Journal articles on the topic 'Landscape architects – United States – Political activity'

During the early part of the twentieth century, Black girls in the United States attended Young Women’s Christian Associations (YWCAs) where they received instruction in sports and physical activity. Using archival research, in this article I examine the role of swimming in Black girls’ sports and physical activity practices in Northern YWCAs. With a focus on the construction of Black girlhood, health, and embodiment, I trace how girls navigated spatial segregation, beauty ideals, and athleticism. I highlight the experiences of Black girl swimmers—subjects who have often been rendered invisible in the historical and contemporary sporting landscape.

Abstract Recent work has offered competing explanations for the long-term evolution of corporate political action in the United States. In one, scholars have theorized that long-term structural changes in the American political and economic landscape may have radically transformed inter-corporate network structures and changed the political orientation of corporate elites. In another, a small group of corporate elites continues to dominate government policy by advocating for class-wide interests through occupying key positions in government and policy planning groups. We offer new evidence of patterns in and predictors of political strategies among the nation’s elite corporate directors. We utilize an original dataset (the Longitudinal Elite Contributor Database) linked with registries of corporate directors and their board memberships. We ask: (1) has the political activity, unity, or pragmatism of the corporate elite declined since 1982; and (2) are individuals who direct multiple firms more pragmatic in their political action? Evidence suggests that corporate elites are more politically active and unified, and continue to exercise pragmatic political strategies vis-à-vis their campaign donations. Using random- and fixed-effects models, we present evidence to suggest that becoming a member of the inner circle has a significant moderating effect on elite political behavior. We offer an alternative mechanism of elite coordination that may help explain the continued political cohesion of the corporate elite.

This symposium examines the politics of religious alliances. While the literature on religion and politics generally focuses on differences across individuals, congregations, denominations, or traditions, these articles instead ask how, when, and why religious groups do — and do not — form alliances with other organizations, both religious and secular. Specifically, this collection of original research examines the formation of multi-denominational coalitions among party activists, litigants, and religious leaders. These varied articles arose from a workshop at Oxford University in March 2015, an event hosted and funded by the Rothermere American Institute. The collection explores the impact of religious coalitional activity upon political attitudes, decision-making, and public policy development. It is wide-ranging, extending our understanding of religious coalitional activity beyond the United States and dealing with topics of vital current significance, including the swiftly changing landscape of school voucher and tax credit expansion, same-sex marriage, healthcare, and abortion advocacy.

The impact of interest groups on foreign policy of the state up until today has not received substantial attention in the theory of international relations. In particular, activities of the entities shaped by the common religious affiliation of their members lack assessment in the academic literature. Meanwhile, their mobilization in the recent decades became significant aspect of political life both in developing and developed countries. The activity of religious groups in the United States forced deep transformation of the national political landscape, as they desire to affect not only internal debate, but external policies as well. Among other issues attention of such social and political bodies is also focused on the situation in the middle East. Their proactive standing facilitated advancement of the partnership between the United States and Israel, including growth of American diplomatic and military aid to Tel-Aviv. The supporters of such policy include not only small, but well organized Jewish community, but also representatives of the conservative Evangelical Protestants, which constitute the most numerous religious group in the U.S. Despite the fact that leaders of both group often use theological reasons to justify their support for Israel, the real motivation of the most regular members is primarily humanitarian and pragmatic. The diversity of the Pro-Israeli groups promotes bipartisan support of cooperation between the two countries, and enabled creation of both Democratic and Republican lobby on this issue. However the growing criticism of the current policy of Tel-Aviv on behalf of some of the adherents of American-Israeli cooperation leads to the erosion of impact of these groups.

Drawing from a 3-year ethnographic project in one elementary school in the United States, this article examines how a group of 43 first graders perceived and constructed Brazil and the U.S. during a drawing and writing activity in their bilingual (Portuguese-English) classroom. The majority of the participating children (81.4%) either migrated from Brazil to the U.S. or were born in the U.S. of Brazilian parents. Data analysis reveals that Brazil was frequently portrayed as an idyllic landscape that included several relatives and friends and a range of activities with loved ones, while the U.S. involved immediate family members, material goods, and places for leisure. Grounded in a relational understanding of place and placemaking, we argue that the children engaged in a range of place-based moves to construct Brazil and the United States during the activity. These acts of placemaking included evocations of transnational memories, ongoing activities and aspirations, social relationships, and local institutional expectations, particularly the school curriculum and teachers’ discourse about Brazil. The findings suggest that immigrant children’s construction of place is multifaceted, dynamic, and situated.

Democracies are postulated upon the ability to carry out fair elections, free from any form of interference or manipulation. Social media have been reportedly used to distort public opinion nearing election events in the United States and beyond. With over 240 million election-related tweets recorded between 20 June and 9 September 2020, in this study we chart the landscape of social media manipulation in the context of the upcoming 3 November 2020 U.S. presidential election. We focus on characterizing two salient dimensions of social media manipulation, namely (i) automation (e.g., the prevalence of bots), and (ii) distortion (e.g., manipulation of narratives, injection of conspiracies or rumors). Despite being outnumbered by several orders of magnitude, just a few thousands of bots generated spikes of conversations around real-world political events in all comparable with the volume of activity of humans. We discover that bots also exacerbate the consumption of content produced by users with their same political views, worsening the issue of political echo chambers. Furthermore, coordinated efforts carried out by Russia, China and other countries are hereby characterized. Finally, we draw a clear connection between bots, hyper-partisan media outlets, and conspiracy groups, suggesting the presence of systematic efforts to distort political narratives and propagate disinformation. Our findings may have impactful implications, shedding light on different forms of social media manipulation that may, altogether, ultimately pose a risk to the integrity of the election.

Rather than trying to lead an audience into a suspension of disbelief, cornball artists who get their own joke hope everyone will play along, or anyway enjoy the joke, which suggests that successful corn involves a suspension of embarrassment, or else a revel in it. (Marcus 323) Sure, it was corny as anything, pretentious, and silly beyond reason. But it felt so refreshing to see a band so absolutely devoid of irony and hipster chic, to see them perform and actually have enough sense and gravitas to not take themselves so damned seriously. And I think that, for a lot of people (myself included), that was a breath of fresh air. If there had been even the slightest trace of irony in the Illinoisemakers’ performance, the crowd would have picked up on it, and I doubt Sufjan and Co would have made it out with their pom-poms intact. (Morehead) The club was packed tight but I managed to find a spot to stand for the next two hours, squeezed along the rail of the upstairs balcony, looking down almost directly at the top of Sufjan Stevens’s head and, in front of him, an unusually hushed audience of fresh-faced indie rock kids. In conversation with some of the club’s staff a few days after the show, they would confide in me that they were unnerved by the evening’s crowd: “Where did these people come from?”, just “too well-behaved” for an all-ages show, there was something vaguely eerie about the level of rapt attention, about their/our unembarrassed affection for the on-stage spectacle. After all, with his gender-split six-piece back-up band (why have just one glockenspiel when two could be better?) dressed in matching cheerleader uniforms (offering between-song cheers and “spirit fingers” and a show-closing human pyramid) and himself all decked-out in a silk American flag jumpsuit, which may or may not have also had a cape, it would be tempting to see and hear 30-year-old Sufjan Stevens and his band – known, on this tour, as the Illinoisemakers – as “kitsch” or “camp”, but that’s not quite it. The affective tone is a bit too far off the mark – the archly self-ironic quotation marks – to qualify as camp or kitsch (or, for that matter, it is also far too waxing to fit any thesis about the waning of affect, such as Fredric Jameson’s notion of “blank parody”). Migrating elsewhere, this affect locates its heartfelt kernel, unabashedly, as corn. Susan Sontag, in her 1964 essay Notes on “Camp”, helped to set out the critical coordinates for the camp sensibility. Among them, an affection for the affectations of artifice and exaggeration, a rewiring of the logics of taste (bad can be good!) in order to account for an excessiveness and/or a “failed seriousness” that doubles back to slip quotation marks around itself, often undertaking a kind of historical salvage operation whereby the once-banal might now be redeemed as fantastic. As a significant subset of (non-naïve) camp, kitsch pertains to the more intentionally frivolous or ostentatious, and it inheres, most immediately, in the practices/objects produced through the camp sensibility. In sum, camp and kitsch take pleasure and refuge in affectedness, and regularly draw upon a particular relationship to the past: a past not to be conserved as it once was but to be transformed toward different, potentially more liberating ends within the present. The sensibility of corn occupies an almost coincidental space in our contemporary moment (where else could it be?) but its initial impulse faces in the other direction: rather than a past, it seeks to redeem a future for the present. Although by no means bypassing the powers of being affected (though without ironically turning this affectedness upon itself), cornball art sets to work by fictively divulging capacities to affect among existing constellations of forces and aesthetic figures, finding hidden-in-plain-sight alliances and branchings, offering a glimpse of a future not quite in view. That is, if camp and especially kitsch are the sound of a world chortling in the mirror at the sight of its own enlightened cynicism, corn gives voice to the near-impossible belief, in the face of all-available evidence to the contrary, that traversing the dreadfully familiar still holds the chance potential for imagining (and perhaps creating) a world that is decidedly otherwise. A work of (“successful”) corn actively dedicates itself to conjuring up an affective topography – opening the way for the possibility of collective inhabitation or contagion – within and around the hollows and shadows of the cliché and the commonplace, extracting from the field of its circulation the tiniest differences and variations. Although camp and kitsch are “statistically” on the political left (in the same way that Roland Barthes claims that “myth” is statistically on the right), corn has no intrinsic political valence. Making itself at home in the midst of the already known and patently obvious, corn’s stubborn (“silly beyond reason”) act of faith in the conversion of the banal becomes the future-oriented task of the always-to-be-made. The fabulist potential of corn then is that, beginning in the middle of nowhere, it can deliver us somewhere else: even if somewhere else is inevitably right here (no-where turned now-here). Corn’s politics don’t arrive in advance but only through its own act of creative, patchwork assembling. Rather than camp’s self-inoculating wink of solidarity (often delivered from arm’s length), whatever might be the coming politics of corn, it is precisely in its articulations and the expanse of its arms-wide embrace. Sufjan Stevens is already a fairly complex tangle of articulations all by himself: a plainly quirky musical composer-arranger and multi-instrumentalist (imagine Philip Glass writing “twee lo-fi” scores for a local community theater) / simultaneously straightforward balladeer and goofy-assed cheerleader-bandleader / fabulating geo-philosopher / practicing Christian (Episcopalian) of the non-evangelical variety / undeterred and affectionate chronicler of an increasingly unsettled America. What keeps this tangle of articulations from falling into a mess of contradictions is his earnestly cornball conceit as a musical surveyor – with or without a cape – of the vast American landscape. Stevens’s new Come on Feel the Illinoise and his 2003 release Greetings from Michigan serve merely as the first two states in an ambitious and admittedly foolhardy “50 States” project. Stevens re-conjures these states as immensely intimate geographies of the everyday mundane (folding laundry, wasp stings, zoo visits), of the cosmically mythic (UFOs, God, ghosts), and through figures, events and places, both past and present (Mary Todd Lincoln, the Black Hawk War, Decatur, his stepmother). In and across his musical compositions, there are no conceptual, lyrical or moral hierarchies (no above or below, including God); everything is situated alongside each other. Nothing is subordinated to anything else, and all are linked as one. Describing his “poetics of landscape”, Stevens says: I think this is a complicated subject, this idea of environment and geography shaping our doctrines, our behavior, our memory, even our inclinations … Now, our life is not a series of compartments. Here is our health. Here is our diet. Here is our genealogy. Here is our religion. Here is our politics. Here is our job. No, these things are all one big thing. Landscape is the palate of all activity. We live and move on the surface of this planet. Of course the character of that geography informs us. Even more, it determines us, and we affect it as well. It’s correlative … (Dodd). Although everything is already in immanence, it is also always to be articulated. Or, in the case of Sufjan Stevens’s rewrite of the United States’ national anthem, it is still all to be re-articulated: reclaiming God from the religious right while declaiming America’s militarism. The affective-aesthetic resonance of these articulations, through corn’s familiar traversal of the recurring same, serves as a selective ontology that comes to guide what falls out or rises up – the difference in repetition – into resources for hope in the present (Massumi). By nurturing these hopeful fall-outs and rise-ups into their next iterations, and by sustaining them into ever-expanding and self-varying accumulation, corn’s peculiar affective sensibility invokes its ethical task and, thus, its capacity to deliver its audience – though there are no guarantees – from nowhere (especially given the present sorry state of affairs on the US political left). It takes landscape as the palate of its activity, and then “populate[s] it with other instances, with other poetic, novelistic, or even pictorial or musical entities” (Deleuze and Guattari 66-7), populates it with a people to come. At present, it is safe to say that Sufjan Stevens is almost precisely nowhere, a mere speck on the popular music landscape of North America – at least as such matters might be determined through sales statistics or mainstream radio airplay. But a growing number of US music critics, journalists, and music bloggers have begun to take notice. See, for example, the critics at Amazon.com in the US or Metacritic.com – a Website that cross-tabulates critical reviews (mostly US and British) of film, television, music, etc – where, in both, Stevens’s Illinoise stands as the number one music release for 2005. All of which might add up, of course, to next to nothing (a temporary crush, this year’s model, a critical darling). Except that, wedged along the balcony rail as I observed the evening’s crowd in resonant conjunction with Stevens and his band, there seemed and still seems every reason to believe or every reason to want to believe that a reconfigured, newly-weird and corn-fed America may be nudging its way onto the horizon as an emergent, fledgling generational sensibility. Or, so, that’s the infectious hope anyway … admittedly as naïve as any before it. Think of it as a manifestation of what Deleuze calls the need for belief (and not its suspension) in the world. In this world (this world now: no waiting for a next one) belief that operates, in one way, through “the powers of the false” (fabulation): supplanting the close-to-expired effectivity of “speaking truth to power” anytime too soon. Deleuze and Guattari maintain that, “belief becomes a genuine concept only when it is made into belief in this world and is connected rather than projected” (92). To connect. To fabulate. To pass into the landscape. To create the conditions for a people-who-are-missing. But, more than any other ingredient to be drawn as political necessity from the contemporary moment, it is belief – unembarrassed by its open expression, unfettered by irony’s built-in self-protection mechanism – that sets corn apart from camp and kitsch. It is belief in this world that sets Sufjan Stevens’s music and its live performance, as corn, into motion: belief as force for belonging. Corn lends itself, almost by its very nature (albeit its fictive nature), to such gathering-up, to collective enunciation. “All things go / All things go / To re-create us / All things grow / All things grow”, Stevens sings in part of the chorus of his Chicago (arguably the centrepiece of Illinoise), his voice supported – both live and on record – by what feels like every other voice in its vicinity. But, in the song, Chicago serves as just a momentary passing through on the way to somewhere else, on the way to New York and beyond that: “Freedom from myself and from the land”. In the sliver of this moment (beyond one state or two, a nation or land dissolving into what develops), the affect of corn reveals its opening on to a boundless expansion of landscape, out past the amber waves of grain, the majesty of purple mountains, and God shedding his grace, pom-poms intact. References Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. What is Philosophy? Trans. H. Tomlinson, and G. Burchell. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. Dodd, J. “Feature Interview with Sufjan Stevens.” Bandoppler #5. 10 Oct. 2005 http://www.bandoppler.com/5_F_Sufjan.htm>. Marcus, G. Ranters and Crowd Pleasers: Punk in Pop Music, 1977-92. New York: Anchor, 1993. Massumi, Brian. “Navigating Movements.” In M. Zournazi, Hope: New Philosophies for Change. New York: Routledge, 2002. This interview with Massumi is also available online: http://www.21cmagazine.com/issue2/massumi.html>. Morehead, J. “Omaha, Lift Up Your Weary Head.” OpusZine.com 23 Sep. 2005. http://www.opuszine.com/blog/entry.html?ID=1276>. Sontag, Susan. “Notes on ‘Camp’.” Against Interpretation. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Seigworth, Gregory J. "The Affect of Corn." M/C Journal 8.6 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/12-seigworth.php>. APA Style Seigworth, G. (Dec. 2005) "The Affect of Corn," M/C Journal, 8(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/12-seigworth.php>.

Cities have long been important sites of collective memory. In this paper, I highlight the ritual and memorial functions of cities by focusing on Gibellina, a Sicilian town destroyed by earthquake, and the subsequent struggle among its community to articulate a sense of spatial belonging with its remains. By examining the productive relationships between art, landscape and collective memory, I consider how memorial objects in Gibellina have become integral to the reimagining of place, and, in some cases, to forgetting. To address the relationship between memorial objects and the articulation of communities from this unique vantage point, a significant part of my analysis compares memorial initiatives both in and around the old site on which Gibellina once stood. More specifically, my paper compares the aesthetic similarities between the Italian artist Alberto Burri’s design for a large concrete overlay of the city’s remains, and the Berlin Holocaust Memorial by the American architect Peter Eisenman. To reveal the distinctiveness of Burri’s design in relation to Eisenman’s work and the rich commentaries that have been produced in its name, and therefore to highlight the specificity of their relationship, I extend my comparison to more recent attempts at rebuilding Gibellina in the image of a “frontier city of art” (“Museum Network Belicina”).Broadly speaking, this paper is framed by a series of observations concerning the role that landscape plays in the construction or naturalization of collective identity, and by a further attempt at mapping the bonds that tend to be shared among members of particular communities in any given circumstance. To organize my thoughts in this area, I follow W. J. T. Mitchell’s interpretation of landscape as “a medium of exchange,” in other words, as an artistic practice that galvanizes nature for the purpose of naturalizing culture and its relations of power (5). While the terms of landscape art may in turn be described as “complicated,” “mutual” and marked by “ambivalence,” as Mitchell himself suggests, I would further argue that the artist’s sought-after result will, in almost every case, be to unify the visual and the discursive fields through an ideological operation that engenders, reinforces, and, perhaps also mystifies the constituents of community in general (9). From this perspective, landscape represents a crucial if unavoidable materialization both of community and collective memory.Conflicting viewpoints about this formation are undoubtedly present in the literature. For instance, in describing the effects of this operation, Mitchell, to use one example, will suggest that landscape as a mode of creation unfolds in ways that are similar to that of a dream, or that the materialization of landscape art is in accordance with the promise of “emancipation” that dreams inscribe into imaginaries (12). During the course of investigating and overturning the premise of Mitchell’s claim through a number of writers and commentators, I conclude my paper by turning to a famous work on the inoperative community by Jean-Luc Nancy. This work is especially useful for bringing clarity for understanding what is lost in the efforts by Gibellina’s residents to reconstruct a new city adjacent to the old, and therefore to emancipate themselves from their destructive past. By emphasizing the significance of acknowledging death for the regeneration and durability of communities and their material urban life, I suggest that the wishes of Gibellina’s residents have resulted in an environment for memory and memorialization despite apparent wishes to the contrary. In my reference to Nancy’s metaphor of ‘inoperativity’, therefore, I suggest that the community to emerge from Gibellina’s disaster is, in a sense, yet to come.Figure 1. The “Cretto di Burri” by Alberto Burri (1984-1989). Creative Commons.The old city of Gibellina was a township of Arabic and Medieval origins located southwest of Palermo in the heart of Sicily’s Belice valley. In January 1968, the region experienced a series of earthquakes as it had before. This time, however, the strongest among them provoked a rupture that within moments led to the complete destruction of towns and villages, and to the death of nearly 400 inhabitants. “From a seismological point of view,” as Susan Hough and Roger Bilham write, the towns and villages of the Belice valley were at this time “disasters in the making” (87). Maligned by a particular configuration of geological fault lines, the fragile structures along the surface of the valley were almost certain to be destroyed at some point in their lifetime. In 1968, after the largest disaster in recent history, the surviving inhabitants of the dilapidated urban centres were moved to the squalor conditions of displacement camps, in which many lived without permanent housing into the 1970s. While some of the smaller communities opted to rebuild, a number of the larger townships made the decision to move altogether. In 1971, a new settlement was created in Gibellina’s name, just eighteen kilometres west of the ruin.Since that time, I claim that a pattern of memory and forgetting has developed in the space between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’. For instance, the old city of Gibellina underwent a dramatic refurbishment in the 1980s when an internationally renowned Italian sculptor, Alberto Burri, was invited by the city to build a large concrete structure directly on top of the city’s remains. As depicted in Figure One, the artist moulded the destroyed buildings into blocks of smooth concrete surfaces. Standing roughly at human scale, Burri divided these stone slabs, or stelae, in such a way as to retain the lineaments of Gibellina’s medieval streets. Although unfinished and abandoned by the artist due to lack of funds, the tomb of this destroyed city has since become both an artistic oddity and a permanent fixture on the Sicilian landscape. As Elisebha Fabienne and Platzer write,if an ancient inhabitant of Gibellina walks in the inside of the Cretto, he is able to recognise the topic position of his house, but he is also forced by the Verfremdung [alienting effect] of the topical elements to distance himself from the past, to infer new information. (75)According to this assessment, the work’s intrinsic merit appears to be in Burri’s effort to forge a link between a shared memory of the city’s past, and the potential for that memory to fortify the imagination towards a future. In spatial terms, the merit of the work lies in preserving the skeletal imprint of the urban landscape in order to retain a semblance of this once vibrant and living community. Andrea Simitch and Val Warke appear to corroborate this hypothesis. They suggest that while Burri’s structure includes a specific imprint or reference point of the city’s remains, “embedded within the masses that construct the ghosted streets is the physical detritus of imagined narratives” (61). In other words, Simitch and Warke maintain that by using the archival or preserving function to communicate a ritual practice, Burri’s Cretto is intended to infuse the forgotten urban space of old Gibellina with a promise that it will eventually be found and therefore remembered. This promise is met, in turn, by the invitation for visitors to stroll through the hallowed interior of Gibellina as they would any other city. In this sense, the Cretto invites a plurality of narratives and meanings depending on the visitor at hand. In the absence of guidance or interruption, the hope appears to be that visitors will gain an experience of the place that is both familiar and disturbing.But there is a hidden dimension to this promise that the authors above do not explore in sufficient detail. For instance, Nigel Clark analyzes the way in which Burri has insisted upon “confronting us with the stark absence of life where once there was vitality,” a confrontation by the artist that is materialized by “cavernous wounds” (83). On this basis, by interpreting the promise of memory that others have discussed in terms of a warning about the longevity or durability of the built environment, Clark writes that Burri’s Cretto represents “an assertion of the forces of earth that have not been eclipsed by other forms of endangerment” (83). The implication of this particular forewarning is that “the precariousness of human settlement” is guaranteed by a non-human world that insists upon the relentless force of erasure (83). On the other hand, I would argue that Clark’s insistence upon situating the Cretto in relation to the natural forces of destruction ultimately represents a narrowing of perspective on Burri’s work. Significantly, by citing Burri’s choice of supposedly abstracted shapes made from lifeless concrete, Clark reduces the geographical intervention of the artist to “a paradigm of modernist austerity” (82). From Clark’s perspective, the overture to Modernism is meant to highlight Burri’s attempt at pairing the scale and proportion of the work with an effort to convey a sense of purity through abstraction. However, while some interpretations of Burri’s Cretto may be dependent upon its allusion to such Modernist formalism, it should also be recognized that the specific concerns raised by Gibellina go significantly beyond these equivocations.In fact, one crucial element of Burri’s artistic process that is not recognized by Clark is his investment in the American land art movement, which at the time of Burri’s design for Gibellina was led by Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson and other prominent artists in the United States. Burri’s debt to this movement can be detected by his gradual shift towards landscape throughout his career, and by his eventual break from the enclosed and constrained space of the gallery. On this basis, the crumbling city design at Gibellina obliterates the boundaries as to what constitutes a work of art in relation to the land it occupies, and this, in turn, throws into question the specific criteria that we use to assess its value or artistic merit. In an important way, land art and landscape in general forces us to rethink the relationship between art and community in unparalleled ways. To put it another way, if Clark’s overriding concern for that which lies beneath the surface allows us to consider the importance of relationships between memory, forgetting, and erasure, I argue that Burri’s concern with the surface and the ground make it clear that projects such as the Gibellina Cretto might be better paired with memorial sites that deal in architecture.Figure 2. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe / Berlin Holocaust Memorial, by Peter Eisenman. Photograph courtesy of the author.A useful comparison in this regard is Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in downtown Berlin. For one, not only is Eisenman’s site composed of a similar exterior of concrete stelae, those concrete blocks resembling gravestones, but it has also been routinely scorned for the same reasons that Clark raised against Burri as mentioned above. To put it another way, while visitors may be struck by the memorial’s haunting and inspirational configuration of voids, some notable commentators, including the venerable James E. Young, have insinuated that the site signifies a restoration of the monument, derived as it is from a modernist architecture in which recuperation and amnesia are at play with each other (184-224). A more sympathetic reading of Eisenman’s memorial might point to the uniquely architectural vision he held for cultural memory. With Adrian Parr for instance, we find that the traumatic memory of the Holocaust can be effectively transposed through the virtual content of the imagination as personified by visitors to Eisenman’s memorial. That is, by attending to the atrocities of the past, Parr claims that we need not be exhausted by the overwhelming sense of destruction that the memorial site brings to the literal surface. Rather, we might benefit more from considering the event of destruction as but one aspect of the spatial experience of the place to which it is dedicated—an experience that must be open-ended by design. By using the topographical lens that Parr, taking several pages from Gilles Deleuze, describes as “intensive,” I argue that Eisenman’s design is unique for its explicit encouragement to be both creative and present simultaneously (158).On this account, Parr makes the compelling assertion that memorial culture facilitates an epistemic rupture or “break,” that that it reveals an opportunity to restore the potential for using the place occupied by memory as a starting point for effecting social change (3). Parr writes that “memorial culture is utopian memory thinking”—a defining slogan, to be sure, but one with which the author hopes will re-establish the link between memory and the force of life, and, in the process, to recognize the energetic resources that remain concealed by the traditional narratives of memorialization (3). Stefano Corbo corroborates Parr’s assertion by pointing to Eisenman’s efforts in the 1980s to supplement formal concerns with archaeological perspectives, and therefore to develop a theory whereby architecture presages a “deep structure,” in which the artistry or attempt at formal innovation ultimately rests on “a process of invention” itself (41). To accomplish this aim, a specific reference should be made to an early period in Eisenman’s career, in which the architect turned to conceptual issues as opposed to the demands of materiality, and more significantly, to a critical rethinking of site-specific engagement (Bedard). Included in this turn was a willingness on Eisenman’s part to explore the layered and textured history of cities, as well as the linguistic or deconstructive relationships that exist between the ground and the trace.The interdisciplinary complexity of Eisenman’s approach is one that responds to the dominance of architectural form, and it therefore mirrors, as Corbo writes, a delicate interplay between “presence and absence, permanence and loss” (44). The city of Berlin with its cultural memory thus evinces a sort of tectonic rupture and collision upon its surfaces, but a rupture that both runs parallel and opposite to the natural disaster that engulfed Gibellina in 1968. Returning to Parr’s demand that we begin to (re)assert the power of virtual and imaginative space, I argue that Eisenman’s memorial design may be better appreciated for its ability to situate the city itself in relation to competing terms of artistic practice. That is, if Eisenman’s efforts indicate a softening “of the boundary between architecture and the landscape,” to quote Tomà Berlanda, the Holocaust Memorial might in turn be a productive counterpoint in the task of working through the specificity of Burri’s design and the meaning with which it has since been attached (2).Burri’s Cretto raises a number of questions for this hypothesis, as with the Cretto we find a displacement of the constitutive process that writers such as W.J.T. Mitchell describe above in relation to the generative potential of community. Undoubtedly, the imperative to unify is present in the Cretto’s aesthetic presentation, as the concrete surfaces maintain the capacity to reflect the light of the sun against a wide green earth that stretches beyond the visitor’s horizon. On the other hand, while Mitchell, along with Parr and other commentators might opt to insist upon a deeper correlation between the unifying function of the landscape and the forces of life, intensity, or desire, I would only reiterate that Burri’s design is ultimately based on establishing a meaningful relationship with death, not life, and he is consequently focused on the much less spectacular mission of providing solutions as to what the remains should become in the aftermath of total destruction. If there is an intensity to speak of here, it is a maligned intensity, and an intensity that can only be established through relation.Figure 3. The “Porta del Belice” by Pietro Consagra (2014). Wiki Commons.If Burri’s Cretto were measured by the criteria that are variously described by Mitchell and others, the effects that the landscape produces would have necessarily to account for an expression of desire for emancipation from death. However, in a significant departure from Eisenman’s Holocaust Memorial, Burri’s design by itself is marked by a throughout absence of any expression of desire for emancipation as such. Indeed, finding such a promised emancipatory narrative would require one to cast their gaze away from the Cretto altogether, and towards a nearby urban center that has supposedly triumphed over the very need for a memory culture at all. This urban center is none other than Gibellina Nuova. As a point in fact, the settlers of Gibellina Nuova did insist upon emancipating themselves from their destructive past. In 1971, the city planners and governors of Gibellina Nuova made efforts to attract contemporary Italian artists and architects, to design and build a series of commemorative structures, and ultimately to make the settlement into a “città di frontiera dell’arte”—a frontier city of art (“Museum Network Belicina”). With the potential for rejuvenation just a stone’s throw away from the original city, the former inhabitants appear to have become immediately invested in the sort of utopian potential that would make its architectural wonders capable of transgressing the line that perennially divides art from community and from the living world. Rivalled only by the refurbishment of Marfa, Texas, which in the last twenty years has become a shrine to minimalist sculpture, the edifices at Gibellina Nuova have been authored by some of Italy’s better-known mid-century artists and architects, including Ludovico Quaroni, Vitorrio Gregotti, and, most notably, Pietro Consagra, whose ‘Porta del Belice’ (Figure Two) has become the most iconic urban fixture of the new urban designs. With the hopes of becoming a sort of “open-air museum” in which to attract international visitors, the city is now in possession of an exceedingly large number of public memorials and avant-garde buildings in various states of decay and disrepair (Bileddo). Predictably, this museological distinction has become a curse in many ways. Some commentators have argued that the obsession among city planners to create a “laboratory of art and architecture” has led in fact to an urban center of monstrous proportions: a city space that can only be described as “elliptical and spinning” (Bileddo). Whereas Gibellina Nuova was supposed to represent a rebalancing of the forces of life in relation to the funereal themes of the Cretto, the robust initiatives of the 1980s have instead produced an egregious lack of cohesiveness, a severed link to Sicilian culture, and a stark erasure of the distinctive traditions of the Belice valley.On the other hand, this experiment in urban design has been reduced to a venerable time capsule of 1970s Italian sculpture, an archive that persists but in constant disrepair. More significantly, however, the city’s failure to deliver on its many promises raises important questions about the ritual and memorial functions of urban space in general, of what specific relationships need to be forged between the history of a place and its architectural presentation, and the ways in which memorials come to reflect, privilege or convoke particular values over those of others. As Elisebha Fabienne Platzer writes, “Gibellina portrays its future in order to forget,” as “its faith in contemporary art is precisely a reaction to death,” or, more specifically, to its effacement (73). If the various pastiche designs of the city’s buildings and ritual edifices fail to stand the measure of time, I claim that it is not simply because they are gaudy reminders of a time best forgotten, but rather because they signify the restless hunt for resolution among inhabitants of this still-unsettled community.Whereas Burri’s Cretto activates a process of mourning and working-through that proves to be unresolvable and yet necessary, the city of Gibellina Nuova operates instead by neutralizing and dividing this process. Taken as a whole, the irreparable relationship between the two sites offers competing images of the relation between place and community. From the time of its division by earthquake if not sooner, the inhabitants of Gibellina became an “inoperative” community in the same way that the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy has famously described. In the specific hopes of uncovering the motives of Burri and those of the designers and architects of Gibellina Nuova, I argue that Nancy uses the terms of inoperability as a makeshift solution for the persistent rootedness of communities in an atomized metaphysics for which the relationality between subjects is an abiding problem. Nancy defines community on the basis of its relational content alone, and for this reason he is able to make the claim that death itself should be a necessary moment of its articulation. Nancy writes that “community has not taken place,” as beyond “what society has crushed or lost, it is something that happens to us in the form of a question, waiting, event or imperative” (11).Though Nancy is attempting to provide his own interpretation of the impervious dialectic between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, between “community” and “society,” the substance of his assertion can be brought into a critical reading of Gibellina’s abiding problem of its formations of collective memory in the aftermath of destruction. For instance, it might be argued that if we leave the experience of loss aside, we can perhaps begin to acknowledge that communities are transformed through complex interactions for which their inert physicality provides but one important indication. While “old” Gibellina was not lost in a day, Gibellina Nuova was not created in an instant. For Nancy, it would rather be the case that “death is indissociable from community, and that it is through death that the community reveals itself” (14). Given this claim, while Gibellina Nuova has undoubtedly been shaped and reconstituted by the architecture of the future and the desire to forget, it could equally be argued that this very architecture shares in a reciprocal exchange with the Cretto, a circuit of memory that inadvertently houses an archive of the city’s destructive past. As the community comes into being through resistance, entropy, possibility and reparation, the city landscape provides some clues regarding the trace of this activity as left upon its ground.ReferencesBedard, Jean-Francois, ed. Cities of Artificial Excavation: The Work of Peter Eisenman, 1978-1988. New York: Rizzoli Publishing, 1994.Berlanda, Tomà. Architectural Topographies: A Graphic Lexicon of How Buildings Touch the Ground. New York: Routledge, 2014.Bileddo, Marco. “Back in Sicily / The Three Dogs Gibellina.” Eodoto108 Magazine. 30 July 2014. Bilham, Roger G., and Susan Elizabeth Hough. After the Earth Quakes: Elastic Rebound on an Urban Planet. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.Clark, Nigel. Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 2010.Corbo, Stefano. From Formalism to Weak Form: The Architecture and Philosophy of Peter Eisenman. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014.Mitchell, W.J. Thomas. Landscape and Power. University of Chicago Press, 2002.Museum Network Belicina. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Inoperative Community. Trans. Christopher Fynsk. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.Parr, Adrian. Deleuze and Memorial Culture: Desire, Singular Memory and the Politics of Trauma. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008.Platzer, Elisbha Fabienne. “Semiotics of Spaces: City and Landart.” Seni/able Spaces: Space, Art and the Environment. Edward Huijbens and Ólafur Jónsson, eds. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007.Simitch, Andrea, and Val Warke. The Language of Architecture: 26 Principles Every Architect Should Know. Rockport Publishers Incorporated, 2014.Young, James E. At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.

IntroductionIn his seminal article, “Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism” (1977), Dallas Smythe suggested that audiences are the commodity form of advertiser-supported communications, as their time is sold to advertisers. Audience measurement firms establish the audience size for a programme by calculating how many people are “tuned in” to a particular offering, and then provide their estimates to advertisers and break down their figures on the basis of demographic characteristics (these characteristics include age, gender, and income level). These ratings have long been the currency of the television industry. Essentially, Smythe points out that advertisers purchase, “the services of audiences with predictable specifications who will pay attention in predictable numbers and at particular times to particular means of communication” (4). Ien Ang has proposed that audience measurement produces an “objectified category of others” that can be governed and abstracted from the “messiness of everyday life” (8, 132). Indeed, Ang sees ratings to be a means of controlling the audience by creating a truth about them that suits the industry’s needs for an exchangeable commodity.In the United States, Nielsen ratings dictate the terms for the buying and selling of television advertising. Over the years, Nielsen has adjusted the measurement methodology to satisfy the demands of various stakeholders: audience measurement companies, advertisers, programme producers, and network executives, among others. Recently, however, social media (particularly Twitter) has threatened Nielsen’s preeminence. Writing in Wired magazine in 2013, Tom Vanderbilt went so far as to declare that the Nielsen Family—the “25,000 households whose TV habits collectively provide a statistical snapshot of a nation’s viewing behavior” (n.p.)—was now dead. He proposed that a show’s “tweetability” had become more important than its Nielsen rating.Nielsen, for its part, has tried to keep up with the changing television landscape and the demands of the television industry. In 2012 they partnered with McKinsey & Company to create the social media consulting company NM Incite, and acquired social TV startup SocialGuide. The following year the company introduced Nielsen Twitter TV Ratings (NTTR) as a supplement to its traditional ratings offering. This step is in line with the shifting industry interest from measuring audience exposure to programming to measuring audience engagement with programming (Jenkins; and Napoli).With NTTR, Nielsen has made, we suggest here, a fairly unimaginative and restricted addition to existing metrics in that it limits its measurements to tweet volume and tweet impressions. In this paper we explore other ways Twitter might be used to create insights that would be useful for audience research. Richard Rogers has raised the question of whether and when standard methods should be applied to the study of a new medium (162). We respond by proposing that, in the case of NTTR, traditional methods should not be applied to Twitter.We begin by briefly discussing the emergence of social media metrics and some of the problems involved in employing these metrics in current audience research. We then investigate how Twitter invites new forms of inquiry, drawing a picture of relationships among television programmes based on viewer tweets. In this re-imagining of audience research, following the Digital Methods tradition, we treat Twitter as a “postdemographic machine” (Rogers) that profiles user tastes, interests, favourite things, and so forth (rather than demographics such as age, income, educational level, and ethnicity).Nielsen and the Introduction of NTTRNielsen collects data about television viewing through diaries kept by members of a relatively small audience sample and meters that are connected to television sets. They provide ratings for programmes according to a system where one Nielsen rating point equals one per cent of all US households with television sets tuned into that programme. Two trends now strain this traditional form of the “exposure metrics” used in the buying and selling of primetime advertising: audience fragmentation and audience autonomy (Napoli). These terms refer, respectively, to the explosion of channels and platforms, first via cable television and later the Internet, on which viewers can watch television programming, and to viewers’ increased control over what television programmes they watch and when they watch them, thanks to technologies such as remote control, DVR, and now the Internet. These trends have eroded audience size for broadcast television and have made traditional metrics, which measure a sample of the audience, increasingly less representative of the viewing population as a whole. Responding to the changing television landscape, Nielsen introduced its “C3 rating” in 2009. This rating measures commercials watched both during first-run broadcasts and on DVR playback within three days (Nielsen Company, “C3 TV Ratings”). In this new landscape, producers and advertisers have begun to think that a small, yet engaged, group of viewers might be more valuable than a larger, more superficial audience (Jenkins 63). They have become increasingly interested in viewers’ engagement with particular programmes. Since around 2009, social TV as a television strategy—to stimulate people to watch television at its scheduled broadcast time and to deepen their engagement with programmes using the real-time features of social media—has gained prominence (van Es). Social TV efforts protect the existing business model for television.The Internet, and its communication structures, are becoming a valuable companion to television, not only because social media reinvigorates first-run viewing, but also because it provides data about viewing activity (Lee and Andrejevic). Social TV’s popularity made the introduction of NTTR unsurprising. Moreover, the particular partnership with Twitter, as opposed to other social platforms, makes sense, because Twitter is—at least for now—the biggest player in the social TV space. Its current ascendency may be due to the particular public openness of the platform, which unlike Facebook allows even non-account holders access to Twitter streams, and its users’ propensity to share their responses to TV on Twitter in real time (Proulx and Shepatin 13).NTTR measures the total number of tweets that refer to a specific television episode, the number of times these tweets were viewed (“impressions”), “unique authors” (accounts that tweeted at least once about a specific episode), and “unique audience” (the number of individual accounts that received at least one “impression” of the tweets about a specific episode [Nielsen Company, “Weekly Top Ten”]). Since May 2014, Nielsen also includes a demographic breakdown in NTTR, specifying the age and gender of those who tweet and view tweets (related to programming from 250 US TV networks). Through a partnership with GfK, a leading market research institute in Europe, Nielsen has since introduced Twitter TV ratings in Germany, Austria, and The Netherlands.In the United States, other companies besides Nielsen generate social TV analytics. Philip Napoli has compared the leading three social TV analytics providers: BlueFin Labs, Trenddr.tv, and General Sentiment. Twitter has recently acquired the first two of these firms as part of its efforts to solidify its position in the social TV landscape. These social TV analytics providers, Napoli claims, and we would add NTTR to the list, are methodologically distinct from traditional ratings in three ways. First, they track everyone who is tweeting about a programme rather than using a “representative” sample. Second, people do not receive incentives to participate in the research, or even get to opt in or out of it. Third, social analytics can focus on not only the “volume” but also the “valence” of an online conversation: it can assign, for instance, a quantitative score between 1 and 10 to reflect either positive or negative contributions on social media (Napoli 11).Among the reviewed providers, Napoli found two main methodological disparities: the platforms they draw data from and the time windows used (10-15). He contends that by measuring different factors they offer different interpretations of “engagement” and give conflicting representations of the audience as a commodity. Social media metrics are not going to work as long as there is disagreement over how to measure and value television’s viewers.Social media metrics have been met with considerable criticism. Like traditional metrics, they track a particular demographic rather than a random sample of people, and so are not broadly representative. Nancy Baym points out how social media metrics in audience research are affected by factors such as “skew,” a by-product of the fact that platforms actively shape the communication that takes place on them. Trending topics on Twitter may, for instance, boost the number of tweets about a programme. She also identifies the problem of deception: bots can tweet about topics and accounts can purchase certain forms of engagement (Baym n.p.).Most important here, perhaps, is what Baym calls “ambiguous meaning”: actions on social media are “uncoupled from contexts of action and application” (Dean in Baym n.p.). In the case of Twitter, for instance, it is not readily evident why people tweet, or why they retweet or favourite certain tweets; one can learn why people do so only through methods such as interviews.The discussion of these limitations highlights the need for a certain sensibility when encountering social media metrics. The limitations themselves, however, do not mean that Twitter is ineffectual for audience research. Tweets can help generate insights and raise new questions about television viewing. Between Counting Viewers and Counting TweetsTo explore the relationship between traditional ratings and NTTR, we collected tweets about television programmes in The Netherlands during the first four weeks of September 2014. This project was conducted, on behalf of BuzzCapture, by a group of research assistants of the Utrecht Data School (Leila Essanoussi, Friso Leder, David de Wied, and Koen Mooij) under our instruction. Specifically, we extracted tweets from 1 September up to, and including, 29 September 2014. We included one extra day since programmes aired on Sunday 28 might still have been discussed around midnight. Initially, we collected tweets on the basis of the official and popular hashtags relating to the 30 most-watched television programmes (rated by the national association for audience research, Stichting KijkOnderzoek, SKO); we then added two programmes not included in this list that were frequently mentioned on Twitter. We collected tweets referring to these 32 programmes as well as profile information of the related Twitter accounts. After removing marketing and spam accounts, we had a sample of 135,882 tweets posted by 39,792 unique tweeters.Figure 1: Number of Viewers versus Average Number of TweetsWe then compared the number of viewers to the average number of tweets referring to the 32 television programmes in a scatterplot (see Figure 1). We took the average number of tweets as our reference point to correct for the fact that the frequency of broadcasting differed among the programmes. Figure 1 shows that some programmes attract a large audience but generate few tweets, and vice versa. For example, Het Journaal, with three million viewers, generates an average of 160 tweets per broadcast, while Pauw, with fewer than 750,000 viewers, generates on average nearly 1,000 tweets.This sort of disparity suggests that what is “successful” in terms of the number of tweets may not be “successful” in terms of the number of viewers. There are several possible explanations for the variation in Twitter activity: a political talk show like Pauw consists of highly controversial content, making it more likely to “spark” tweets and retweets, while the eight o’clock news airs less polarising points of view. Moreover, reality shows like The Voice of Holland not only stir up conflict and invite enthusiastic judgements (Bratich) but also actively encourage their audience to interact through social media.Our sample, moreover, suggests that viewing television and tweeting about programming constitute two distinct phenomena. However, there remains a lot of speculation about what can be inferred from a tweet and tweet impressions, and thus what price tag to attach to these sorts of activities. Twitter numbers are now used either as a point of differentiation from traditional methods (such as, to sell programmes by claiming that they are successful, despite their low ratings), or when a programme’s audience is too small to be registered by traditional methods (Napoli). In what follows, we explore how tweets can be used to study viewing patterns, and briefly consider the advantages of doing so.Looking at Affiliations among TV Programmes through Tweets In his book Digital Methods (2013), Richard Rogers points out how social networking sites allow for new methods to study social networks. Information supplied to social media platforms can be used to explore “post-demographics,” meaning that they can be used to profile users’ tastes, interests, and favourite items, and the co-occurrences of the expressions of these preferences (154). Although this approach is common on various platforms (for example, in Amazon recommendations) and in online marketing practices (as in those that establish affiliations among the brands people tweet about), it has not commonly been used to research audiences. Looking at affiliations can, we suggest here, help create new knowledge about audiences.Figure 2: The Overlap in Tweeters among 32 Programmes in the NetherlandsUsing the same dataset of tweets used for the scatterplot, we tracked the viewing patterns of tweeters, analysing the sequence in which they used programme hashtags. We found that 8,958 people tweeted about more than one programme. The data revealed very interesting results when we calculated the relative overlap among programmes, charting the number of interrelating tweeters with respect to the absolute number of tweeters who referred to the two respective programmes. We imported the 32 nodes (the programmes) and the relative relations to Gephi in order to generate an association network, using the force-directed layout algorithm ForceAtlas2. The resulting network helps illuminate which programmes attract the same tweeters (see Figure 2). Our decision to rectify for the bias of highly social programmes has serious consequences and its validity is open to discussion. We did so to help expose taste relations (rather than reflect popularity).The association network demonstrates that TV shows of the same genre attract similar Twitter audiences: Dubbeltje op Zijn Kant and Uitstel van Executie are both reality shows about personal financial struggles, Studio Sport and Studio Voetbal are sport programmes, Hart van Nederland and RTL Boulevard are tabloid news shows, and Spoorloos and Familiedinner are programmes that centre on family issues. Aside from the strong overlap between programmes of the same genre, the visualisation also shows a concentration of programmes from public broadcasters—on the left-hand side of the figure—and those on commercial television—seen on the right. These connections suggest that people that watch commercial television tend to focus their viewing to commercial television (and the same is true for public television). The Voice of Holland, which seems to have a weak overlap in tweeters with multiple programmes, presents an intriguing case. This observation invites further consideration of its audience composition (which traditional ratings might help with).These are just some quick reflections made possible by using different methods to study Twitter. Although the input from an association network does not provide neat numbers that can serve as a “commodity,” it could help inform the programme schedules of television networks (they could adjust air times to better fit audience preferences, for example, by scheduling two TV shows with similar Twitter audiences in back-to-back time slots). Such insights could assist advertisers better understand consumer behaviour and viewing habits and thus maximise the effectiveness of their commercials. Television producers could also explore on-air and online collaborations between programmes. ConclusionIn this paper we have discussed the limitations of both traditional metrics and newer social media metrics. We explored how tweets can be used to generate insights into viewing patterns, briefly considering how such findings could benefit various parties. We have shown that the counting of tweets addresses the tweetability of a show but seems unrelated to the show’s number of viewers. We speculate, also, that programmes that spark polarised debate or motivate users to engage through social media are receiving many more mentions on Twitter than other sorts of programming. There is much space for TV programmers to build new relationships with their viewers.We have offered some criticism on the decision of NTTR to apply old methods to a new medium, and proposed that audience research on social media should—as the digital methods dictum goes—“follow the medium.” That is, such research should make use of the features of the medium (links, tags, timestamps, and the like) that invite new forms of inquiry. Finally, we have shown that a digital methods approach, although it will not necessarily provide conclusive answers, raises relevant questions that can elicit additional research.ReferencesAng, Ien. Desperately Seeking the Audience. London: Routledge, 1991.Baym, Nancy. “Data Not Seen: The Uses and Shortcomings of Social Media Metrics.” First Monday 18.10 (2013). 23 Sep. 2015 ‹http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4873/3752›.Bratich, Jack. “Affective Convergence in Reality Television: A Case Study in Divergence.” Flow TV: Television in the Age of Media Convergence. Ed. M. Kackman, M. Binfield, M. Payne, A. Perlman, and B. Sebok. New York: Routledge, 2011. 55–74.Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture. New York: New York UP, 2006.Lee, Hye Jin, and Mark Andrejevic. “Second-Screen Theory: From the Democratic Surround to the Digital Enclosure.” Connected Viewing: Selling, Streaming, & Sharing Media in the Digital Era. Eds. Jennifer Holt and Kevin Sanson. New York: Routledge, 2014. 40–61.Napoli, Philip M. “The Institutionally Effective Audience in Flux: Social Media and the Reassessment of the Audience Commodity.” SSRN Electronic Journal (2013). 23 Sep. 2015 ‹http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID2260925_code548166.pdf?abstractid=2260925&mirid=3›.Proulx, Mike, and Stacey Shepatin. Social TV: How Marketers Can Reach and Engage Audiences by Connecting Television to the Web, Social Media, and Mobile. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2012. Rogers, Richard. Digital Methods. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. SKO. “Kijkcijfers.” Home—Kijkonderzoek. n.d. 23 Sep. 2015 ‹https://kijkonderzoek.nl/kijkcijfers›.Smythe, Dallas W. “Communications: Blind Spot of Western Marxism.” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 1.3 (1977): 1–27.The Nielsen Company. “C3 TV Ratings Show Impact of DVR Ad Viewing.” What People Watch, Listen to and Buy. Oct. 2009. 23 Sep. 2015 ‹http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2009/c3-tv-ratings-show-impact-of-dvr-ad-viewing.html›.———. "Weekly Top Ten." Nielsen Social. n.d. 23 Sep. 2015 ‹http://www.nielsensocial.com/nielsentwittertvratings/weekly/›.Vanderbilt, Tom. "The New Rules of the Hyper-Social, Data-Driven, Actor-Friendly, Super-Seductive Platinum Age of Television." Wired, Mar. 2013. 23 Sep. 2015 ‹http://www.wired.com/2013/03/nielsen-family-is-dead/›.Van Es, Karin. “The Perks and Perils of Social TV: On the Participation Dilemma in NBC’s The Voice.” Television & New Media (forthcoming).

Disinformation can appear in various forms. Firstly, different formats can be manipulated, such as texts, images, and videos. Secondly, the amount and degree of falseness can vary, from completely fabricated content to decontextualized information to satire that intentionally misleads recipients. Therefore, the forms and format of disinformation might vary and differ not only between the supposedly clear categories of “true” and “false”. Field of application/theoretical foundation: Studies on types of disinformation are conducted in various fields, e.g. political communication, journalism studies, and media effects studies. Among other things, the studies identify the most common types of mis- or disinformation during certain events (Brennen, Simon, Howard, & Nielsen, 2020), analyze and categorize the behavior of different types of Twitter accounts (Linvill & Warren, 2020), and investigate the existence of serveral types of “junk news” in different national media landscapes (Bradshaw, Howard, Kollanyi, & Neudert, 2020; Neudert, Howard, & Kollanyi, 2019). References/combination with other methods of data collection: Only relatively few studies use combinations of methods. Some studies identify different types of disinformation via qualitative and quantitative content analyses (Bradshaw et al., 2020; Brennen et al., 2020; Linvill & Warren, 2020; Neudert et al., 2019). Others use surveys to analyze respondents’ concerns as well as exposure towards different types of mis- and disinformation (Fletcher, 2018). Example studies: Brennen et al. (2020); Bradshaw et al. (2020); Linvill and Warren (2020) Information on example studies: Types of disinformation are defined by the presentation and contextualization of content and sometimes additionally by details (e.g. professionalism) about the communicator. Studies either deductively identify different types of disinformation (Brennen et al., 2020) by applying the theoretical framework by Wardle (2019), or additionally inductively identify and build different categories based on content analyses (Bradshaw et al., 2020; Linvill & Warren, 2020). Table 1. Types of mis-/disinformation by Brennen et al. (2020) Category Specification Satire or parody - False connection Headlines, visuals or captions don’t support the content Misleading content Misleading use of information to frame an issue or individual, when facts/information are misrepresented or skewed False context Genuine content is shared with false contextual information, e.g. real images which have been taken out of context Imposter content Genuine sources, e.g. news outlets or government agencies, are impersonated Fabricated content Content is made up and 100% false; designed to deceive and do harm Manipulated content Genuine information or imagery is manipulated to deceive, e.g. deepfakes or other kinds of manipulation of audio and/or visuals Note. The categories are adapted from the theoretical framework by Wardle (2019). The coding instruction was: “To the best of your ability, what type of misinformation is it? (Select one that fits best.)” (Brennen et al., 2020, p. 12). The coders reached an intercoder reliability of a Cohen’s kappa of 0.82. Table 2. Criteria for the “junk news” label by Bradshaw et al. (2020) Criteria Reference Specification Professionalism refers to the information about authors and the organization “Sources do not employ the standards and best practices of professional journalism, including information about real authors, editors, and owners” (pp. 174-175). “Distinct from other forms of user-generated content and citizen journalism, junk news domains satisfy the professionalism criterion because they purposefully refrain from providing clear information about real authors, editors, publishers, and owners, and they do not publish corrections of debunked information” (p. 176). Procedure: - Systematically checked the about pages of domains: Contact information, information about ownership and editors, and other information relating to professional standards - Reviewed whether the sources appeared in third-party fact-checking reports - Checked whether sources published corrections of fact-checked reporting. Examples: zerohedge.com, conservative- fighters.org, deepstatenation.news Counterfeit refers to the layout and design of the domain itself “(…) [S]ources mimic established news reporting by using certain fonts, having branding, and employing content strategies. (…) Junk news is stylistically disguised as professional news by the inclusion of references to news agencies and credible sources as well as headlines written in a news tone with date, time, and location stamps. In the most extreme cases, outlets will copy logos and counterfeit entire domains” (p. 176). Procedure: - Systematically reviewed organizational information about the owner and headquarters by checking sources like Wikipedia, the WHOIS database, and third-party fact-checkers (like Politico or MediaBiasFactCheck) - Consulted country-specific expert knowledge of the media landscape in the US to identify counterfeiting websites. Examples: politicoinfo.com, NBC.com.co Style refers to the content of the domain as a whole “ (…) [S]tyle is concerned with the literary devices and language used throughout news reporting. (…) Designed to systematically manipulate users for political purposes, junk news sources deploy propaganda techniques to persuade users at an emotional, rather than cognitive, level and employ techniques that include using emotionally driven language with emotive expressions and symbolism, ad hominem attacks, misleading headlines, exaggeration, excessive capitalization, unsafe generalizations, logical fallacies, moving images and lots of pictures or mobilizing memes, and innuendo (Bernays, 1928; Jowette & O’Donnell, 2012; Taylor, 2003). (…) Stylistically, problematic sources will employ propaganda and clickbait techniques to varying degrees. As a result, determining style can be highly complex and context dependent” (p. 177). Procedure: - Examined at least five stories on the front page of each news source in depth during the US presidential campaign in 2016 and the SOTU address in 2018 - Checked the headlines of the stories and the content of the articles for literary and visual propaganda devices - Considered as stylistically problematic if three of the five stories systematically exhibited elements of propaganda Examples: 100percentfedup.com, barenakedislam.com, theconservativetribune.com, dangerandplay.com Credibility refers to the content of the domain as a whole “(…) [S]ources rely on false information or conspiracy theories and do not post corrections” (p. 175). “[They] typically report on unsubstantiated claims and rely on conspiratorial and dubious sources. (…) Junk news sources that satisfy the credibility criterion frequently fail to vet their sources, do not consult multiple sources, and do not fact-check” (p. 178). Procedure: - Examined at least five front page stories and reviewed the sources that were cited - Reviewed pages to see if they included known conspiracy theories on issues such as climate change, vaccination, and “Pizzagate” - Checked third-party fact-checkers for evidence of debunked stories and conspiracy theories Examples: infowars.com, endingthefed.com, thegatewaypundit.com, newspunch.com Bias refers to the content of the domain as a whole “(…) [H]yper-partisan media websites and blogs (…) are highly biased, ideologically skewed, and publish opinion pieces as news. Basing their stories on the same events, these sources manage to convey strikingly different impressions of what actually transpired. It is such systematic differences in the mapping from facts to news reports that we call bias. (…) Bias exists on both sides of the political spectrum. Like determining style, determining bias can be highly complex and context dependent” (pp. 177-178). Procedure: - Checked third-party sources that systematically evaluate media bias - If the domain was not evaluated by a third party, the authors examined the ideological leaning of the sources used to support stories appearing on the domain - Evaluation of the labeling of politicians (are there differences between the left and the right?) - Identified bias created through the omission of unfavorable facts, or through writing that is falsely presented as being objective Examples on the right: breitbart.com, dailycaller.com, infowars.com, truthfeed.com Examples on the left: occupydemocrats.com, addictinginfo.com, bipartisanreport.com Note. The coders reached an intercoder reliability of a Krippendorff’s kappa of 0.89. The label of “junk news” is defined by fulfilling at least three of the five criteria. It refers to sources that deliberately publish misleading, deceptive, or incorrect information packaged as real news. Table 3. Identified types of IRA-associated Twitter accounts by Linvill and Warren (2020) Category Specification Right troll “Twitter-handles broadcast nativist and right-leaning populist messages. These handles’ themes were distinct from mainstream Republicanism. (…) They rarely broadcast traditionally important Republican themes, such as taxes, abortion, and regulation, but often sent divisive messages about mainstream and moderate Republicans. (…) The overwhelming majority of handles, however, had limited identifying information, with profile pictures typically of attractive, young women” (p. 5). Hashtags frequently used by these accounts: #MAGA (i.e., “Make America Great Again,”), #tcot (i.e. “Top Conservative on Twitter), #AmericaFirst, and #IslamKills Left troll “These handles sent socially liberal messages, with an overwhelming focus on cultural identity. (…) They discussed gender and sexual identity (e.g., #LGBTQ) and religious identity (e.g., #MuslimBan), but primarily focused on racial identity. Just as the Right Troll handles attacked mainstream Republican politicians, Left Troll handles attacked mainstream Democratic politicians, particularly Hillary Clinton. (…) It is worth noting that this account type also included a substantial portion of messages which had no clear political motivation” (p. 6). Hashtags frequently used by these accounts: #BlackLivesMatter, #PoliceBrutality, and #BlackSkinIsNotACrime Newsfeed “These handles overwhelmingly presented themselves as U.S. local news aggregators and had descriptive names (…). These accounts linked to legitimate regional news sources and tweeted about issues of local interest (…). A small number of these handles, (…) tweeted about global issues, often with a pro-Russia perspective” (p. 6). Hashtags frequently used by these accounts: #news, #sports, and #local Hashtag gamer “These handles are dedicated almost entirely to playing hashtag games, a popular word game played on Twitter. Users add a hashtag to a tweet (e.g., #ThingsILearnedFromCartoons) and then answer the implied question. These handles also posted tweets that seemed organizational regarding these games (…). Like some tweets from Left Trolls, it is possible such tweets were employed as a form of camouflage, as a means of accruing followers, or both. Other tweets, however, often using the same hashtag as mundane tweets, were socially divisive (…)” (p. 7). Hashtags frequently used by these accounts: #ToDoListBeforeChristmas, #ThingsYouCantIgnore, #MustBeBanned, and #2016In4Words Fearmonger “These accounts spread disinformation regarding fabricated crisis events, both in the U.S. and abroad. Such events included non-existent outbreaks of Ebola in Atlanta and Salmonella in New York, an explosion at the Columbian Chemicals plan in Louisiana, a phosphorus leak in Idaho, as well as nuclear plant accidents and war crimes perpetrated in Ukraine. (…) These accounts typically tweeted a great deal of innocent, often frivolous content (i.e. song lyrics or lines of poetry) which were potentially automated. With this content these accounts often added popular hashtags such as #love (…) and #rap (…). These accounts changed behavior sporadically to tweet disinformation, and that output was produced using a different Twitter client than the one used to produce the frivolous content. (…) The Fearmonger category was the only category where we observed some inconsistency in account activity. A small number of handles tweeted briefly in a manner consistent with the Right Troll category but switched to tweeting as a Fearmonger or vice-versa” (p. 7). Hashtags frequently used by these accounts: #Fukushima2015 and #ColumbianChemicals Note. The categories were identified qualitatively analyzing the content produced and were then refined and explored more detailed via a quantitative analysis. The coders reached a Krippendorff’s alpha intercoder-reliability of 0.92. References Bradshaw, S., Howard, P. N., Kollanyi, B., & Neudert, L.?M. (2020). Sourcing and automation of political news and information over social media in the United States, 2016-2018. Political Communication, 37(2), 173–193. Brennen, J. S., Simon, F. M., Howard, P. N. [P. N.], & Nielsen, R. K. (2020). Types, sources, and claims of covid-19 misinformation. Reuters Institute. Retrieved from http://www.primaonline.it/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/COVID-19_reuters.pdf Fletcher, R. (2018). Misinformation and disinformation unpacked. Reuters Institute. Retrieved from http://www.digitalnewsreport.org/survey/2018/misinformation-and-disinformation-unpacked/ Linvill, D. L., & Warren, P. L. (2020). Troll factories: Manufacturing specialized disinformation on Twitter. Political Communication, 1–21. Neudert, L.?M., Howard, P., & Kollanyi, B. (2019). Sourcing and automation of political news and information during three European elections. Social Media + Society, 5(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119863147 Wardle, C. (2019). First Draft's essential guide to understanding information disorder. UK: First Draft News. Retrieved from https://firstdraftnews.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Information_Disorder_Digital_AW.pdf?x76701

Introduction Burning Man (BM) is a festival of art and music that materialises for one week each year in the Nevada desert. It is considered by many to be the world’s largest countercultural event. But what is BM, really? With record attendance of 69,613 in 2013 (Griffith) (the original event in 1986 had twenty), and recent event themes that have engaged with mainstream political themes such as “Green Man” (2007) and “American Dream” (2008), can BM still be considered countercultural? Was it ever? In the first part of this article, we define counterculture as a subculture that originates in the hippie movement of 1960s America and the rejection of “mainstream” values associated with post-WWII industrial culture, that aligns itself with environmentalism and ecological consciousness, and that is distinctly anti-consumer (Roszak, Making). Second, we identify BM as an art and music festival that transcends the event to travel with its desert denizens out into the “real world.” In this way, it is also a festival that has countercultural connections. Third, though BM bears some resemblance to counterculture, given that it is founded upon “Radical Self-Reliance”, BM is actually anything but countercultural because it interlocks with the current socioeconomic zeitgeist of neoliberalism, and that reflects a “new individualism” (Elliot & Lemert). BM’s ambition to be a commercial-free zone runs aground against its entanglement with market relations, and BM is also arguably a consumer space. Finally, neoliberal ideology and “new individualism” are encoded in the space of BM at the level of the spectacle (Debord). The Uchronian’s structure from BM 2006 (a cavernous wooden construction nicknamed the “Belgian Waffle”) could be read as one example. However, opportunities for personal transformation and transcendent experience may persist as counterculture moves into a global age. Defining Counterculture To talk about BM as a counterculture, we must first define counterculture. Hebdige provided a useful distinction between subculture and counterculture in an endnote to a discussion of Teds versus Rockers (148). According to Hebdige, what distinguishes counterculture from mere subculture and related styles is its association with a specific era (1967–70), that its adherents tended to hail from educated, middle-class families, and that it is “explicitly political and ideological” and thus more easily “read” by the dominant powers. Finally, it opposes the dominant culture. Counterculture has its roots in “the hippies, the flower children, the yippies” of the 60s. However, perhaps Hebdige’s definition is too narrow; it is more of an instance of counterculture than a definition. A more general definition of counterculture might be a subculture that rejects “mainstream” values, and examples of this have existed throughout time. For example, we might include the 19th century Romantics with their rejection of the Enlightenment and distrust of capitalism (Roszak 1972), or the Beat generation and post-War America (Miller). Perhaps counterculture even requires one to be a criminal: the prominent Beat writer William S. Burroughs shot guns and heroin, was a homosexual, and accidentally shot and killed his wife in a drug haze (Severo). All of these are examples of subcultures that rejected or opposed the mainstream values of the time. But it was Roszak (Making) who originally defined counterculture as the hippie movement of 1960s era college-aged middle-class American youth who revolted against the values and society inherited not only from their parents, but from the “military-industrial complex” itself, which “quite simply was the American political system” (3). Indeed, the 1960s counterculture—what the term “counterculture” has more generally come to mean—was perhaps the most radical expression of humanity ever in its ontological overthrow of industrial culture and all that it implied (and also, Roszak speculates, in so much that it may have been an experiment gone wrong on the part of the American establishment): The Communist and Socialist Left had always been as committed to industrialism as their capitalist foes, never questioning it as an inevitable historical stage. From this viewpoint, all that needed to be debated was the ownership and control of the system. But here was a dissenting movement that yearned for an entirely different quality of life. It was not simply calling the political superstructure into question; with precocious ecological insight, it was challenging the culture of industrial cities on which that superstructure stood. And more troubling still, there were those among the dissenters who questioned the very sanity of that culture. These psychic disaffiliates took off in search of altered states of consciousness that might generate altered states of society. (8) For the purposes of this paper, then, counterculture refers specifically to those cultures that find their roots in the hippie movement of the late 1960s. I embrace both Roszak’s and Hebdige’s definitions of counterculture because they define it as a unique reaction of post-WWII American youth against industrial culture and a rejection of the accompanying values of home, marriage and career. Instead, counterculture embraced ecological awareness, rejected consumption, and even directed itself toward mystical altered states. In the case of the espoused ecological consciousness, that blossomed into the contemporary (increasingly mainstream) environmental movement toward “green” energy. In the case of counterculture, the specific instance really is the definition in this case because the response of postwar youth was so strong and idiosyncratic, and there is overlap between counterculture and the BM community. So what is Burning Man? Defining Burning Man According to the event’s website: Burning Man is an annual event and a thriving year-round culture. The event takes place the week leading up to and including Labor Day, in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. The Burning Man organization […] creates the infrastructure of Black Rock City, wherein attendees (or “participants”) dedicate themselves to the spirit of community, art, self-expression, and self-reliance. They depart one week later, leaving no trace […] Outside the event, Burning Man’s vibrant year-round culture is growing through the non-profit Burning Man Project, including worldwide Regional Groups and associated non-profits who embody Burning Man’s ethos out in the world. (“What is Burning Man?”) I interpret BM as a massive art festival and party that materialises in the desert once a year to produce one of the largest cities in Nevada, but one with increasingly global reach in which the participants feel compelled to carry the ethos forward into their everyday lives. It is also an event with an increasing number of “regional burns” (Taylor) that have emerged as offshoots of the original. Creator Larry Harvey originally conceived of burning the effigy of a man on San Francisco’s Baker Beach in 1986 in honor of the solstice (“Burning Man Timeline”). Twenty people attended the first BM. That figure rapidly rose to 800 by 1990 when for legal reasons it became necessary to relocate to the remote Black Rock desert in Nevada, the largest expanse of flat land in the United States. In the early 90s, when BM had newly relocated and attendees numbered in the low thousands, it was not uncommon for participants to mix drugs, booze, speeding cars and firearms (Bonin) (reminiscent of the outlaw associations of counterculture). As the Internet became popular in the mid-1990s word spread quickly, leading to a surge in the population. By the early 2000s attendance regularly numbered in the tens of thousands and BM had become a global phenomenon. In 2014 the festival turned 28, but it had already been a corporation for nearly two decades before transitioning to a non-profit (“Burning Man Transitions”). Burning Man as Countercultural Event BM has connections to the counterculture, though the organisation is quick to dispel these connections as myths (“Media Myths”). For example, in response to the notion that BM is a “90s Woodstock”, the organisers point out that BM is for all ages and not a concert. Rather, it is a “noncommercial environment” where the participants come to entertain each other, and thus it is “not limited by the conventions of any subculture.” The idea that BM is a “hippie” festival is also a myth, but one with some truth to it: Hippies helped create environmental ethics, founded communes, wore colorful clothing, courted mysticism, and distrusted the modern industrial economy. In some ways, this counterculture bears a resemblance to aspects of Burning Man. Hippie society was also a youth movement that often revolved around drugs, music, and checks from home. Burning Man is about “radical self-reliance”–it is not a youth movement, and it is definitely not a subculture (“Media Myths”). There are some familiar aspects of counterculture here, particularly environmental consciousness, anti-consumer tendencies and mysticism. Yet, looking at the high attendance numbers and the progression of themes in recent years one might speculate that BM is no longer as countercultural as it once was. For instance, psychedelic themes such as “Vault of Heaven” (2004) and “Psyche” (2005) gave way to “The Green Man” (2007) and “American Dream” (2008). Although “Green Man” was an environmental theme it debuted the year after Vice President Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” (2006) brought the issue of climate change to a mainstream audience. Indeed, as a global, leaderless event with a strong participatory ethos in many respects BM followed suit with the business world, particularly given it was a Limited Liability Corporation (LLC) for many years (though it was ahead of the curve): “Capitalism has learned from the counter culture. But this is not news” (Rojek 355). Similarly, just in time for the 2008 U.S. Presidential election the organisational committee decided to juxtapose “the Man” with the American flag. Therefore, there has been an arguable shift toward engagement with mainstream issues and politics in recent years (and away from mysticism). Recent themes are really re-appropriations of mainstream discourses; hence they are “agonistic” readings (Mouffe). Take for example the VoterDrive Bus, an early example of political talk at BM that engaged with mainstream politics. The driver was seven-time BM veteran Corey Mervis (also known as “Misty Mocracy”) (“Jack Rabbit Speaks”). Beginning on 22 July 2004, the VoterDrive Bus wrote the word VOTE in script across the continental United States in the months before the election, stopping in the Black Rock City (BRC) for one week during the BM festival. Four years later the theme “American Dream” would reflect this countercultural re-appropriation of mainstream political themes in the final months leading up to the 2008 Presidential election. In that year, “the Man,” a massive wooden effigy that burns on the last night of the event, stood atop a platform of windows, each inscribed with the flag of a different country. “American Dream” was as politically as it was poetically inspired. Note the agonistic appeal: “This year's art theme is about patriotism—not that kind which freights the nation state with the collective weight of ego, but a patriotism that is based upon a love of country and culture. Leave ideology at home…Ask yourself, instead…What can postmodern America, this stumbling, roused, half-conscious giant, yet give to the world?” (“2008 Art Theme: American Dream”). BM has arguably retained its countercultural authenticity despite engagement with mainstream political themes by virtue of such agonistic appeals to “American Dream”, and to “Green Man” which promoted environmental awareness, and which after all started out in the counterculture. I attended BM twice in 2006 and 2007 with “The Zombie Hotel”, one among a thousand camps in the BRC, Nevada (oddly, there were numerous zombie-themed camps). The last year I attended, the festival seemed to have come of age, and 2007 was the first in its history that BM invited corporate presence in the form of green energy companies (and informational kiosks, courtesy of Google) (Taylor). Midway through the week, as I stumbled through the haphazard common area that was The Zombie Hotel hiding from the infernal heat of the desert sun, two twin fighter jets, their paths intertwining, disturbed the sanctity of the clear, blue afternoon sky followed by a collective roar from the city. One can imagine my dismay at rumours that the fighter jets—which I had initially assumed to be some sort of military reconnaissance—were in fact hired by the BM Organizational Committee to trace the event’s symbol in the sky. Speculation would later abound on Tribe.net (“What was up with the fighter jets?”). What had BM become after all? Figure 1: Misty Mocracy & the VoterDrive Bus. Photo: Erick Leskinen (2004). Reproduced with permission. “Radical Self-Reliance”, Neoliberalism and the “New Individualism” Despite overlap with elements of counterculture, there is something quite normative about BM from the standpoint of ideology, and thus “mainstream” in the sense of favouring values associated with what Roszak calls “industrial society”, namely consumption and capitalist labor relations. To understand this, let us examine “The Ten Principles of BM”. These include: Radical Inclusion, Gifting, Decommodification, Radical Self-Reliance, Radical Self-Expression, Communal Effort, Civic Responsibility, Leaving No Trace, Participation and Immediacy (“Ten Principles of Burning Man”). These categories speak to BM’s strong connection to the counterculture. For example, “Decommodification” is a rejection of consumerism in favour of a culture of giving; “Immediacy” rejects mediation, and “Participation” stresses transformative change. Many of these categories also evoke political agonism, for example “Radical Inclusion” requires that “anyone may be a part of Burning Man”, and “Radical Self-Expression”, which suggests that no one other than the gift-giver can determine the content of the message. Finally, there are categories that also engage with concepts associated with traditional civil society and democracy, such as “Civic Responsibility”, which refers to the “public welfare”, “Participation”, and “Communal Effort.” Though at first it may seem to connect with countercultural values, upon closer inspection “Radical Self-Reliance” aligns BM with the larger socioeconomic zeitgeist under late-capitalism, subverting its message of “Decommodification.” Here is what it says: “Burning Man encourages the individual to discover, exercise and rely on his or her inner resources.” That message is transformative, even mystical, but it aligns well with a neoliberal ideology and uncertain labor relations under late capitalism. Indeed, Elliot and Lemert explore the psychological impact of a “new individualism”, setting the self in opposition to the incoming forces of globalisation. They address the question of how individuals respond to globalisation, perhaps pathologically. Elliot and Lemert clarify the socio-psychological ramifications of economic fragmentation. They envision this as inextricably caught up with the erosion of personal identity and the necessity to please “self-absorbed others” in a multiplicity of incommensurate realities (20, 21). Individuals are not merely atomised socially but fragmented psychologically, while at the macroscopic level privatisation of the economy spawns this colonisation of the personal Lifeworld, as social things move into the realm of individualised dilemmas (42). It is interesting to note how BM’s principles (in particular “Radical Self-Reliance”) evoke this fracturing of identity as identities and realities multiply in the BRC. Furthermore, the spectre of neoliberal labour conditions on “the Playa” kicks down the door for consumer culture’s entrée. Consumer society “technicises” the project of the self as a series of problems having consumer solutions with reference to expert advice (Slater 86), BM provides that solution in the form of a transformative experience through “Participation”, and acolytes of the BM festival can be said to be deeply invested in the “experience economy” (Pine & Gilmore): “We believe that transformative change, whether in the individual or in society, can occur only through the medium of deeply personal participation” (“Ten Principles”). Yet, while BM rejects consumption as part of “Decommodification”, the event has become something of a playground for new technological elites (with a taste for pink fur and glow tape rather than wine and cheese) with some camps charging as much as US $25,000 in fees per person for the week (most charge $300) (Bilton). BM is gentrifying, or as veteran attendee Tyler Hanson put it, “Burning Man is no longer a counterculture revolution. It’s now become a mirror of society” (quoted in Bilton). Neoliberalism and “new individualism” are all around at BM, and a reading of space and spectacle in the Uchronian structure reveals this encoding. Figure 2: “Message Out of the Future by Night” (also known as “the Belgian Waffle). Photo: Laurent Chavanne (2006). Reproduced with permission. “Long Gone Hippies” Republican tax reformist Grover Norquist made his way to BM for the first time this year, joining the tech elites. He subsequently proclaimed that America had a lot to learn from BM: “The story of Burning Man is one of radical self-reliance” (Norquist). As the population of the BRC surges toward seventy thousand, it may be difficult to call BM a countercultural event any longer. Given parallels between the BM ethos and neoliberal market relations and a “new individualism”, it is hard to deny that BM is deeply intertwined with counterposing forces of globalisation. However, if you ask the participants (and Norquist) they will have a different story: After you buy your ticket to Burning Man to help pay for the infrastructure, and after you pay for your own transportation, food and water, and if you optionally decide to pay to join a camp that provides some services THEN you never have to take your wallet out while at Burning Man. Folks share food, massages, alcohol, swimming pools, trampolines, many experiences. The expenses that occur prior to the festival are very reasonable and it is wonderful to walk around free from shopping or purchasing. Pockets are unnecessary. So are clothes. (Alex & Allyson Grey) Consumerism is a means to an end in an environment where the meanings of civic participation and “giving back” to the counterculture take many forms. Moreover, Thornton argued that the varied definitions of what is “mainstream” among subcultures point more to a complex and multifaceted landscape of subculture than to any coherent agreement as to what “mainstream” actually means (101), and so perhaps our entire discussion of the counterculture/mainstream binary is moot. Perhaps there is something yet to be salvaged in the spaces of participation at BM, some agonistic activity to be harnessed. The fluid spaces of the desert are the loci of community action. Jan Kriekels, founder of the Uchronia Community, holds out some hope. The Belgian based art collective hauled 150 kilometres of lumber to the BRC in the summer of 2006 to construct a freestanding, cavernous structure with a floor space of 60 by 30 metres at its center and a height of 15 metres (they promised a reforestation of the equivalent amount of trees) (Figure 1). “Don’t mistake us for long gone hippies in the desert”, wrote Kriekels in Message Out of the Future: Uchronia Community, “we are trying to build a bridge between materialism and spiritualism” (102). The Uchronians announced themselves as not only desert nomads but nomads in time (“U” signifying “nothing” and “chronos” or “time”), their time-traveller personas designed to subvert commodification, their mysterious structure (nicknamed the “Belgian Waffle” by the burners, a painful misnomer in the eyes of the Uchronians) evoking a sense of timelessness. I remember standing within that “cathedral-like” (60) structure and feeling exhilarated and lonely and cold all at once for the chill of the desert at night, and later, much later, away from the Playa in conversations with a friend we recalled Guy Debord’s “Thesis 30”: “The spectator feels at home nowhere, for the spectacle is everywhere.” The message of the Uchronians provokes a comparison with Virilio’s conceptualisations of “world time” and “simultaneity” that emerge from globalisation and digital technologies (13), part of the rise of a “globalitarianism” (15)—“world time (‘live’) takes over from the ancient, immemorial supremacy of the local time of regions” (113). A fragmented sense of time, after all, accompanies unstable labour conditions in the 21st century. Still, I hold out hope for the “resistance” inherent in counterculture as it fosters humanity’s “bothersomely unfulfilled potentialities” (Roszak, Making 16). I wonder in closing if I have damaged the trust of burners in attempting to write about what is a transcendent experience for many. It may be argued that the space of the BRC is not merely a spectacle—rather, it contains the urban “forests of gestures” (de Certeau 102). These are the secret perambulations—physical and mental—at risk of betrayal. References An Inconvenient Truth. Dir. Davis Guggenheim. Perf. Al Gore. Paramount Pictures, 2006. Bilton, Nick. “At Burning Man, the Tech Elite One-Up One Another.” The New York Times: Fashion & Style, 20 Aug. 2014. 10 Oct. 2014 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/21/fashion/at-burning-man-the-tech-elite-one-up-one-another.html› “Burning Man Timeline.” Burningman. 10 Oct. 2014 ‹http://burningman.org/timeline/›. “Burning Man Transitions to Non-Profit Organization.” Burningman 3 Mar. 2014. 10 Oct. 2014 ‹http://blog.burningman.com/2014/03/news/burning-man-transitions-to-non-profit-organization/›. De Bord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone, 1994. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, Calif.: U of California P, 1984. Dust & Illusions: 30 Years of History of Burning Man. Dir. Oliver Bonin. Perf. Jerry James, Larry Harvey, John Law. Imagine, 2009. Elliot, Anthony, and Charles Lemert. The New Individualism. New York: Routledge, 2006. Grey, Alex, and Alyson Grey. “Ticket 4066, Burning Man Study.” Message to the author. 30 Nov. 2007. E-mail. Griffith, Martin. “Burning Man Draws 66,000 People to the Nevada Desert.” The Huffington Post 2 Sep. 2014. 10 Oct. 2014 ‹http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/02/burning-man-2014_n_5751648.html›. Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. New York: Methuen, 1979. “Jack Rabbit Speaks.” JRS 8.32 (2004). 10 Oct. 2014 ‹http://www.burningman.com/blackrockcity_yearround/jrs/vol08/jrs_v08_i32.html›. Kriekels, Jan. Message Out of the Future: Uchronia Community. 2006. 10 Oct. 2014 ‹http://issuu.com/harmenvdw/docs/uchronia-book-low#›. “Media Myths.” Burningman. 6 Nov. 2014 ‹http://www.burningman.com/press/myths.html›. Miller, Timothy. The Hippies and American Values. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1999. Mouffe, Chantal. On the Political. London: Routledge, 2005. Norquist, Grover. “My First Burning Man: Confessions of a Conservative from Washington.” The Guardian 2 Sep. 2014. 10 Oct. 2014 ‹http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/02/my-first-burning-man-grover-norquist›. Pine, B. Joseph, and James H. Gilmore. The Experience Economy. Boston: Harvard Business School P, 1999. Rojek, Chris. "Leaderless Organization, World Historical Events and Their Contradictions: The ‘Burning Man’ City Case.” Cultural Sociology 8.3 (2014): 351–364. Roszak, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture. Oakiland, Calif.: U of California P, 1995 [1968]. Roszak, Theodore. Where the Wasteland Ends. Charlottesville, Va.: U of Virginia P, 1972. Severo, Richard. “William S. Burroughs Dies at 83.” New York Times 3 Aug. 1997. 6 Nov. 2014 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/1997/08/03/nyregion/william-s-burroughs-dies-at-83-member-of-the-beat-generation-wrote-naked-lunch.html›. Slater, Don. Consumer Culture and Modernity. Cambridge, U.K.: Polity, 1997. Taylor, Chris. “Burning Man Grows Up.” CNN: Money. 10 Oct. 2014 ‹http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2007/07/01/100117064›. “Ten Principles of Burning Man.” Burningman. 10 Oct. 2014 ‹http://burningman.org/culture/philosophical-center/10-principles/›. Thornton, Sarah. Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan UP, 1996. Virilio, Paul. The Information Bomb. London: Verso, 2000. “What Was Up with the Fighter Jets?” Tribe 7 Sep. 2007. 10 Oct. 2014 ‹http://bm.tribe.net/thread/84f762e0-2160-4e6e-b5af-1e35ce81a1b7›. “2008 Art Theme: American Dream.” Tribe 3 Sep. 2007. 10 Oct. 2014 ‹http://bm.tribe.net/thread/60b9b69c-001a-401f-b69f-25e9bdef95ce›.

My thesis is that new media, starting with analog broadcast and going through digital convergence, blur the line between work time and free time. The technology that we are adopting has transformed free time into potential and actual labour time. At the dawn of the modern age, work shifted from tasked time to measured time. Previously, tasked time intermingled work and leisure according to the vagaries of nature. All this was banished when industrial capitalism instituted the work clock (Mumford 12-8). But now, many have noticed how post-industrial capitalism features a new intermingling captured in such expressions as "24/7" and "multi-tasking." Yet, we are only beginning to understand that media are driving a return to the pre-modern where the hour and the space are both ambiguous, available for either work or leisure. This may be the unfortunate side effect of the much vaunted "interactivity." Do you remember the old American TV show Dobie Gillis (1959-63) which featured the character Maynard G. Krebs? He always shuddered at the mention of the four-letter word "work." Now, American television shows makes it a point that everyone works (even if just barely). Seinfeld was a bold exception in featuring the work-free Kramer; a deliberate homage to the 1940s team of Abbott and Costello. Today, as welfare is turned into workfare, The New York Times scolds even the idle rich to adopt the work ethic (Yazigi). The Forms of Broadcast and Digital Media Are Driving the Merger of Work and Leisure More than the Content It is not just the content of television and other media that is undermining the leisured life; it is the social structure within which we use the media. Broadcast advertisements were the first mode/media combinations that began to recolonise free time for the new consumer economy. There had been a previous buildup in the volume and the ubiquity of advertising particularly in billboards and print. However, the attention of the reader to the printed commercial message could not be controlled and measured. Radio was the first to appropriate and measure its audience's time for the purposes of advertising. Nineteenth century media had promoted a middle class lifestyle based on spending money on home to create a refuge from work. Twentieth century broadcasting was now planting commercial messages within that refuge in the sacred moments of repose. Subsequent to broadcast, home video and cable facilitated flexible work by offering entertainment on a 24 hour basis. Finally, the computer, which juxtaposes image/sound/text within a single machine, offers the user the same proto-interactive blend of entertainment and commercial messages that broadcasting pioneered. It also fulfills the earlier promise of interactive TV by allowing us to work and to shop, in all parts of the day and night. We need to theorise this movement. The theory of media as work needs an institutional perspective. Therefore, I begin with Dallas Smythe's blindspot argument, which gave scholarly gravitas to the structural relationship of work and media (263-299). Horkheimer and Adorno had already noticed that capitalism was extending work into free time (137). Dallas Smythe went on to dissect the precise means by which late capitalism was extending work. Smythe restates the Marxist definition of capitalist labour as that human activity which creates exchange value. Then he considered the advertising industry, which currently approaches200 billion in the USA and realised that a great deal of exchange value has been created. The audience is one element of the labour that creates this exchange value. The appropriation of people's time creates advertising value. The time we spend listening to commercials on radio or viewing them on TV can be measured and is the unit of production for the value of advertising. Our viewing time ipso facto has been changed into work time. We may not experience it subjectively as work time although pundits such as Marie Winn and Jerry Mander suggest that TV viewing contributes to the same physical stresses as actual work. Nonetheless, Smythe sees commercial broadcasting as expanding the realm of capitalism into time that was otherwise set aside for private uses. Smythe's essay created a certain degree of excitement among political economists of media. Sut Jhally used Smythe to explain aspects of US broadcast history such as the innovations of William Paley in creating the CBS network (Jhally 70-9). In 1927, as Paley contemplated winning market share from his rival NBC, he realised that selling audience time was far more profitable than selling programs. Therefore, he paid affiliated stations to air his network's programs while NBC was still charging them for the privilege. It was more lucrative to Paley to turn around and sell the stations' guaranteed time to advertisers, than to collect direct payments for supplying programs. NBC switched to his business model within a year. Smythe/Jhally's model explains the superiority of Paley's model and is a historical proof of Smythe's thesis. Nonetheless, many economists and media theorists have responded with a "so what?" to Smythe's thesis that watching TV as work. Everyone knows that the basis of network television is the sale of "eyeballs" to the advertisers. However, Smythe's thesis remains suggestive. Perhaps he arrived at it after working at the U.S. Federal Communications Commission from 1943 to 1948 (Smythe 2). He was part of a team that made one last futile attempt to force radio to embrace public interest programming. This effort failed because the tide of consumerism was too strong. Radio and television were the leading edge of recapturing the home for work, setting the stage for the Internet and a postmodern replication of the cottage industries of pre and proto-industrial worlds. The consequences have been immense. The Depression and the crisis of over-production Cultural studies recognises that social values have shifted from production to consumption (Lash and Urry). The shift has a crystallising moment in the Great Depression of 1929 through 1940. One proposal at the time was to reduce individual work hours in order to create more jobs (see Hunnicut). This proposal of "share the work" was not adopted. From the point of view of the producer, sharing the work would make little difference to productivity. However, from the retailer's perspective each individual worker would accumulate less money to buy products. Overall sales would stagnate or decline. Prominent American economists at the time argued that sharing the work would mean sharing the unemployment. They warned the US government this was a fundamental threat to an economy based on consumption. Only a fully employed laborer could have enough money to buy down the national inventory. In 1932, N. A. Weston told the American Economic Association that: " ...[the labourers'] function in society as a consumer is of equal importance as the part he plays as a producer." (Weston 11). If the defeat of the share the work movement is the negative manifestation of consumerism, then the invasion by broadcast of our leisure time is its positive materialisation. We can trace this understanding by looking at Herbert Hoover. When he was the Secretary of Commerce in 1924 he warned station executives that: "I have never believed that it was possible to advertise through broadcasting without ruining the [radio] industry" (Radio's Big Issue). He had not recognised that broadcast advertising would be qualitatively more powerful for the economy than print advertising. By 1929, Hoover, now President Hoover, approved an economics committee recommendation in the traumatic year of 1929 that leisure time be made "consumable " (Committee on Recent Economic Changes xvi). His administration supported the growth of commercial radio because broadcasting was a new efficient answer to the economists' question of how to motivate consumption. Not so coincidentally network radio became a profitable industry during the great Depression. The economic power that pre-war radio hinted at flourished in the proliferation of post-war television. Advertisers switched their dollars from magazines to TV, causing the demise of such general interest magazines as Life, The Saturday Evening Postet al. Western Europe quickly followed the American broadcasting model. Great Britain was the first, allowing television to advertise the consumer revolution in 1955. Japan and many others started to permit advertising on television. During the era of television, the nature of work changed from manufacturing to servicing (Preston 148-9). Two working parents also became the norm as a greater percentage of the population took salaried employment, mostly women (International Labour Office). Many of the service jobs are to monitor the new global division of labour that allows industrialised nations to consume while emerging nations produce. (Chapter seven of Preston is the most current discussion of the shift of jobs within information economies and between industrialised and emerging nations.) Flexible Time/ Flexible Media Film and television has responded by depicting these shifts. The Mary Tyler Moore Show debuted in September of 1970 (see http://www.transparencynow.com/mary.htm). In this show nurturing and emotional attachments were centered in the work place, not in an actual biological family. It started a trend that continues to this day. However, media representations of the changing nature of work are merely symptomatic of the relationship between media and work. Broadcast advertising has a more causal relationship. As people worked more to buy more, they found that they wanted time-saving media. It is in this time period that the Internet started (1968), that the video cassette recorder was introduced (1975) and that the cable industry grew. Each of these ultimately enhanced the flexibility of work time. The VCR allowed time shifting programs. This is the media answer to the work concept of flexible time. The tired worker can now see her/his favourite TV show according to his/her own flex schedule (Wasser 2001). Cable programming, with its repeats and staggered starting times, also accommodates the new 24/7 work day. These machines, offering greater choice of programming and scheduling, are the first prototypes of interactivity. The Internet goes further in expanding flexible time by adding actual shopping to the vicarious enjoyment of consumerist products on television. The Internet user continues to perform the labour of watching advertising and, in addition, now has the opportunity to do actual work tasks at any time of the day or night. The computer enters the home as an all-purpose machine. Its purchase is motivated by several simultaneous factors. The rhetoric often stresses the recreational and work aspects of the computer in the same breath (Reed 173, Friedrich 16-7). Games drove the early computer programmers to find more "user-friendly" interfaces in order to entice young consumers. Entertainment continues to be the main driving force behind visual and audio improvements. This has been true ever since the introduction of the Apple II, Radio Shack's TRS 80 and Atari 400 personal computers in the 1977-1978 time frame (see http://www.atari-history.com/computers/8bits/400.html). The current ubiquity of colour monitors, and the standard package of speakers with PC computers are strong indications that entertainment and leisure pursuits continue to drive the marketing of computers. However, once the computer is in place in the study or bedroom, its uses fully integrates the user with world of work in both the sense of consuming and creating value. This is a specific instance of what Philip Graham calls the analytical convergence of production, consumption and circulation in hypercapitalism. The streaming video and audio not only captures the action of the game, they lend sensual appeal to the banner advertising and the power point downloads from work. In one regard, the advent of Internet advertising is a regression to the pre-broadcast era. The passive web site ad runs the same risk of being ignored as does print advertising. The measure of a successful web ad is interactivity that most often necessitates a click through on the part of the viewer. Ads often show up on separate windows that necessitate a click from the viewer if only to close down the program. In the words of Bolter and Grusin, click-through advertising is a hypermediation of television. In other words, it makes apparent the transparent relationship television forged between work and leisure. We do not sit passively through Internet advertising, we click to either eliminate them or to go on and buy the advertised products. Just as broadcasting facilitated consumable leisure, new media combines consumable leisure with flexible portable work. The new media landscape has had consequences, although the price of consumable leisure took awhile to become visible. The average work week declined from 1945 to 1982. After that point in the US, it has been edging up, continuously (United States Bureau of Labor Statistics). There is some question whether the computer has improved productivity (Kim), there is little question that the computer is colonising leisure time for multi-tasking. In a population that goes online from home almost twice as much as those who go online from work, almost half use their online time for work based activities other than email. Undoubtedly, email activity would account for even more work time (Horrigan). On the other side of the blur between work and leisure, the Pew Institute estimates that fifty percent use work Internet time for personal pleasure ("Wired Workers"). Media theory has to reengage the problem that Horkheimer/Adorno/Smythe raised. The contemporary problem of leisure is not so much the lack of leisure, but its fractured, non-contemplative, unfulfilling nature. A media critique will demonstrate the contribution of the TV and the Internet to this erosion of free time. References Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. Committee on Recent Economic Changes. Recent Economic Changes. Vol. 1. New York: no publisher listed, 1929. Friedrich, Otto. "The Computer Moves In." Time 3 Jan. 1983: 14-24. Graham, Philip. Hypercapitalism: A Political Economy of Informational Idealism. In press for New Media and Society2.2 (2000). Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Continuum Publishing, 1944/1987. Horrigan, John B. "New Internet Users: What They Do Online, What They Don't and Implications for the 'Net's Future." Pew Internet and American Life Project. 25 Sep. 2000. 24 Oct. 2001 <http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/toc.asp?Report=22>. Hunnicutt, Benjamin Kline. Work without End: Abandoning Shorter Hours for the Right to Work. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1988. International Labour Office. Economically Active Populations: Estimates and Projections 1950-2025. Geneva: ILO, 1995. Jhally, Sut. The Codes of Advertising. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987. Kim, Jane. "Computers and the Digital Economy." Digital Economy 1999. 8 June 1999. October 24, 2001 <http://www.digitaleconomy.gov/powerpoint/triplett/index.htm>. Lash, Scott, and John Urry. Economies of Signs and Space. London: Sage Publications, 1994. Mander, Jerry. Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. New York: Morrow Press, 1978. Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Civilization. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1934. Preston, Paschal. Reshaping Communication: Technology, Information and Social Change. London: Sage, 2001. "Radio's Big Issue Who Is to Pay the Artist?" The New York Times 18 May 1924: Section 8, 3. Reed, Lori. "Domesticating the Personal Computer." Critical Studies in Media Communication17 (2000): 159-85. Smythe, Dallas. Counterclockwise: Perspectives on Communication. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993. United States Bureau of Labor Statistics. Unpublished Data from the Current Population Survey. 2001. Wasser, Frederick A. Veni, Vidi, Video: The Hollywood Empire and the VCR. Austin, TX: U of Texas P, 2001. Weston, N.A., T.N. Carver, J.P. Frey, E.H. Johnson, T.R. Snavely and F.D. Tyson. "Shorter Working Time and Unemployment." American Economic Review Supplement 22.1 (March 1932): 8-15. <http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-8282%28193203%2922%3C8%3ASWTAU%3E2.0.CO%3B2-3>. Winn, Marie. The Plug-in Drug. New York: Viking Press, 1977. "Wired Workers: Who They Are, What They're Doing Online." Pew Internet Life Report 3 Sep. 2000. 24 Oct. 2000 <http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/toc.asp?Report=20>. Yazigi, Monique P. "Shocking Visits to the Real World." The New York Times 21 Feb. 1990. Page unknown. Links http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/toc.asp?Report=20 http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/toc.asp?Report=22 http://www.atari-history.com/computers/8bits/400.html http://www.transparencynow.com/mary.htm http://www.digitaleconomy.gov/powerpoint/triplett/index.htm http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-8282%28193203%2922%3C8%3ASWTAU%3 E2.0.CO%3B2-3 Citation reference for this article MLA Style Wasser, Frederick. "Media Is Driving Work" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4.5 (2001). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0111/Wasser.xml >. Chicago Style Wasser, Frederick, "Media Is Driving Work" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4, no. 5 (2001), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0111/Wasser.xml > ([your date of access]). APA Style Wasser, Frederick. (2001) Media Is Driving Work. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4(5). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0111/Wasser.xml > ([your date of access]).

There is no diagram that does not also include, besides the points it connects up, certain relatively free or unbounded points, points of creativity, change and resistance, and it is perhaps with these that we ought to begin in order to understand the whole picture. (Deleuze, “Foucault” 37) Monty Cantsin: Why do we use a pervert software robot to exploit our collective consensual mind? Letitia: Because we want the thief to be a digital entity. Monty Cantsin: But isn’t this really blasphemic? Letitia: Yes, but god – in our case a meta-cocktail of authorship and copyright – can not be trusted anymore. (Amazon Noir, “Dialogue”) In 2006, some 3,000 digital copies of books were silently “stolen” from online retailer Amazon.com by targeting vulnerabilities in the “Search inside the Book” feature from the company’s website. Over several weeks, between July and October, a specially designed software program bombarded the Search Inside!™ interface with multiple requests, assembling full versions of texts and distributing them across peer-to-peer networks (P2P). Rather than a purely malicious and anonymous hack, however, the “heist” was publicised as a tactical media performance, Amazon Noir, produced by self-proclaimed super-villains Paolo Cirio, Alessandro Ludovico, and Ubermorgen.com. While controversially directed at highlighting the infrastructures that materially enforce property rights and access to knowledge online, the exploit additionally interrogated its own interventionist status as theoretically and politically ambiguous. That the “thief” was represented as a digital entity or machinic process (operating on the very terrain where exchange is differentiated) and the emergent act of “piracy” was fictionalised through the genre of noir conveys something of the indeterminacy or immensurability of the event. In this short article, I discuss some political aspects of intellectual property in relation to the complexities of Amazon Noir, particularly in the context of control, technological action, and discourses of freedom. Software, Piracy As a force of distribution, the Internet is continually subject to controversies concerning flows and permutations of agency. While often directed by discourses cast in terms of either radical autonomy or control, the technical constitution of these digital systems is more regularly a case of establishing structures of operation, codified rules, or conditions of possibility; that is, of guiding social processes and relations (McKenzie, “Cutting Code” 1-19). Software, as a medium through which such communication unfolds and becomes organised, is difficult to conceptualise as a result of being so event-orientated. There lies a complicated logic of contingency and calculation at its centre, a dimension exacerbated by the global scale of informational networks, where the inability to comprehend an environment that exceeds the limits of individual experience is frequently expressed through desires, anxieties, paranoia. Unsurprisingly, cautionary accounts and moral panics on identity theft, email fraud, pornography, surveillance, hackers, and computer viruses are as commonplace as those narratives advocating user interactivity. When analysing digital systems, cultural theory often struggles to describe forces that dictate movement and relations between disparate entities composed by code, an aspect heightened by the intensive movement of informational networks where differences are worked out through the constant exposure to unpredictability and chance (Terranova, “Communication beyond Meaning”). Such volatility partially explains the recent turn to distribution in media theory, as once durable networks for constructing economic difference – organising information in space and time (“at a distance”), accelerating or delaying its delivery – appear contingent, unstable, or consistently irregular (Cubitt 194). Attributing actions to users, programmers, or the software itself is a difficult task when faced with these states of co-emergence, especially in the context of sharing knowledge and distributing media content. Exchanges between corporate entities, mainstream media, popular cultural producers, and legal institutions over P2P networks represent an ongoing controversy in this respect, with numerous stakeholders competing between investments in property, innovation, piracy, and publics. Beginning to understand this problematic landscape is an urgent task, especially in relation to the technological dynamics that organised and propel such antagonisms. In the influential fragment, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” Gilles Deleuze describes the historical passage from modern forms of organised enclosure (the prison, clinic, factory) to the contemporary arrangement of relational apparatuses and open systems as being materially provoked by – but not limited to – the mass deployment of networked digital technologies. In his analysis, the disciplinary mode most famously described by Foucault is spatially extended to informational systems based on code and flexibility. According to Deleuze, these cybernetic machines are connected into apparatuses that aim for intrusive monitoring: “in a control-based system nothing’s left alone for long” (“Control and Becoming” 175). Such a constant networking of behaviour is described as a shift from “molds” to “modulation,” where controls become “a self-transmuting molding changing from one moment to the next, or like a sieve whose mesh varies from one point to another” (“Postscript” 179). Accordingly, the crisis underpinning civil institutions is consistent with the generalisation of disciplinary logics across social space, forming an intensive modulation of everyday life, but one ambiguously associated with socio-technical ensembles. The precise dynamics of this epistemic shift are significant in terms of political agency: while control implies an arrangement capable of absorbing massive contingency, a series of complex instabilities actually mark its operation. Noise, viral contamination, and piracy are identified as key points of discontinuity; they appear as divisions or “errors” that force change by promoting indeterminacies in a system that would otherwise appear infinitely calculable, programmable, and predictable. The rendering of piracy as a tactic of resistance, a technique capable of levelling out the uneven economic field of global capitalism, has become a predictable catch-cry for political activists. In their analysis of multitude, for instance, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt describe the contradictions of post-Fordist production as conjuring forth a tendency for labour to “become common.” That is, as productivity depends on flexibility, communication, and cognitive skills, directed by the cultivation of an ideal entrepreneurial or flexible subject, the greater the possibilities for self-organised forms of living that significantly challenge its operation. In this case, intellectual property exemplifies such a spiralling paradoxical logic, since “the infinite reproducibility central to these immaterial forms of property directly undermines any such construction of scarcity” (Hardt and Negri 180). The implications of the filesharing program Napster, accordingly, are read as not merely directed toward theft, but in relation to the private character of the property itself; a kind of social piracy is perpetuated that is viewed as radically recomposing social resources and relations. Ravi Sundaram, a co-founder of the Sarai new media initiative in Delhi, has meanwhile drawn attention to the existence of “pirate modernities” capable of being actualised when individuals or local groups gain illegitimate access to distributive media technologies; these are worlds of “innovation and non-legality,” of electronic survival strategies that partake in cultures of dispersal and escape simple classification (94). Meanwhile, pirate entrepreneurs Magnus Eriksson and Rasmus Fleische – associated with the notorious Piratbyrn – have promoted the bleeding away of Hollywood profits through fully deployed P2P networks, with the intention of pushing filesharing dynamics to an extreme in order to radicalise the potential for social change (“Copies and Context”). From an aesthetic perspective, such activist theories are complemented by the affective register of appropriation art, a movement broadly conceived in terms of antagonistically liberating knowledge from the confines of intellectual property: “those who pirate and hijack owned material, attempting to free information, art, film, and music – the rhetoric of our cultural life – from what they see as the prison of private ownership” (Harold 114). These “unruly” escape attempts are pursued through various modes of engagement, from experimental performances with legislative infrastructures (i.e. Kembrew McLeod’s patenting of the phrase “freedom of expression”) to musical remix projects, such as the work of Negativland, John Oswald, RTMark, Detritus, Illegal Art, and the Evolution Control Committee. Amazon Noir, while similarly engaging with questions of ownership, is distinguished by specifically targeting information communication systems and finding “niches” or gaps between overlapping networks of control and economic governance. Hans Bernhard and Lizvlx from Ubermorgen.com (meaning ‘Day after Tomorrow,’ or ‘Super-Tomorrow’) actually describe their work as “research-based”: “we not are opportunistic, money-driven or success-driven, our central motivation is to gain as much information as possible as fast as possible as chaotic as possible and to redistribute this information via digital channels” (“Interview with Ubermorgen”). This has led to experiments like Google Will Eat Itself (2005) and the construction of the automated software thief against Amazon.com, as process-based explorations of technological action. Agency, Distribution Deleuze’s “postscript” on control has proven massively influential for new media art by introducing a series of key questions on power (or desire) and digital networks. As a social diagram, however, control should be understood as a partial rather than totalising map of relations, referring to the augmentation of disciplinary power in specific technological settings. While control is a conceptual regime that refers to open-ended terrains beyond the architectural locales of enclosure, implying a move toward informational networks, data solicitation, and cybernetic feedback, there remains a peculiar contingent dimension to its limits. For example, software code is typically designed to remain cycling until user input is provided. There is a specifically immanent and localised quality to its actions that might be taken as exemplary of control as a continuously modulating affective materialism. The outcome is a heightened sense of bounded emergencies that are either flattened out or absorbed through reconstitution; however, these are never linear gestures of containment. As Tiziana Terranova observes, control operates through multilayered mechanisms of order and organisation: “messy local assemblages and compositions, subjective and machinic, characterised by different types of psychic investments, that cannot be the subject of normative, pre-made political judgments, but which need to be thought anew again and again, each time, in specific dynamic compositions” (“Of Sense and Sensibility” 34). This event-orientated vitality accounts for the political ambitions of tactical media as opening out communication channels through selective “transversal” targeting. Amazon Noir, for that reason, is pitched specifically against the material processes of communication. The system used to harvest the content from “Search inside the Book” is described as “robot-perversion-technology,” based on a network of four servers around the globe, each with a specific function: one located in the United States that retrieved (or “sucked”) the books from the site, one in Russia that injected the assembled documents onto P2P networks and two in Europe that coordinated the action via intelligent automated programs (see “The Diagram”). According to the “villains,” the main goal was to steal all 150,000 books from Search Inside!™ then use the same technology to steal books from the “Google Print Service” (the exploit was limited only by the amount of technological resources financially available, but there are apparent plans to improve the technique by reinvesting the money received through the settlement with Amazon.com not to publicise the hack). In terms of informational culture, this system resembles a machinic process directed at redistributing copyright content; “The Diagram” visualises key processes that define digital piracy as an emergent phenomenon within an open-ended and responsive milieu. That is, the static image foregrounds something of the activity of copying being a technological action that complicates any analysis focusing purely on copyright as content. In this respect, intellectual property rights are revealed as being entangled within information architectures as communication management and cultural recombination – dissipated and enforced by a measured interplay between openness and obstruction, resonance and emergence (Terranova, “Communication beyond Meaning” 52). To understand data distribution requires an acknowledgement of these underlying nonhuman relations that allow for such informational exchanges. It requires an understanding of the permutations of agency carried along by digital entities. According to Lawrence Lessig’s influential argument, code is not merely an object of governance, but has an overt legislative function itself. Within the informational environments of software, “a law is defined, not through a statue, but through the code that governs the space” (20). These points of symmetry are understood as concretised social values: they are material standards that regulate flow. Similarly, Alexander Galloway describes computer protocols as non-institutional “etiquette for autonomous agents,” or “conventional rules that govern the set of possible behavior patterns within a heterogeneous system” (7). In his analysis, these agreed-upon standardised actions operate as a style of management fostered by contradiction: progressive though reactionary, encouraging diversity by striving for the universal, synonymous with possibility but completely predetermined, and so on (243-244). Needless to say, political uncertainties arise from a paradigm that generates internal material obscurities through a constant twinning of freedom and control. For Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, these Cold War systems subvert the possibilities for any actual experience of autonomy by generalising paranoia through constant intrusion and reducing social problems to questions of technological optimisation (1-30). In confrontation with these seemingly ubiquitous regulatory structures, cultural theory requires a critical vocabulary differentiated from computer engineering to account for the sociality that permeates through and concatenates technological realities. In his recent work on “mundane” devices, software and code, Adrian McKenzie introduces a relevant analytic approach in the concept of technological action as something that both abstracts and concretises relations in a diffusion of collective-individual forces. Drawing on the thought of French philosopher Gilbert Simondon, he uses the term “transduction” to identify a key characteristic of technology in the relational process of becoming, or ontogenesis. This is described as bringing together disparate things into composites of relations that evolve and propagate a structure throughout a domain, or “overflow existing modalities of perception and movement on many scales” (“Impersonal and Personal Forces in Technological Action” 201). Most importantly, these innovative diffusions or contagions occur by bridging states of difference or incompatibilities. Technological action, therefore, arises from a particular type of disjunctive relation between an entity and something external to itself: “in making this relation, technical action changes not only the ensemble, but also the form of life of its agent. Abstraction comes into being and begins to subsume or reconfigure existing relations between the inside and outside” (203). Here, reciprocal interactions between two states or dimensions actualise disparate potentials through metastability: an equilibrium that proliferates, unfolds, and drives individuation. While drawing on cybernetics and dealing with specific technological platforms, McKenzie’s work can be extended to describe the significance of informational devices throughout control societies as a whole, particularly as a predictive and future-orientated force that thrives on staged conflicts. Moreover, being a non-deterministic technical theory, it additionally speaks to new tendencies in regimes of production that harness cognition and cooperation through specially designed infrastructures to enact persistent innovation without any end-point, final goal or natural target (Thrift 283-295). Here, the interface between intellectual property and reproduction can be seen as a site of variation that weaves together disparate objects and entities by imbrication in social life itself. These are specific acts of interference that propel relations toward unforeseen conclusions by drawing on memories, attention spans, material-technical traits, and so on. The focus lies on performance, context, and design “as a continual process of tuning arrived at by distributed aspiration” (Thrift 295). This later point is demonstrated in recent scholarly treatments of filesharing networks as media ecologies. Kate Crawford, for instance, describes the movement of P2P as processual or adaptive, comparable to technological action, marked by key transitions from partially decentralised architectures such as Napster, to the fully distributed systems of Gnutella and seeded swarm-based networks like BitTorrent (30-39). Each of these technologies can be understood as a response to various legal incursions, producing radically dissimilar socio-technological dynamics and emergent trends for how agency is modulated by informational exchanges. Indeed, even these aberrant formations are characterised by modes of commodification that continually spillover and feedback on themselves, repositioning markets and commodities in doing so, from MP3s to iPods, P2P to broadband subscription rates. However, one key limitation of this ontological approach is apparent when dealing with the sheer scale of activity involved, where mass participation elicits certain degrees of obscurity and relative safety in numbers. This represents an obvious problem for analysis, as dynamics can easily be identified in the broadest conceptual sense, without any understanding of the specific contexts of usage, political impacts, and economic effects for participants in their everyday consumptive habits. Large-scale distributed ensembles are “problematic” in their technological constitution, as a result. They are sites of expansive overflow that provoke an equivalent individuation of thought, as the Recording Industry Association of America observes on their educational website: “because of the nature of the theft, the damage is not always easy to calculate but not hard to envision” (“Piracy”). The politics of the filesharing debate, in this sense, depends on the command of imaginaries; that is, being able to conceptualise an overarching structural consistency to a persistent and adaptive ecology. As a mode of tactical intervention, Amazon Noir dramatises these ambiguities by framing technological action through the fictional sensibilities of narrative genre. Ambiguity, Control The extensive use of imagery and iconography from “noir” can be understood as an explicit reference to the increasing criminalisation of copyright violation through digital technologies. However, the term also refers to the indistinct or uncertain effects produced by this tactical intervention: who are the “bad guys” or the “good guys”? Are positions like ‘good’ and ‘evil’ (something like freedom or tyranny) so easily identified and distinguished? As Paolo Cirio explains, this political disposition is deliberately kept obscure in the project: “it’s a representation of the actual ambiguity about copyright issues, where every case seems to lack a moral or ethical basis” (“Amazon Noir Interview”). While user communications made available on the site clearly identify culprits (describing the project as jeopardising arts funding, as both irresponsible and arrogant), the self-description of the artists as political “failures” highlights the uncertainty regarding the project’s qualities as a force of long-term social renewal: Lizvlx from Ubermorgen.com had daily shootouts with the global mass-media, Cirio continuously pushed the boundaries of copyright (books are just pixels on a screen or just ink on paper), Ludovico and Bernhard resisted kickback-bribes from powerful Amazon.com until they finally gave in and sold the technology for an undisclosed sum to Amazon. Betrayal, blasphemy and pessimism finally split the gang of bad guys. (“Press Release”) Here, the adaptive and flexible qualities of informatic commodities and computational systems of distribution are knowingly posited as critical limits; in a certain sense, the project fails technologically in order to succeed conceptually. From a cynical perspective, this might be interpreted as guaranteeing authenticity by insisting on the useless or non-instrumental quality of art. However, through this process, Amazon Noir illustrates how forces confined as exterior to control (virality, piracy, noncommunication) regularly operate as points of distinction to generate change and innovation. Just as hackers are legitimately employed to challenge the durability of network exchanges, malfunctions are relied upon as potential sources of future information. Indeed, the notion of demonstrating ‘autonomy’ by illustrating the shortcomings of software is entirely consistent with the logic of control as a modulating organisational diagram. These so-called “circuit breakers” are positioned as points of bifurcation that open up new systems and encompass a more general “abstract machine” or tendency governing contemporary capitalism (Parikka 300). As a consequence, the ambiguities of Amazon Noir emerge not just from the contrary articulation of intellectual property and digital technology, but additionally through the concept of thinking “resistance” simultaneously with regimes of control. This tension is apparent in Galloway’s analysis of the cybernetic machines that are synonymous with the operation of Deleuzian control societies – i.e. “computerised information management” – where tactical media are posited as potential modes of contestation against the tyranny of code, “able to exploit flaws in protocological and proprietary command and control, not to destroy technology, but to sculpt protocol and make it better suited to people’s real desires” (176). While pushing a system into a state of hypertrophy to reform digital architectures might represent a possible technique that produces a space through which to imagine something like “our” freedom, it still leaves unexamined the desire for reformation itself as nurtured by and produced through the coupling of cybernetics, information theory, and distributed networking. This draws into focus the significance of McKenzie’s Simondon-inspired cybernetic perspective on socio-technological ensembles as being always-already predetermined by and driven through asymmetries or difference. As Chun observes, consequently, there is no paradox between resistance and capture since “control and freedom are not opposites, but different sides of the same coin: just as discipline served as a grid on which liberty was established, control is the matrix that enables freedom as openness” (71). Why “openness” should be so readily equated with a state of being free represents a major unexamined presumption of digital culture, and leads to the associated predicament of attempting to think of how this freedom has become something one cannot not desire. If Amazon Noir has political currency in this context, however, it emerges from a capacity to recognise how informational networks channel desire, memories, and imaginative visions rather than just cultivated antagonisms and counterintuitive economics. As a final point, it is worth observing that the project was initiated without publicity until the settlement with Amazon.com. There is, as a consequence, nothing to suggest that this subversive “event” might have actually occurred, a feeling heightened by the abstractions of software entities. To the extent that we believe in “the big book heist,” that such an act is even possible, is a gauge through which the paranoia of control societies is illuminated as a longing or desire for autonomy. As Hakim Bey observes in his conceptualisation of “pirate utopias,” such fleeting encounters with the imaginaries of freedom flow back into the experience of the everyday as political instantiations of utopian hope. Amazon Noir, with all its underlying ethical ambiguities, presents us with a challenge to rethink these affective investments by considering our profound weaknesses to master the complexities and constant intrusions of control. It provides an opportunity to conceive of a future that begins with limits and limitations as immanently central, even foundational, to our deep interconnection with socio-technological ensembles. References “Amazon Noir – The Big Book Crime.” http://www.amazon-noir.com/>. Bey, Hakim. T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism. New York: Autonomedia, 1991. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fibre Optics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Crawford, Kate. “Adaptation: Tracking the Ecologies of Music and Peer-to-Peer Networks.” Media International Australia 114 (2005): 30-39. Cubitt, Sean. “Distribution and Media Flows.” Cultural Politics 1.2 (2005): 193-214. Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Trans. Seán Hand. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. ———. “Control and Becoming.” Negotiations 1972-1990. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia UP, 1995. 169-176. ———. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” Negotiations 1972-1990. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia UP, 1995. 177-182. Eriksson, Magnus, and Rasmus Fleische. “Copies and Context in the Age of Cultural Abundance.” Online posting. 5 June 2007. Nettime 25 Aug 2007. Galloway, Alexander. Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin Press, 2004. Harold, Christine. OurSpace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007. Lessig, Lawrence. Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. New York: Basic Books, 1999. McKenzie, Adrian. Cutting Code: Software and Sociality. New York: Peter Lang, 2006. ———. “The Strange Meshing of Impersonal and Personal Forces in Technological Action.” Culture, Theory and Critique 47.2 (2006): 197-212. Parikka, Jussi. “Contagion and Repetition: On the Viral Logic of Network Culture.” Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization 7.2 (2007): 287-308. “Piracy Online.” Recording Industry Association of America. 28 Aug 2007. http://www.riaa.com/physicalpiracy.php>. Sundaram, Ravi. “Recycling Modernity: Pirate Electronic Cultures in India.” Sarai Reader 2001: The Public Domain. Delhi, Sarai Media Lab, 2001. 93-99. http://www.sarai.net>. Terranova, Tiziana. “Communication beyond Meaning: On the Cultural Politics of Information.” Social Text 22.3 (2004): 51-73. ———. “Of Sense and Sensibility: Immaterial Labour in Open Systems.” DATA Browser 03 – Curating Immateriality: The Work of the Curator in the Age of Network Systems. Ed. Joasia Krysa. New York: Autonomedia, 2006. 27-38. Thrift, Nigel. “Re-inventing Invention: New Tendencies in Capitalist Commodification.” Economy and Society 35.2 (2006): 279-306. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Dieter, Michael. "Amazon Noir: Piracy, Distribution, Control." M/C Journal 10.5 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/07-dieter.php>. APA Style Dieter, M. (Oct. 2007) "Amazon Noir: Piracy, Distribution, Control," M/C Journal, 10(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/07-dieter.php>.

…love is queered not when we discover it to be resistant to or more than its known forms, but when we see that there is no world that admits how it actually works as a principle of living. Lauren Berlant – “Love, A Queer Feeling” As the sun beats down on a very dusty Musgrave Park, the crowd is hushed in respect for the elder addressing us. It is Pride Fair Day and we are listening to the story of how this place has been a home for queer and black people throughout Brisbane’s history. Like so many others, this park has been a place of refuge in times when Boundary Streets marked the lines aboriginal people couldn’t cross to enter the genteel heart of Brisbane’s commercial district. The street names remain today, and even if movements across territory are somewhat less constrained, a manslaughter trial taking place nearby reminds us of the surveillance aboriginal people still suffer as a result of their refusal to stay off the streets and out of sight in homes they don’t have. In the past few years, Fair Day has grown in size. It now charges an entry fee to fence out unwelcome guests, so that those who normally live here have been effectively uninvited from the party. On this sunny Saturday, we sit and talk about these things, and wonder at the number of spaces still left in this city for spontaneous, non-commercial encounters and alliances. We could hardly have known that in the course of just a few weeks, the distance separating us from others would grow even further. During the course of Brisbane’s month-long Pride celebrations in 2007, two events affected the rights agendas of both queer and black Australians. First, The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Report, Same Sex, Same Entitlements, was tabled in parliament. Second, the Federal government decided to declare a state of emergency in remote indigenous communities in the Northern Territory in response to an inquiry on the state of aboriginal child abuse. (The full title of the report is “Ampe Akelyernemane Meke Mekarle”: Little Children are Sacred, and the words are from the Arrandic languages of the Central Desert Region of the Northern Territory. The report’s front cover also explains the title in relation to traditional law of the Yolngu people of Arnhem Land.) While the latter issue has commanded the most media and intellectual attention, and will be discussed later in this piece, the timing of both reports provides an opportunity to consider the varying experiences of two particularly marginalised groups in contemporary Australia. In a period when the Liberal Party has succeeded in pitting minority claims against one another as various manifestations of “special interests” (Brett, Gregg) this essay suggests there is a case to be made for queer and black activists to join forces against wider tendencies that affect both communities. To do this I draw on the work of American critic, Lauren Berlant, who for many years has offered a unique take on debates about citizenship in the United States. Writing from a queer theory perspective, Berlant argues that the conservative political landscape in her country has succeeded in convincing people that “the intimacy of citizenship is something scarce and sacred, private and proper, and only for members of families” (Berlant Queen 2-3). The consequence of this shift is that politics moves from being a conversation conducted in the public sphere about social issues to instead resemble a form of adjudication on the conduct of others in the sphere of private life. In this way, Berlant indicates how heteronormative culture “uses cruel and mundane strategies both to promote change from non-normative populations and to deny them state, federal, and juridical supports because they are deemed morally incompetent to their own citizenship” (Berlant, Queen 19). In relation to the so-called state of emergency in the Northern Territory, coming so soon after attempts to encourage indigenous home-ownership in the same region, the compulsion to promote change from non-normative populations currently affects indigenous Australians in ways that resonate with Berlant’s argument. While her position reacts to an environment where the moral majority has a much firmer hold on the national political spectrum, in Australia these conservative forces have no need to be so eloquent—normativity is already embedded in a particular form of “ordinariness” that is the commonsense basis for public political debate (Allon, Brett and Moran). These issues take on further significance as home-ownership and aspirations towards it have gradually become synonymous with the demonstration of appropriate citizenship under the Coalition government: here, phrases like “an interest rate election” are assumed to encapsulate voter sentiment while “the mortgage belt” has emerged as the demographic most keenly wooed by precariously placed politicians. As Berlant argues elsewhere, the project of normalization that makes heterosexuality hegemonic also entails “material practices that, though not explicitly sexual, are implicated in the hierarchies of property and propriety” that secure heteronormative privilege (Berlant and Warner 548). Inhabitants of remote indigenous communities in Australia are invited to desire and enact normal homes in order to be accepted and rewarded as valuable members of the nation; meanwhile gay and lesbian couples base their claims for recognition on the adequate manifestation of normal homes. In this situation black and queer activists share an interest in elaborating forms of kinship and community that resist the limited varieties of home-building currently sanctioned and celebrated by the State. As such, I will conclude this essay with a model for this alternative process of home-building in the hope of inspiring others. Home Sweet Home Ever since the declaration of terra nullius, white Australia has had a hard time recognising homes it doesn’t consider normal. To the first settlers, indigenous people’s uncultivated land lacked meaning, their seasonal itinerancy challenged established notions of property, while their communal living and wider kinship relations confused nuclear models of procreative responsibility and ancestry. From the homes white people still call “camps” many aboriginal people were moved against their will on to “missions” which even in name invoked the goal of assimilation into mainstream society. So many years later, white people continue to maintain that their version of homemaking is the most superior, the most economically effective, the most functional, with government policy and media commentators both agreeing that “the way out of indigenous disadvantage is home ownership.”(The 1 July broadcast of the esteemed political chat show Insiders provides a representative example of this consensus view among some of the country’s most respected journalists.) In the past few months, low-interest loans have been touted as the surest route out of the shared “squalor” (Weekend Australian, June 30-July1) of communal living and the right path towards economic development in remote aboriginal communities (Karvelas, “New Deal”). As these references suggest, The Australian newspaper has been at the forefront of reporting these government initiatives in a positive light: one story from late May featured a picture of Tiwi Islander Mavis Kerinaiua watering her garden with the pet dog and sporting a Tigers Aussie Rules singlet. The headline, “Home, sweet home, for Mavis” (Wilson) was a striking example of a happy and contented black woman in her own backyard, especially given how regularly mainstream national news coverage of indigenous issues follows a script of failed aboriginal communities. In stories like these, communal land ownership is painted as the cause of dysfunction, and individual homes are crucial to “changing the culture.” Never is it mentioned that communal living arrangements clearly were functional before white settlement, were an intrinsic part of “the culture”; nor is it acknowledged that the option being offered to indigenous people is land that had already been taken away from them in one way or another. That this same land can be given back only on certain conditions—including financially rewarding those who “prove they are doing well” by cultivating their garden in recognisably right ways (Karvelas, “New Deal”)— bolsters Berlant’s claim that government rhetoric succeeds by transforming wider structural questions into matters of individual responsibility. Home ownership is the stunningly selective neoliberal interpretation of “land rights”. The very notion of private property erases the social and cultural underpinnings of communal living as a viable way of life, stigmatising any alternative forms of belonging that might form the basis for another kind of home. Little Children Are Sacred The latest advance in efforts to encourage greater individual responsibility in indigenous communities highlights child abuse as the pivotal consequence of State and Local government inaction. The innocent indigenous child provides the catalyst for a myriad of competing political positions, the most vocal of which welcomes military intervention on behalf of powerless, voiceless kids trapped in horrendous scenarios (Kervalas, “Pearson’s Passion”). In these representations, the potentially abused aboriginal child takes on “supericonicity” in public debate. In her North American context, Berlant uses this concept to explain how the unborn child figures in acrimonious arguments over abortion. The foetus has become the most mobilising image in the US political scene because: it is an image of an American, perhaps the last living American, not yet bruised by history: not yet caught up in the processes of secularisation and centralisation… This national icon is too innocent of knowledge, agency, and accountability and thus has ethical claims on the adult political agents who write laws, make culture, administer resources, control things. (Berlant, Queen 6) In Australia, the indigenous child takes on supericonicity because he or she is too young to formulate a “black armband” view of history, to have a point of view on why their circumstance happens to be so objectionable, to vote out the government that wants to survey and penetrate his or her body. The child’s very lack of agency is used as justification for the military action taken by those who write laws, make the culture that will be recognized as an appropriate performance of indigeneity, administer (at the same time as they cut) essential resources; those who, for the moment, control things. However, and although a government perspective would not recognize this, in Australia the indigenous child is always already bruised by conventional history in the sense that he or she will have trouble accessing the stories of ancestors and therefore the situation that affects his or her entry into the world. Indeed, it is precisely the extent to which the government denies its institutional culpability in inflicting wounds on aboriginal people throughout history that the indigenous child’s supericonicity is now available as a political weapon. Same-Sex: Same Entitlements A situation in which the desire for home ownership is pedagogically enforced while also being economically sanctioned takes on further dimensions when considered next to the fate of other marginalised groups in society—those for whom an appeal for acceptance and equal rights pivots on the basis of successfully performing normal homes. While indigenous Australians are encouraged to aspire for home ownership as the appropriate manifestation of responsible citizenship, the HREOC report represents a group of citizens who crave recognition for already having developed this same aspiration. In the case studies selected for the Same-Sex: Same Entitlements Report, discrimination against same-sex couples is identified in areas such as work and taxation, workers’ compensation, superannuation, social security, veterans’ entitlements and childrearing. It recommends changes to existing laws in these areas to match those that apply to de facto relationships. When launching the report, the commissioner argued that gay people suffer discrimination “simply because of whom they love”, and the report launch quotes a “self-described ‘average suburban family’” who insist “we don’t want special treatment …we just want equality” (HREOC). Such positioning exercises give some insight into Berlant’s statement that “love is a site that has perhaps not yet been queered enough” (Berlant, “Love” 433). A queer response to the report might highlight that by focussing on legal entitlements of the most material kind, little is done to challenge the wider situation in which one’s sexual relationship has the power to determine intimate possessions and decisions—whether this is buying a plane ticket, getting a loan, retiring in some comfort or finding a nice nursing home. An agenda calling for legislative changes to financial entitlement serves to reiterate rather than challenge the extent to which economically sanctioned subjectivities are tied to sexuality and normative models of home-building. A same-sex rights agenda promoting traditional notions of procreative familial attachment (the concerned parents of gay kids cited in the report, the emphasis on the children of gay couples) suggests that this movement for change relies on a heteronormative model—if this is understood as the manner in which the institutions of personal life remain “the privileged institutions of social reproduction, the accumulation and transfer of capital, and self-development” (Berlant and Warner 553). What happens to those who do not seek the same procreative path? Put another way, the same-sex entitlements discourse can be seen to demand “intelligibility” within the hegemonic understanding of love, when love currently stands as the primordial signifier and ultimate suturing device for all forms of safe, reliable and useful citizenly identity (Berlant, “Love”). In its very terminology, same-sex entitlement asks to access the benefits of normativity without challenging the ideological or economic bases for its attachment to particular living arrangements and rewards. The political agenda for same-sex rights taking shape in the Federal arena appears to have chosen its objectives carefully in order to fit existing notions of proper home building and the economic incentives that come with them. While this is understandable in a conservative political environment, a wider agenda for queer activism in and outside the home would acknowledge that safety, security and belonging are universal desires that stretch beyond material acquisitions, financial concerns and procreative activity (however important these things are). It is to the possibilities this perspective might generate that I now turn. One Size Fits Most Urban space is always a host space. The right to the city extends to those who use the city. It is not limited to property owners. (Berlant and Warner, 563) The affective charge and resonance of a concept like home allows an opportunity to consider the intimacies particular to different groups in society, at the same time as it allows contemplation of the kinds of alliances increasingly required to resist neoliberalism’s impact on personal space. On one level, this might entail publicly denouncing representations of indigenous living conditions that describe them as “squalor” as some kind of hygienic short-hand that comes at the expense of advocating infrastructure suited to the very different way of living that aboriginal kinship relations typically require. Further, as alternative cultural understandings of home face ongoing pressure to fit normative ideals, a key project for contemporary queer activism is to archive, document and publicise the varied ways people choose to live at this point in history in defiance of sanctioned arrangements (eg Gorman-Murray 2007). Rights for gay and lesbian couples and parents need not be called for in the name of equality if to do so means reproducing a logic that feeds the worst stereotypes around non-procreating queers. Such a perspective fares poorly for the many literally unproductive citizens, queer and straight alike, whose treacherous refusal to breed banishes them from the respectable suburban politics to which the current government caters. Which takes me back to the park. Later that afternoon on Fair Day, we’ve been entertained by a range of performers, including the best Tina Turner impersonator I’ll ever see. But the highlight is the festival’s special guest, Vanessa Wagner who decides to end her show with a special ceremony. Taking the role of celebrant, Vanessa invites three men on to the stage who she explains are in an ongoing, committed three-way relationship. Looking a little closer, I remember meeting these blokes at a friend’s party last Christmas Eve: I was the only girl in an apartment full of gay men in the midst of some serious partying (and who could blame them, on the eve of an event that holds dubious relevance for their preferred forms of intimacy and celebration?). The wedding takes place in front of an increasingly boisterous crowd that cannot fail to appreciate the gesture as farcically mocking the sacred bastion of gay activism—same-sex marriage. But clearly, the ceremony plays a role in consecrating the obvious desire these men have for each other, in a safe space that feels something like a home. Their relationship might be a long way from many people’s definition of normal, but it clearly operates with care, love and a will for some kind of longevity. For queer subjects, faced with a history of persecution, shame and an unequal share of a pernicious illness, this most banal of possible definitions of home has been a luxury difficult to afford. Understood in this way, queer experience is hard to compare with that of indigenous people: “The queer world is a space of entrances, exits, unsystematised lines of acquaintance, projected horizons, typifying examples, alternate routes, blockages, incommensurate geographies” (Berlant and Warner 558). In many instances, it has “required the development of kinds of intimacy that bear no necessary relation to domestic space, to kinship, to the couple form, to property, or to the nation” (ibid) in liminal and fleeting zones of improvisation like parties, parks and public toilets. In contrast, indigenous Australians’ distinct lines of ancestry, geography, and story continue through generations of kin in spite of the efforts of a colonising power to reproduce others in its own image. But in this sense, what queer and black Australians now share is the fight to live and love in more than one way, with more than one person: to extend relationships of care beyond the procreative imperative and to include land that is beyond the scope of one’s own backyard. Both indigenous and queer Australians stand to benefit from a shared project “to support forms of affective, erotic and personal living that are public in the sense of accessible, available to memory, and sustained through collective activity” (Berlant and Warner 562). To build this history is to generate an archive that is “not simply a repository” but “is also a theory of cultural relevance” (Halberstam 163). A queer politics of home respects and learns from different ways of organising love, care, affinity and responsibility to a community. This essay has been an attempt to document other ways of living that take place in the pockets of one city, to show that homes often exist where others see empty space, and that love regularly survives beyond the confines of the couple. In learning from the history of oppression experienced in the immediate territories I inhabit, I also hope it captures what it means to reckon with the ongoing knowledge of being an uninvited guest in the home of another culture, one which, through shared activism, will continue to survive much longer than this, or any other archive. References Allon, Fiona. “Home as Cultural Translation: John Howard’s Earlwood.” Communal/Plural 5 (1997): 1-25. Berlant, Lauren. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. ———. “Love, A Queer Feeling.” Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis. Eds. Tim Dean and Christopher Lane. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2001. 432-51. ———, and Michael Warner. “Sex in Public.” Critical Inquiry 24.2 (1998): 547-566. Brett, Judith. Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class: From Alfred Deakin to John Howard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ———, and Anthony Moran. Ordinary People’s Politics: Australians Talk About Politics, Life and the Future of Their Country. Melbourne: Pluto Press, 2006. Gorman-Murray, Andrew. “Contesting Domestic Ideals: Queering the Australian Home.” Australian Geographer 38.2 (2007): 195-213. Gregg, Melissa. “The Importance of Being Ordinary.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 10.1 (2007): 95-104. Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York and London: NYU Press, 2005 Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. Same-Sex: Same Entitlements Report. 2007. 21 Aug. 2007 http://www.hreoc.gov.au/human_rights/samesex/report/index.html>. ———. Launch of Final Report of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s Same-Sex: Same Entitlements Inquiry (transcript). 2007. 5 July 2007 . Insiders. ABC TV. 1 July 2007. 5 July 2007 http://www.abc.net.au/insiders/content/2007/s1966728.htm>. Karvelas, Patricia. “It’s New Deal or Despair: Pearson.” The Weekend Australian 12-13 May 2007: 7. ———. “How Pearson’s Passion Moved Howard to Act.” The Australian. 23 June 2007. 5 July 2007 http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21952951-5013172,00.html>. Northern Territory Government Inquiry Report into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse. Ampe Akelyernemane Meke Mekarle: Little Children Are Sacred. 2007. 5 July 2007 http://www.nt.gov.au/dcm/inquirysaac/pdf/bipacsa_final_report.pdf>. Wilson, Ashleigh. “Home, Sweet Home, for Mavis.” The Weekend Australian 12-13 May 2007: 7. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Gregg, Melissa. "Normal Homes." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/02-gregg.php>. APA Style Gregg, M. (Aug. 2007) "Normal Homes," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/02-gregg.php>.

The general who wins a battle makes many calculations in his temple ere the battle is fought. — Sun TzuWorld War II saw a proliferation of maps. From command posts to the pages of National Geographic to the pages of daily newspapers, they were everywhere (Schulten). The era also saw substantive developments in cartography, especially with respect to the topographical maps that feature in our selected films. This essay offers a preliminary examination of the battle-map as depicted in two films about the Second World War: Franklin J. Shaffner’s biopic Patton (1970) and Jack Smight’s epic Midway (1976). In these films, maps, charts, or tableaux (the three-dimensional models upon which are plotted the movements of battalions, fleets, and so on) emerge as an expression of both martial and cinematic strategy. As a rear-view representation of the relative movements of personnel and materiel in particular battle arenas, the map and its accessories (pins, tape, markers, and so forth) trace the broad military dispositions of Patton’s 2nd Corp (Africa), Seventh Army (Italy) and Third Army (Western Europe) and the relative position of American and Japanese fleets in the Pacific. In both Patton and Midway, the map also emerges as a simple mode of narrative plotting: as the various encounters in the two texts play out, the battle-map more or less contemporaneously traces the progress of forces. It also serves as a foreshadowing device, not just narratively, but cinematically: that which is plotted in advance comes to pass (even if as preliminary movements before catastrophe), but the audience is also cued for the cinematic chaos and disjuncture that almost inevitably ensues in the battle scenes proper.On one hand, then, this essay proposes that at the fundamental level of fabula (seen through either the lens of historical hindsight or through the eyes of the novice who knows nothing of World War II), the annotated map is engaged both strategically and cinematically: as a stage upon which commanders attempt to act out (either in anticipation, or retrospectively) the intricate, but grotesque, ballet of warfare — and as a reflection of the broad, sequential, sweeps of conflict. While, in War and Cinema, Paul Virilio offers the phrase ‘the logistics of perception’ (1), in this this essay we, on the other hand, consider that, for those in command, the battle-map is a representation of the perception of logistics: the big picture of war finds rough indexical representation on a map, but (as Clausewitz tells us) chance, the creative agency of individual commanders, and the fog of battle make it far less probable (than is the case in more specific mappings, such as, say, the wedding rehearsal) that what is planned will play out with any degree of close correspondence (On War 19, 21, 77-81). Such mapping is, of course, further problematised by the processes of abstraction themselves: indexicality is necessarily a reduction; a de-realisation or déterritorialisation. ‘For the military commander,’ writes Virilio, ‘every dimension is unstable and presents itself in isolation from its original context’ (War and Cinema 32). Yet rehearsal (on maps, charts, or tableaux) is a keying activity that seeks to presage particular real world patterns (Goffman 45). As suggested above, far from being a rhizomatic activity, the heavily plotted (as opposed to thematic) business of mapping is always out of joint: either a practice of imperfect anticipation or an equally imperfect (pared back and behind-the-times) rendition of activity in the field. As is argued by Tolstoj in War and Peace, the map then presents to the responder a series of tensions and ironies often lost on the masters of conflict themselves. War, as Tostoj proposes, is a stochastic phenomenon while the map is a relatively static, and naive, attempt to impose order upon it. Tolstoj, then, pillories Phull (in the novel, Pfuhl), the aptly-named Prussian general whose lock-stepped obedience to the science of war (of which the map is part) results in the abject humiliation of 1806:Pfuhl was one of those theoreticians who are so fond of their theory that they lose sight of the object of that theory - its application in practice. (Vol. 2, Part 1, Ch. 10, 53)In both Patton and Midway, then, the map unfolds not only as an epistemological tool (read, ‘battle plan’) or reflection (read, the near contemporaneous plotting of real world affray) of the war narrative, but as a device of foreshadowing and as an allegory of command and its profound limitations. So, in Deleuzian terms, while emerging as an image of both time and perception, for commanders and filmgoers alike, the map is also something of a seduction: a ‘crystal-image’ situated in the interstices between the virtual and the actual (Deleuze 95). To put it another way, in our films the map emerges as an isomorphism: a studied plotting in which inheres a counter-text (Goffman 26). As a simple device of narrative, and in the conventional terms of latitude and longitude, in both Patton and Midway, the map, chart, or tableau facilitate the plotting of the resources of war in relation to relief (including island land masses), roads, railways, settlements, rivers, and seas. On this syntagmatic plane, in Greimasian terms, the map is likewise received as a canonical sign of command: where there are maps, there are, after all, commanders (Culler 13). On the other hand, as suggested above, the battle-map (hereafter, we use the term to signify the conventional paper map, the maritime chart, or tableau) materialises as a sanitised image of the unknown and the grotesque: as apodictic object that reduces complexity and that incidentally banishes horror and affect. Thus, the map evolves, in the viewer’s perception, as an ironic sign of all that may not be commanded. This is because, as an emblem of the rational order, in Patton and Midway the map belies the ubiquity of battle’s friction: that defined by Clausewitz as ‘the only concept which...distinguishes real war from war on paper’ (73). ‘Friction’ writes Clausewitz, ‘makes that which appears easy in War difficult in reality’ (81).Our work here cannot ignore or side-step the work of others in identifying the core cycles, characteristics of the war film genre. Jeanine Basinger, for instance, offers nothing less than an annotated checklist of sixteen key characteristics for the World War II combat film. Beyond this taxonomy, though, Basinger identifies the crucial role this sub-type of film plays in the corpus of war cinema more broadly. The World War II combat film’s ‘position in the evolutionary process is established, as well as its overall relationship to history and reality. It demonstrates how a primary set of concepts solidifies into a story – and how they can be interpreted for a changing ideology’ (78). Stuart Bender builds on Basinger’s taxonomy and discussion of narrative tropes with a substantial quantitative analysis of the very building blocks of battle sequences. This is due to Bender’s contention that ‘when a critic’s focus [is] on the narrative or ideological components of a combat film [this may] lead them to make assumptions about the style which are untenable’ (8). We seek with this research to add to a rich and detailed body of knowledge by redressing a surprising omission therein: a conscious and focussed analysis of the use of battle-maps in war cinema. In Patton and in Midway — as in War and Peace — the map emerges as an emblem of an intergeneric dialogue: as a simple storytelling device and as a paradigmatic engine of understanding. To put it another way, as viewer-responders with a synoptic perspective we perceive what might be considered a ‘double exposure’: in the map we see what is obviously before us (the collision of represented forces), but an Archimedean positioning facilitates the production of far more revelatory textual isotopies along what Roman Jakobson calls the ‘axis of combination’ (Linguistics and Poetics 358). Here, otherwise unconnected signs (in our case various manifestations and configurations of the battle-map) are brought together in relation to particular settings, situations, and figures. Through this palimpsest of perspective, a crucial binary emerges: via the battle-map we see ‘command’ and the sequence of engagement — and, through Greimasian processes of axiological combination (belonging more to syuzhet than fabula), elucidated for us are the wrenching ironies of warfare (Culler 228). Thus, through the profound and bound motif of the map (Tomashevsky 69), are we empowered to pass judgement on the map bearers who, in both films, present as the larger-than-life heroes of old. Figure 1.While we have scope only to deal with the African theatre, Patton opens with a dramatic wide-shot of the American flag: a ‘map’, if you will, of a national history forged in war (Fig. 1). Against this potent sign of American hegemony, as he slowly climbs up to the stage before it, the general appears a diminutive figure -- until, via a series of matched cuts that culminate in extreme close-ups, he manifests as a giant about to play his part in a great American story (Fig. 2).Figure 2.Some nineteen minutes into a film, having surveyed the carnage of Kasserine Pass (in which, in February 1943, the Germans inflicted a humiliating defeat on the Americans) General Omar Bradley is reunited with his old friend and newly-nominated three-star general, George S. Patton Jr.. Against a backdrop of an indistinct topographical map (that nonetheless appears to show the front line) and the American flag that together denote the men’s authority, the two discuss the Kasserine catastrophe. Bradley’s response to Patton’s question ‘What happened at Kasserine?’ clearly illustrates the tension between strategy and real-world engagement. While the battle-plan was solid, the Americans were outgunned, their tanks were outclassed, and (most importantly) their troops were out-disciplined. Patton’s concludes that Rommel can only be beaten if the American soldiers are fearless and fight as a cohesive unit. Now that he is in command of the American 2nd Corp, the tide of American martial fortune is about to turn.The next time Patton appears in relation to the map is around half an hour into the two-and-three-quarter-hour feature. Here, in the American HQ, the map once more appears as a simple, canonical sign of command. Somewhat carelessly, the map of Europe seems to show post-1945 national divisions and so is ostensibly offered as a straightforward prop. In terms of martial specifics, screenplay writer Francis Ford Coppola apparently did not envisage much close scrutiny of the film’s maps. Highlighted, instead, are the tensions between strategy as a general principle and action on the ground. As British General Sir Arthur Coningham waxes lyrical about allied air supremacy, a German bomber drops its payload on the HQ, causing the map of Europe to (emblematically) collapse forward into the room. Following a few passes by the attacking aircraft, the film then cuts to a one second medium shot as a hail of bullets from a Heinkel He 111 strike a North African battle map (Fig. 3). Still prone, Patton remarks: ‘You were discussing air supremacy, Sir Arthur.’ Dramatising a scene that did take place (although Coningham was not present), Schaffner’s intention is to allow Patton to shoot holes in the British strategy (of which he is contemptuous) but a broader objective is the director’s exposé of the more general disjuncture between strategy and action. As the film progresses, and the battle-map’s allegorical significance is increasingly foregrounded, this critique becomes definitively sharper.Figure 3.Immediately following a scene in which an introspective Patton walks through a cemetery in which are interred the remains of those killed at Kasserine, to further the critique of Allied strategy the camera cuts to Berlin’s high command and a high-tech ensemble of tableaux, projected maps, and walls featuring lights, counters, and clocks. Tasked to research the newly appointed Patton, Captain Steiger walks through the bunker HQ with Hitler’s Chief of Staff, General Jodl, to meet with Rommel — who, suffering nasal diphtheria, is away from the African theatre. In a memorable exchange, Steiger reveals that Patton permanently attacks and never retreats. Rommel, who, following his easy victory at Kasserine, is on the verge of total tactical victory, in turn declares that he will ‘attack and annihilate’ Patton — before the poet-warrior does the same to him. As Clausewitz has argued, and as Schaffner is at pains to point out, it seems that, in part, the outcome of warfare has more to do with the individual consciousness of competing warriors than it does with even the most exquisite of battle-plans.Figure 4.So, even this early in the film’s runtime, as viewer-responders we start to reassess various manifestations of the battle-map. To put it as Michelle Langford does in her assessment of Schroeter’s cinema, ‘fragments of the familiar world [in our case, battle-maps] … become radically unfamiliar’ (Allegorical Images 57). Among the revelations is that from the flag (in the context of close battle, all sense of ‘the national’ dissolves), to the wall map, to the most detailed of tableau, the battle-plan is enveloped in the fog of war: thus, the extended deeply-focussed scenes of the Battle of El Guettar take us from strategic overview (Patton’s field glass perspectives over what will soon become a Valley of Death) to what Boris Eichenbaum has called ‘Stendhalian’ scale (The Young Tolstoi 105) in which, (in Patton) through more closely situated perspectives, we almost palpably experience the Germans’ disarray under heavy fire. As the camera pivots between the general and the particular (and between the omniscient and the nescient) the cinematographer highlights the tension between the strategic and the actual. Inasmuch as it works out (and, as Schaffner shows us, it never works out completely as planned) this is the outcome of modern martial strategy: chaos and unimaginable carnage on the ground that no cartographic representation might capture. As Patton observes the destruction unfold in the valley below and before him, he declares: ‘Hell of a waste of fine infantry.’ Figure 5.An important inclusion, then, is that following the protracted El Guettar battle scenes, Schaffner has the (symbolically flag-draped) casket of Patton’s aide, Captain Richard N. “Dick” Jenson, wheeled away on a horse-drawn cart — with the lonely figure of the mourning general marching behind, his ironic interior monologue audible to the audience: ‘I can't see the reason such fine young men get killed. There are so many battles yet to fight.’ Finally, in terms of this brief and partial assessment of the battle-map in Patton, less than an hour in, we may observe that the map is emerging as something far more than a casual prop; as something more than a plotting of battlelines; as something more than an emblem of command. Along a new and unexpected axis of semantic combination, it is now manifesting as a sign of that which cannot be represented nor commanded.Midway presents the lead-up to the eponymous naval battle of 1942. Smight’s work is of interest primarily because the battle itself plays a relatively small role in the film; what is most important is the prolonged strategising that comprises most of the film’s run time. In Midway, battle-tables and fleet markers become key players in the cinematic action, second almost to the commanders themselves. Two key sequences are discussed here: the moment in which Yamamoto outlines his strategy for the attack on Midway (by way of a decoy attack on the Aleutian Islands), and the scene some moments later where Admiral Nimitz and his assembled fleet commanders (Spruance, Blake, and company) survey their own plan to defend the atoll. In Midway, as is represented by the notion of a fleet-in-being, the oceanic battlefield is presented as a speculative plane on which commanders can test ideas. Here, a fleet in a certain position projects a radius of influence that will deter an enemy fleet from attacking: i.e. ‘a fleet which is able and willing to attack an enemy proposing a descent upon territory which that force has it in charge to protect’ (Colomb viii). The fleet-in-being, it is worth noting, is one that never leaves port and, while it is certainly true that the latter half of Midway is concerned with the execution of strategy, the first half is a prolonged cinematic game of chess, with neither player wanting to move lest the other has thought three moves ahead. Virilio opines that the fleet-in-being is ‘a new idea of violence that no longer comes from direct confrontation and bloodshed, but rather from the unequal properties of bodies, evaluation of the number of movements allowed them in a chosen element, permanent verification of their dynamic efficiency’ (Speed and Politics 62). Here, as in Patton, we begin to read the map as a sign of the subjective as well as the objective. This ‘game of chess’ (or, if you prefer, ‘Battleships’) is presented cinematically through the interaction of command teams with their battle-tables and fleet markers. To be sure, this is to show strategy being developed — but it is also to prepare viewers for the defamiliarised representation of the battle itself.The first sequence opens with a close-up of Admiral Yamamoto declaring: ‘This is how I expect the battle to develop.’ The plan to decoy the Americans with an attack on the Aleutians is shown via close-ups of the conveniently-labelled ‘Northern Force’ (Fig. 6). It is then explained that, twenty-four hours later, a second force will break off and strike south, on the Midway atoll. There is a cut from closeups of the pointer on the map to the wider shot of the Japanese commanders around their battle table (Fig. 7). Interestingly, apart from the opening of the film in the Japanese garden, and the later parts of the film in the operations room, the Japanese commanders are only ever shown in this battle-table area. This canonically positions the Japanese as pure strategists, little concerned with the enmeshing of war with political or social considerations. The sequence ends with Commander Yasimasa showing a photograph of Vice Admiral Halsey, who the Japanese mistakenly believe will be leading the carrier fleet. Despite some bickering among the commanders earlier in the film, this sequence shows the absolute confidence of the Japanese strategists in their plan. The shots are suitably languorous — averaging three to four seconds between cuts — and the body language of the commanders shows a calm determination. The battle-map here is presented as an index of perfect command and inevitable victory: each part of the plan is presented with narration suggesting the Japanese expect to encounter little resistance. While Yasimasa and his clique are confident, the other commanders suggest a reconnaissance flight over Pearl Harbor to ascertain the position of the American fleet; the fear of fleet-in-being is shown here firsthand and on the map, where the reconnaissance planes are placed alongside the ship markers. The battle-map is never shown in full: only sections of the naval landscape are presented. We suggest that this is done in order to prepare the audience for the later stages of the film: as in Patton (from time to time) the battle-map here is filmed abstractly, to prime the audience for the abstract montage of the battle itself in the film’s second half.Figure 6.Figure 7.Having established in the intervening running time that Halsey is out of action, his replacement, Rear Admiral Spruance, is introduced to the rest of the command team. As with all the important American command and strategy meetings in the film, this is done in the operations room. A transparent coordinates board is shown in the foreground as Nimitz, Spruance and Rear Admiral Fletcher move through to the battle table. Behind the men, as they lean over the table, is an enormous map of the world (Fig. 8). In this sequence, Nimitz freely admits that while he knows each Japanese battle group’s origin and heading, he is unsure of their target. He asks Spruance for his advice:‘Ray, assuming what you see here isn’t just an elaborate ruse — Washington thinks it is, but assuming they’re wrong — what kind of move do you suggest?’This querying is followed by Spruance glancing to a particular point on the map (Fig. 9), then a cut to a shot of models representing the aircraft carriers Hornet, Enterprise & Yorktown (Fig. 10). This is one of the few model/map shots unaccompanied by dialogue or exposition. In effect, this shot shows Spruance’s thought process before he responds: strategic thought presented via cinematography. Spruance then suggests situating the American carrier group just northeast of Midway, in case the Japanese target is actually the West Coast of the United States. It is, in effect, a hedging of bets. Spruance’s positioning of the carrier group also projects that group’s sphere of influence around Midway atoll and north to essentially cut off Japanese access to the US. The fleet-in-being is presented graphically — on the map — in order to, once again, cue the audience to match the later (edited) images of the battle to these strategic musings.In summary, in Midway, the map is an element of production design that works alongside cinematography, editing, and performance to present the notion of strategic thought to the audience. In addition, and crucially, it functions as an abstraction of strategy that prepares the audience for the cinematic disorientation that will occur through montage as the actual battle rages later in the film. Figure 8.Figure 9.Figure 10.This essay has argued that the battle-map is a simulacrum of the weakest kind: what Baudrillard would call ‘simulacra of simulation, founded on information, the model’ (121). Just as cinema itself offers a distorted view of history (the war film, in particular, tends to hagiography), the battle-map is an over-simplification that fails to capture the physical and psychological realities of conflict. We have also argued that in both Patton and Midway, the map is not a ‘free’ motif (Tomashevsky 69). Rather, it is bound: a central thematic device. In the two films, the battle-map emerges as a crucial isomorphic element. On the one hand, it features as a prop to signify command and to relay otherwise complex strategic plottings. At this syntagmatic level, it functions alongside cinematography, editing, and performance to give audiences a glimpse into how military strategy is formed and tested: a traditional ‘reading’ of the map. But on the flip side of what emerges as a classic structuralist binary, is the map as a device of foreshadowing (especially in Midway) and as a depiction of command’s profound limitations. Here, at a paradigmatic level, along a new axis of combination, a new reading of the map in war cinema is proposed: the battle-map is as much a sign of the subjective as it is the objective.ReferencesBasinger, Jeanine. The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre. Middletown, CT: Columbia UP, 1986.Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbour: U of Michigan Press, 1994.Bender, Stuart. Film Style and the World War II Combat Genre. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013.Clausewitz, Carl. On War. Vol. 1. London: Kegan Paul, 1908.Colomb, Philip Howard. Naval Warfare: Its Ruling Principles and Practice Historically Treated. 3rd ed. London: W.H. Allen & Co, 1899.Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975.Deleuze, Gilles. 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