add up to the point where any inferred velocity or position would be unreliable. A common solution to these problems is in the combination of devices. Many new smartphones combine an accelerometer and a gyroscopes (a device which measures changes in rotational inertia) to provide a sensing system known as an IMU (Inertial measurement unit), which makes the readings from each more reliable. In this case, the gyroscope can be used to directly measure tilt (instead of inferring it from gravity) and this tilt information can be subtracted from the accelerometer reading to separate out the motion of the device from the force of gravity. Augmentation Applications in Health, Gaming, and Art Accelerometer-based devices have been used extensively in healthcare (Ward et al. 582), either using the accelerometer within a smartphone worn in the pocket (Yoshioka et al. 502) or using a standalone accelerometer device such as a wristband or shoe tab (Paradiso and Hu 165). In many cases, these devices have been used to measure specific activity such as swimming, gait (Henriksen et al. 288), and muscular activity (Thompson and Bemben 897), as well as general activity for tracking health (Troiano et al. 181), both in children (Stone et al. 136) and the elderly (Davis and Fox 581). These simple measurements are the first step in allowing athletes to modify their performance based on past activity. In the past, athletes would pour over recorded video to analyze and improve their performance, but with accelerometer devices, they can receive feedback in real time and modify their own behaviour based on these measurements. This augmentation is a competitive advantage but could be seen as unfair considering the current non-equal access to computer and electronic technology, i.e. the digital divide (Buente and Robbin 1743). When video games were augmented with motion controls, many assumed that this would have a positive impact on health. Physical activity in children is a common concern (Treuth et al. 1259), and there was a hope that if children had to move to play games, an activity that used to be considered a problem for health could be turned into an opportunity (Mellecker et al. 343). Unfortunately, the impact of children playing motion controlled video games has been less than successful. Although fitness games have been created, it is relatively easy to figure out how to activate controls with the least possible motion, thereby nullifying any potential benefit. One of the most interesting applications of accelerometers, in the context of this paper, is the application to dance-based video games (Brezmes et al. 796). In these systems, participants wear devices originally intended for health tracking in order to increase the sensitivity and control options for dance. This has evolved both from the use of accelerometers for gestural control in video games and for measuring and augmenting sport. Researchers and artists have also recently used accelerometers to augment dance systems in many ways (Latulipe et al. 2995) including combining multiple sensors (Yang et al. 121), as discussed above. Conclusions Although more and more people are using accelerometers in their research and art practice, it is significant that there is a lack of widespread knowledge about how the devices actually work. This can be seen in the many art installations and sports research studies that do not take full advantage of the capabilities of the accelerometer, or infer information or data that is unreliable because of the way that accelerometers behave. This lack of understanding of accelerometers also serves to limit the increased utilization of this powerful device, specifically in the context of augmentation tools. Being able to detect, analyze and interpret the motion of a body part has significant applications in augmentation that are only starting to be realized. The history of accelerometers is interesting and varied, and it is worthwhile, when exploring new ideas for applications of accelerometers, to be fully aware of the previous uses, current trends and technical limitations. It is clear that applications of accelerometers to the measurement of human motion are increasing, and that many new opportunities exist, especially in the application of combinations of sensors and new software techniques. The real novelty, however, will come from researchers and artists using accelerometers and sensors in novel and unusual ways. References Brezmes, Tomas, Juan-Luis Gorricho, and Josep Cotrina. “Activity Recognition from Accelerometer Data on a Mobile Phone.” In Distributed Computing, Artificial Intelligence, Bioinformatics, Soft Computing, and Ambient Assisted Living. Springer, 2009. Buente, Wayne, and Alice Robbin. “Trends in Internet Information Behavior, 2000-2004.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 59.11 (2008).Chu, Narisa N.Y., Chang-Ming Yang, and Chih-Chung Wu. “Game Interface Using Digital Textile Sensors, Accelerometer and Gyroscope.” IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics 58.2 (2012): 184-189. 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‘Every space has become ad space’. Steve Hayden, Wired Magazine, May 2003. Marshall McLuhan’s (1964) dictum that media technologies constitute a sensory extension of the body shares a conceptual affinity with Ernst Jünger’s notion of ‘“organic construction” [which] indicates [a] synergy between man and machine’ and Walter Benjamin’s exploration of the mimetic correspondence between the organic and the inorganic, between human and non-human forms (Bolz, 2002: 19). The logo or brand is co-extensive with various media of communication – billboards, TV advertisements, fashion labels, book spines, mobile phones, etc. Often the logo is interchangeable with the product itself or a way or life. Since all social relations are mediated, whether by communications technologies or architectonic forms ranging from corporate buildings to sporting grounds to family living rooms, it follows that there can be no outside for sociality. The social is and always has been in a mutually determining relationship with mediating forms. It is in this sense that there is no outside. Such an idea has become a refrain amongst various contemporary media theorists. Here’s a sample: There is no outside position anymore, nor is this perceived as something desirable. (Lovink, 2002a: 4) Both “us” and “them” (whoever we are, whoever they are) are all always situated in this same virtual geography. There’s no outside …. There is nothing outside the vector. (Wark, 2002: 316) There is no more outside. The critique of information is in the information itself. (Lash, 2002: 220) In declaring a universality for media culture and information flows, all of the above statements acknowledge the political and conceptual failure of assuming a critical position outside socio-technically constituted relations. Similarly, they recognise the problems inherent in the “ideology critique” of the Frankfurt School who, in their distinction between “truth” and “false-consciousness”, claimed a sort of absolute knowledge for the critic that transcended the field of ideology as it is produced by the culture industry. Althusser’s more complex conception of ideology, material practices and subject formation nevertheless also fell prey to the pretence of historical materialism as an autonomous “science” that is able to determine the totality, albeit fragmented, of lived social relations. One of the key failings of ideology critique, then, is its incapacity to account for the ways in which the critic, theorist or intellectual is implicated in the operations of ideology. That is, such approaches displace the reflexivity and power relationships between epistemology, ontology and their constitution as material practices within socio-political institutions and historical constellations, which in turn are the settings for the formation of ideology. Scott Lash abandons the term ideology altogether due to its conceptual legacies within German dialectics and French post-structuralist aporetics, both of which ‘are based in a fundamental dualism, a fundamental binary, of the two types of reason. One speaks of grounding and reconciliation, the other of unbridgeability …. Both presume a sphere of transcendence’ (Lash, 2002: 8). Such assertions can be made at a general level concerning these diverse and often conflicting approaches when they are reduced to categories for the purpose of a polemic. However, the work of “post-structuralists” such as Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari and the work of German systems theorist Niklas Luhmann is clearly amenable to the task of critique within information societies (see Rossiter, 2003). Indeed, Lash draws on such theorists in assembling his critical dispositif for the information age. More concretely, Lash (2002: 9) advances his case for a new mode of critique by noting the socio-technical and historical shift from ‘constitutive dualisms of the era of the national manufacturing society’ to global information cultures, whose constitutive form is immanent to informational networks and flows. Such a shift, according to Lash, needs to be met with a corresponding mode of critique: Ideologycritique [ideologiekritik] had to be somehow outside of ideology. With the disappearance of a constitutive outside, informationcritique must be inside of information. There is no outside any more. (2002: 10) Lash goes on to note, quite rightly, that ‘Informationcritique itself is branded, another object of intellectual property, machinically mediated’ (2002: 10). It is the political and conceptual tensions between information critique and its regulation via intellectual property regimes which condition critique as yet another brand or logo that I wish to explore in the rest of this essay. Further, I will question the supposed erasure of a “constitutive outside” to the field of socio-technical relations within network societies and informational economies. Lash is far too totalising in supposing a break between industrial modes of production and informational flows. Moreover, the assertion that there is no more outside to information too readily and simplistically assumes informational relations as universal and horizontally organised, and hence overlooks the significant structural, cultural and economic obstacles to participation within media vectors. That is, there certainly is an outside to information! Indeed, there are a plurality of outsides. These outsides are intertwined with the flows of capital and the imperial biopower of Empire, as Hardt and Negri (2000) have argued. As difficult as it may be to ascertain the boundaries of life in all its complexity, borders, however defined, nonetheless exist. Just ask the so-called “illegal immigrant”! This essay identifies three key modalities comprising a constitutive outside: material (uneven geographies of labour-power and the digital divide), symbolic (cultural capital), and strategic (figures of critique). My point of reference in developing this inquiry will pivot around an analysis of the importation in Australia of the British “Creative Industries” project and the problematic foundation such a project presents to the branding and commercialisation of intellectual labour. The creative industries movement – or Queensland Ideology, as I’ve discussed elsewhere with Danny Butt (2002) – holds further implications for the political and economic position of the university vis-à-vis the arts and humanities. Creative industries constructs itself as inside the culture of informationalism and its concomitant economies by the very fact that it is an exercise in branding. Such branding is evidenced in the discourses, rhetoric and policies of creative industries as adopted by university faculties, government departments and the cultural industries and service sectors seeking to reposition themselves in an institutional environment that is adjusting to ongoing structural reforms attributed to the demands by the “New Economy” for increased labour flexibility and specialisation, institutional and economic deregulation, product customisation and capital accumulation. Within the creative industries the content produced by labour-power is branded as copyrights and trademarks within the system of Intellectual Property Regimes (IPRs). However, as I will go on to show, a constitutive outside figures in material, symbolic and strategic ways that condition the possibility of creative industries. The creative industries project, as envisioned by the Blair government’s Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) responsible for the Creative Industry Task Force Mapping Documents of 1998 and 2001, is interested in enhancing the “creative” potential of cultural labour in order to extract a commercial value from cultural objects and services. Just as there is no outside for informationcritique, for proponents of the creative industries there is no culture that is worth its name if it is outside a market economy. That is, the commercialisation of “creativity” – or indeed commerce as a creative undertaking – acts as a legitimising function and hence plays a delimiting role for “culture” and, by association, sociality. And let us not forget, the institutional life of career academics is also at stake in this legitimating process. The DCMS cast its net wide when defining creative sectors and deploys a lexicon that is as vague and unquantifiable as the next mission statement by government and corporate bodies enmeshed within a neo-liberal paradigm. At least one of the key proponents of the creative industries in Australia is ready to acknowledge this (see Cunningham, 2003). The list of sectors identified as holding creative capacities in the CITF Mapping Document include: film, music, television and radio, publishing, software, interactive leisure software, design, designer fashion, architecture, performing arts, crafts, arts and antique markets, architecture and advertising. The Mapping Document seeks to demonstrate how these sectors consist of ‘... activities which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have the potential for wealth and job creation through generation and exploitation of intellectual property’ (CITF: 1998/2001). The CITF’s identification of intellectual property as central to the creation of jobs and wealth firmly places the creative industries within informational and knowledge economies. Unlike material property, intellectual property such as artistic creations (films, music, books) and innovative technical processes (software, biotechnologies) are forms of knowledge that do not diminish when they are distributed. This is especially the case when information has been encoded in a digital form and distributed through technologies such as the internet. In such instances, information is often attributed an “immaterial” and nonrivalrous quality, although this can be highly misleading for both the conceptualisation of information and the politics of knowledge production. Intellectual property, as distinct from material property, operates as a scaling device in which the unit cost of labour is offset by the potential for substantial profit margins realised by distribution techniques availed by new information and communication technologies (ICTs) and their capacity to infinitely reproduce the digital commodity object as a property relation. Within the logic of intellectual property regimes, the use of content is based on the capacity of individuals and institutions to pay. The syndication of media content ensures that market saturation is optimal and competition is kept to a minimum. However, such a legal architecture and hegemonic media industry has run into conflict with other net cultures such as open source movements and peer-to-peer networks (Lovink, 2002b; Meikle, 2002), which is to say nothing of the digital piracy of software and digitally encoded cinematic forms. To this end, IPRs are an unstable architecture for extracting profit. The operation of Intellectual Property Regimes constitutes an outside within creative industries by alienating labour from its mode of information or form of expression. Lash is apposite on this point: ‘Intellectual property carries with it the right to exclude’ (Lash, 2002: 24). This principle of exclusion applies not only to those outside the informational economy and culture of networks as result of geographic, economic, infrastructural, and cultural constraints. The very practitioners within the creative industries are excluded from control over their creations. It is in this sense that a legal and material outside is established within an informational society. At the same time, this internal outside – to put it rather clumsily – operates in a constitutive manner in as much as the creative industries, by definition, depend upon the capacity to exploit the IP produced by its primary source of labour. For all the emphasis the Mapping Document places on exploiting intellectual property, it’s really quite remarkable how absent any elaboration or considered development of IP is from creative industries rhetoric. It’s even more astonishing that media and cultural studies academics have given at best passing attention to the issues of IPRs. Terry Flew (2002: 154-159) is one of the rare exceptions, though even here there is no attempt to identify the implications IPRs hold for those working in the creative industries sectors. Perhaps such oversights by academics associated with the creative industries can be accounted for by the fact that their own jobs rest within the modern, industrial institution of the university which continues to offer the security of a salary award system and continuing if not tenured employment despite the onslaught of neo-liberal reforms since the 1980s. Such an industrial system of traditional and organised labour, however, does not define the labour conditions for those working in the so-called creative industries. Within those sectors engaged more intensively in commercialising culture, labour practices closely resemble work characterised by the dotcom boom, which saw young people working excessively long hours without any of the sort of employment security and protection vis-à-vis salary, health benefits and pension schemes peculiar to traditional and organised labour (see McRobbie, 2002; Ross, 2003). During the dotcom mania of the mid to late 90s, stock options were frequently offered to people as an incentive for offsetting the often minimum or even deferred payment of wages (see Frank, 2000). It is understandable that the creative industries project holds an appeal for managerial intellectuals operating in arts and humanities disciplines in Australia, most particularly at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), which claims to have established the ‘world’s first’ Creative Industries faculty (http://www.creativeindustries.qut.com/). The creative industries provide a validating discourse for those suffering anxiety disorders over what Ruth Barcan (2003) has called the ‘usefulness’ of ‘idle’ intellectual pastimes. As a project that endeavours to articulate graduate skills with labour markets, the creative industries is a natural extension of the neo-liberal agenda within education as advocated by successive governments in Australia since the Dawkins reforms in the mid 1980s (see Marginson and Considine, 2000). Certainly there’s a constructive dimension to this: graduates, after all, need jobs and universities should display an awareness of market conditions; they also have a responsibility to do so. And on this count, I find it remarkable that so many university departments in my own field of communications and media studies are so bold and, let’s face it, stupid, as to make unwavering assertions about market demands and student needs on the basis of doing little more than sniffing the wind! Time for a bit of a reality check, I’d say. And this means becoming a little more serious about allocating funds and resources towards market research and analysis based on the combination of needs between students, staff, disciplinary values, university expectations, and the political economy of markets. However, the extent to which there should be a wholesale shift of the arts and humanities into a creative industries model is open to debate. The arts and humanities, after all, are a set of disciplinary practices and values that operate as a constitutive outside for creative industries. Indeed, in their creative industries manifesto, Stuart Cunningham and John Hartley (2002) loath the arts and humanities in such confused, paradoxical and hypocritical ways in order to establish the arts and humanities as a cultural and ideological outside. To this end, to subsume the arts and humanities into the creative industries, if not eradicate them altogether, is to spell the end of creative industries as it’s currently conceived at the institutional level within academe. Too much specialisation in one post-industrial sector, broad as it may be, ensures a situation of labour reserves that exceed market needs. One only needs to consider all those now unemployed web-designers that graduated from multi-media programs in the mid to late 90s. Further, it does not augur well for the inevitable shift from or collapse of a creative industries economy. Where is the standing reserve of labour shaped by university education and training in a post-creative industries economy? Diehard neo-liberals and true-believers in the capacity for perpetual institutional flexibility would say that this isn’t a problem. The university will just “organically” adapt to prevailing market conditions and shape their curriculum and staff composition accordingly. Perhaps. Arguably if the university is to maintain a modality of time that is distinct from the just-in-time mode of production characteristic of informational economies – and indeed, such a difference is a quality that defines the market value of the educational commodity – then limits have to be established between institutions of education and the corporate organisation or creative industry entity. The creative industries project is a reactionary model insofar as it reinforces the status quo of labour relations within a neo-liberal paradigm in which bids for industry contracts are based on a combination of rich technological infrastructures that have often been subsidised by the state (i.e. paid for by the public), high labour skills, a low currency exchange rate and the lowest possible labour costs. In this respect it is no wonder that literature on the creative industries omits discussion of the importance of unions within informational, networked economies. What is the place of unions in a labour force constituted as individualised units? The conditions of possibility for creative industries within Australia are at once its frailties. In many respects, the success of the creative industries sector depends upon the ongoing combination of cheap labour enabled by a low currency exchange rate and the capacity of students to access the skills and training offered by universities. Certainly in relation to matters such as these there is no outside for the creative industries. There’s a great need to explore alternative economic models to the content production one if wealth is to be successfully extracted and distributed from activities in the new media sectors. The suggestion that the creative industries project initiates a strategic response to the conditions of cultural production within network societies and informational economies is highly debateable. The now well documented history of digital piracy in the film and software industries and the difficulties associated with regulating violations to proprietors of IP in the form of copyright and trademarks is enough of a reason to look for alternative models of wealth extraction. And you can be sure this will occur irrespective of the endeavours of the creative industries. To conclude, I am suggesting that those working in the creative industries, be they content producers or educators, need to intervene in IPRs in such a way that: 1) ensures the alienation of their labour is minimised; 2) collectivising “creative” labour in the form of unions or what Wark (2001) has termed the “hacker class”, as distinct from the “vectoralist class”, may be one way of achieving this; and 3) the advocates of creative industries within the higher education sector in particular are made aware of the implications IPRs have for graduates entering the workforce and adjust their rhetoric, curriculum, and policy engagements accordingly. Works Cited Barcan, Ruth. ‘The Idleness of Academics: Reflections on the Usefulness of Cultural Studies’. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies (forthcoming, 2003). Bolz, Norbert. ‘Rethinking Media Aesthetics’, in Geert Lovink, Uncanny Networks: Dialogues with the Virtual Intelligentsia. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002, 18-27. Butt, Danny and Rossiter, Ned. ‘Blowing Bubbles: Post-Crash Creative Industries and the Withering of Political Critique in Cultural Studies’. Paper presented at Ute Culture: The Utility of Culture and the Uses of Cultural Studies, Cultural Studies Association of Australia Conference, Melbourne, 5-7 December, 2002. Posted to fibreculture mailing list, 10 December, 2002, http://www.fibreculture.org/archives/index.html Creative Industry Task Force: Mapping Document, DCMS (Department of Culture, Media and Sport), London, 1998/2001. http://www.culture.gov.uk/creative/mapping.html Cunningham, Stuart. ‘The Evolving Creative Industries: From Original Assumptions to Contemporary Interpretations’. Seminar Paper, QUT, Brisbane, 9 May, 2003, http://www.creativeindustries.qut.com/research/cirac/documen... ...ts/THE_EVOLVING_CREATIVE_INDUSTRIES.pdf Cunningham, Stuart; Hearn, Gregory; Cox, Stephen; Ninan, Abraham and Keane, Michael. Brisbane’s Creative Industries 2003. Report delivered to Brisbane City Council, Community and Economic Development, Brisbane: CIRAC, 2003. http://www.creativeindustries.qut.com/research/cirac/documen... ...ts/bccreportonly.pdf Flew, Terry. New Media: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Frank, Thomas. One Market under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy. New York: Anchor Books, 2000. Hartley, John and Cunningham, Stuart. ‘Creative Industries: from Blue Poles to fat pipes’, in Malcolm Gillies (ed.) The National Humanities and Social Sciences Summit: Position Papers. Canberra: DEST, 2002. Hayden, Steve. ‘Tastes Great, Less Filling: Ad Space – Will Advertisers Learn the Hard Lesson of Over-Development?’. Wired Magazine 11.06 (June, 2003), http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/ad_spc.html Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio. Empire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000. Lash, Scott. Critique of Information. London: Sage, 2002. Lovink, Geert. Uncanny Networks: Dialogues with the Virtual Intelligentsia. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002a. Lovink, Geert. Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002b. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964. McRobbie, Angela. ‘Clubs to Companies: Notes on the Decline of Political Culture in Speeded up Creative Worlds’, Cultural Studies 16.4 (2002): 516-31. Marginson, Simon and Considine, Mark. The Enterprise University: Power, Governance and Reinvention in Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Meikle, Graham. Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet. Sydney: Pluto Press, 2002. Ross, Andrew. No-Collar: The Humane Workplace and Its Hidden Costs. New York: Basic Books, 2003. Rossiter, Ned. ‘Processual Media Theory’, in Adrian Miles (ed.) Streaming Worlds: 5th International Digital Arts & Culture (DAC) Conference. 19-23 May. Melbourne: RMIT University, 2003, 173-184. http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/dac/papers/Rossiter.pdf Sassen, Saskia. Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Wark, McKenzie. ‘Abstraction’ and ‘Hack’, in Hugh Brown, Geert Lovink, Helen Merrick, Ned Rossiter, David Teh, Michele Willson (eds). Politics of a Digital Present: An Inventory of Australian Net Culture, Criticism and Theory. Melbourne: Fibreculture Publications, 2001, 3-7, 99-102. Wark, McKenzie. ‘The Power of Multiplicity and the Multiplicity of Power’, in Geert Lovink, Uncanny Networks: Dialogues with the Virtual Intelligentsia. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002, 314-325. Links http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/dac/papers/Rossiter.pdf http://www.creativeindustries.qut.com/ http://www.creativeindustries.qut.com/research/cirac/documents/THE_EVOLVING_CREATIVE_INDUSTRIES.pdf http://www.creativeindustries.qut.com/research/cirac/documents/bccreportonly.pdf http://www.culture.gov.uk/creative/mapping.html http://www.fibreculture.org/archives/index.html http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/ad_spc.html Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Rossiter, Ned. "Creative Industries and the Limits of Critique from " M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/11-creativeindustries.php>. APA Style Rossiter, N. (2003, Jun 19). Creative Industries and the Limits of Critique from . M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/11-creativeindustries.php>

In a media saturated world, doodles have recently received the kind of attention usually reserved for coverage of racy extra marital affairs, corrupt governance, and product malfunction. Former British Prime Minister Blair’s private doodling at a World Economic Forum meeting in 2005 raised suspicions that he, according to one keen graphologist, struggled “to maintain control in a confusing world," which infers he was attempting to cohere a scattershot, fragmentary series of events (Spiegel). However, placid-faced Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, who sat nearby, actually scrawled the doodles. In this case, perhaps the scrawls mimicked the ambience in the room: Gates might have been ‘tuning’–registering the ‘white noise’ of the participants, letting his unconscious dictate doodles as a way to cope with the dissonance trekking in with the officialspeak. The doodles may have documented and registered the space between words, acting like deposits from his gestalt.Sometimes the most intriguing doodles co-exist with printed texts. This includes common vernacular graffiti that lines public and private books and magazines. Such graffiti exposes tensions in the role of readers as well as horror vacui: a fear of unused, empty space. Yet, school children fingering fresh pages and stiff book spines for the first few times often consider their book pages as sanctioned, discreet, and inviolable. The book is an object of financial and cultural investment, or imbued both with mystique and ideologies. Yet, in the e-book era, the old-fashioned, physical page is a relic of sorts, a holdover from coarse papyrus culled from wetland sage, linking us to the First Dynasty in Egypt. Some might consider the page as a vessel for typography, a mere framing device for text. The margins may reflect a perimeter of nothingness, an invisible borderland that doodles render visible by inhabiting them. Perhaps the margins are a bare landscape, like unmarred flat sand in a black and white panchromatic photo with unique tonal signature and distinct grain. Perhaps the margins are a mute locality, a space where words have evaporated, or a yet-to-be-explored environment, or an ambient field. Then comes the doodle, an icon of vernacular art.As a modern folklorist, I have studied and explored vernacular art at length, especially forms that may challenge and fissure aesthetic, cultural, and social mores, even within my own field. For instance, I contend that Grandma Prisbrey’s “Bottle Village,” featuring millions of artfully arranged pencils, bottles, and dolls culled from dumps in Southern California, is a syncretic culturescape with underlying feminist symbolism, not merely the product of trauma and hoarding (Ensminger). Recently, I flew to Oregon to deliver a paper on Mexican-American gravesite traditions. In a quest for increased multicultural tolerance, I argued that inexpensive dimestore objects left on Catholic immigrant graves do not represent a messy landscape of trinkets but unique spiritual environments with links to customs 3,000 years old. For me, doodles represent a variation on graffiti-style art with cultural antecedents stretching back throughout history, ranging from ancient scrawls on Greek ruins to contemporary park benches (with chiseled names, dates, and symbols), public bathroom latrinalia, and spray can aerosol art, including ‘bombing’ and ‘tagging’ hailed as “Spectacular Vernaculars” by Russell Potter (1995). Noted folklorist Alan Dundes mused on the meaning of latrinalia in Here I Sit – A Study of American Latrinalia (1966), which has inspired pop culture books and web pages for the preservation and discussion of such art (see for instance, www.itsallinthehead.com/gallery1.html). Older texts such as Classic American Graffiti by Allen Walker Read (1935), originally intended for “students of linguistics, folk-lore, abnormal psychology,” reveal the field’s longstanding interest in marginal, crude, and profane graffiti.Yet, to my knowledge, a monograph on doodles has yet to be published by a folklorist, perhaps because the art form is reconsidered too idiosyncratic, too private, the difference between jots and doodles too blurry for a taxonomy and not the domain of identifiable folk groups. In addition, the doodles in texts often remain hidden until single readers encounter them. No broad public interaction is likely, unless a library text circulates freely, which may not occur after doodles are discovered. In essence, the books become tainted, infected goods. Whereas latrinalia speaks openly and irreverently, doodles feature a different scale and audience.Doodles in texts may represent a kind of speaking from the ‘margin’s margins,’ revealing the reader-cum-writer’s idiosyncratic, self-meaningful, and stylised hieroglyphics from the ambient margins of one’s consciousness set forth in the ambient margins of the page. The original page itself is an ambient territory that allows the meaning of the text to take effect. When those liminal spaces (both between and betwixt, in which the rules of page format, design, style, and typography are abandoned) are altered by the presence of doodles, the formerly blank, surplus, and soft spaces of the page offer messages coterminous with the text, often allowing readers to speak, however haphazardly and unconsciously, with and against the triggering text. The bleached whiteness can become a crowded milieu in the hands of a reader re-scripting the ambient territory. If the book is borrowed, then the margins are also an intimate negotiation with shared or public space. The cryptic residue of the doodler now resides, waiting, for the city of eyes.Throughout history, both admired artists and Presidents regularly doodled. Famed Italian Renaissance painter Filippo Lippi avoided strenuous studying by doodling in his books (Van Cleave 44). Both sides of the American political spectrum have produced plentiful inky depictions as well: roughshod Democratic President Johnson drew flags and pagodas; former Hollywood fantasy fulfiller turned politician Republican President Reagan’s specialty was western themes, recalling tropes both from his actor period and his duration acting as President; meanwhile, former law student turned current President, Barack Obama, has sketched members of Congress and the Senate for charity auctions. These doodles are rich fodder for both psychologists and cross-discipline analysts that propose theories regarding the automatic writing and self-styled miniature pictures of civic leaders. Doodles allow graphologists to navigate and determine the internal, cognitive fabric of the maker. To critics, they exist as mere trifles and offer nothing more than an iota of insight; doodles are not uncanny offerings from the recesses of memory, like bite-sized Rorschach tests, but simply sloppy scrawls of the bored.Ambient music theory may shed some light. Timothy Morton argues that Brian Eno designed to make music that evoked “space whose quality had become minimally significant” and “deconstruct the opposition … between figure and ground.” In fact, doodles may yield the same attributes as well. After a doodle is inserted into texts, the typography loses its primacy. There is a merging of the horizons. The text of the author can conflate with the text of the reader in an uneasy dance of meaning: the page becomes an interface revealing a landscape of signs and symbols with multiple intelligences–one manufactured and condoned, the other vernacular and unsanctioned. A fixed end or beginning between the two no longer exists. The ambient space allows potential energies to hover at the edge, ready to illustrate a tension zone and occupy the page. The blank spaces keep inviting responses. An emergent discourse is always in waiting, always threatening to overspill the text’s intended meaning. In fact, the doodles may carry more weight than the intended text: the hierarchy between authorship and readership may topple.Resistant reading may take shape during these bouts. The doodle is an invasion and signals the geography of disruption, even when innocuous. It is a leveling tool. As doodlers place it alongside official discourse, they move away from positions of passivity, being mere consumers, and claim their own autonomy and agency. The space becomes co-determinant as boundaries are blurred. The destiny of the original text’s meaning is deferred. The habitus of the reader becomes embodied in the scrawl, and the next reader must negotiate and navigate the cultural capital of this new author. As such, the doodle constitutes an alternative authority and economy of meaning within the text.Recent studies indicate doodling, often regarded as behavior that announces a person’s boredom and withdrawal, is actually a very special tool to prevent memory loss. Jackie Andrade, an expert from the School of Psychology at the University of Plymouth, maintains that doodling actually “offsets the effects of selective memory blockade,” which yields a surprising result (quoted in “Doodling Gets”). Doodlers exhibit 29% more memory recall than those who passively listen, frozen in an unequal bond with the speaker/lecturer. Students that doodle actually retain more information and are likely more productive due to their active listening. They adeptly absorb information while students who stare patiently or daydream falter.Furthermore, in a 2006 paper, Andrew Kear argues that “doodling is a way in which students, consciously or not, stake a claim of personal agency and challenge some the values inherent in the education system” (2). As a teacher concerned with the engagement of students, he asked for three classes to submit their doodles. Letting them submit any two-dimensional graphic or text made during a class (even if made from body fluid), he soon discovered examples of “acts of resistance” in “student-initiated effort[s] to carve out a sense of place within the educational institution” (6). Not simply an ennui-prone teenager or a proto-surrealist trying to render some automatic writing from the fringes of cognition, a student doodling may represent contested space both in terms of the page itself and the ambience of the environment. The doodle indicates tension, and according to Kear, reflects students reclaiming “their own self-recognized voice” (6).In a widely referenced 1966 article (known as the “doodle” article) intended to describe the paragraph organisational styles of different cultures, Robert Kaplan used five doodles to investigate a writer’s thought patterns, which are rooted in cultural values. Now considered rather problematic by some critics after being adopted by educators for teacher-training materials, Kaplan’s doodles-as-models suggest, “English speakers develop their ideas in a linear, hierarchal fashion and ‘Orientals’ in a non-liner, spiral fashion…” (Severino 45). In turn, when used as pedagogical tools, these graphics, intentionally or not, may lead an “ethnocentric, assimilationist stance” (45). In this case, doodles likely shape the discourse of English as Second Language instruction. Doodles also represent a unique kind of “finger trace,” not unlike prints from the tips of a person’s fingers and snowflakes. Such symbol systems might be used for “a means of lightweight authentication,” according to Christopher Varenhorst of MIT (1). Doodles, he posits, can be used as “passdoodles"–a means by which a program can “quickly identify users.” They are singular expressions that are quirky and hard to duplicate; thus, doodles could serve as substitute methods of verifying people who desire devices that can safeguard their privacy without users having to rely on an ever-increasing number of passwords. Doodles may represent one such key. For many years, psychologists and psychiatrists have used doodles as therapeutic tools in their treatment of children that have endured hardship, ailments, and assault. They may indicate conditions, explain various symptoms and pathologies, and reveal patterns that otherwise may go unnoticed. For instance, doodles may “reflect a specific physical illness and point to family stress, accidents, difficult sibling relationships, and trauma” (Lowe 307). Lowe reports that children who create a doodle featuring their own caricature on the far side of the page, distant from an image of parent figures on the same page, may be experiencing detachment, while the portrayal of a father figure with “jagged teeth” may indicate a menace. What may be difficult to investigate in a doctor’s office conversation or clinical overview may, in fact, be gleaned from “the evaluation of a child’s spontaneous doodle” (307). So, if children are suffering physically or psychologically and unable to express themselves in a fully conscious and articulate way, doodles may reveal their “self-concept” and how they feel about their bodies; therefore, such creative and descriptive inroads are important diagnostic tools (307). Austrian born researcher Erich Guttman and his cohort Walter MacLay both pioneered art therapy in England during the mid-twentieth century. They posited doodles might offer some insight into the condition of schizophrenics. Guttman was intrigued by both the paintings associated with the Surrealist movement and the pioneering, much-debated work of Sigmund Freud too. Although Guttman mostly studied professionally trained artists who suffered from delusions and other conditions, he also collected a variety of art from patients, including those undergoing mescaline therapy, which alters a person’s consciousness. In a stroke of luck, they were able to convince a newspaper editor at the Evening Standard to provide them over 9,000 doodles that were provided by readers for a contest, each coded with the person’s name, age, and occupation. This invaluable data let the academicians compare the work of those hospitalised with the larger population. Their results, released in 1938, contain several key declarations and remain significant contributions to the field. Subsequently, Francis Reitman recounted them in his own book Psychotic Art: Doodles “release the censor of the conscious mind,” allowing a person to “relax, which to creative people was indispensable to production.”No appropriate descriptive terminology could be agreed upon.“Doodles are not communications,” for the meaning is only apparent when analysed individually.Doodles are “self-meaningful.” (37) Doodles, the authors also established, could be divided into this taxonomy: “stereotypy, ornamental details, movements, figures, faces and animals” or those “depicting scenes, medley, and mixtures” (37). The authors also noted that practitioners from the Jungian school of psychology often used “spontaneously produced drawings” that were quite “doodle-like in nature” in their own discussions (37). As a modern folklorist, I venture that doodles offer rich potential for our discipline as well. At this stage, I am offering a series of dictums, especially in regards to doodles that are commonly found adjacent to text in books and magazines, notebooks and journals, that may be expanded upon and investigated further. Doodles allow the reader to repopulate the text with ideogram-like expressions that are highly personalised, even inscrutable, like ambient sounds.Doodles re-purpose the text. The text no longer is unidirectional. The text becomes a point of convergence between writer and reader. The doodling allows for such a conversation, bilateral flow, or “talking back” to the text.Doodles reveal a secret language–informal codes that hearken back to the “lively, spontaneous, and charged with feeling” works of child art or naïve art that Victor Sanua discusses as being replaced in a child’s later years by art that is “stilted, formal, and conforming” (62).Doodling animates blank margins, the dead space of the text adjacent to the script, making such places ripe for spontaneous, fertile, and exploratory markings.Doodling reveals a democratic, participatory ethos. No text is too sacred, no narrative too inviolable. Anything can be reworked by the intimate graffiti of the reader. The authority of the book is not fixed; readers negotiate and form a second intelligence imprinted over the top of the original text, blurring modes of power.Doodles reveal liminal moments. Since the reader in unmonitored, he or she can express thoughts that may be considered marginal or taboo by the next reader. The original subject of the book itself does not restrict the reader. Thus, within the margins of the page, a brief suspension of boundaries and borders, authority and power, occurs. The reader hides in anonymity, free to reroute the meaning of the book. Doodling may convey a reader’s infantalism. Every book can become a picture book. This art can be the route returning a reader to the ambience of childhood.Doodling may constitute Illuminated/Painted Texts in reverse, commemorating the significance of the object in hitherto unexpected forms and revealing the reader’s codex. William Blake adorned his own poems by illuminating the skin/page that held his living verse; common readers may do so too, in naïve, nomadic, and primitive forms. Doodling demarcates tension zones, yielding social-historical insights into eras while offering psychological glimpses and displaying aesthetic values of readers-cum-writers.Doodling reveals margins as inter-zones, replete with psychogeography. While the typography is sanctioned, legitimate, normalised, and official discourse (“chartered” and “manacled,” to hijack lines from William Blake), the margins are a vernacular depository, a terminus, allowing readers a sense of agency and autonomy. The doodled page becomes a visible reminder and signifier: all pages are potentially “contested” spaces. Whereas graffiti often allows a writer to hide anonymously in the light in a city besieged by multiple conflicting texts, doodles allow a reader-cum-writer’s imprint to live in the cocoon of a formerly fossilised text, waiting for the light. Upon being opened, the book, now a chimera, truly breathes. Further exploration and analysis should likely consider several issues. What truly constitutes and shapes the role of agent and reader? Is the reader an agent all the time, or only when offering resistant readings through doodles? How is a doodler’s agency mediated by the author or the format of texts in forms that I have to map? Lastly, if, as I have argued, the ambient space allows potential energies to hover at the edge, ready to illustrate a tension zone and occupy the page, what occurs in the age of digital or e-books? Will these platforms signal an age of acquiescence to manufactured products or signal era of vernacular responses, somehow hitched to html code and PDF file infiltration? Will bytes totally replace type soon in the future, shaping unforeseen actions by doodlers? Attached Figures Figure One presents the intimate graffiti of my grandfather, found in the 1907 edition of his McGuffey’s Eclectic Spelling Book. The depiction is simple, even crude, revealing a figure found on the adjacent page to Lesson 248, “Of Characters Used in Punctuation,” which lists the perfunctory functions of commas, semicolons, periods, and so forth. This doodle may offset the routine, rote, and rather humdrum memorisation of such grammatical tools. The smiling figure may embody and signify joy on an otherwise machine-made bare page, a space where my grandfather illustrated his desires (to lighten a mood, to ease dissatisfaction?). Historians Joe Austin and Michael Willard examine how youth have been historically left without legitimate spaces in which to live out their autonomy outside of adult surveillance. For instance, graffiti often found on walls and trains may reflect a sad reality: young people are pushed to appropriate “nomadic, temporary, abandoned, illegal, or otherwise unwatched spaces within the landscape” (14). Indeed, book graffiti, like the graffiti found on surfaces throughout cities, may offer youth a sense of appropriation, authorship, agency, and autonomy: they take the page of the book, commit their writing or illustration to the page, discover some freedom, and feel temporarily independent even while they are young and disempowered. Figure Two depicts the doodles of experimental filmmaker Jim Fetterley (Animal Charm productions) during his tenure as a student at the Art Institute of Chicago in the early 1990s. His two doodles flank the text of “Lady Lazarus” by Sylvia Plath, regarded by most readers as an autobiographical poem that addresses her own suicide attempts. The story of Lazarus is grounded in the Biblical story of John Lazarus of Bethany, who was resurrected from the dead. The poem also alludes to the Holocaust (“Nazi Lampshades”), the folklore surrounding cats (“And like the cat I have nine times to die”), and impending omens of death (“eye pits “ … “sour breath”). The lower doodle seems to signify a motorised tank-like machine, replete with a furnace or engine compartment on top that bellows smoke. Such ominous images, saturated with potential cartoon-like violence, may link to the World War II references in the poem. Meanwhile, the upper doodle seems to be curiously insect-like, and Fetterley’s name can be found within the illustration, just like Plath’s poem is self-reflexive and addresses her own plight. Most viewers might find the image a bit more lighthearted than the poem, a caricature of something biomorphic and surreal, but not very lethal. Again, perhaps this is a counter-message to the weight of the poem, a way to balance the mood and tone, or it may well represent the larval-like apparition that haunts the very thoughts of Plath in the poem: the impending disease of her mind, as understood by the wary reader. References Austin, Joe, and Michael Willard. “Introduction: Angels of History, Demons of Culture.” Eds. Joe Austion and Michael Willard. Generations of Youth: Youth Cultures and History in Twentieth-Century America. New York: NYU Press, 1998. “Doodling Gets Its Due: Those Tiny Artworks May Aid Memory.” World Science 2 March 2009. 15 Jan. 2009 ‹http://www.world-science.net/othernews/090302_doodle›. Dundes, Alan. “Here I Sit – A Study of American Latrinalia.” Papers of the Kroeber Anthropological Society 34: 91-105. Ensminger, David. “All Bottle Up: Reinterpreting the Culturescape of Grandma Prisbey.” Adironack Review 9.3 (Fall 2008). ‹http://adirondackreview.homestead.com/ensminger2.html›. Kear, Andrew. “Drawings in the Margins: Doodling in Class an Act of Reclamation.” Graduate Student Conference. University of Toronto, 2006. ‹http://gradstudentconference.oise.utoronto.ca/documents/185/Drawing%20in%20the%20Margins.doc›. Lowe, Sheila R. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Handwriting Analysis. New York: Alpha Books, 1999. Morton, Timothy. “‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’ as an Ambient Poem; a Study of Dialectical Image; with Some Remarks on Coleridge and Wordsworth.” Romantic Circles Praxis Series (2001). 6 Jan. 2009 ‹http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/ecology/morton/morton.html›. Potter, Russell A. Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism. Albany: State University of New York, 1995. Read, Allen Walker. Classic American Graffiti: Lexical Evidence from Folk Epigraphy in Western North America. Waukesha, Wisconsin: Maledicta Press, 1997. Reitman, Francis. Psychotic Art. London: Routledge, 1999. Sanua, Victor. “The World of Mystery and Wonder of the Schizophrenic Patient.” International Journal of Social Psychiatry 8 (1961): 62-65. Severino, Carol. “The ‘Doodles’ in Context: Qualifying Claims about Contrastive Rhetoric.” The Writing Center Journal 14.1 (Fall 1993): 44-62. Van Cleave, Claire. Master Drawings of the Italian Rennaissance. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2007. Varenhost, Christopher. Passdoodles: A Lightweight Authentication Method. Research Science Institute. Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004.

In the contemporary era, media spectacle organizes and mobilizes economic life, political conflict, social interactions, culture, and everyday life. My recently published book Media Spectacle explores a profusion of developments in hi-tech culture, media-driven society, and spectacle politics. Spectacle culture involves everything from film and broadcasting to Internet cyberculture and encompasses phenomena ranging from elections to terrorism and to the media dramas of the moment. For ‘Logo’, I am accordingly sketching out briefly a terrain I probe in detail in the book from which these examples are taken.1 During the past decades, every form of culture and significant forms of social life have become permeated by the logic of the spectacle. Movies are bigger and more spectacular than ever, with high-tech special effects expanding the range of cinematic spectacle. Television channels proliferate endlessly with all-day movies, news, sports, specialty niches, re-runs of the history of television, and whatever else can gain an audience. The rock spectacle reverberates through radio, television, CDs, computers networks, and extravagant concerts. The Internet encircles the world in the spectacle of an interactive and multimedia cyberculture. Media culture excels in creating megaspectacles of sports championships, political conflicts, entertainment, "breaking news" and media events, such as the O.J. Simpson trial, the Death of Princess Diana, or the sex or murder scandal of the moment. Megaspectacle comes as well to dominate party politics, as the political battles of the day, such as the Clinton sex scandals and impeachment, the 36 Day Battle for the White House after Election 2000, and the September 11 terrorist attacks and subsequent Terror War. These dramatic media passion plays define the politics of the time, and attract mass audiences to their programming, hour after hour, day after day. The concept of "spectacle" derives from French Situationist theorist Guy Debord's 1972 book Society of the Spectacle. "Spectacle," in Debord's terms, "unifies and explains a great diversity of apparent phenomena" (Debord 1970: #10). In one sense, it refers to a media and consumer society, organized around the consumption of images, commodities, and spectacles. Spectacles are those phenomena of media culture which embody contemporary society's basic values, and dreams and nightmares, putting on display dominant hopes and fears. They serve to enculturate individuals into its way of life, and dramatize its conflicts and modes of conflict resolution. They include sports events, political campaigns and elections, and media extravaganzas like sensational murder trials, or the Bill Clinton sex scandals and impeachment spectacle (1998-1999). As we enter a new millennium, the media are becoming ever more technologically dazzling and are playing an increasingly central role in everyday life. Under the influence of a postmodern image culture, seductive spectacles fascinate the denizens of the media and consumer society and involve them in the semiotics of a new world of entertainment, information, a semiotics of a new world of entertainment, information, and drama, which deeply influence thought and action. For Debord: "When the real world changes into simple images, simple images become real beings and effective motivations of a hypnotic behavior. The spectacle as a tendency to make one see the world by means of various specialized mediations (it can no longer be grasped directly), naturally finds vision to be the privileged human sense which the sense of touch was for other epochs; the most abstract, the most mystifiable sense corresponds to the generalized abstraction of present day society" (#18). Today, however, I would maintain it is the multimedia spectacle of sight, sound, touch, and, coming to you soon, smell that constitutes the multidimensional sense experience of the new interactive spectacle. For Debord, the spectacle is a tool of pacification and depoliticization; it is a "permanent opium war" (#44) which stupefies social subjects and distracts them from the most urgent task of real life -- recovering the full range of their human powers through creative praxis. The concept of the spectacle is integrally connected to the concept of separation and passivity, for in passively consuming spectacles, one is separated from actively producing one's life. Capitalist society separates workers from the products of their labor, art from life, and consumption from human needs and self-directing activity, as individuals passively observe the spectacles of social life from within the privacy of their homes (#25 and #26). The situationist project by contrast involved an overcoming of all forms of separation, in which individuals would directly produce their own life and modes of self-activity and collective practice. Since Debord's theorization of the society of the spectacle in the 1960s and 1970s, spectacle culture has expanded in every area of life. In the culture of the spectacle, commercial enterprises have to be entertaining to prosper and as Michael J. Wolf (1999) argues, in an "entertainment economy," business and fun fuse, so that the E-factor is becoming major aspect of business.2 Via the "entertainmentization" of the economy, television, film, theme parks, video games, casinos, and so forth become major sectors of the national economy. In the U.S., the entertainment industry is now a $480 billion industry, and consumers spend more on having fun than on clothes or health care (Wolf 1999: 4).3 In a competitive business world, the "fun factor" can give one business the edge over another. Hence, corporations seek to be more entertaining in their commercials, their business environment, their commercial spaces, and their web sites. Budweiser ads, for instance, feature talking frogs who tell us nothing about the beer, but who catch the viewers' attention, while Taco Bell deploys a talking dog, and Pepsi uses Star Wars characters. Buying, shopping, and dining out are coded as an "experience," as businesses adopt a theme-park style. Places like the Hard Rock Cafe and the House of Blues are not renowned for their food, after all; people go there for the ambience, to buy clothing, and to view music and media memorabilia. It is no longer good enough just to have a web site, it has to be an interactive spectacle, featuring not only products to buy, but music and videos to download, games to play, prizes to win, travel information, and "links to other cool sites." To succeed in the ultracompetitive global marketplace, corporations need to circulate their image and brand name so business and advertising combine in the promotion of corporations as media spectacles. Endless promotion circulates the McDonald’s Golden Arches, Nike’s Swoosh, or the logos of Apple, Intel, or Microsoft. In the brand wars between commodities, corporations need to make their logos or “trademarks” a familiar signpost in contemporary culture. Corporations place their logos on their products, in ads, in the spaces of everyday life, and in the midst of media spectacles like important sports events, TV shows, movie product placement, and wherever they can catch consumer eyeballs, to impress their brand name on a potential buyer. Consequently, advertising, marketing, public relations and promotion are an essential part of commodity spectacle in the global marketplace. Celebrity too is manufactured and managed in the world of media spectacle. Celebrities are the icons of media culture, the gods and goddesses of everyday life. To become a celebrity requires recognition as a star player in the field of media spectacle, be it sports, entertainment, or politics. Celebrities have their handlers and image managers to make sure that their celebrities continue to be seen and positively perceived by publics. Just as with corporate brand names, celebrities become brands to sell their Madonna, Michael Jordan, Tom Cruise, or Jennifer Lopez product and image. In a media culture, however, celebrities are always prey to scandal and thus must have at their disposal an entire public relations apparatus to manage their spectacle fortunes, to make sure their clients not only maintain high visibility but keep projecting a positive image. Of course, within limits, “bad” and transgressions can also sell and so media spectacle contains celebrity dramas that attract public attention and can even define an entire period, as when the O.J. Simpson murder trials and Bill Clinton sex scandals dominated the media in the mid and late 1990s. Entertainment has always been a prime field of the spectacle, but in today's infotainment society, entertainment and spectacle have entered into the domains of the economy, politics, society, and everyday life in important new ways. Building on the tradition of spectacle, contemporary forms of entertainment from television to the stage are incorporating spectacle culture into their enterprises, transforming film, television, music, drama, and other domains of culture, as well as producing spectacular new forms of culture such as cyberspace, multimedia, and virtual reality. For Neil Gabler, in an era of media spectacle, life itself is becoming like a movie and we create our own lives as a genre like film, or television, in which we become "at once performance artists in and audiences for a grand, ongoing show" (1998: 4). On Gabler’s view, we star in our own "lifies," making our lives into entertainment acted out for audiences of our peers, following the scripts of media culture, adopting its role models and fashion types, its style and look. Seeing our lives in cinematic terms, entertainment becomes for Gabler "arguably the most pervasive, powerful and ineluctable force of our time--a force so overwhelming that it has metastasized into life" to such an extent that it is impossible to distinguish between the two (1998: 9). As Gabler sees it, Ralph Lauren is our fashion expert; Martha Stewart designs our sets; Jane Fonda models our shaping of our bodies; and Oprah Winfrey advises us on our personal problems.4 Media spectacle is indeed a culture of celebrity who provide dominant role models and icons of fashion, look, and personality. In the world of spectacle, celebrity encompasses every major social domain from entertainment to politics to sports to business. An ever-expanding public relations industry hypes certain figures, elevating them to celebrity status, and protects their positive image in the never-ending image wars and dangers that a celebrity will fall prey to the machinations of negative-image and thus lose celebrity status, and/or become figures of scandal and approbation, as will some of the players and institutions that I examine in Media Spectacle (Kellner 2003). Sports has long been a domain of the spectacle with events like the Olympics, World Series, Super Bowl, World Soccer Cup, and NBA championships attracting massive audiences, while generating sky-high advertising rates. These cultural rituals celebrate society's deepest values (i.e. competition, winning, success, and money), and corporations are willing to pay top dollar to get their products associated with such events. Indeed, it appears that the logic of the commodity spectacle is inexorably permeating professional sports which can no longer be played without the accompaniment of cheerleaders, giant mascots who clown with players and spectators, and raffles, promotions, and contests that feature the products of various sponsors. Sports stadiums themselves contain electronic reproduction of the action, as well as giant advertisements for various products that rotate for maximum saturation -- previewing environmental advertising in which entire urban sites are becoming scenes to boost consumption spectacles. Arenas, like the United Center in Chicago, America West Arena in Phoenix, on Enron Field in Houston are named after corporate sponsors. Of course, after major corporate scandals or collapse, like the Enron spectacle, the ballparks must be renamed! The Texas Ranger Ballpark in Arlington, Texas supplements its sports arena with a shopping mall, office buildings, and a restaurant in which for a hefty price one can watch the athletic events while eating and drinking.5 The architecture of the Texas Rangers stadium is an example of the implosion of sports and entertainment and postmodern spectacle. A man-made lake surrounds the stadium, the corridor inside is modeled after Chartes Cathedral, and the structure is made of local stone that provides the look of the Texas Capitol in Austin. Inside there are Texas longhorn cattle carvings, panels of Texas and baseball history, and other iconic signifiers of sports and Texas. The merging of sports, entertainment, and local spectacle is now typical in sports palaces. Tropicana Field in Tampa Bay, Florida, for instance, "has a three-level mall that includes places where 'fans can get a trim at the barber shop, do their banking and then grab a cold one at the Budweiser brew pub, whose copper kettles rise three stories. There is even a climbing wall for kids and showroom space for car dealerships'" (Ritzer 1998: 229). Film has long been a fertile field of the spectacle, with "Hollywood" connoting a world of glamour, publicity, fashion, and excess. Hollywood film has exhibited grand movie palaces, spectacular openings with searchlights and camera-popping paparazzi, glamorous Oscars, and stylish hi-tech film. While epic spectacle became a dominant genre of Hollywood film from early versions of The Ten Commandments through Cleopatra and 2001 in the 1960s, contemporary film has incorporated the mechanics of spectacle into its form, style, and special effects. Films are hyped into spectacle through advertising and trailers which are ever louder, more glitzy, and razzle-dazzle. Some of the most popular films of the late 1990s were spectacle films, including Titanic, Star Wars -- Phantom Menace, Three Kings, and Austin Powers, a spoof of spectacle, which became one of the most successful films of summer 1999. During Fall 1999, there was a cycle of spectacles, including Topsy Turvy, Titus, Cradle Will Rock, Sleepy Hollow, The Insider, and Magnolia, with the latter featuring the biblical spectacle of the raining of frogs in the San Fernando Valley, in an allegory of the decadence of the entertainment industry and deserved punishment for its excesses. The 2000 Academy Awards were dominated by the spectacle Gladiator, a mediocre film that captured best picture award and best acting award for Russell Crowe, thus demonstrating the extent to which the logic of the spectacle now dominates Hollywood film. Some of the most critically acclaimed and popular films of 2001 are also hi-tech spectacle, such as Moulin Rouge, a film spectacle that itself is a delirious ode to spectacle, from cabaret and the brothel to can-can dancing, opera, musical comedy, dance, theater, popular music, and film. A postmodern pastiche of popular music styles and hits, the film used songs and music ranging from Madonna and the Beatles to Dolly Parton and Kiss. Other 2001 film spectacles include Pearl Harbor, which re-enacts the Japanese attack on the U.S. that propelled the country to enter World War II, and that provided a ready metaphor for the September 11 terror attacks. Major 2001 film spectacles range from David Lynch’s postmodern surrealism in Mulholland Drive to Steven Spielberg’s blending of his typically sentimental spectacle of the family with the formalist rigor of Stanley Kubrick in A.I. And the popular 2001 military film Black-Hawk Down provided a spectacle of American military heroism which some critics believed sugar-coated the actual problems with the U.S. military intervention in Somalia, causing worries that a future U.S. adventure by the Bush administration and Pentagon would meet similar problems. There were reports, however, that in Somalian cinemas there were loud cheers as the Somalians in the film shot down the U.S. helicopter, and pursued and killed American soldiers, attesting to growing anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world against Bush administration policies. Television has been from its introduction in the 1940s a promoter of consumption spectacle, selling cars, fashion, home appliances, and other commodities along with consumer life-styles and values. It is also the home of sports spectacle like the Super Bowl or World Series, political spectacles like elections (or more recently, scandals), entertainment spectacle like the Oscars or Grammies, and its own spectacles like breaking news or special events. Following the logic of spectacle entertainment, contemporary television exhibits more hi-tech glitter, faster and glitzier editing, computer simulations, and with cable and satellite television, a fantastic array of every conceivable type of show and genre. TV is today a medium of spectacular programs like The X-Files or Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, and spectacles of everyday life such as MTV's The Real World and Road Rules, or the globally popular Survivor and Big Brother series. Real life events, however, took over TV spectacle in 2000-2001 in, first, an intense battle for the White House in a dead-heat election, that arguably constitutes one of the greatest political crimes and scandals in U.S. history (see Kellner 2001). After months of the Bush administration pushing the most hardright political agenda in memory and then deadlocking as the Democrats took control of the Senate in a dramatic party re-affiliation of Vermont’s Jim Jeffords, the world was treated to the most horrifying spectacle of the new millennium, the September 11 terror attacks and unfolding Terror War that has so far engulfed Afghanistan and Iraq. These events promise an unending series of deadly spectacle for the foreseeable future.6 Hence, we are emerging into a new culture of media spectacle that constitutes a novel configuration of economy, society, politics, and everyday life. It involves new cultural forms, social relations, and modes of experience. It is producing an ever-proliferating and expanding spectacle culture with its proliferating media forms, cultural spaces, and myriad forms of spectacle. It is evident in the U.S. as the new millennium unfolds and may well constitute emergent new forms of global culture. Critical social theory thus faces important challenges in theoretically mapping and analyzing these emergent forms of culture and society and the ways that they may contain novel forms of domination and oppression, as well as potential for democratization and social justice. Works Cited Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black and Red, 1967. Gabler, Neil. Life the Movie. How Entertainment Conquered Reality. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. Kellner, Douglas. Grand Theft 2000. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001. Kellner, Douglas. From 9/11 to Terror War: Dangers of the Bush Legacy. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003. Kellner, Douglas. Media Spectacle. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. Ritzer, George. The McDonaldization Thesis: Explorations and Extensions. Thousand Oaks, Cal. and London: Sage, 1998. Wolf, Michael J. Entertainment Economy: How Mega-Media Forces are Transforming Our Lives. New York: Times Books, 1999. Notes 1 See Douglas Kellner, Media Spectacle. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. 2 Wolf's book is a detailed and useful celebration of the "entertainment economy," although he is a shill for the firms and tycoons that he works for and celebrates them in his book. Moreover, while entertainment is certainly an important component of the infotainment economy, it is an exaggeration to say that it drives it and is actually propelling it, as Wolf repeatedly claims. Wolf also downplays the negative aspects of the entertainment economy, such as growing consumer debt and the ups and downs of the infotainment stock market and vicissitudes of the global economy. 3 Another source notes that "the average American household spent $1,813 in 1997 on entertainment -- books, TV, movies, theater, toys -- almost as much as the $1,841 spent on health care per family, according to a survey by the US Labor Department." Moreover, "the price we pay to amuse ourselves has, in some cases, risen at a rate triple that of inflation over the past five years" (USA Today, April 2, 1999: E1). The NPD Group provided a survey that indicated that the amount of time spent on entertainment outside of the home –- such as going to the movies or a sport event – was up 8% from the early to the late 1990s and the amount of time in home entertainment, such as watching television or surfing the Internet, went up 2%. Reports indicate that in a typical American household, people with broadband Internet connections spend 22% more time on all-electronic media and entertainment than the average household without broadband. See “Study: Broadband in homes changes media habits” (PCWORLD.COM, October 11, 2000). 4 Gabler’s book is a synthesis of Daniel Boorstin, Dwight Macdonald, Neil Poster, Marshall McLuhan, and other trendy theorists of media culture, but without the brilliance of a Baudrillard, the incisive criticism of an Adorno, or the understanding of the deeper utopian attraction of media culture of a Bloch or Jameson. Likewise, Gabler does not, a la cultural studies, engage the politics of representation, or its economics and political economy. He thus ignores mergers in the culture industries, new technologies, the restructuring of capitalism, globalization, and shifts in the economy that are driving the impetus toward entertainment. Gabler does get discuss how new technologies are creating new spheres of entertainment and forms of experience and in general describes rather than theorizes the trends he is engaging. 5 The project was designed and sold to the public in part through the efforts of the son of a former President, George W. Bush. Young Bush was bailed out of heavy losses in the Texas oil industry in the 1980s by his father's friends and used his capital gains, gleaned from what some say as illicit insider trading, to purchase part-ownership of a baseball team to keep the wayward son out of trouble and to give him something to do. The soon-to-be Texas governor, and future President of the United States, sold the new stadium to local taxpayers, getting them to agree to a higher sales tax to build the stadium which would then become the property of Bush and his partners. This deal allowed Bush to generate a healthy profit when he sold his interest in the Texas Rangers franchise and to buy his Texas ranch, paid for by Texas tax-payers (for sources on the scandalous life of George W. Bush and his surprising success in politics, see Kellner 2001 and the further discussion of Bush Jr. in Chapter 6). 6 See Douglas Kellner, From 9/11 to Terror War: Dangers of the Bush Legacy. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Kellner, Douglas. "Engaging Media Spectacle " M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/09-mediaspectacle.php>. APA Style Kellner, D. (2003, Jun 19). Engaging Media Spectacle . M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/09-mediaspectacle.php>

If thinking about home necessitates thinking about “place, space, scale, identity and power,” as Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling (2) suggest, then thinking about home themes in popular music makes no less a conceptual demand. Song lyrics and titles most often invoke dominant readings such as intimacy, privacy, nurture, refuge, connectedness and shared belonging, all issues found within Blunt and Dowling’s analysis. The spatial imaginary to which these authors refer takes vivid shape through repertoires of songs dealing with houses and other specific sites, vast and distant homelands, communities or, less tangibly, geographical or cultural settings where particular relationships can be found, supporting Blunt and Dowling’s major claim that home is complex, multi-scalar and multi-layered. Shelley Mallett’s claim that the term home “functions as a repository for complex, inter-related and at times contradictory socio-cultural ideas about people’s relationships with one another…and with places, spaces and things” (84) is borne out heavily by popular music where, for almost every sentiment that the term home evokes, it seems an opposite sentiment is evoked elsewhere: familiarity versus alienation, acceptance versus rejection, love versus loneliness. Making use of conceptual groundwork by Blunt and Dowling and by Mallett and others, the following discussion canvasses a range of meanings that home has had for a variety of songwriters, singers and audiences over the years. Intended as merely partial and exploratory rather than exhaustive, it provides some insights into contrasts, ironies and relationships between home and gender, diaspora and loss. While it cannot cover all the themes, it gives prominence to the major recurring themes and a variety of important contexts that give rise to these home themes. Most prominent among those songs dealing with home has been a nostalgia and yearning, while issues of how women may have viewed the home within which they have often been restricted to a narrowly defined private sphere are almost entirely absent. This serves as a reminder that, while some themes can be conducive to the medium of popular music, others may be significantly less so. Songs may speak directly of experience but not necessarily of all experiences and certainly not of all experiences equally. B. Lee Cooper claims “most popular culture ventures rely upon formula-oriented settings and phrasings to attract interest, to spur mental or emotional involvement” (93). Notions of home have generally proved both formulaic and emotionally-charged. Commonly understood patterns of meaning and other hegemonic references generally operate more successfully than alternative reference points. Those notions with the strongest cultural currency can be conveyed succinctly and denote widely agreed upon meanings. Lyrics can seldom afford to be deeply analytical but generally must be concise and immediately evocative. Despite that, this discussion will point to diverse meanings carried by songs about home. Blunt and Dowling point out that “a house is not necessarily nor automatically a home” (3). The differences are strongly apparent in music, with only a few songs relating to houses compared with homes. When Malvina Reynolds wrote in 1962 of “little boxes, on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky-tacky,” she was certainly referring to houses, not homes, thus making it easier to bypass the relationships which might have vested the inhabitants with more warmth and individuality than their houses, in this song about conformity and homogeneity. The more complex though elusive concept of home, however, is more likely to feature in love songs and to emanate from diasporal songs. Certainly these two genres are not mutually exclusive. Irish songs are particularly noteworthy for adding to the array of music written by, or representational of, those who have been forced away from home by war, poverty, strife or other circumstances. They manifest identities of displacement rather than of placement, as studied by Bronwen Walter, looking back at rather than from within their spatial imaginary. Phil Eva claims that during the 19th Century Irish émigrés sang songs of exile in Manchester’s streets. Since many in England’s industrial towns had been uprooted from their homes, the songs found rapport with street audiences and entered popular culture. For example, the song Killarney, of hazy origins but thought to date back to as early as 1850, tells of Killarney’s lakes and fells, Emerald isles and winding bays; Mountain paths and woodland dells… ...her [nature’s] home is surely there. As well as anthropomorphising nature and giving it a home, the song suggests a specifically geographic sense of home. Galway Bay, written by A. Fahy, does likewise, as do many other Irish songs of exile which link geography with family, kin and sometimes culture to evoke a sense of home. The final verse of Cliffs of Doneen gives a sense of both people and place making up home: Fare thee well to Doneen, fare thee well for a while And to all the kind people I’m leaving behind To the streams and the meadows where late I have been And the high rocky slopes round the cliffs of Doneen. Earlier Irish songs intertwine home with political issues. For example, Tho’ the Last Glimpse of Erin vows to Erin that “In exile thy bosum shall still be my home.” Such exile resulted from a preference of fleeing Ireland rather than bowing to English oppression, which then included a prohibition on Irish having moustaches or certain hairstyles. Thomas Moore is said to have set the words of the song to the air Coulin which itself referred to an Irish woman’s preference for her “Coulin” (a long-haired Irish youth) to the English (Nelson-Burns). Diasporal songs have continued, as has their political edge, as evidenced by global recognition of songs such as Bayan Ko (My Country), written by José Corazon de Jesus in 1929, out of love and concern for the Philippines and sung among Filipinos worldwide. Robin Cohen outlines a set of criteria for diaspora that includes a shared belief in the possibility of return to home, evident in songs such as the 1943 Welsh song A Welcome in the Hillside, in which a Welsh word translating roughly as a yearning to return home, hiraeth, is used: We’ll kiss away each hour of hiraeth When you come home again to Wales. However, the immensely popular I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen, not of Irish origin but written by Thomas Westendorf of Illinois in 1875, suggests that such emotions can have a resonance beyond the diaspora. Anti-colonial sentiments about home can also be expressed by long-time inhabitants, as Harry Belafonte demonstrated in Island in the Sun: This is my island in the sun Where my people have toiled since time begun. Though I may sail on many a sea, Her shores will always be home to me. War brought a deluge of sentimental songs lamenting separation from home and loved ones, just as likely to be parents and siblings as sweethearts. Radios allowed wider audiences and greater popularity for these songs. If separation had brought a longing previously, the added horrors of war presented a stronger contrast between that which the young soldiers were missing and that which they were experiencing. Both the First and Second World Wars gave rise to songs long since sung which originated in such separations, but these also had a strong sense of home as defined by the nationalism that has for over a century given the contours of expectations of soldiers. Focusing on home, these songs seldom speak of the details of war. Rather they are specific about what the singers have left behind and what they hope to return to. Songs of home did not have to be written specifically for the war effort nor for overseas troops. Irving Berlin’s 1942 White Christmas, written for a film, became extremely popular with US troops during WWII, instilling a sense of home that related to familiarities and festivities. Expressing a sense of home could be specific and relate to regions or towns, as did I’m Goin’ Back Again to Yarrawonga, or it could refer to any home, anywhere where there were sons away fighting. Indeed the American Civil War song When Johnny Comes Marching Home, written by Patrick Sarsfield Gilmour, was sung by both Northerners and Southerners, so adaptable was it, with home remarkably unspecified and undescribed. The 1914 British song Keep the Home Fires Burning by Ivor Novello and Lena Ford was among those that evoked a connection between home and the military effort and helped establish a responsibility on those at home to remain optimistic: Keep the Homes fires burning While your hearts are yearning, Though your lads are far away They dream of home, There’s a silver lining Through the dark clouds shining, Turn the dark clouds inside out, Till the boys come Home. No space exists in this song for critique of the reasons for war, nor of a role for women other than that of homemaker and moral guardian. It was women’s duty to ensure men enlisted and home was rendered a private site for emotional enlistment for a presumed public good, though ironically also a point of personal hope where the light of love burned for the enlistees’ safe return. Later songs about home and war challenged these traditional notions. Two serve as examples. One is Pink Floyd’s brief musical piece of the 1970s, Bring the Boys Back Home, whose words of protest against the American war on Viet Nam present home, again, as a site of safety but within a less conservative context. Home becomes implicated in a challenge to the prevailing foreign policy and the interests that influence it, undermining the normal public sphere/private sphere distinction. The other more complex song is Judy Small’s Mothers, Daughters, Wives, from 1982, set against a backdrop of home. Small eloquently describes the dynamics of the domestic space and how women understood their roles in relation to the First and Second World Wars and the Viet Nam War. Reinforcing that “The materialities and imaginaries of home are closely connected” (Blunt and Dowling 188), Small sings of how the gold frames held the photographs that mothers kissed each night And the doorframe held the shocked and silent strangers from the fight. Small provides a rare musical insight into the disjuncture between the men who left the domestic space and those who return to it, and we sense that women may have borne much of the brunt of those awful changes. The idea of domestic bliss is also challenged, though from the returned soldier’s point of view, in Redgum’s 1983 song I Was Only Nineteen, written by group member John Schuman. It touches on the tragedy of young men thrust into war situations and the horrific after-affects for them, which cannot be shrugged off on return to home. The nurturing of home has limits but the privacy associated with the domestic sphere has often concealed the violence and mental anguish that happens away from public view. But by this time most of the songs referring to home were dominated once more by sentimental love, often borne of travel as mobility rose. Journeys help “establish the thresholds and boundaries of home” and can give rise to “an idealized, ideological and ethnocentric view of home” (Mallett 78). Where previously songsters had sung of leaving home in exile or for escape from poverty, lyrics from the 1960s onwards often suggested that work had removed people from loved ones. It could be work on a day-by-day basis, as in A Hard Day’s Night from the 1964 film of the same name, where the Beatles illuminate differences between the public sphere of work and the private sphere to which they return: When I’m home, everything seems to be alright, When I’m home feeling you holding me tight, tight, yeah and reiterated by Paul McCartney in Every Night: And every night that day is through But tonight I just want to stay in And be with you. Lyrics such as these and McCartney’s call to be taken “...home to the Mull of Kintyre,” singled him out for his home-and-hearth messages (Dempsey). But work might involve longer absences and thus more deepfelt loneliness. Simon and Garfunkel’s exemplary Homeward Bound starkly portrays a site of “away-ness”: I’m sittin’ in the railway station, got a ticket for my destination… Mundaneness, monotony and predictability contrast with the home to which the singer’s thoughts are constantly escaping. The routine is familiar but the faces are those of strangers. Home here is, again, not simply a domicile but the warmth of those we know and love. Written at a railway station, Homeward Bound echoes sentiments almost identical to those of (Leaving on a) Jet Plane, written by John Denver at an airport in 1967. Denver also co-wrote (Take Me Home) Country Roads, where, in another example of anthropomorphism as a tool of establishing a strong link, he asks to be taken home to the place I belong West Virginia, mountain momma, Take me home, Country Roads. The theme has recurred in numerous songs since, spawning examples such as Darin and Alquist’s When I Get Home, Chris Daughtry’s Home, Michael Bublé’s Home and Will Smith’s Ain’t No Place Like Home, where, in an opening reminiscent of Homeward Bound, the singer is Sitting in a hotel room A thousand miles away from nowhere Sloped over a chair as I stare… Furniture from home, on the other hand, can be used to evoke contentment and bliss, as demonstrated by George Weiss and Bob Thiele’s song The Home Fire, in which both kin and the objects of home become charged with meaning: All of the folks that I love are there I got a date with my favourite chair Of course, in regard to earlier songs especially, while the traveller associates home with love, security and tenderness, back at home the waiting one may have had feelings more of frustration and oppression. One is desperate to get back home, but for all we know the other may be desperate to get out of home or to develop a life more meaningful than that which was then offered to women. If the lot of homemakers was invisible to national economies (Waring), it seemed equally invisible to mainstream songwriters. This reflects the tradition that “Despite home being generally considered a feminine, nurturing space created by women themselves, they often lack both authority and a space of their own within this realm” (Mallett 75). Few songs have offered the perspective of the one at home awaiting the return of the traveller. One exception is the Seekers’ 1965 A World of Our Own but, written by Tom Springfield, the words trilled by Judith Durham may have been more of a projection of the traveller’s hopes and expectations than a true reflection of the full experiences of housebound women of the day. Certainly, the song reinforces connections between home and intimacy and privacy: Close the door, light the lights. We’re stayin’ home tonight, Far away from the bustle and the bright city lights. Let them all fade away, just leave us alone And we’ll live in a world of our own. This also strongly supports Gaston Bachelard’s claim that one’s house in the sense of a home is one’s “first universe, a real cosmos” (qtd. in Blunt and Dowling 12). But privacy can also be a loneliness when home is not inhabited by loved ones, as in the lyrics of Don Gibson’s 1958 Oh, Lonesome Me, where Everybody’s going out and having fun I’m a fool for staying home and having none. Similar sentiments emerge in Debbie Boone’s You Light up My Life: So many nights I’d sit by my window Waiting for someone to sing me his song. Home in these situations can be just as alienating as the “away” depicted as so unfriendly by Homeward Bound’s strangers’ faces and the “million people” who still leave Michael Bublé feeling alone. Yet there are other songs that depict “away” as a prison made of freedom, insinuating that the lack of a home and consequently of the stable love and commitment presumably found there is a sad situation indeed. This is suggested by the lilting tune, if not by the lyrics themselves, in songs such as Wandrin’ Star from the musical Paint Your Wagon and Ron Miller’s I’ve Never Been to Me, which has both a male and female version with different words, reinforcing gendered experiences. The somewhat conservative lyrics in the female version made it a perfect send-up song in the 1994 film Priscilla: Queen of the Desert. In some songs the absentee is not a traveller but has been in jail. In Tie a Yellow Ribbon round the Ole Oak Tree, an ex-inmate states “I’m comin’ home. I’ve done my time.” Home here is contingent upon the availability and forgivingness of his old girl friend. Another song juxtaposing home with prison is Tom Jones’ The Green, Green Grass of Home in which the singer dreams he is returning to his home, to his parents, girlfriend and, once again, an old oak tree. However, he awakes to find he was dreaming and is about to be executed. His body will be taken home and placed under the oak tree, suggesting some resigned sense of satisfaction that he will, after all, be going home, albeit in different circumstances. Death and home are thus sometimes linked, with home a euphemism for the former, as suggested in many spirituals, with heaven or an afterlife being considered “going home”. The reverse is the case in the haunting Bring Him Home of the musical Les Misérables. With Marius going off to the barricades and the danger involved, Jean Valjean prays for the young man’s safe return and that he might live. Home is connected here with life, safety and ongoing love. In a number of songs about home and absence there is a sense of home being a place where morality is gently enforced, presumably by women who keep men on the straight and narrow, in line with one of the women’s roles of colonial Australia, researched by Anne Summers. These songs imply that when men wander from home, their morals also go astray. Wild Rover bemoans Oh, I’ve been a wild rover for many a year, and I’ve spent all my money on whiskey and beer… There is the resolve in the chorus, however, that home will have a reforming influence. Gene Pitney’s Twenty-Four Hours from Tulsa poses the dangers of distance from a wife’s influence, while displaying opposition to the sentimental yearning of so many other songs: Dearest darlin’, I have to write to say that I won’t be home anymore ‘cause something happened to me while I was drivin’ home And I’m not the same anymore Class as well as gender can be a debated issue in meanings attached to home, as evident in several songs that take a more jaundiced view of home, seeing it as a place from which to escape. The Animals’ powerful We Gotta Get Outta This Place clearly suggests a life of drudgery in a home town or region. Protectively, the lyrics insist “Girl, there’s a better life for me and you” but it has to be elsewhere. This runs against the grain of other British songs addressing poverty or a working class existence as something that comes with its own blessings, all to do with an area identified as home. These traits may be loyalty, familiarity or a refusal to judge and involve identities of placement rather than of displacement in, for instance, Gerry and the Pacemakers’ Ferry Cross the Mersey: People around every corner, they seem to smile and say “We don’t care what your name is, boy. We’ll never send you away.” This bears out Blunt and Dowling’s claim that “people’s senses of themselves are related to and produced through lived and metaphorical experiences of home” (252). It also resonates with some of the region-based identity and solidarity issues explored a short time later by Paul Willis in his study of working class youth in Britain, which help to inform how a sense of home can operate to constrict consciousness, ideas and aspirations. Identity features strongly in other songs about home. Several years after Neil Young recorded his 1970 song Southern Man about racism in the south of the USA, the group Lynyrd Skynyrd, responded with Sweet Home Alabama. While the meaning of its lyrics are still debated, there is no debate about the way in which the song has been embraced, as I recently discovered first-hand in Tennessee. A banjo-and-fiddle band performing the song during a gig virtually brought down the house as the predominantly southern audience clapped, whopped and stamped its feet. The real meanings of home were found not in the lyrics but in the audience’s response. Wally Johnson and Bob Brown’s 1975 Home Among the Gum Trees is a more straightforward ode to home, with lyrics that prescribe a set of non-commodified values. It is about simplicity and the right to embrace a lifestyle that includes companionship, leisure and an enjoyment of and appreciation of nature, all threatened seriously in the three decades since the song’s writing. The second verse in which large shopping complexes – and implicitly the consumerism they encourage – are eschewed (“I’d trade it all tomorrow for a little bush retreat where the kookaburras call”), is a challenge to notions of progress and reflects social movements of the day, The Green Bans Movement, for instance, took a broader and more socially conscientious attitude towards home and community, putting forward alternative sets of values and insisting people should have a say in the social and aesthetic construction of their neighbourhoods as well as the impacts of their labour (Mundey). Ironically, the song has gone on to become the theme song for a TV show about home gardens. With a strong yet more vague notion of home, Peter Allen’s I Still Call Australia Home, was more prone to commodification and has been adopted as a promotional song for Qantas. Nominating only the desire to travel and the love of freedom as Australian values, both politically and socially innocuous within the song’s context, this catchy and uplifting song, when not being used as an advertisement, paradoxically works for a “diaspora” of Australians who are not in exile but have mostly travelled for reasons of pleasure or professional or financial gain. Another paradox arises from the song Home on the Range, dating back to the 19th century at a time when the frontier was still a strong concept in the USA and people were simultaneously leaving homes and reminiscing about home (Mechem). Although it was written in Kansas, the lyrics – again vague and adaptable – were changed by other travellers so that versions such as Colorado Home and My Arizona Home soon abounded. In 1947 Kansas made Home on the Range its state song, despite there being very few buffalo left there, thus highlighting a disjuncture between the modern Kansas and “a home where the buffalo roam” as described in the song. These themes, paradoxes and oppositional understandings of home only scratch the surface of the wide range of claims that are made on home throughout popular music. It has been shown that home is a flexible concept, referring to homelands, regions, communities and private houses. While predominantly used to evoke positive feelings, mostly with traditional views of the relationships that lie within homes, songs also raise challenges to notions of domesticity, the rights of those inhabiting the private sphere and the demarcation between the private and public spheres. Songs about home reflect contexts and challenges of their respective eras and remind us that vigorous discussion takes place about and within homes. The challenges are changing. Where many women once felt restrictively tied to the home – and no doubt many continue to do so – many women and men are now struggling to rediscover spatial boundaries, with production and consumption increasingly impinging upon relationships that have so frequently given the term home its meaning. With evidence that we are working longer hours and that home life, in whatever form, is frequently suffering (Beder, Hochschild), the discussion should continue. In the words of Sam Cooke, Bring it on home to me! References Bacheland, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1994. Beder, Sharon. Selling the Work Ethic: From Puritan Pulpit to Corporate PR. London: Zed Books, 2000. Blunt, Alison, and Robyn Dowling. Home. London: Routledge, 2006. Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. London: UCL Press, 1997. Cooper, B. Lee. “Good Timin’: Searching for Meaning in Clock Songs.” Popular Music and Society 30.1 (Feb. 2007): 93-106. Dempsey, J.M. “McCartney at 60: A Body of Work Celebrating Home and Hearth.” Popular Music and Society 27.1 (Feb. 2004): 27-40. Eva, Phil. “Home Sweet Home? The Culture of ‘Exile’ in Mid-Victorian Popular Song.” Popular Music 16.2 (May 1997): 131-150. Hochschild, Arlie. The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work. New York: Metropolitan/Holt, 1997. Mallett, Sonia. “Understanding Home: A Critical Review of the Literature.” The Sociological Review 52.1 (2004): 62-89. Mechem, Kirke, “The Story of ‘Home on the Range’.” Reprint from the Kansas Historical Quarterly (Nov. 1949). Topeka, Kansas: Kansas State Historical Society. 28 May 2007 http://www.emporia.edu/cgps/tales/nov2003.html>. Mundey, Jack. Green Bans and Beyond. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1981. Nelson-Burns, Lesley. Folk Music of England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and America. 29 May 2007 http://www.contemplator.com/ireland/thoerin.html>. Summers, Anne. Damned Whores and God’s Police: The Colonization of Women in Australia. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975. Walter, Bronwen. Outsiders Inside: Whiteness, Place and Irish Women. London: Routledge, 2001. Waring, Marilyn. Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women Are Worth. Wellington, NZ: Allen & Unwin, 1988. Willis, Paul. Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. New York: Columbia UP, 1977. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Varney, Wendy. "Homeward Bound or Housebound?: Themes of Home in Popular Music." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/16-varney.php>. APA Style Varney, W. (Aug. 2007) "Homeward Bound or Housebound?: Themes of Home in Popular Music," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/16-varney.php>.

“The electronic media do away with cleanliness; they are by their nature ‘dirty’. That is part of their productive power…” (Enzensberger qtd. in Hartley 23) “Why do people have to be so ugly? Write about such ugly characters? It’s perverted. I know you all think that I’m being prissy but I don’t care. I was brought up in a certain way and this is … mean-spirited.” (Writing student, Storytelling). In 1986 David Lynch brought the suburbs into focus. Before Lynch they had remained slightly bland and indistinct, white picket fences and lush green lawns in the background of Doris Day comedies, Douglas Sirk films and television sitcoms. But in the opening shots of Blue Velvet (1986) Lynch announced that he was going to do something quite different. He skipped through the stock suburban footage of vibrant colours – the red roses, the blue skies, the happy, smiling faces of the children – preferring instead, to track through the grass. There, through a series of grotesque close-ups of seething, warring insects, Lynch revealed the anomalies and ambiguities beneath the bright and shiny surface of suburbia. Recalling his childhood of “elegant homes, tree-lined streets, the milkman… Middle America as it is supposed to be” (Rodley 10), Lynch explains: “I discovered that if one looks a little closer at this beautiful world, there are always red ants underneath… I saw life in extreme close-ups” (Rodley 11). In Blue Velvet Lynch offers us an extreme close-up of suburbia by focussing on the dirt. In her seminal work Purity and Danger anthropologist Mary Douglas studied the way some substances are classified as dirt because they are (following William James) “matter out of place” (Douglas 36), something that is considered inappropriate in a given context. “Dirt” is therefore an indication of what is taboo and disruptive, an idea Douglas goes on to link to notions of ambiguity and anomaly. Blue Velvet’s “matter out of place” begins with the warring insects beneath the lawn, continues with the discovery of an amputated ear and goes on to include fellatio at knife-point, sex acts with velvet, kidnapping, murder and torture, all juxtaposed against an adolescent romance, a Hardy Boys mystery and the blue skies and birdsong of the opening. On its release Blue Velvet was considered part of a wave of mid-eighties films that were re-evaluating suburbia, amongst them True Stories (1986), Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), River’s Edge (1986) and the thematically similar Something’s Wild (1986). But Lynch’s ability to make the ordinary strange, through his juxtaposition of image and sound (Chion), meant that Blue Velvet went further than its contemporaries because in this film the suburban as a whole took on the “strange and threatening” characteristics of something without a stable identity (Douglas). Just as critics proclaimed Blue Velvet “leaves us altered, for good or ill – forever” (Total Film 96) so too does Lynch soil our very perception of the suburban, his “red ant” view of the world suggesting disorder where there was order, desperation where there was happiness, filth where there was cleanliness. In this way Blue Velvet inaugurates a genre of “corrupted idealism in the suburbs” (Total Film 97) that would include The Virgin Suicides (1999), Donnie Darko (2001), American Beauty (1999) and the works of Todd Solondz, together with television series like Lynch’s own Twin Peaks (1990-1991), Picket Fences (1992-1996), Dead like Me (2003-2004), Close to Home (2005-), Weeds (2005-) and Desperate Housewives (2004-). John Hartley applies Douglas’ notion of dirt to both ‘television’ and its ‘audience’, referring to them as ‘dirty’ categories. This is because “television texts do not supply the analyst with a warrant for considering them either as unitary or as structurally bounded into an inside and outside” (Hartley 22). Similarly what sense an audience might make of television “depends… on the discursive resources available” some of which the audience will “identify” with and some of which will “marginalize”, “deny” or be “more obvious, well-worn and time-honoured than others” (Hartley 23). Hartley draws on the work of Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Edmund Leach (discussing the ‘dirtiness’ of television and individuals respectively) to conclude that “power is located in dirt” (Hartley 23) because dirt creates “ambiguous boundaries” between the media and its readers. While film may be a more bounded, unitary medium (delineated at the very least by its running time) the “ambiguous boundaries” that dirt creates are something Lynch toys with in Blue Velvet. In a similar fashion to Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), the viewer is made complicit in the voyeuristic tendencies of his protagonist, Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan). But Lynch goes a step further, turning the camera back on his voyeur in answer to a concern voiced by the nurse, Stella (Thelma Ritter), in that earlier film: “We’ve become a race of Peeping Toms. What people ought to do is look in for a change.” Lynch offers us Jeffrey as a potential source of identification but also makes us witness to Jeffrey’s own moral failings. In this way Jeffrey becomes as ambiguous as his sadomasochistic relationship with singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini), simultaneously abuser and abused, truth-teller and deceiver. As his girlfriend Sandy (Laura Dern) states: “I don’t know if you’re a detective or a pervert.” Here, the ambiguity offered by dirt results in the examination – the making visible – of both the voyeur and the audience as (complicit) voyeurs. Both are called into question – “detective or pervert?” – continually blurring the boundaries between subject and object, viewer and participant. By movie’s end Jeffrey can return to Sandy and the alluring veneer of suburbia, but he has murdered, molested and (impliedly) been raped. Dirt sticks. Jeffrey is forever changed and so is our perception of the suburban. If Lynch’s Blue Velvet revealed the rich vein of dirt running through suburbia, then perhaps it is Todd Solondz who has mined it most extensively. While Lynch was to return to suburbia in his television series Twin Peaks his attention has frequently turned to other more extreme and experimental ideas. In contrast Solondz has focussed almost exclusively on the suburban in four of his projects: Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995), Happiness (1998), Storytelling (2001) and Palindromes (2004). It is Happiness that provides the clearest sense of the “imagined community” of suburbia because its multiple storylines suggest multiple lives being conducted simultaneously. Like Blue Velvet it presents a veneer of suburban life which it then goes on to soil, particularly through the Maplewood family (whose story provides the climax for the film). In the first shot of the Maplewood’s home a cleaner is seen at the rear of the shot scrubbing the floor; dirt is presented as a threat to order and Trish Maplewood (Cynthia Stevenson) refers to “having it all”. By the film’s end the focus will have shifted to masturbation, homicide, dismemberment, various perverse sexual acts and the revelation that her husband is a paedophile. Uniting these disparate streams are the searches for happiness each of the nine central characters undertakes, with only character, the boy Billy Maplewood (Rufus Reed), achieving his happiness, through a successful ejaculation that provides the denouement of the film. Much like Blue Velvet, Happiness was decried as “sick” upon its release. But Happiness’s dirtiness goes further than its subject matter; it also resides in the “ambiguity of its boundaries with its media neighbours” (Hartley 25). Whereas Hartley finds that television is “characterized by a will to limit its own excess, to settle its significations into established, taken-for-granted, common senses, which viewers can be disciplined to identify and to identify with” (37) the dirty filmic text makes no effort to limit its excess (rather limitation is applied through censorship and ratings); Happiness is simultaneously scary, repellant and poignant. Allen (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) the obscene phone-caller, Kristina (Camryn Manheim) the lonely woman who dismembers her rapist and Bill Maplewood (Dylan Baker) the loving father and paedophile all elicit moments of horror, humour and sympathy. Indeed, Happiness successfully “scandalizes the overlaps” between categories without attempting to clarify their ambiguities (Hartley 38) by constantly deflecting and redirecting the audience’s identification with any one character by revealing more about that character (he is shallow, she kills, he is a serial rapist) or simply through the constant narrative shifts between characters. As Hartley notes: “the point about dirt, crudely, is that it encompasses notions of ambiguity, contradiction, power and social relations all in one” (39). In the context of the suburban these ideas of dirt are frequently equated with sex. Lynch had previously depicted sex as “the site of domestic trauma, fear, power and – on occasion – euphoria” (Rodley 125): Jeffrey experiences all four of these aspects in his encounters with Dorothy, something that leaves him profoundly shamed and shaken. Sex is similarly ancillary to dirt in Happiness where Allen, Kristina and Bill’s own predilections and pleasures lead them into ambiguous power and social relations that are alternatively thwarted, indulged and constrained. This lends “Happiness” itself to being read as an ironic title for the film, but while Billy is the only character to achieve the euphoria promised, many of the characters enjoy (brief) moments of happiness, be it Joy Jordan’s (Jane Adams) one night stand or Allen and Kristina’s date (and possibility of redemption). Similarly, even the paedophile father Bill confesses to his son that sex with young boys is “great”, some small measure of happiness even as he admits to being sick. “Happiness” itself is therefore also a dirty, subjective, embodied and ambiguous term; one man’s happiness is another’s shame, another’s pain, another’s crime. Solondz actually comments on the power of dirt in the “Nonfiction” segment of his next feature Storytelling. In many respects a parody of the suburban genre (through its obvious digs at American Beauty) “Nonfiction” chronicles the efforts of documentarian Toby Oxman (Paul Giamatti) to construct a film around disaffected teenager Scooby Livingstone (Mark Webber). The end product, “American Scooby”, reveals that Oxman cannot move beyond the surface. Unlike Lynch or Solondz, the dirtiness of his subject slips by unnoticed. Oxman’s documentary can only provoke laughter through its exploitation of Scooby as it ignores the subtleties occurring in the Livingstone family’s lives, most notably Scooby’s relationship with his friend Stanley and the rising resentment of Consuelo the maid (culminating in her gassing the family to death as they sleep, perhaps the ultimate statement on the ambiguity of happiness). This probable commercial success/social failure of “American Scooby” confirms the power of dirt implicit in Lynch and Solondz’s films. By soiling suburbia Lynch and Solondz have exnominated the middle-class, making visible the minutiae, the motives and the pleasures of a social grouping traditionally under-represented on film. Typically, Hartley says, we identify the “power of dirt” as being “of the negative kind – it infects and corrupts the rising generation” (25), arguments levelled at both of these films. But as Douglas argues, a culture’s taboos can tell us a great deal about its sense of its own identity. Blue Velvet and Happiness can therefore be understood in Douglas’s terms as part of a “dirt-affirming ritual” that accesses the power “residing in what is excluded from [the traditional] ordering of things” (165), thus exnominating the middle-class and revealing our complicity in the voyeurism of their characters. This then is the true power of dirt. It makes visible all the ambiguities and anomalies we try to exclude from our lives – and our suburbs. That this is currently the formula for one of the most popular series on television (Desperate Housewives), albeit in a slightly cleaner “network friendly” formula, suggests that Lynch and Solondz’s soiling of suburbia will have resonance for some time to come. References Atkinson, Michael. Blue Velvet. London: BFI, 1997. Chion, Michael. David Lynch. Trans. Robert Julian. London: BFI, 1995. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge, 2002 [1966]. Drazin, Charles. blue velvet. London: Bloomsbury, 2000. Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. “Constituents of a Theory of the Media.” In Denis McQuail, ed. Sociology of Mass Communication. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. Hartley, John. “Television and the Power of Dirt.” Tele-ology: Studies in Television. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. Leach, Edmund. Culture and Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1976. Lynch, David. Blue Velvet. 1986. Rodley, Chris, ed. Lynch on Lynch. London: Faber and Faber, 1997. Solondz, Todd. Happiness. 1998. ———. Happiness. London: Faber and Faber, 1998. ———. Storytelling. 2001. ———. Palindromes. 2004. ———. Welcome to the Dollhouse. 1995. Total Film: The Decades Collection: The Eighties. London: Future Publications, 2006. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Bainbridge, Jason. "Soiling Suburbia: Lynch, Solondz and the Power of Dirt." M/C Journal 9.5 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/11-bainbridge.php>. APA Style Bainbridge, J. (Nov. 2006) "Soiling Suburbia: Lynch, Solondz and the Power of Dirt," M/C Journal, 9(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/11-bainbridge.php>.

Le châtiment est généralement considéré comme la réponse à une violation des lois ou des normes. Plus spécifiquement, dans le langage juridique, on parle de peine. On se réfère alors à la définition qui en a été donnée par le philosophe du droit britannique H. L. A. Hart (1959), selon lequel il s’agit de l’infliction d’une souffrance ou d’un équivalent à l’auteur réel ou supposé d’une infraction à l’encontre des règles légales, la décision et l’exécution en revenant à des êtres humains autres que le contrevenant qui agissent dans le cadre d’une autorité instituée. Ces cinq critères sont typiquement présents lorsqu’une personne accusée d’un crime ou d’un délit est jugée par un tribunal et, au terme du procès, se voit condamnée à une sanction telle qu’un emprisonnement. Cette situation est celle qu’étudie David Garland (1990). Deux faits méritent toutefois d’être relevés à propos de cette définition. D’une part, elle produit implicitement une légitimation du châtiment, qui est à la fois morale, puisqu’il punit l’auteur d’une infraction, et légale, puisqu’il procède d’une pure application de la loi. D’autre part, elle suppose un travail de normalisation et une forme de publicité, excluant notamment les punitions dans le cadre familial ou scolaire. Face à cette lecture normative, l’anthropologue s’interroge : qu’en est-il dans les faits ? Comme l’a établi Bronislaw Malinowski (1926) dans le cas des sociétés qu’on appelait alors primitives, ce déplacement ethnographique a une fonction critique, dans la mesure où il soulève des questions qui vont à l’encontre du sens commun et dévoilent des faits inattendus. Il convient d’abord de se demander avec Nietzsche (1993 [1887]) dans une perspective généalogique comment il se fait qu’une équivalence soit ainsi établie entre la commission d’une infraction et l’infliction d’une souffrance. Cette interrogation conduit à une autre : en a-t-il été ainsi toujours et partout ? Le philologue s’avère ici d’un certain secours, puisqu’Émile Benveniste (1969) note que le verbe punir provient du latin pœna et du grec poin?, lequel correspond à la dette que l’on doit payer pour réparer un crime, la connotation doloriste du mot n’étant apparue que dans le latin tardif. Au départ, donc, la réponse à l’infraction commise procédait d’une logique de réparation. Il fallait indemniser la violation de la loi ou de la norme par un paiement, par exemple à la famille de la victime s’il s’agissait de violence ou de meurtre. Les études historiques confirment que tel était bien le cas dans les sociétés anciennes, et Georg Simmel (1997 [1907]) montre notamment que, dans l’Angleterre anglo-saxonne, le montant de la somme due pour la compensation d’un meurtre, appelée wergeld, était établi en fonction du statut de la personne tuée et que le châtiment dans ces cas est intervenu tardivement. Les données ethnologiques vont dans le même sens, et par exemple l’enquête conduite par Kalervo Oberg (1934) parmi les Tlingit d’Alaska révèle que le meurtre du membre d’un clan était réparé par la mise à mort d’un membre du clan de l’auteur du crime de rang égal, cette réparation se réduisant toutefois à une simple somme d’argent lorsque la victime était de statut inférieur. Quand cette logique de la dette et de sa restitution s’est-elle éteinte ? Dans le monde occidental, le fait essentiel a été le passage de l’ancien droit germanique au droit romain et de la réparation à la peine. Comme l’analyse Michel Foucault (2015 [1971]), cette évolution s’est faite en France sous la double influence de la Royauté, qui affaiblit ainsi les structures féodales, et de l’Église, qui introduit les notions de péché et de pénitence. Dans les sociétés précoloniales, c’est précisément la colonisation qui introduit ce changement, et Leopold Pospisil (1981) raconte la douloureuse rencontre des deux mondes dans le cas des Kapauku de Papouasie-Nouvelle Guinée, brutalement passés d’une situation où le paiement de dommages réparait une transgression de la norme à un paradigme juridique dans lequel l’emprisonnement était la réponse à la violation de la loi. L’imposition de cette sanction, qui n’était pas comprise par des populations dont la liberté était vue comme un bien supérieur, a donné lieu à des suicides et des révoltes. Un élément essentiel de cette transformation de la signification du châtiment, relevé par E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1972 [1937]), est son individualisation. Dans les sociétés sous le régime de la réparation, le collectif, qu’il s’agisse de la famille ou du clan, doit répondre de l’acte commis. Dans les sociétés sous le régime de la peine, c’est l’individu qui doit en rendre compte. Au principe d’échange entre des groupes se substitue un principe de responsabilité de la personne. D’une manière générale, on peut donc dire, au regard de cette analyse généalogique, que l’évolution s’est opérée, dans le long terme, d’une économie de la dette à une morale de la souffrance. Pour autant, la première n’a pas totalement disparu au bénéfice de la seconde. Il en existe de nombreuses illustrations contemporaines, dont la plus manifeste concerne le monde musulman. En effet, selon la loi islamique, pour autant qu’un crime n’ait pas été commis contre Dieu, le juge propose à la famille de la victime une alternative : soit la qisas, châtiment imposé sur la base de la loi du talion, impliquant donc la mort en cas de meurtre ; soit la diyya, réparation par une somme d’argent déterminée par le magistrat. Comme le montre Arzoo Osanloo (2012) à propos de l’Iran contemporain, la seconde formule est bien plus souvent utilisée que la première, mais le juge ajoute souvent au paiement du dommage une peine d’emprisonnement. Au regard de l’évolution qui vient d’être décrite, une autre question se pose, dont John Rawls (1955) souligne combien elle est débattue : comment justifie-t-on l’infliction d’une souffrance ? La philosophie morale et le droit ont en effet une double réponse. La première, utilitariste, dans la suite de Jeremy Bentham (2011 [1780]), pose que la souffrance de l’auteur d’un crime ne se justifie que pour autant qu’elle augmente le bonheur dans la société, autrement dit, qu’elle diminue la criminalité. Ce peut être par effet de neutralisation (l’exécution, l’emprisonnement, l’exil), dissuasion (pour l’individu et la collectivité) et réhabilitation (par la réforme morale ou la réinsertion sociale). La seconde, rétributiviste, héritière d’Emmanuel Kant (2011 [1795]), affirme que la souffrance ne se justifie qu’en tant qu’elle expie l’acte répréhensible commis, indépendamment de toute conséquence sociale, positive ou négative. La peine ainsi infligée doit en principe être équivalente de la violation de la loi ou de la norme (allant donc jusqu’à l’exécution en cas de meurtre). Le tournant punitif des dernières décennies dans la plupart des pays manifeste un glissement de la première justification vers la seconde. Ces deux théories, qui ont donné lieu, au cours des deux derniers siècles à une considérable littérature visant à contester ou affiner l’une ou l’autre, énoncent ce qui devrait justifier le châtiment, mais est-ce bien ainsi que les choses se passent dans le monde réel ? Rien n’est moins sûr, et nombre de travaux de sciences sociales le montrent. On peut trouver une justification au châtiment d’une personne, même possiblement innocente, pour faire un exemple, pour humilier un adversaire, pour pacifier un mécontentement populaire, pour satisfaire le désir de vengeance des proches d’une victime, pour instituer un ordre social inégal fondé sur la peur, pour simplifier des procédures judiciaires grâce au plaider coupable, et pour bien d’autres raisons encore. Mais quand bien même on a énuméré ces justifications rationnelles, on n’a pas épuisé les fondements de l’acte de punir car il demeure une forme de jouissance dans l’administration de la souffrance, qu’en paraphrasant Georges Bataille (1949), on peut appeler la part maudite du châtiment. Cette dimension affective se manifeste à travers les gestes de cruauté constatés dans les métiers de la répression et les excès de tourment habituels dans les institutions carcérales qui, comme l’analyse Everett Hughes (1962), ne sont pas seulement le fait d’individus ou même de professions. C’est la société qui leur délègue ce qu’elle considère comme ses basses œuvres, sans guère chercher à les réguler ou à en sanctionner les abus. On se souvient que Claude Lévi-Strauss (1955) établissait un parallèle entre l’anthropophagie, qui semble une pratique barbare aux yeux des Occidentaux, et les formes contemporaines du châtiment, notamment la prison, qui paraîtraient tout aussi choquantes aux Amérindiens. Comment expliquer que le châtiment tel qu’il existe dans les sociétés modernes non seulement se maintienne mais plus encore se développe considérablement ? Pour répondre à cette question, il faut probablement prendre en considération une dimension à laquelle la philosophie morale et le droit ont rarement prêté attention : c’est la manière dont le châtiment est réparti dans la société. Les théories normatives supposent en effet que l’on punisse de façon juste, ce qui implique à la fois que plus une infraction est grave et plus elle est lourdement sanctionnée et que pour une même infraction deux individus soient également sanctionnés. Est-ce le cas ? Les travaux menés par des chercheurs, à l’instar de Bruce Western (2006), sur la distribution du châtiment dans la société révèlent que les classes populaires et les minorités ethnoraciales sont très surreprésentées dans les prisons et plus largement dans l’ensemble de l’appareil punitif. Est-ce parce que leurs membres commettent plus de violations de la loi ou que ces violations sont plus graves ? Les études montrent que la sévérité du système pénal, depuis le niveau législatif de fabrication des lois jusqu’au niveau judiciaire de leur application, n’est pas principalement lié aux conséquences néfastes des actes commis mais tient à des choix opérés en fonction de ceux qui les commettent. Ainsi le vol à la tire est-il souvent plus durement réprimé que l’abus de biens sociaux et, plus généralement, la petite délinquance que la criminalité financière, même lorsque cette dernière a des effets désastreux en termes de paupérisation et de surmortalité des segments les plus fragiles de la société. Ce qui conduit Émile Durkheim (1996 [1893]) à inverser la définition habituelle du châtiment, en affirmant qu’on ne condamne pas un acte parce qu’il est criminel, mais qu’il est criminel parce qu’on le condamne. À quoi sert donc le châtiment si ce qui détermine sa sévérité est moins la gravité de l’acte que les caractéristiques sociales de son auteur ? En prolongeant la réflexion de Michel Foucault (1975), on peut penser que le châtiment n’a peut-être pas pour vocation première de sanctionner les transgressions de la loi, de protéger la société de leurs auteurs et in fine de réduire la délinquance et la criminalité, mais que sa fonction sociale principale est plutôt d’opérer des différenciations entre ceux que l’on peut punir et ceux que l’on veut épargner. Ainsi relève-t-il tout autant d’une politique de la justice, au sens du droit, que d’une politique de l’injustice, dans un sens moral. Dans un contexte où la population carcérale atteint des niveaux records dans le monde et où les pratiques punitives participent de la reproduction des inégalités (Fassin 2017), la réflexion anthropologique sur le châtiment est assurément une tâche essentielle.

Longing on a large scale is what makes history.Don DeLillo, UnderworldIntroductionWhile the media industries have been rather thoroughly dissected for their capacity to generate enthusiasm through well-honed practices of marketing and patterns of consumerism, any analysis of the shift underway to capture and modulate the ‘enthusiastic’ and affective labour of media industry practitioners themselves may still have much to learn by reaching back to the long tradition in Western philosophy: a tradition, starting with the Greeks that has almost always contrasted enthusiasm with reason (Heyd). To quote Hume: “Hope, pride, presumption, a warm imagination, together with ignorance, are … the true sources of enthusiasm” (73). Hume’s remarks are contextualised in protestant theological debates of the 18th century, where enthusiasm was a term for a religious practice, in which God possesses the believer. Especially English preachers and theologians were putting considerable energy into demonising this far too ecstatic form of belief in god (Heyd). This ambivalent attitude towards enthusiasm time-travels from the Greeks and the Enlightenment period straight into the 20th century. In 1929, William Henry Schoenau, an early author of self-help literature for the white-collar worker, aimed to gain a wider audience with the title: “Charm, Enthusiasm and Originality - their Acquisition and Use”. According to him, enthusiasm is necessary for the success of the salesman, and has to be generated by techniques such as a rigorous special diet and physical exercises of his facial muscles. But it also has to be controlled:Enthusiasm, when controlled by subtle repression, results in either élan, originality, magnetism, charm or “IT”, depending on the manner of its use. Uncontrolled enthusiasm results in blaring jazz, fanaticism and recklessness. A complete lack of enthusiasm produces the obsequious waiter and the uneducated street car conductor. (7)Though William Henry Schoenau got rather lost in his somewhat esoteric take on enthusiasm – for him it was a result of magnetic and electric currents – we argue that Schoenau had a point: Enthusiasm is a necessary affect in many forms of work, and especially so in the creative industries. It has to be generated, it sometimes has to be enacted, and it has also to be controlled. However, we disagree with Schoenau in one important issue: For us, enthusiasm can only be controlled up to a certain degree. Enthusiasm in the Creative IndustriesSchoenau wrote for an audience of salesmen and ambitious managers. This was simultaneous with the rise of Fordism. Most labour in Fordism was routine labour with the assembly line as its iconic representation. In mass-production itself, enthusiasm was not needed, often not even wanted. Henry Ford himself noted dryly: “Why do I get a human being when all I want is a pair of hands” (Kane 128). It was reserved for few occupational groups situated around the core of the mass-produced economy, such as salesmen, inventors, and leaders like him. “Henry Ford had a burning enthusiasm for the motor car” (Pearle 196).In industrial capitalism enthusiasm on a larger scale was not for the masses. It could be found in political movements, but hardly in the realm of work. This was different in the first socialist state. In the 1920s and 1930s Soviet Union the leaders turned their experience in stimulating a revolutionary mindset into a formula for industrial development – famously documented in Dziga Vertov’s “Enthusiasm. Symphony of the Donbass”.In capitalist countries things changed with the crisis of Fordism. The end of mass production and its transformation to flexible specialisation (Piore/Sabel) prepared the ground for a revival of enthusiasm on a large scale. Post-industrial economies rely on permanent innovation. Now discourses in media, management, and academia emphasise the relevance of buzzwords such as flexibility, adaptability, change, youth, speed, fun, and creativity. In social science debates around topics such as the cultural economy (Ray/Sayers, Cook et al., du Gay/Pryke, Amin/Thrift), affective labour (Lazzarato, Hardt/Negri, Virno) and creative industries (Florida, Hartley) gained in momentum (for an interesting take on enthusiasm see Bröckling). Enthusiasm has become an imperative for most professions. Those who are not on fire are in danger of getting fired. Producing and Consuming EnthusiasmOur interest in enthusiasm as affective labour emerged in an ethnographic and experimental project that we conducted in 2003-2007 in London’s creative industries. The project brought together three industrial and one academic partner to produce a reality TV show tailor-made for IPTV (internet-protocol-based television). During this project we encountered enthusiasm in many forms. Initially, we were faced with the need to be enthusiastic, while we established the project coalition. To be convincing, we had to pitch the commercial potential of such a project enthusiastically to our potential partners, and often we had to cope with rejections and start the search and pitch again (Caldwell). When the project coalition was set up, we as academic partners managed the network. In the following two years we had to cope with our partner’s different directions, different rhythms and different styles of enthusiasm. The TV producer for example had different ways to express excitement than the new media firm. Such differences resulted in conflicts and blockades, and part of our task as project managers was to rebuild an enthusiastic spirit after periods of frustration. At the same time enthusiasm was one of the ingredients of the digital object that we produced: `Real’ emotions form the material of most reality TV shows (Grindstaff). Affects are for reality TV, what steel was for a Fordist factory. We needed an enthusiastic audience as part of the filmed material. There is thus a need to elicit, select, engineer and film such emotions. To this aim we engaged with the participants and the audience in complex ways, sometimes by distancing ourselves, other times by consciously manipulating them, and at even other times by sharing enthusiasm (similar processes in respect to other emotions are ethnographically described in Hesmondhalgh/Baker). Generating and managing enthusiasm is obviously a necessary part of affective labour in the creative industries. However, just as Hesmondhalgh/Baker indicate, this seemingly simple claim is problematic.Affective Labour as Practice‘Affective labour’ is a term that describes labour through its products: ‘A feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, or passion’ (Hardt/Negri 292-293). Thus, the term ‘affective labour’ usually describes a sector by the area of human endeavour, which it commodifies. But the concept looses its coherence, if it is used to describe labour by its practice (for an analogue argument see Dowling). The latter is what interests us. Such a usage will have to re-introduce the notion of the working subject. To see affective labour as a practice should enable us to describe in more detail, how enthusiasm shapes the becoming of a cultural object. Who employed affect when and what kinds of affects in which way? Analysing enthusiasm as social practice and affective labour usually brings about one of two contrasting perceptions. On the one hand one can celebrate enthusiasm – like Pekka Himanen – as one of the key characteristics for a new work ethic emerging alongside the Protestant Ethic. On the other hand we find critique of the need to display affects. Barbara Ehrenreich shows how a forced display of enthusiasm becomes a requirement for all office workers to survive in late capitalism. Judging from our experience these two approaches need to be synthesized: Much affective labour consists in the display of affects, in showing off, in pretending. On the other hand, enthusiasm can only realise its potential, if it is ‘real’ (as opposed to enacted).With Ehrenreich, Hochschild and many others we think that an analysis of affective labour as a practice needs to start with a notion of expression. Enthusiasm can be expressed through excited gestures, rapid movements, raised voices, eyes wide open, clapping hands, speech. For us it was often impossible to separate which expression was ‘genuine’ and which was enacted. Judging from introspection, it is probable that many actors had a similar experience to ours: They mixed some genuine enthusiasm with more or less enforced forms of re-enactment. Perhaps re-enactment turned to a ‘real’ feeling: We enacted ourselves into an authentic mood - an effect that is also described as “deep acting” (Grandey). What can happen inside us, can also happen in social situations. German philosopher Max Scheler went to substantial lengths to make a case for the contagiousness of affects, and enthusiasm is one of the most contagious affects. Mutual contagiousness of enthusiasm can lead to collective elation, with or without genuine enthusiasm of all members. The difference of real, authentic affects and enacted affects is thus not only theoretically, but also empirically rather problematic. It is impossible to make convincing claims about the degree of authenticity of an affect. However, it is also impossible to ignore this ambivalence. Both ‘authentic’ and ‘faked’ enthusiasm can be affective labour, but they differ hugely in terms of their productive capacities.Enthusiasm as Productive ForceWhy is enthusiasm so important in the first place? The answer is threefold. Firstly, an enthusiastic worker is more productive. He or she will work more intensively, put in more commitment, is likely to go the so-called extra mile. Enthusiasm can create a surplus of labour and a surplus of value, thus a surplus of productivity. Secondly enthusiasm is part of the creative act. It can unleash energies and overcome self-imposed limitations. Thirdly enthusiasm is future-oriented, a stimulus for investment, always risky. Enthusiasm can be the affective equivalent of venture capital – but it is not reified in capital, but remains incorporated in labour. Thus enthusiasm not only leads to an increase of productivity, it can be productive itself. This is what makes it to one of the most precious commodities in the creative industries. To make this argument in more detail we need to turn to one of the key philosophers of affect.Thinking Enthusiasm with SpinozaFor Spinoza, all affects are derivatives of a first basic drive or appetite. Desire/appetite is the direct equivalent of what Spinoza calls Conatus: Our striving to increase our power. From this starting point, Spinoza derives two basic affects: pleasure/joy and sadness/pain. Pleasure/joy is the result of an increase of our power, and sadness/pain is the result of its decrease. Spinoza explains all other affects through this basic framework. Even though enthusiasm is not one of the affects that Spinoza mentions, we want to suggest that Spinoza’s approach enables us to understand the productivity of enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is a hybrid between desire (the drive) and joy (the basic affect). Like hope or fear, it is future-oriented. It is a desire (to increase our power) combined with an anticipated outcome. Present and the future are tightly bound. Enthusiasm differs in this respect from its closest relatives: hope and optimism. Both hope and optimism believe in the desired outcome, but only against the odds and with a presumption of doubt. Enthusiasm is a form of ecstatic and hyper-confident hope. It already rewards us with joy in the present.With Spinoza we can understand the magical trick of future-oriented enthusiasm: To be enthusiastic means to anticipate an outcome of an increased power. This anticipation increases our power in the present. The increased power in the present can then be used to achieve the increased power in the future. If successful, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is this future-orientedness, which can make enthusiasm productive. Actions and PassionsIn its Greek origin (‘enthousiasmos’) to be enthusiastic meant to be possessed or inspired by a god. An enthusiast was someone with an intense religious fervour and sometimes someone with an exaggerated belief in religious inspiration. Accordingly, enthusiasm is often connected to the devotion to an ideal, cause, study or pursuit. In late capitalism, we get possessed by different gods. We get possessed by the gods of opportunity – in our case the opportunities of a new technology like IPTV. Obsessions cannot easily be switched on and off. This is part of affective labour: The ability to open up and let the gods of future-oriented enthusiasm take hold of us. We believe in something not for the sake of believing, but for the sake of what we believe in. But at the same time we know that we need to believe. The management of this contradiction is a problem of control. As enthusiasm now constitutes a precious commodity, we cannot leave it to mere chance. Spinoza addresses exactly this point. He distinguishes two kinds of affects, actions and passions. Actions are what we control, passions are what controls us. Joy (= the experience of increased power of acting) can also weaken, if someone is not able to control the affection that triggered the joy. In such a case it becomes a passion: An increase of power that weakens in the long run. Enthusiasm is often exactly this. How can enthusiasm as a passion be turned into an action? One possible answer is to control what Spinoza calls the ‘ideas’ of the bodily affections. For Spinoza, affections (affectiones) ‘strike’ the body, but affect (affectus) is formed of both, of the bodily affectiones, but also of our ideas of these affectiones. Can such ideas become convictions, beliefs, persuasions? Our experience suggests that this is indeed possible. The excitement about the creative possibilities of IPTV, for example, was turned into a conviction. We had internalised the affect as part of our beliefs. But we had internalised it for a prize: The more it became an idea the more stable it got, but the less it was a full, bodily affect, something that touched our nervous system. We gained power over it for the price that it became less powerful in its drive.Managing the UnmanageableIn all institutions and organisations enthusiasm needs to be managed on a regular basis. In project networks however the orchestration of affects faces a different set of obstacles than in traditional organizations. Power structures are often shifting and not formally defined. Project partners are likely to have diverging interests, different expectations and different views on how to collaborate. What might be a disappointing result for one partner can be a successful result for another one. Differences of interest can be accompanied by differences of the expression of enthusiasm. This was clearly the case in our project network. The TV company entered a state of hype and frenzy while pitching the project. They were expressing their enthusiasm with talk about prominent TV channels that would buy the product, and celebrities who would take part in the show. The new media company showed its commitment through the development of beautifully designed time plans and prototypes – one of them included the idea to advertise the logo of the project on banners placed on airplanes. This sort of enthusiastic presentation led the TV producer to oppose the vision of the new media’s brand developer: She perceived this as an example of unrealistic pipe dreams. In turn the TV producer’s repeated name-dropping led other partners to mistrust them.Timing was another reason why it seemed to be impossible to integrate the affective cohorts of all partners into one well-oiled machine. Work in TV production requires periods of heightened enthusiasm while shooting the script. Not surprisingly, TV professionals save up their energy for this time. In contrast, new media practitioners create their products on the go: hype and energy are spread over the whole work process. Their labour becomes materialised in detailed plans, concepts, and prototypes. In short, the affective machine of a project network needs orchestration. This is a question of management.As this management failed so often in our project, we could discover another issue in the universe of enthusiasm: Disappointed high spirits can easily turn into bitterness and hostility. High expectations can lead to a lack of motivation and finally to a loss of loyalty towards the product and towards other project partners. Thus managing enthusiasm is not just about timing. It is also about managing disappointment and frustration. These are techniques, which have to be well developed on the level of the self-management as well as group management.Beyond the ProjectWe want to conclude this paper with a scene that happened at the very end of the project. In a final meeting, all partners agreed – much to our surprise – that the product was a big success. At that time we as academic partners found this irritating. There were many reasons why we disagreed: we did not produce a new format, we did not get positive user feedback, and we could not sell the show to further broadcasters (our original aims). However, all of this did not seem to have any impact on this final assessment. At the time of the meeting this looked for us like surreal theatre. Looking back now, this display of enthusiasm was indeed perhaps a ‘rational’ thing to do. Most projects and products in the creative industries are not successful on the market (Frith). 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