Journal articles on the topic 'Lessons of darkness'

As I read the short announcement about a trip to Nepal, I could smell the aroma of seductive perfumes, hear the distant sound of drums and cymbals, and feel the passion of timeless love in the balmy darkness of star-filled nights. For centuries this mysterious, enchanted land had been an island forbidden to mankind by its geographic design and decree of kings.

Abstract The state of etiolation is generally defined by the presence of non-green plastids (etioplasts) in plant tissues that would normally contain chloroplasts. In the commonly used dark-grown seedling system, etiolation is coupled with a type of growth called skotomorphogenesis. Upon illumination, de-etiolation occurs, marked by the transition from etioplast to chloroplast, and, at the seedling level, a switch to photomorphogenic growth. Etiolation and de-etiolation systems are therefore important for understanding both the acquisition of photosynthetic capacity during chloroplast biogenesis and plant responses to light—the most relevant signal in the life and growth of the organism. In this review, we discuss recent discoveries (within the past 2–3 years) in the field of etiolation and de-etiolation, with a particular focus on post-transcriptional processes and ultrastructural changes. We further discuss ambiguities in definitions of the term ‘etiolation’, and benefits and biases of common etiolation/de-etiolation systems. Finally, we raise several open questions and future research possibilities.

A 26-year-old male driver presented with a history of pain in the neck for the past 1 week following trauma due to a road traffic accident. The patient had no neurological deficit. He had type 1 diabetes and was on regular oral hypoglycemics. After radiological investigations, the patient was diagnosed to have traumatic AO Spine Classification type C translational injury involving anterolisthesis of C6 over C7. After a detailed preoperative assessment, the patient was taken up for surgery. The patient underwent posterior stabilisation with instrumentation from C5 to T2. On extubation from anaesthesia, he immediately complained of complete painless loss of this vision in his left eye. Ophthalmological investigations attributed the cause to be due to central retinal artery occlusion. The patient was discharged with reassurance on the 20th postoperative day with minimal improvement in his vision and at 6-month follow-up, his vision improved to 1/60 and was advised for close follow-up.

Every year around 3000 British school pupils and teachers visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum as participants on a Lessons from Auschwitz Project organized by the Holocaust Educational Trust. Each visit ends with a memorial ceremony held at the end of the railway tracks at Birkenau. This article analyses interview and survey data from participating students and educators to explore their experiences of these ceremonies. The research findings indicate that the context and content of the ceremony are significant for both groups, with a general consensus that the ceremony is an important and appropriate way to end the day visit to Poland and the museum. The students’ responses also particularly raise issues around their emotional engagement with the ceremony and the impact it had on them in this way. In conclusion, this article suggests how similar reflective spaces might be created in other educational contexts at similar sites of memory.

Ponerology is devoted to the study of evil in its different aspects. Indeed, also in the early Church it was created a kind of ponerological symbolism. This short study analyses some of these significant traditionally interpreted symbols. In the Christian symbolism holiness is full of fragrance, however the demons and sins emit a terrible odor. The symbolic value of darkness covers the negative aspects of human ignorance, evil, disbelief, danger and death. The fire represents not only illumination and light, but it has the punitive value. The serpent is first mentioned in connection with the history of the temptation and fall of the humanity. In the Christian tradition the serpent or the „dragon” represents Satan, the malicious ene­my. Babylon symbolizes all that is worldly and fell away from God. St. Augustine sees the world in which he lives as a mixture of the city of confusion and the city of heaven (Jerusalem). In the ponerological symbolism appears Amalek. The Fathers equated them with passion or evil. The faithful of Christ always fights against him. In Origen this approach is much more clearly defined in his explicitly spiritualizing reading. The ponerological symbolism of the ancient Christian lite­rature contained a moral or religious lessons or allegories.

The paper studies the image of Saint Sergius of Radonezh as depicted in the saints’ lives (written by Epiphanius the Wise, Pachomius Logothetes, and Archbishop Nikon Rozhdestvensky) and in 20th century literature (Boris Zaytsev’s essay ‘The Life of Saint Sergius’ and Ivan Shmelev’s short story ‘Kulikovo Field’). The main difference between the depictions of Sergius in the saints’ lives as opposed to the modern accounts lies in the authors’ historical perspective. The main goal of Epiphanius the Wise is to paint a detailed picture of the spiritual countenance of Sergius, his teacher and contemporary, while Archbishop Nikon focuses on the saint’s historical context. In contrast, Zaytsev takes a particular interest in Sergius’ personality and its ‘human’ manifestations; in parallels with his own life and time; and in moral lessons taught to us by Sergius’ life. In Shmelev’s short story, Sergius’ miraculous appearance in 1925 serves as an inspiring symbol of the inner unity of history and eternity. With peace and light he brings, Sergius counteracts the darkness and madness of life after the Revolution. For Zaytsev and Shmelev, Saint Sergius of Radonezh was a beacon that illuminated the difficult worldly life of contemporary man and directed him towards his main goal, salvation.

One of the most effective ways to understand the structure of that concept is to reveal individuals' mental perceptions through metaphor. The views put forward regarding the metaphorical way of understanding physical and social reality against the concept of school also increased academic interest in this subject. The aim of this study is to determine students' perceptions of schools through metaphorical perception and to identify their views on the ideal school concept. The study consists of 94 students studying at a private high school in 2019 in Antalya. It was carried out with phenomenological pattern of the qualitative research method. Maximum diversity sampling method was used in the study. As a data collection tool, first forms were distributed to students and they were asked to write the metaphor about the school then students were interviewed to take their views on the ideal school. According to the research, while high number of students perceive the school a prison, mental hospital; it was seen that they expressed them with negative concepts such as a closed box, zoo, darkness and slavery, it was observed that the students expressed the school as a home, nursery or family with positive concepts less often. The physical conditions of the ideal school that students dream of are more suitable and useful; lecture programs are lighter; they express it as an effective school in which practical lessons are increased.

Abstract The essay inquires about the historical condition of representation in our present while invoking the modern experience of the sublime and landscape as the medium of that experience. Can the sublime as the experience of the subject confronted with the very limits of representation be extended to our late capitalist conditions of mediatized representations? What constitutes “a landscape” as the site of the experience of the sublime in late capitalism? The essay addresses these questions through a renewed discussion of Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility” (1936) by focusing on the discussion of the aura and the decay of the aura in relation to landscape. In the wake of the failure of a transformative praxis to bring about a new social order, the technologically hyper-mediated engagement of man with nature under the conditions of extreme alienation and reification results in the production of the aesthetics of destruction experienced as “supreme pleasure”. In the age of the atomic bomb and technological hyper-mediation, the singularity of the moment of the experience of the sublime is multiply reproduced. The essay ends with an analysis of Werner Herzog’s 1992 film Lessons of Darkness as an example of rendering cinematically the aura’s survival under the conditions of its decay in the burning oil fields of Kuwait. Capitalism’s “desert of the real”, as the vast desert in Kuwait in Herzog’s film, is precisely the landscape in relation to which the subject attempts to represent that which evades representation (the event, nature, capitalism, and so on).

Abstract:Global constitutionalism offers a utopian picture of the future of international law. Its advocates suggest a governance system is emergent that will fill the gaps in legitimacy, democracy and the rule of law present in international law. Speculation about the future of international law is shaped, partly at least, by global constitutionalism aspiring to create a better global legal order, by filling these legitimacy gaps with both normative and procedural constitutionalism. But this raises the question ‘better for whom’? Feminist theory has challenged the foundations of both international law and constitutionalism; demonstrating that the design of normative structures accommodates and sustains prevailing patriarchal forms that leave little room for alternative accounts or voices. Both international and constitutional law’s structures support the status quo and are resistant to critical and feminist voices. The question is whether it is possible for constitutionalism to change international law in ways that will open it up to alternate possibilities. Building on a seven-point manifesto of feminist constitutionalism, previously proffered by the authors, which inculcated feminist concerns into global constitutionalism, this article offers an alternative starting point: feminist science fiction. Feminist utopian tracts such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland and Ursula K Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness offer valuable lessons for global constitutionalist discourses. The article uses feminist utopias in science fiction to better understand how to dismantle hierarchical structures, how to build feminist societies, and how to find approaches to governance not predicated on patriarchy. It does so by focusing on feminist alternatives for constructing communities, for understanding constituent power and constituent moments, and dismantling manifestations of the public/private divide. This article demonstrates that reading feminist utopian science fiction facilitates the reimagining of global constitutionalism.

This ReView of a series of therapy sessions that took place two years ago, over a period of seven months, takes the form of a theatrical text written for the stage. Coracles, Castanets, Cadaqu�s is part monologue, part comedy, part detective story, and part history lesson and follows the story of theatre professor who makes an appointment with a therapist. What ensues is a sonic and surrealistic autobiographical tale of lost orientation, and of learning to turn an eye into an ear in order to hear the ways that our own darkness is looped with our grandest understanding of love. Oh, and there�s a tiger.

INTRODUCTION: Melatonin is a promising therapeutic agent due to its multiple beneficial effects, wide availability and relatively high safety. As melatonin acts as a chronobiotic agent, its adequate production by the pineal gland allows for adaptation to environmental changes, while disturbances in melatonin secretion are associated with health disorders. The renoprotective effect of exogenous melatonin was established on different experimental models of acute kidney injury (AKI), while the influence of the altered pineal gland activity on the efficacy of melatonin treatment has not been investigated. OBJECTIVES: The aim of this research was to study the renoprotective potential of melatonin in conditions of aminoglycoside-induced AKI against the background of pineal hypo- and hyperfunction. METHODS: Nonlinear mature white rats (n=40) were randomly divided into 5 groups. Animals from the I (Control), and II (AKI) group were kept under the natural light regimen. Pineal hypofunction was simulated in rats from the III group by maintenance under conditions of constant light at 500 lux (24.00 light : 0.00 darkness) for 7 days. Pineal hyperfunction was simulated in rats from the IV group by maintenance under conditions of constant darkness (0.00 light : 24.00 darkness). Toxic AKI (II-IV groups) was induced by daily administration of gentamicin at a dose of 80 mg/kg for 6 days. Animals from the III-IV groups were injected daily with melatonin at a dose of 5 mg/kg. 24 h after the last injection biochemical and histological examination was performed. For the statistical analysis SPSS 17.0 software was used. RESULTS: Nephrotoxicity of gentamicin caused significant (p<0.05) functional changes and structural alterations to the rat kidneys. Treatment with melatonin in conditions of gentamicin-induced kidney injury significantly limited the degree of damage to renal tissue and prevented a critical reduction in kidney function, confirming a protective effect of melatonin. At the same time, significant (p<0.05) differences between the indices of the III and IV group allow us to state, that treatment with exogenous melatonin on the background of endogenous melatonin deficiency was less effective in comparison to the administration of melatonin in conditions of pineal hyperfunction. CONCLUSION: Melatonin ameliorates gentamicin-induced kidney injury by the limitation of histopathological changes in kidney tissue and the preservation of kidney function. Pre-existing deficiency of endogenous melatonin decreases the resistance of kidneys to the damaging action of the toxin and lessens the protective effect of the exogenous melatonin. Alternatively, in rats with increased pineal gland activity and melatonin production, co-treatment with exogenous melatonin more effectively protects the kidney from gentamicin-induced structural and functional changes and prevents the development of renal failure.

What mechanisms ensure the loading of a SNARE into a nascent carrier? In this issue, Bowman et al. (2021. J. Cell Biol.https://doi.org/10.1083/jcb.202005173) describe an unprecedented mechanism where two sorting complexes, AP-3 and BLOC-1, the latter bound to syntaxin 13, work as a fail-safe to recognize sorting signals in VAMP7, a membrane protein required for fusion to melanosomes. Their observations define one of the first examples of distributed robustness in membrane traffic mechanisms.

The essay takes as its subject Sophie Ristelhueber’s "Fait" and Werner Herzog’s "Lessons of Darkness" (both 1992) to interpret them as instances of ‘pensive’ images. As such – negating the transparency of the photographic image – they are able to internalize the logic of what Judith Butler called their “visual frame, coercive and consensually established,” allowing it to transpire from the picture itself, as well as to confront or to sidetrack the issues of rhetoric and address. The essay tries to see what the two works, in spite of their abstract and decontextualized character, can tell about the war in general, and the Gulf War in particular, claiming that pensive images reflect the world in a more obtuse, but at the same time more thoughtful way.

The circadian timing system optimizes health by temporally coordinating behavior and physiology. During mammalian gestation, fetal circadian rhythms are synchronized by the daily fluctuations in maternal body temperature, hormones and nutrients. Circadian disruption during pregnancy is associated with negative effects on developmental outcomes in the offspring, highlighting the importance of regular and robust 24-h rhythms over gestation. In the case of preterm birth (before 37 weeks of gestation), maternal cues no longer synchronize the neonate’s circadian system, which may adversely affect the neonate. There is increasing evidence that introducing robust light-dark cycles in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit has beneficial effects on clinical outcomes in preterm infants, such as weight gain and hospitalization time, compared to infants exposed to constant light or constant near-darkness. However, the biological basis for these effects and the relationship with the functional and anatomical development of the circadian system is not fully understood. In this review, we provide a concise overview of the effects of light-dark cycles on clinical outcomes of preterm neonates in the NICU and its alignment with the development of the circadian system.

This issue of M/C Journal rejects the association of darkness with immorality. In digital communication, the possibilities of darkness are greater than simple fears of what is hidden in online networks. Instead, new work in an emerging field of “dark social” studies’ consider “dark” as holding the potential for autonomy away from the digital visibilities that pervade economic, political, and surveillance logics of the present age. We shall not be afraid of the dark. We start from a technical rather than moral definition of darkness (Gehl), a definition that conceives of dark spaces as having legitimacies and anonymities against structural surveillance. At the same time, breaking away from techno-centric critiques of the dark allows a humanisation of how dark is embodied and performed at individual and structural levels. Other readings of digitally mediated dark (Fisher and Bolter) suggest tensions between exploitative potentials and deep societal reflection, and the ability for a new dark age (Bridle) to allow us to explore unknown potentials. Together these perspectives allow our authors a way to use dark to question and upend the unresting pressure and acceptance of—and hierarchy given to—the light in aesthetics of power and social transformation. While we reject, however, the reduction of “dark” to “immoral” as we are not blind to “bad actors” lurking in hidden spaces (see Potter, forthcoming). Dark algorithms and their encoded biases shape our online lives. Not everyone has the ability to go off grid or create their own dark networks. Colonial settlerism often hides its brutal logics behind discourses of welfare. And some of us are forced to go dark against our will, as in the case of economies or nations being shut out of communication networks. But above all, the tensions produced in darkness, going dark, and acting dark show the normative powers beyond only focusing on the light. Taken as a whole, the articles in this issue explore the tensions between dark and connected, opting in and opting out, and exposure and retreat. They challenge binaries that reduce our vision to the monochromaticism of dark and light. They explain how the concept of “dark” expands opportunities for existence and persistence beyond datafication. They point to moral, ethical, and pragmatic responses of selves and communities seeking to be/belong in/of the dark. The issue starts with a high-stakes contest: what happens when an entire country is forced to go dark? While the articles in this issue were in review, Australian Facebook users were abruptly introduced to a unique form of darkness when, overnight, all news posts were removed from Facebook. Leaver’s feature article responds to tell the story of how Facebook and Google fought the Australian media law, and nobody won. Simply put, the platforms-cum-infrastructures did not want the government to mandate terms of their payments and business to traditional news organisations, so pulled the plug on Australia. As Leaver points out, Facebook’s cull not only made news media go dark, but in the midst of a pandemic and ongoing bushfires, prevented government agencies from posting and sharing government public health information, weather and wind patterns, and some State Emergency Services information. His article positions darkness on the spectrum from visibility to invisibility and focuses on the complex interplays of who is in control of, or has the power over, visibility. Facebook’s power to darken vital voices in society was unprecedented in Australia, a form of “de-platforming at scale” (Crawford). It seemed that Facebook (and as Leaver explains, Google, to a lesser extent) were using Australia to test platform power and legislative response. The results of this experiment, Leaver argues, was not a dawn of a new dark age—without the misinforming-glare of Facebook (see Cinque in this issue)—but confirmatory evidence of the political economy of national media: News Corp and other large traditional media companies received millions from Facebook and Google in exchange for the latter being exempt from the very law in question. Everyone won, except the Australians looking to experiment and explore alternatives in a new darkness. Scared of the dark, politicians accepted a mutually agreed transfer of ad-revenue from Google and Facebook to large and incumbent media organisations; and with that, hope of exploring a world mediated without the glare of digital incumbents was snuffed out. These agreements, of course, found user privacy, algorithmic biases, and other concerns of computational light out of scope. Playing off the themes of status quo of institutionalised social media companies, Cinque examines how social online spaces (SOS) which are governed by logics of surveillance and datafication embodied in the concept of the “gazing elite” (data aggregators including social media), can prompt anxieties for users regarding data privacy. Her work in the issue particularly observes that anxiety for many users is shaped by this manifestation of the “dark” as it relates to the hidden processes of data capture and processing by the mainstream platforms, surveillant digital objects that are incorporated into the Internet of Things, and “dark” or black boxed automated decisions which censor expression and self-representation. Against this way of conceptualising digital darkness, Cinque argues that dark SOS which use VPNs or the Tor browser to evade monitoring are valuable to users precisely because of their ability to evade the politics of visibility and resist the power of the gazing elite. Continuing away from the ubiquitous and all consuming blue glow of Facebook to more esoteric online communities, Maddox and Heemsbergen use their article to expand a critique on the normative computational logics which define the current information age (based on datafication, tracking, prediction, and surveillance of human socialities). They consider how “digging in the shadows” and “tinkering” with cryptocurrencies in the “dark” is shaping alternative futures based on social, equitable, and reciprocal relations. Their work traces cryptocurrencies—a “community generated technology” made by makers, miners and traders on darknets—from its emergence during a time of global economic upheaval, uncertainty and mistrust in centralised financial systems, through to new generations of cryptocurrencies like Dogecoin that, based on lessons from early cryptocurrencies, are mutating and becoming absorbed into larger economic structures. These themes are explored using an innovative analytical framework considering the “construction, disruption, contention, redirection, and finally absorption of emerging techno-potentials into larger structures”. The authors conclude by arguing that experiments in the dark don’t stay in the dark, but are radical potentials that impact and shape larger social forms. Bradfield and Fredericks take a step back from a focus on potentially arcane online cultures to position dark in an explicit provocation to settler politics’ fears and anxieties. They show how being dark in Australia is embodied and everyday. In doing so, they draw back the veil on the uncontested normality of fear of the dark-as-object. Their article’s examples offer a stark demonstration of how for Indigenous peoples, associations of “dark” fear and danger are built into the structural mechanisms that shape and maintain colonial understandings of Indigenous peoples and their bodies as part of larger power structures. They note activist practices that provoke settlers to confront individuals, communities, and politics that proclaim “I’m not afraid of the Dark” (see Cotes in Bradfield and Fredericks). Drawing on a related embodied refusal of poorly situated connotations of the dark, Hardley considers the embodied ways mobile media have been deployed in the urban night and observes that in darkness, and the night, while vision is obscured and other senses are heightened we also encounter enmeshed cultural relationships of darkness and danger. Drawing on the postphenomenological concept of multistability, Hardley frames engagement with mobile media as a particular kind of body-technology relation in which the same technology can be used by different people in multiple ways, as people assign different meanings to the technology. Presenting empirical research on participants’ night-time mobile media practices, Hardley analyses how users co-opt mobile media functionalities to manage their embodied experiences of the dark. The article highlights how mobile media practices of privacy and isolation in urban spaces can be impacted by geographical location and urban darkness, and are also distinctly gendered. Smith explores how conversations flow across social media platforms and messaging technologies and in and out of sight across the public domain. Darkness is the backstage where backchannel conversations take place outside of public view, in private and parochial spaces, and in the shadow spaces where communication crosses between platforms. This narrative threading view of conversation, which Smith frames as a multiplatform accomplishment, responds to the question held by so many researchers and people trying to interpret what people say in public on social media. Is what we see the tip of an iceberg or just a small blip in the ocean? From Smith’s work we can see that so much happens in the dark, beyond the gaze of the onlooker, where conversational practices move by their own logic. Smith argues that drawing on pre-digital conversational analysis techniques associated with ethnomethodology will illuminate the social logics that structure online interaction and increase our understanding of online sociality forces. Set in the context of merging platforms and the “rise of data”, Lee presents issues that undergird contemporary, globally connected media systems. In translating descriptions of complex systems, the article critically discusses the changing relational quality of “the shadow of hierarchy” and “Platform Power”. The governmental use of private platforms, and the influence it has on power and opportunity for government and civil society is prefigured. The “dark” in this work is lucidly presented as a relationality; an expression of differing values, logics, and (techno)socialities. The author finds and highlights the line between traditional notions of "infrastructure" and the workings of contemporary digital platforms which is becoming increasingly indistinct. Lee concludes by showing how the intersection of platforms with public institutions and infrastructures has moulded society’s light into an evolving and emergent shadow of hierarchy over many domains where there are, as always, those that will have the advantage—and those that do not. Finally, Jethani and Fordyce present an understanding of “data provenance” as a metaphor and method both for analysing data as a social and political artefact. The authors point to the term via an inter-disciplinary history as a way to explain a custodial history of objects. They adroitly argue that in our contemporary communication environment that data is more than just a transact-able commodity. Data is vital—being acquired, shared, interpreted and re-used with significant influence and socio-technical affects. As we see in this article, the key methods that rely on the materiality and subjectivity of data extraction and interpretation are not to be ignored. Not least because they come with ethical challenges as the authors make clear. As an illuminating methodology, “data provenance” offers a narrative for data assets themselves (asking what, when, who, how, and why). In the process, the kinds of valences unearthed as being private, secret, or exclusive reveal aspects of the ‘dark’ (and ‘light’) that is the focus of this issue. References Bridle, James. New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future. London, UK: Verso Books, 2018. Crawford, Kate (katecrawford). “It happened: Facebook just went off the deep end in Australia. They are blocking *all* news content to Australians, and *no* Australian media can post news. This is what showdowns between states and platforms look like. It's deplatforming at scale.” 18 Feb. 2021. 22 Apr. 2021 <https://twitter.com/katecrawford/status/1362149306170368004>. Fisher, Joshua A., and Jay David Bolter. "Ethical Considerations for AR Experiences at Dark Tourism Sites." 2018 IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality Adjunct (ISMAR-Adjunct) (2018): 365-69. Gehl, Robert. Weaving the Dark Web: Legitimacy on Freenet, Tor, and I2p. The Information Society Series. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018. Potter, Martin. “Bad Actors Never Sleep: Content Manipulation on Reddit.” Eds. Toija Cinque, Robert W. Gehl, Luke Heemsbergen, and Alexia Maddox. Continuum Dark Social Special Issue (forthcoming).

Sammurtok, Nadia. The Caterpillar Woman. Inhabit Media, 2016In The Caterpillar Woman, Nadia Sammurtok tells a traditional Inuit version of “the princess and the frog” story. A kind young woman, Piujuq, trades coats with a woman who is cold. When she puts on the other woman’s coat she turns into a caterpillar. She lives alone because she thinks that no one will want to be around her until an older hunter sees past her strange exterior and marries her. Through the magic of an ancient drum beater, they are “rewarded for their kindness and unconditional love” and become young, strong and beautiful again. The language is too difficult for a picture book, so an older person would need to read this to small children. While the cover design is strangely uninviting and sad, not making the reader want to pick up the book, the rest of the illustration is well done. The pictures convey creepiness where appropriate, such as the darkness of the inside of a tent at night and many sweeping tundra landscapes.In the same way that this book’s cover is not a good representation of its content, the main health message in this book is “don’t judge a book by its cover” or learn to look past superficial physical differences to see the person, their character, and their abilities. The secondary message is that we should be kind to people, no matter what their appearance. These are good lessons for young children to learn. I highly recommend this book for as a starting place for classroom discussions on physical differences.Highly Recommended: 4 stars out of 4Reviewer: Sean BorleSean Borle is a University of Alberta undergraduate student who is an advocate for child health and safety.

The Black Summer of 2019/2020 saw the forests of southeast Australia go up in flames. The fire season started early, in September 2019, and by March 2020 fires had burned over 12.6 million hectares (Werner and Lyons). The scale and severity of the fires was quickly confirmed by scientists to be “unprecedented globally” (Boer et al.) and attributable to climate change (Nolan et al.).The fires were also a media spectacle, generating months of apocalyptic front-page images and harrowing broadcast footage. Media coverage was particularly preoccupied by the cause of the fires. Media framing of disasters often seeks to attribute blame (Anderson et al.; Ewart and McLean) and, over the course of the fire period, blame for the fires was attributed to climate change in much media coverage. However, as the disaster unfolded, denialist discourses in some media outlets sought to veil this revelation by providing alternative explanations for the fires. Misinformation originating from social media also contributed to this obscuration.In this article, we investigate the extent to which media coverage of the 2019/2020 bushfires functioned both to precipitate a climate change epiphany and also to support refutation of the connection between catastrophic fires and the climate crisis.Environmental Communication and RevelationIn its biblical sense, revelation is both an ending and an opening: it is the apocalyptic end-time and also the “revealing” of this time through stories and images. Environmental communication has always been revelatory, in these dual senses of the word – it is a mode of communication that is tightly bound to crisis; that has long grappled with obfuscation and misinformation; and that disrupts power structures and notions of the status quo as it seeks to reveal what is hidden. Climate change in particular is associated in the popular imagination with apocalypse, and is also a reality that is constantly being “revealed”. Indeed, the narrative of climate change has been “animated by the revelations of science” (McNeish 1045) and presented to the public through “key moments of disclosure and revelation”, or “signal moments”, such as scientist James Hansen’s 1988 US Senate testimony on global warming (Hamblyn 224).Journalism is “at the frontline of environmental communication” (Parham 96) and environmental news, too, is often revelatory in nature – it exposes the problems inherent in the human relationship with the natural world, and it reveals the scientific evidence behind contentious issues such as climate change. Like other environmental communicators, environmental journalists seek to “break through the perceptual paralysis” (Nisbet 44) surrounding climate change, with the dual aim of better informing the public and instigating policy change. Yet leading environmental commentators continually call for “better media coverage” of the planetary crisis (Suzuki), as climate change is repeatedly bumped off the news agenda by stories and events deemed more newsworthy.News coverage of climate-related disasters is often revelatory both in tone and in cultural function. The disasters themselves and the news narratives which communicate them become processes that make visible what is hidden. Because environmental news is “event driven” (Hansen 95), disasters receive far more news coverage than ongoing problems and trends such as climate change itself, or more quietly devastating issues such as species extinction or climate migration. Disasters are also highly visual in nature. Trumbo (269) describes climate change as an issue that is urgent, global in scale, and yet “practically invisible”; in this sense, climate-related disasters become a means of visualising and realising what is otherwise a complex, difficult, abstract, and un-seeable concept.Unsurprisingly, natural disasters are often presented to the public through a film of apocalyptic rhetoric and imagery. Yet natural disasters can be also “revelatory” moments: instances of awakening in which suppressed truths come spectacularly and devastatingly to the surface. Matthewman (9–10) argues that “disasters afford us insights into social reality that ordinarily pass unnoticed. As such, they can be read as modes of disclosure, forms of communication”. Disasters, he continues, can reveal both “our new normal” and “our general existential condition”, bringing “the underbelly of progress into sharp relief”. Similarly, Lukes (1) states that disasters “lift veils”, revealing “what is hidden from view in normal times”. Yet for Lukes, “the revelation tells us nothing new, nothing that we did not already know”, and is instead a forced confronting of that which is known yet difficult to engage with. Lukes’ concern is the “revealing” of poverty and inequality in New Orleans following the impact of Hurricane Katrina, yet climate-related disasters can also make visible what McNeish terms “the dark side effects of industrial civilisation” (1047). The Australian bushfires of 2019/2020 can be read in these terms, primarily because they unveiled the connection between climate change and extreme events. Scorching millions of hectares, with a devastating impact on human and non-human communities, the fires revealed climate change as a physical reality, and—for Australians—as a local issue as well as a global one. As media coverage of the fires unfolded and smoke settled on half the country, the impact of climate change on individual lives, communities, landscapes, native animal and plant species, and well-established cultural practices (such as the summer camping holiday) could be fully and dramatically realised. Even for those Australians not immediately impacted, the effects were lived and felt: in our lungs, and on our skin, a physical revelation that the impacts of climate change are not limited to geographically distant people or as-yet-unborn future generations. For many of us, the summer of fire was a realisation that climate change can no longer be held at arm’s length.“Revelation” also involves a temporal collapse whereby the future is dragged into the present. A revelatory streak of this nature has always existed at the heart of environmental communication and can be traced back at least as far as the environmentalist Rachel Carson, whose 1962 book Silent Spring revealed a bleak, apocalyptic future devoid of wildlife and birdsong. In other words, environmental communication can inspire action for change by exposing the ways in which the comforts and securities of the present are built upon a refusal to engage with the future. This temporal rupture where the future meets the present is particularly characteristic of climate change narratives. It is not surprising, then, that media coverage of the 2019/2020 bushfires addressed not just the immediate loss and devastation but also dread of the future, and the understanding that summer will increasingly hold such threats. Bushfires, Climate Change and the MediaThe link between bushfire risk and climate change generated a flurry of coverage in the Australian media well before the fires started in the spring of 2019. In April that year, a coalition of 23 former fire and emergency services leaders warned that Australia was “unprepared for an escalating climate threat” (Cox). They requested a meeting with the new government, to be elected in May, and better funding for firefighting to face the coming bushfire season. When that meeting was granted, at the end of Australia’s hottest and driest year on record (Doyle) in November 2019, bushfires had already been burning for two months. As the fires burned, the emergency leaders expressed frustration that their warnings had been ignored, claiming they had been “gagged” because “you are not allowed to talk about climate change”. They cited climate change as the key reason why the fire season was lengthening and fires were harder to fight. "If it's not time now to speak about climate and what's driving these events”, they asked, “– when?" (McCubbing).The mediatised uncovering of a bushfire/climate change connection was not strictly a revelation. Recent fires in California, Russia, the Amazon, Greece, and Sweden have all been reported in the media as having been exacerbated by climate change. Australia, however, has long regarded itself as a “fire continent”: a place adapted to fire, whose landscapes invite fire and can recover from it. Bushfires had therefore been considered part of the Australian “normal”. But in the Australian spring of 2019, with fires having started earlier than ever and charring rainforests that did not usually burn, the fire chiefs’ warning of a climate change-induced catastrophic bushfire season seemed prescient. As the fires spread and merged, taking homes, lives, landscapes, and driving people towards the water, revelatory images emerged in the media. Pictures of fire refugees fleeing under dystopian crimson skies, masked against the smoke, were accompanied by headlines like “Apocalypse Now” (Fife-Yeomans) and “Escaping Hell” (The Independent). Reports used words like “terror”, “nightmare” (Smee), “mayhem”, and “Armageddon” (Davidson).In the Australian media, the fire/climate change connection quickly became politicised. The Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack interviewed by the ABC, responding to a comment by Greens leader Adam Bandt, said connecting bushfire and climate while the fires raged was “disgraceful” and “disgusting”. People needed help, he said, not “the ravings of some pure enlightened and woke capital city greenies” (Goloubeva and Haydar). Gladys Berejiklian the NSW Premier also described it as “inappropriate” (Baker) and “disappointing” (Fox and Higgins) to talk about climate change at this time. However Carol Sparks, Mayor of bushfire-ravaged Glen Innes in rural NSW, contradicted this stance, telling the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) “Michael McCormack needs to read the science”. Climate change, she said, was “not a political thing” but “scientific fact” (Goloubeva and Haydar).As the fires merged and intensified, so did the media firestorm. Key Australian media became a sparring ground for issue definition, with media predictably split down ideological lines. Public broadcasters the ABC and SBS (Special Broadcasting Service), along with The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Guardian Australia, predominantly framed the catastrophe as wrought by climate change. The Guardian, in an in-depth investigation of climate science and bushfire risk, stated that “despite the political smokescreen” the connection between the fires and global warming was “unequivocal” (Redfearn). The ABC characterised the fires as “a glimpse of the horrors of climate change’s crescendoing impact” (Rose). News outlets owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp Australia, however, actively sought to play down the fires’ seriousness. On 2 January, as front pages of newspapers across the world revealed horrifying fiery images, Murdoch’s Australian ran an upbeat shot of New Year’s Day picnic races as its lead, relegating discussion of the fires to page 4 (Meade). More than simply obscuring the fires’ significance, News Corp media actively sought to convince readers that the fires were not out of the ordinary. For example, as the fires’ magnitude was becoming clear on the last day of 2019, The Australian ran a piece comparing the fires with previous conflagrations, claiming such conditions were “not unprecedented” and the fires were “nothing new” (Johnstone). News Corp’s Sky News also used this frame: “climate alarmists”, “catastrophise”, and “don’t want to look at history”, it stated in a segment comparing the event to past major bushfires (Kenny).As the fires continued into January and February 2020, the refutation of the climate change frame solidified around several themes. Conservative media continued to insist the fires were “normal” for Australia and attributed their severity to a lack of hazard reduction burning, which they blamed on “Greens policies” (Brown and Caisley). They also promoted the argument, espoused by Energy Minister Angus Taylor, that with only “1.3% of global emissions” Australia “could not have meaningful impact” on global warming through emissions reductions, and that top-down climate mitigation pressure from the UN was “doomed to fail” (Lloyd). Foreign media saw the fires in quite different terms. From the outside looking in, the Australian fires were clearly revealed as fuelled by global heating and exacerbated by the Australian government’s climate denialism. Australia was framed as a “notorious climate offender” (Shield) that was—as The New York Times put it—“committing climate suicide” (Flanagan) with its lack of coherent climate policy and its predilection for mining coal. Ouest-France ran a headline reading “High on carbon, rich Australia denies global warming” in which it called Scott Morrison’s position on climate change “incomprehensible” (Guibert). The LA Times called the Australian fires “a climate change warning to its leaders—and ours”, noting how “fossil fuel friendly Morrison” had “gleefully wielded a fist-sized chunk of coal on the floor of parliament in 2017” (Karlik). In the UK, the Independent online ran a front page spread of the fires’ vast smoke plume, with the headline “This is what a climate crisis looks like” (Independent Online), while Australian MP Craig Kelly was called “disgraceful” by an interviewer on Good Morning Britain for denying the fires’ link to climate change (Good Morning Britain).Both in Australia and internationally, deliberate misinformation spread by social media additionally shaped media discourse on the fires. The false revelation that the fires had predominantly been started by arson spread on Twitter under the hashtag #ArsonEmergency. While research has been quick to show that this hashtag was artificially promoted by bots (Weber et al.), this and misinformation like it was also shared and amplified by real Twitter users, and quickly spread into mainstream media in Australia—including Murdoch’s Australian (Ross and Reid)—and internationally. Such misinformation was used to shore up denialist discourses about the fires, and to obscure revelation of the fire/climate change connection. Blame Framing, Public Opinion and the Extent of the Climate Change RevelationAs studies of media coverage of environmental disasters show us, media seek to apportion blame. This blame framing is “accountability work”, undertaken to explain how and why a disaster occurred, with the aim of “scrutinizing the actions of crisis actors, and holding responsible authorities to account” (Anderson et al. 930). In moments of disaster and in their aftermath, “framing contests” (Benford and Snow) can emerge in which some actors, regarding the crisis as an opportunity for change, highlight the systemic issues that have led to the crisis. Other actors, experiencing the crisis as a threat to the status quo, try to attribute the blame to others, and deny the need for policy change. As the Black Summer unfolded, just such a contest took place in Australian media discourse. While Murdoch’s dominant News Corp media sought to protect the status quo, promote conservative politicians’ views, and divert attention from the climate crisis, other Australian and overseas media outlets revealed the fires’ link to climate change and intransigent emissions policy. However, cracks did begin to show in the News Corp stance on climate change during the fires: an internal whistleblower publicly resigned over the media company’s fires coverage, calling it a “misinformation campaign”, and James Murdoch also spoke out about being “disappointed with the ongoing denial of the role of climate change” in reporting the fires (ABC/Reuters).Although media reporting on the environment has long been at the forefront of shaping social understanding of environmental issues, and news maintains a central role in both revealing environmental threats and shaping environmental politics (Lester), during Australia’s Black Summer people were also learning about the fires from lived experience. Polls show that the fires affected 57% of Australians. Even those distant from the catastrophe were, for some time, breathing the most toxic air in the world. This personal experience of disaster revealed a bushfire season that was far outside the normal, and public opinion reflected this. A YouGov Australia Institute poll in January 2020 found that 79% of Australians were concerned about climate change—an increase of 5% from July 2019—and 67% believed climate change was making the bushfires worse (Australia Institute). However, a January 2020 Ipsos poll also found that polarisation along political lines on whether climate change was indeed occurring had increased since 2018, and was at its highest levels since 2014 (Crowe). This may reflect the kind of polarised media landscape that was evident during the fires. A thorough dissection in public discourse of Australia’s unprecedented fire season has been largely eclipsed by the vast coverage of the coronavirus pandemic that so quickly followed it. In May 2020, however, the fires were back in the media, when the Bushfires Royal Commission found that the Black Summer “played out exactly as scientists predicted it would” and that more seasons like it were now “locked in” because of carbon emissions (Hitch). It now remains to be seen whether the revelatory extent of the climate change blame frame that played out in media discourse on the fires will be sufficient to garner meaningful action and policy change—or whether denialist discourses will again obscure climate change revelation and seek to maintain the status quo. References Anderson, Deb, et al. "Fanning the Blame: Media Accountability, Climate and Crisis on the Australian ‘Fire Continent’." 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Flanagan, Richard. “Australia Is Committing Climate Suicide.” The New York Times 3 Jan. 2020. <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/03/opinion/australia-fires-climate-change.html>.Fox, Aine, and Hannah Higgins. “Climate Talks for Another Day: NSW Premier.” 7 News 11 Nov. 2019. <https://7news.com.au/news/disaster-and-emergency/climate-change-talk-inappropriate-premier-c-55045>.Goloubeva, Jenya, and Nour Haydar. “Regional Mayors Criticise Politicians for Failing to Link Climate Change and Deadly Bushfires.” ABC News 11 Nov. 2019. <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-11/carol-sparks-climate-change-federal-government-claire-pontin/11691444>.Good Morning Britain. “Interview with Craig Kelly MP.” ITV 6 Jan. 2020.Guibert, Christelle. “Dopée au Charbon, la Riche Australie Nie le Réchauffement Climatique.” Ouest France 20 Dec. 2019. <https://www.ouest-france.fr/monde/australie/dopee-au-charbon-la-riche-australie-nie-le-rechauffement-climatique-6664289>.Hamblyn, Richard. “The Whistleblower and the Canary: Rhetorical Constructions of Climate Change.” Journal of Historical Geography 35 (2009): 223–36.Hansen, Anders. 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New York: Routledge, 2010.Happer, Catherine, and Greg Philo. “New Approaches to Understanding the Role of the News Media in the Formation of Public Attitudes and Behaviours on Climate Change.” European Journal of Communication 31.2 (2016): 136–51.Hitch, Georgia. “Bushfire Royal Commission: 'Black Summer' Played Out Exactly as Scientists Predicted It Would.” ABC News 25 May 2020. <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-25/bushfire-royal-commission-hearing-updates/12282808>.Johnstone, Craig. “History of Disasters Shows There Is Nothing New about Nation’s Destructive Blazes.” The Australian 31 Dec. 2019. <https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/history-of-disasters-shows-there-is-nothing-new-about-nations-destructive-blazes/news-story/f43c2a6037a8b0e422a69880bce10139>.Karlik, Evan. “Opinion: In Australia’s Raging Bushfires, a Climate-Change Warning to Its Leaders — and Ours.” The Los Angeles Times 10 Jan. 2020. <https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-01-10/australia-fires-prime-minister-politics-united-states>.Kenny, Chris. “Climate Alarmists Don't Want to Look at History.” Sky News 21 Nov. 2019. <https://www.skynews.com.au/details/_6106878027001>.Lester, Libby. 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London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.McCubbing, Gus. “Declare Climate Emergency: Ex-Fire Chiefs.” The Canberra Times 14 Nov. 2019. <https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/6491540/declare-climate-emergency-ex-fire-chiefs/>.McNeish, Wallace. “From Revelation to Revolution: Apocalypticism in Green Politics.” Environmental Politics 26.6 (2017): 1035–54.Meade, Amanda. “The Australian: Murdoch-Owned Newspaper Accused of Downplaying Bushfires in Favour of Picnic Races.” The Guardian 4 Jan. 2020. <https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/jan/04/the-australian-murdoch-owned-newspaper-accused-of-downplaying-bushfires-in-favour-of-picnic-races>.Nisbet Matthew C. “Knowledge into Action: Framing the Debates over Climate Change and Poverty.” Doing News Framing Analysis: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives. Eds. Paul D’Angelo and Jim A. Kuypers. London and New York: Routledge, 2010. 59–99.Nolan, Rachael H., et al. 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Imagine this historical scene, if you will. It is 1892, and you are up in the gallery at Her Majesty’s Theatre in Sydney, taking in an English burlesque. The people around you have just found out that Alice Leamar will not be performing her famed turn in Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay tonight, a high-kicking Can-Canesque number, very much the dance du jour. Your fellow audience members are none too pleased about this – they are shouting, and stamping the heels of their boots so loudly the whole theatre resounds with the noise. Most people in the expensive seats below look up in the direction of the gallery with a familiar blend of fear and loathing. The rough ‘gods’ up there are nearly always restless, more this time than usual. The uproar fulfils its purpose, though, because tomorrow night, Leamar’s act will be reinstated: the ‘gods’ will have their way (Bulletin, 1 October 1892). Another scene now, this time at the Newtown Bridge Theatre in Sydney, shortly after the turn of the twentieth century. A comedian is trying a new routine for the crowd, but no one seems much impressed so far. A few discontented rumbles begin at first – ‘I want to go home’, says one wag, and then another – and soon these gain momentum, so that almost everyone is caught up in an ecstasy of roisterous abuse. A burly ‘chucker out’ appears, trying to eject some of the loudest hecklers, and a fully-fledged punch-up ensues (Djubal 19, 23; Cheshire 86). Eventually, one or two men are made to leave – but so too is the hapless comedian, evicted by derisive howls from the stage. The scenes I have just described show that audience interaction was a key feature in late-nineteenth century popular theatre, and in some cases even persisted into the following century. Obviously, there was no formal voting mechanism used during these performances à la contemporary shows like Idol. But rowdy practises amounted to a kind of audience ‘vote’ nonetheless, through which people decided those entertainers they wanted to see and those they emphatically did not. In this paper, I intend to use these bald parallels between Victorian audience practices and new-millennium viewer-voting to investigate claims about the links between democracy and plebiscitary entertainment. The rise of voting for pleasure in televised contests and online polls is widely attended by debate about democracy (e.g. Andrejevic; Coleman; Hartley, “Reality”). The most hyped commentary on this count evokes a teleological assumption – that western history is inexorably moving towards direct democracy. This view becomes hard to sustain when we consider the extent to which the direct expression of audience views was a feature of Victorian popular entertainment, and that these participatory practices were largely suppressed by the turn of the twentieth century. Old audience practices also allow us to question some of the uses of the term ‘direct democracy’ in new media commentary. Descriptions of voting for pleasure as part of a growth towards direct democracy are often made to celebrate rather than investigate plebiscitary forms. They elide the fact that direct democracy is a vexed political ideal. And they limit our discussion of voting for leisure and fun. Ultimately, arguing back and forth about whether viewer-voting is democratic stops us from more interesting explorations of this emerging cultural phenomenon. ‘To a degree that would be unimaginable to theatregoers today’, says historian Robert Allen, ‘early nineteenth-century audiences controlled what went on at the theatre’. The so-called ‘shirt-sleeve’ crowd in the cheapest seats of theatrical venues were habitually given to hissing, shouting, and even throwing objects in order to evict performers during the course of a show. The control exerted by the peanut-chomping gallery was certainly apparent in the mid-century burlesques Allen writes about (55). It was also apparent in minstrel, variety and music hall productions until around the turn of the century. Audience members in the galleries of variety theatres and music halls regularly engaged in the pleasure of voicing their aesthetic preferences. Sometimes comic interjectors from among them even drew more laughs than the performers on stage. ‘We went there not as spectators but as performers’, as an English music-hall habitué put it (Bailey 154). In more downmarket venues such as Sydney’s Newtown Bridge Theatre, these participatory practices continued into the early 1900s. Boisterous audience practices came under sustained attack in the late-Victorian era. A series of measures were taken by authorities, theatre managers and social commentators to wrest the control of popular performances from those in theatre pits and galleries. These included restricting the sale of alcohol in theatre venues, employing brawn in the form of ‘chuckers out’, and darkening auditoriums, so that only the stage was illuminated and the audience thus de-emphasised (Allen 51–61; Bailey 157–68; Waterhouse 127, 138–43). They also included a relentless public critique of those engaging in heckling behaviours, thus displaying their ‘littleness of mind’ (Age, 6 Sep. 1876). The intensity of attacks on rowdy audience participation suggests that symbolic factors were at play in late-Victorian attempts to enforce decorous conduct at the theatre. The last half of the century was, after all, an era of intense debate about the qualities necessary for democratic citizenship. The suffrage was being dramatically expanded during this time, so that it encompassed the vast majority of white men – and by the early twentieth century, many white women as well. In Australia, the prelude to federation also involved debate about the type of democracy to be adopted. Should it be republican? Should it enfranchise all men and women; all people, or only white ones? At stake in these debates were the characteristics and subjectivities one needed to possess before being deemed capable of enfranchisement. To be worthy of the vote, as of other democratic privileges, one needed to be what Toby Miller has called a ‘well-tempered’ subject at the turn of the twentieth century (Miller; Joyce 4). One needed to be carefully deliberative and self-watching, to avoid being ‘savage’, ‘uncivilised’, emotive – all qualities which riotous audience members (like black people and women) were thought not to possess (Lake). This is why the growing respectability of popular theatre is so often considered a key feature of the modernisation of popular culture. Civil and respectful audience behaviours went hand in hand with liberal-democratic concepts of the well-tempered citizen. Working-class culture in late nineteenth-century England has famously (and notoriously) been described as a ‘culture of consolation’: an escapist desire for fun based on a fatalistic acceptance of under-privilege and social discrimination (Jones). This idea does not do justice to the range of hopes and efforts to create a better society among workingpeople at the time. But it still captures the motivation behind most unruly audience behaviours: a gleeful kind of resistance or ‘culture jamming’ which viewed disruption and uproar as ends in themselves, without the hope that they would be productive of improved social conditions. Whether or not theatrical rowdiness served a solely consolatory purpose for the shirt-sleeve crowd, it certainly evoked a sharp fear of disorderly exuberance in mainstream society. Anxieties about violent working-class uprisings leading to the institution of mob rule were a characteristic of the late-nineteenth century, often making their way into fiction (Brantlinger). Roisterous behaviours in popular theatres resonated with the concerns expressed in works such as Caesar’s Column (Donnelly), feeding on a long association between the theatre and misrule. These fears obviously stand in stark contrast to the ebullient commentary surrounding interactive entertainment today. Over-oxygenated rhetoric about the democratic potential of cyberspace was of course a feature of new media commentary at the beginning of the 1990s (for a critique of such rhetoric see Meikle 33–42; Grossman). Current helium-giddy claims about digital technologies as ‘democratising’ reprise this cyberhype (Andrejevic 12–15, 23–8; Jenkins and Thornburn). One recent example of upbeat talk about plebiscitary formats as direct democracy is John Hartley’s contribution to the edited collection, Politicotainment (Hartley, “Reality”). There are now a range of TV shows and online formats, he says, which offer audiences the opportunity to directly express their views. The development of these entertainment forms are part of a movement towards a ‘direct open network’ in global media culture (3). They are also part of a macro historical shift: a movement ‘down the value chain of meaning’ which has taken place over the past few centuries (Hartley, “Value Chain”). Hartley’s notion of a ‘value chain of meaning’ is an application of business analysis to media and cultural studies. In business, a value chain is what links the producer/originator, via commodity/distribution, to the consumer. In the same way, Hartley says, one might speak of a symbolic value chain moving from an author/producer, via the text, to the audience/consumer. Much of western history may indeed be understood as a movement along this chain. In pre-modern times, meaning resided in the author. The Divine Author, God, was regarded as the source of all meaning. In the modern period, ‘after Milton and Johnson’, meaning was located in texts. Experts observed the properties of a text or other object, and by this means discovered its meaning. In ‘the contemporary period’, however – the period roughly following the Second World War – meaning has overwhelming come to be located with audiences or consumers (Hartley, “Value Chain” 131–35). It is in this context, Hartley tells us, that the plebiscite is coming to the fore. As a means of allowing audiences to directly represent their own choices, the plebiscite is part of a new paradigm taking shape, as global culture moves away from the modern epoch and its text-dominated paradigm (Hartley, “Reality” 1–3). Talk of a symbolic value chain is a self-conscious example of the logic of business/cultural partnership currently circulating in neo-liberal discourse. It is also an example of a teleological understanding of history, through which the past few centuries are presented as part of a linear progression towards direct democracy. This teleology works well with the up-tempo talk of television as ‘democratainment’ in Hartley’s earlier work (Hartley, Uses of Television). Western history is essentially a triumphant progression, he implies, from the Dark Ages, to representative democracy, to the enlightened and direct ‘consumer democracy’ unfolding around us today (Hartley, “Reality” 47). Teleological assumptions are always suspect from an historical point of view. For a start, casting the modern period as one in which meaning resided overwhelmingly in the text fails to consider the culture of popular performance flourishing before the twentieth century. Popular theatrical forms were far more significant to ordinary people of the nineteenth century than the notions of empirical or textual analysis cultivated in elite circles. Burlesques, minstrel-shows, music hall and variety productions all took a playful approach to their texts, altering their tone and content in line with audience expectations (Chevalier 40). Before the commercialisation of popular theatre in the late-nineteenth century, many theatricals also worked in a relatively open-ended way. At concert saloons or ‘free-and-easies’ (pubs where musical performances were offered), amateur singers volunteered their services, stepping out from the audience to perform an act or two and then disappearing into it again (Joyce 206). As a precursor to TV talent contests and ‘open mic’ comedy sessions today, many theatrical managers held amateur nights in which would-be professionals tried their luck before a restless crowd, with a contract awarded to performers drawing the loudest applause (Watson 5). Each of these considerations challenge the view that open participatory networks are the expression of an historical process through which meaning has only recently come to reside with audiences and consumers. Another reason for suspecting teleological notions about democracy is that it proceeds as if Foucauldian analysis did not exist. Characterising history as a process of democratisation tends to equate democracy with openness and freedom in an uncritical way. It glosses over the fact that representative democracy involved the repression of directly participatory practices and unruly social groups. More pertinently, it ignores critiques of direct democracy. Even if there are positive aspects to the re-emergence of participatory practices among audiences today, there are still real problems with direct democracy as a political ideal. It would be fairly easy to make the case that rowdy Victorian audiences engaged in ‘direct democratic’ practices during the course of a variety show or burlesque. The ‘gods’ in Victorian galleries exulted in expressing their preferences: evicting lack-lustre comics and demanding more of other performers. It would also be easy to valorise these practices as examples of the kind of culture-jamming I referred to earlier – as forms of resistance to the tyranny of well-tempered citizenship gaining sway at the time. Given the often hysterical attacks directed at unruly audiences, there is an obvious satisfaction to be had from observing the reinstatement of Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay at Her Majesty’s Theatre, or in the pleasure that working-class audiences derived from ‘calling the tune’. The same kind of satisfaction is not to be had, however, when observing direct democracy in action on YouTube, or during a season of Dancing with the Stars, or some other kind of plebiscitary TV. The expression of audience preferences in this context hardly carries the subversive connotations of informal evictions during a late-Victorian music-hall show. Viewer-voting today is indeed dominated by a rhetoric of partnership which centres on audience participation, rather than a notion of opposition between producers and audiences (Jenkins). The terrain of plebiscitary entertainment is very different now from the terrain of popular culture described by Stuart Hall in the 1980s – let alone as it stood in the 1890s, during Alice Leamar’s tour. Most commentary on plebiscitary TV avoids talk of ‘cultural struggle’ (Hall 235) and instead adopts a language of collaboration and of people ‘having a ball’ (Neville; Hartley, “Reality” 3). The extent to which contemporary plebiscites are managed by what Hartley calls the ‘plebiscitary industries’ evokes one of the most powerful criticisms made against direct democracy. That is, it evokes the view that direct democracy allows commercial interests to set the terms of public participation in decision-making, and thus to influence its outcomes (Barber 36; Moore 55–56). There is obviously big money to be made from plebiscitary TV. The advertising blitz which takes place during viewer-voting programs, and the vote-rigging scandals so often surrounding them make this clear. These considerations highlight the fact that public involvement in a plebiscitary process is not something to make a song and dance about unless broad involvement first takes place in deciding the issues open for determination by plebiscite, and the way in which these issues are framed. In the absence of this kind of broad participation, engagement in plebiscitary forms serves a solely consolatory function, offering the pleasures of viewer-voting as a substitute for substantive involvement in cultural creation and political change. Another critique sometimes made against direct democracy is that it makes an easy vehicle for prejudice (Barber 36–7). This was certainly the case in Victorian theatres, where it was common for Anglo gallery-members to heckle female and non-white performers in an intimidatory way. A group of American vaudeville performers called the Cherry Sisters certainly experienced this phenomenon in the early 1900s. The Cherry Sisters were defiantly unglamorous middle-aged women in a period when female performers were increasingly expected to display scantily-clad youthful figures on stage. As a consequence, they were embroiled in a number of near-riots in which male audience members hurled abuse and heavy objects from the galleries, and in some cases chased them into the street to physically assault them there (Pittinger 76–77). Such incidents give us a glimpse of the dark face of direct democracy. In some cases, the direct expression of popular views becomes an attack on diversity, leading to the kind of violent mêlée experienced either by the Cherry Sisters or the Middle Eastern people attacked on Sydney’s Cronulla Beach at the end of 2005. ‘Democracy’ is always an obviously politically loaded term when used in debates about new media. It is frequently used to imply that particular cultural or technological forms are inherently liberatory and inclusive. As Graeme Turner points out, reality TV has been celebrated as ‘democratic’ in this way. Only rarely, however, is there an attempt to argue why this is the case – to show how viewer-voting formats actually serve a democratic agenda. It was for this reason that Turner argued that the inclusion of ordinary people on reality TV should be understood as demotic rather than democratic (Turner, Understanding Celebrity 82–5; Turner, “Mass Production”). Ultimately, however, it is immaterial whether one uses the term ‘demotic’ or ‘direct democratic’ to describe the growth of plebiscitary entertainment. What is important is that we avoid making inflated claims about the direct expression of audience views, using the term ‘democratic’ to give an unduly celebratory spin to the political complexities involved. People may indeed be having a ball as they take part in online polls or choose what they want to watch on YouTube or shout at the TV during an episode of Idol. The ‘participatory enthusiasm’ that fans feel watching a show like Big Brother may also have lessons for those interested in making parliamentary process more responsive to people’s interests and needs (Coleman 458). But the development of plebiscitary forms is not inherently democratic in the sense that Turner suggests the term should be used – that is, it does not of itself serve a liberatory or socially inclusive agenda. Nor does it lead to substantive participation in cultural and political processes. In the end, it seems to me that we need to move beyond the discussion of plebiscitary entertainment in terms of democracy. The whole concept of democracy as the yardstick against which new media should be measured is highly problematic. Not only is direct democracy a vexed political ideal to start off with – it also leads commentators to take predictable positions when debating its relationship to new technologies and cultural forms. Some turn to hype, others to critique, and the result often appears as a mere restatement of the commentators’ political inclinations rather than a useful investigation of the developments at hand. Some of the most intriguing aspects of plebiscitary entertainments are left unexplored if we remain preoccupied with democracy. One might well investigate the re-introduction of studio audiences and participatory audience practices, for example, as a nostalgia for the interactivity experienced in live theatres such as the Newtown Bridge in the early twentieth century. It certainly seems to me that a retro impulse informs some of the developments in televised stand-up comedy in recent years. This was obviously the case for Paul McDermott’s The Side Show on Australian television in 2007, with its nod to the late-Victorian or early twentieth-century fairground and its live-theatrical vibe. More relevantly here, it also seems to be the case for American viewer-voting programs such as Last Comic Standing and the Comedy Channel’s Open Mic Fight. Further, reviews of programs such as Idol sometimes emphasise the emotional engagement arising out of their combination of viewer-voting and live performance as a harking-back to the good old days when entertainment was about being real (Neville). One misses this nostalgia associated with plebiscitary entertainments if bound to a teleological assumption that they form part of an ineluctable progression towards the New and the Free. Perhaps, then, it is time to pay more attention to the historical roots of viewer-voting formats, to think about the way that new media is sometimes about a re-invention of the old, trying to escape the recurrent back-and-forthing of debate about their relationship to progress and democracy. References Allen, Robert C. Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture .Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Andrejevic, Mark. Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2004. Bailey, Peter. Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the Contest for Control, 1830–1885. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978. Barber, Benjamin R. Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. ———. “Which Technology and Which Democracy?” Democracy and New Media. Eds. Henry Jenkins and David Thorburn. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2003. 33–48. Brantlinger, Patrick, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1988. Cheshire, D. F. Music Hall in Britain. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1974. Chevalier, Albert. Before I Forget: The Autobiography of a Chevalier d’Industrie. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1901. Coleman, Stephen. “How the Other Half Votes: Big Brother Viewers and the 2005 General Election”. International Journal of Cultural Studies 9.4 (2006): 457–79. Djubal, Clay. “From Minstrel Tenor to Vaudeville Showman: Harry Clay, ‘A Friend of the Australian Performer’”. Australasian Drama Studies 34 (April 1999): 10–24. Donnelly, Ignatius. Caesar’s Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century. London: Sampson Low, Marston and Co., 1891. Grossman, Lawrence. The Electronic Republic: Reshaping Democracy in the Information Age. New York: Penguin, 1995. Hall, Stuart. “Notes on Deconstructing the ‘Popular’”. People’s History and Socialist Theory. Ed. Raphael Samuel. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. 227–49. Hartley, John, The Uses of Television. London: Routledge, 1999. ———. “‘Reality’ and the Plebiscite”. Politoctainment: Television’s Take on the Real. Ed. Kristina Riegert. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2006. http://www.cci.edu.au/hartley/downloads/Plebiscite%20(Riegert%20chapter) %20revised%20FINAL%20%5BFeb%2014%5D.pdf. ———. “The ‘Value-Chain of Meaning’ and the New Economy”. International Journal of Cultural Studies 7.1 (2004): 129–41. Jenkins, Henry. “The Cultural Logic of Media Convergence”. International Journal of Cultural Studies 7.1 (2004): 33–43. ———, and David Thornburn. “Introduction: The Digital Revolution, the Informed Citizen, and the Culture of Democracy”. Democracy and New Media. Eds. Henry Jenkins and David Thorburn. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003. 1–20. Jones, Gareth Stedman. ‘Working-Class Culture and Working-Class Politics in London, 1870-1900: Notes on the Remaking of a Working Class’. Languages of Class: Studies in English Working-Class History, 1832–1982. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. 179–238. Joyce, Patrick. The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City. London: Verso, 2003. Lake, Marilyn. “White Man’s Country: The Trans-National History of a National Project”. Australian Historical Studies 122 ( 2003): 346–63. Meikle, Graham. Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet. London: Routledge, 2002. Miller, Toby. The Well-Tempered Self: Citizenship, Culture and the Postmodern Subject. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1993. Moore, Richard K. “Democracy and Cyberspace”. Digital Democracy: Discourse and Decision Making in the Information Age. Eds. Barry Hague and Brian D. Loader. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. 39–59. Neville, Richard. “Crass, Corny, But Still a Woodstock Moment for a New Generation”. Sydney Morning Herald, 23 November 2004. Pittinger, Peach R. “The Cherry Sisters in Early Vaudeville: Performing a Failed Femininity”. Theatre History Studies 24 (2004): 73–97. Turner, Graeme. Understanding Celebrity. London: Sage, 2004. ———. “The Mass Production of Celebrity: ‘Celetoids’, Reality TV and the ‘Demotic Turn’”. International Journal of Cultural Studies 9.2 (2006): 153–165. Waterhouse, Richard. From Minstrel Show to Vaudeville: The Australian Popular Stage, 1788–1914. Sydney: New South Wales University Press, 1990. Watson, Bobby. Fifty Years Behind the Scenes. Sydney: Slater, 1924.

Imagine this historical scene, if you will. It is 1892, and you are up in the gallery at Her Majesty’s Theatre in Sydney, taking in an English burlesque. The people around you have just found out that Alice Leamar will not be performing her famed turn in Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay tonight, a high-kicking Can-Canesque number, very much the dance du jour. Your fellow audience members are none too pleased about this – they are shouting, and stamping the heels of their boots so loudly the whole theatre resounds with the noise. Most people in the expensive seats below look up in the direction of the gallery with a familiar blend of fear and loathing. The rough ‘gods’ up there are nearly always restless, more this time than usual. The uproar fulfils its purpose, though, because tomorrow night, Leamar’s act will be reinstated: the ‘gods’ will have their way (Bulletin, 1 October 1892). Another scene now, this time at the Newtown Bridge Theatre in Sydney, shortly after the turn of the twentieth century. A comedian is trying a new routine for the crowd, but no one seems much impressed so far. A few discontented rumbles begin at first – ‘I want to go home’, says one wag, and then another – and soon these gain momentum, so that almost everyone is caught up in an ecstasy of roisterous abuse. A burly ‘chucker out’ appears, trying to eject some of the loudest hecklers, and a fully-fledged punch-up ensues (Djubal 19, 23; Cheshire 86). Eventually, one or two men are made to leave – but so too is the hapless comedian, evicted by derisive howls from the stage. The scenes I have just described show that audience interaction was a key feature in late-nineteenth century popular theatre, and in some cases even persisted into the following century. Obviously, there was no formal voting mechanism used during these performances à la contemporary shows like Idol. But rowdy practises amounted to a kind of audience ‘vote’ nonetheless, through which people decided those entertainers they wanted to see and those they emphatically did not. In this paper, I intend to use these bald parallels between Victorian audience practices and new-millennium viewer-voting to investigate claims about the links between democracy and plebiscitary entertainment. The rise of voting for pleasure in televised contests and online polls is widely attended by debate about democracy (e.g. Andrejevic; Coleman; Hartley, “Reality”). The most hyped commentary on this count evokes a teleological assumption – that western history is inexorably moving towards direct democracy. This view becomes hard to sustain when we consider the extent to which the direct expression of audience views was a feature of Victorian popular entertainment, and that these participatory practices were largely suppressed by the turn of the twentieth century. Old audience practices also allow us to question some of the uses of the term ‘direct democracy’ in new media commentary. Descriptions of voting for pleasure as part of a growth towards direct democracy are often made to celebrate rather than investigate plebiscitary forms. They elide the fact that direct democracy is a vexed political ideal. And they limit our discussion of voting for leisure and fun. Ultimately, arguing back and forth about whether viewer-voting is democratic stops us from more interesting explorations of this emerging cultural phenomenon. ‘To a degree that would be unimaginable to theatregoers today’, says historian Robert Allen, ‘early nineteenth-century audiences controlled what went on at the theatre’. The so-called ‘shirt-sleeve’ crowd in the cheapest seats of theatrical venues were habitually given to hissing, shouting, and even throwing objects in order to evict performers during the course of a show. The control exerted by the peanut-chomping gallery was certainly apparent in the mid-century burlesques Allen writes about (55). It was also apparent in minstrel, variety and music hall productions until around the turn of the century. Audience members in the galleries of variety theatres and music halls regularly engaged in the pleasure of voicing their aesthetic preferences. Sometimes comic interjectors from among them even drew more laughs than the performers on stage. ‘We went there not as spectators but as performers’, as an English music-hall habitué put it (Bailey 154). In more downmarket venues such as Sydney’s Newtown Bridge Theatre, these participatory practices continued into the early 1900s. Boisterous audience practices came under sustained attack in the late-Victorian era. A series of measures were taken by authorities, theatre managers and social commentators to wrest the control of popular performances from those in theatre pits and galleries. These included restricting the sale of alcohol in theatre venues, employing brawn in the form of ‘chuckers out’, and darkening auditoriums, so that only the stage was illuminated and the audience thus de-emphasised (Allen 51–61; Bailey 157–68; Waterhouse 127, 138–43). They also included a relentless public critique of those engaging in heckling behaviours, thus displaying their ‘littleness of mind’ (Age, 6 Sep. 1876). The intensity of attacks on rowdy audience participation suggests that symbolic factors were at play in late-Victorian attempts to enforce decorous conduct at the theatre. The last half of the century was, after all, an era of intense debate about the qualities necessary for democratic citizenship. The suffrage was being dramatically expanded during this time, so that it encompassed the vast majority of white men – and by the early twentieth century, many white women as well. In Australia, the prelude to federation also involved debate about the type of democracy to be adopted. Should it be republican? Should it enfranchise all men and women; all people, or only white ones? At stake in these debates were the characteristics and subjectivities one needed to possess before being deemed capable of enfranchisement. To be worthy of the vote, as of other democratic privileges, one needed to be what Toby Miller has called a ‘well-tempered’ subject at the turn of the twentieth century (Miller; Joyce 4). One needed to be carefully deliberative and self-watching, to avoid being ‘savage’, ‘uncivilised’, emotive – all qualities which riotous audience members (like black people and women) were thought not to possess (Lake). This is why the growing respectability of popular theatre is so often considered a key feature of the modernisation of popular culture. Civil and respectful audience behaviours went hand in hand with liberal-democratic concepts of the well-tempered citizen. Working-class culture in late nineteenth-century England has famously (and notoriously) been described as a ‘culture of consolation’: an escapist desire for fun based on a fatalistic acceptance of under-privilege and social discrimination (Jones). This idea does not do justice to the range of hopes and efforts to create a better society among workingpeople at the time. But it still captures the motivation behind most unruly audience behaviours: a gleeful kind of resistance or ‘culture jamming’ which viewed disruption and uproar as ends in themselves, without the hope that they would be productive of improved social conditions. Whether or not theatrical rowdiness served a solely consolatory purpose for the shirt-sleeve crowd, it certainly evoked a sharp fear of disorderly exuberance in mainstream society. Anxieties about violent working-class uprisings leading to the institution of mob rule were a characteristic of the late-nineteenth century, often making their way into fiction (Brantlinger). Roisterous behaviours in popular theatres resonated with the concerns expressed in works such as Caesar’s Column (Donnelly), feeding on a long association between the theatre and misrule. These fears obviously stand in stark contrast to the ebullient commentary surrounding interactive entertainment today. Over-oxygenated rhetoric about the democratic potential of cyberspace was of course a feature of new media commentary at the beginning of the 1990s (for a critique of such rhetoric see Meikle 33–42; Grossman). Current helium-giddy claims about digital technologies as ‘democratising’ reprise this cyberhype (Andrejevic 12–15, 23–8; Jenkins and Thornburn). One recent example of upbeat talk about plebiscitary formats as direct democracy is John Hartley’s contribution to the edited collection, Politicotainment (Hartley, “Reality”). There are now a range of TV shows and online formats, he says, which offer audiences the opportunity to directly express their views. The development of these entertainment forms are part of a movement towards a ‘direct open network’ in global media culture (3). They are also part of a macro historical shift: a movement ‘down the value chain of meaning’ which has taken place over the past few centuries (Hartley, “Value Chain”). Hartley’s notion of a ‘value chain of meaning’ is an application of business analysis to media and cultural studies. In business, a value chain is what links the producer/originator, via commodity/distribution, to the consumer. In the same way, Hartley says, one might speak of a symbolic value chain moving from an author/producer, via the text, to the audience/consumer. Much of western history may indeed be understood as a movement along this chain. In pre-modern times, meaning resided in the author. The Divine Author, God, was regarded as the source of all meaning. In the modern period, ‘after Milton and Johnson’, meaning was located in texts. Experts observed the properties of a text or other object, and by this means discovered its meaning. In ‘the contemporary period’, however – the period roughly following the Second World War – meaning has overwhelming come to be located with audiences or consumers (Hartley, “Value Chain” 131–35). It is in this context, Hartley tells us, that the plebiscite is coming to the fore. As a means of allowing audiences to directly represent their own choices, the plebiscite is part of a new paradigm taking shape, as global culture moves away from the modern epoch and its text-dominated paradigm (Hartley, “Reality” 1–3). Talk of a symbolic value chain is a self-conscious example of the logic of business/cultural partnership currently circulating in neo-liberal discourse. It is also an example of a teleological understanding of history, through which the past few centuries are presented as part of a linear progression towards direct democracy. This teleology works well with the up-tempo talk of television as ‘democratainment’ in Hartley’s earlier work (Hartley, Uses of Television). Western history is essentially a triumphant progression, he implies, from the Dark Ages, to representative democracy, to the enlightened and direct ‘consumer democracy’ unfolding around us today (Hartley, “Reality” 47). Teleological assumptions are always suspect from an historical point of view. For a start, casting the modern period as one in which meaning resided overwhelmingly in the text fails to consider the culture of popular performance flourishing before the twentieth century. Popular theatrical forms were far more significant to ordinary people of the nineteenth century than the notions of empirical or textual analysis cultivated in elite circles. Burlesques, minstrel-shows, music hall and variety productions all took a playful approach to their texts, altering their tone and content in line with audience expectations (Chevalier 40). Before the commercialisation of popular theatre in the late-nineteenth century, many theatricals also worked in a relatively open-ended way. At concert saloons or ‘free-and-easies’ (pubs where musical performances were offered), amateur singers volunteered their services, stepping out from the audience to perform an act or two and then disappearing into it again (Joyce 206). As a precursor to TV talent contests and ‘open mic’ comedy sessions today, many theatrical managers held amateur nights in which would-be professionals tried their luck before a restless crowd, with a contract awarded to performers drawing the loudest applause (Watson 5). Each of these considerations challenge the view that open participatory networks are the expression of an historical process through which meaning has only recently come to reside with audiences and consumers. Another reason for suspecting teleological notions about democracy is that it proceeds as if Foucauldian analysis did not exist. Characterising history as a process of democratisation tends to equate democracy with openness and freedom in an uncritical way. It glosses over the fact that representative democracy involved the repression of directly participatory practices and unruly social groups. More pertinently, it ignores critiques of direct democracy. Even if there are positive aspects to the re-emergence of participatory practices among audiences today, there are still real problems with direct democracy as a political ideal. It would be fairly easy to make the case that rowdy Victorian audiences engaged in ‘direct democratic’ practices during the course of a variety show or burlesque. The ‘gods’ in Victorian galleries exulted in expressing their preferences: evicting lack-lustre comics and demanding more of other performers. It would also be easy to valorise these practices as examples of the kind of culture-jamming I referred to earlier – as forms of resistance to the tyranny of well-tempered citizenship gaining sway at the time. Given the often hysterical attacks directed at unruly audiences, there is an obvious satisfaction to be had from observing the reinstatement of Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay at Her Majesty’s Theatre, or in the pleasure that working-class audiences derived from ‘calling the tune’. The same kind of satisfaction is not to be had, however, when observing direct democracy in action on YouTube, or during a season of Dancing with the Stars, or some other kind of plebiscitary TV. The expression of audience preferences in this context hardly carries the subversive connotations of informal evictions during a late-Victorian music-hall show. Viewer-voting today is indeed dominated by a rhetoric of partnership which centres on audience participation, rather than a notion of opposition between producers and audiences (Jenkins). The terrain of plebiscitary entertainment is very different now from the terrain of popular culture described by Stuart Hall in the 1980s – let alone as it stood in the 1890s, during Alice Leamar’s tour. Most commentary on plebiscitary TV avoids talk of ‘cultural struggle’ (Hall 235) and instead adopts a language of collaboration and of people ‘having a ball’ (Neville; Hartley, “Reality” 3). The extent to which contemporary plebiscites are managed by what Hartley calls the ‘plebiscitary industries’ evokes one of the most powerful criticisms made against direct democracy. That is, it evokes the view that direct democracy allows commercial interests to set the terms of public participation in decision-making, and thus to influence its outcomes (Barber 36; Moore 55–56). There is obviously big money to be made from plebiscitary TV. The advertising blitz which takes place during viewer-voting programs, and the vote-rigging scandals so often surrounding them make this clear. These considerations highlight the fact that public involvement in a plebiscitary process is not something to make a song and dance about unless broad involvement first takes place in deciding the issues open for determination by plebiscite, and the way in which these issues are framed. In the absence of this kind of broad participation, engagement in plebiscitary forms serves a solely consolatory function, offering the pleasures of viewer-voting as a substitute for substantive involvement in cultural creation and political change. Another critique sometimes made against direct democracy is that it makes an easy vehicle for prejudice (Barber 36–7). This was certainly the case in Victorian theatres, where it was common for Anglo gallery-members to heckle female and non-white performers in an intimidatory way. A group of American vaudeville performers called the Cherry Sisters certainly experienced this phenomenon in the early 1900s. The Cherry Sisters were defiantly unglamorous middle-aged women in a period when female performers were increasingly expected to display scantily-clad youthful figures on stage. As a consequence, they were embroiled in a number of near-riots in which male audience members hurled abuse and heavy objects from the galleries, and in some cases chased them into the street to physically assault them there (Pittinger 76–77). Such incidents give us a glimpse of the dark face of direct democracy. In some cases, the direct expression of popular views becomes an attack on diversity, leading to the kind of violent mêlée experienced either by the Cherry Sisters or the Middle Eastern people attacked on Sydney’s Cronulla Beach at the end of 2005. ‘Democracy’ is always an obviously politically loaded term when used in debates about new media. It is frequently used to imply that particular cultural or technological forms are inherently liberatory and inclusive. As Graeme Turner points out, reality TV has been celebrated as ‘democratic’ in this way. Only rarely, however, is there an attempt to argue why this is the case – to show how viewer-voting formats actually serve a democratic agenda. It was for this reason that Turner argued that the inclusion of ordinary people on reality TV should be understood as demotic rather than democratic (Turner, Understanding Celebrity 82–5; Turner, “Mass Production”). Ultimately, however, it is immaterial whether one uses the term ‘demotic’ or ‘direct democratic’ to describe the growth of plebiscitary entertainment. What is important is that we avoid making inflated claims about the direct expression of audience views, using the term ‘democratic’ to give an unduly celebratory spin to the political complexities involved. People may indeed be having a ball as they take part in online polls or choose what they want to watch on YouTube or shout at the TV during an episode of Idol. The ‘participatory enthusiasm’ that fans feel watching a show like Big Brother may also have lessons for those interested in making parliamentary process more responsive to people’s interests and needs (Coleman 458). But the development of plebiscitary forms is not inherently democratic in the sense that Turner suggests the term should be used – that is, it does not of itself serve a liberatory or socially inclusive agenda. Nor does it lead to substantive participation in cultural and political processes. In the end, it seems to me that we need to move beyond the discussion of plebiscitary entertainment in terms of democracy. The whole concept of democracy as the yardstick against which new media should be measured is highly problematic. Not only is direct democracy a vexed political ideal to start off with – it also leads commentators to take predictable positions when debating its relationship to new technologies and cultural forms. Some turn to hype, others to critique, and the result often appears as a mere restatement of the commentators’ political inclinations rather than a useful investigation of the developments at hand. Some of the most intriguing aspects of plebiscitary entertainments are left unexplored if we remain preoccupied with democracy. One might well investigate the re-introduction of studio audiences and participatory audience practices, for example, as a nostalgia for the interactivity experienced in live theatres such as the Newtown Bridge in the early twentieth century. It certainly seems to me that a retro impulse informs some of the developments in televised stand-up comedy in recent years. This was obviously the case for Paul McDermott’s The Side Show on Australian television in 2007, with its nod to the late-Victorian or early twentieth-century fairground and its live-theatrical vibe. More relevantly here, it also seems to be the case for American viewer-voting programs such as Last Comic Standing and the Comedy Channel’s Open Mic Fight. Further, reviews of programs such as Idol sometimes emphasise the emotional engagement arising out of their combination of viewer-voting and live performance as a harking-back to the good old days when entertainment was about being real (Neville). One misses this nostalgia associated with plebiscitary entertainments if bound to a teleological assumption that they form part of an ineluctable progression towards the New and the Free. Perhaps, then, it is time to pay more attention to the historical roots of viewer-voting formats, to think about the way that new media is sometimes about a re-invention of the old, trying to escape the recurrent back-and-forthing of debate about their relationship to progress and democracy. References Allen, Robert C. Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture .Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Andrejevic, Mark. Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2004. Bailey, Peter. Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the Contest for Control, 1830–1885. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978. Barber, Benjamin R. Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. ———. “Which Technology and Which Democracy?” Democracy and New Media. Eds. Henry Jenkins and David Thorburn. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2003. 33–48. Brantlinger, Patrick, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1988. Cheshire, D. F. Music Hall in Britain. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1974. Chevalier, Albert. Before I Forget: The Autobiography of a Chevalier d’Industrie. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1901. Coleman, Stephen. “How the Other Half Votes: Big Brother Viewers and the 2005 General Election”. International Journal of Cultural Studies 9.4 (2006): 457–79. Djubal, Clay. “From Minstrel Tenor to Vaudeville Showman: Harry Clay, ‘A Friend of the Australian Performer’”. Australasian Drama Studies 34 (April 1999): 10–24. Donnelly, Ignatius. Caesar’s Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century. London: Sampson Low, Marston and Co., 1891. Grossman, Lawrence. The Electronic Republic: Reshaping Democracy in the Information Age. New York: Penguin, 1995. Hall, Stuart. “Notes on Deconstructing the ‘Popular’”. People’s History and Socialist Theory. Ed. Raphael Samuel. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. 227–49. Hartley, John, The Uses of Television. London: Routledge, 1999. ———. “‘Reality’ and the Plebiscite”. Politoctainment: Television’s Take on the Real. Ed. Kristina Riegert. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2006. http://www.cci.edu.au/hartley/downloads/Plebiscite%20(Riegert%20chapter) %20revised%20FINAL%20%5BFeb%2014%5D.pdf. ———. “The ‘Value-Chain of Meaning’ and the New Economy”. International Journal of Cultural Studies 7.1 (2004): 129–41. Jenkins, Henry. “The Cultural Logic of Media Convergence”. International Journal of Cultural Studies 7.1 (2004): 33–43. ———, and David Thornburn. “Introduction: The Digital Revolution, the Informed Citizen, and the Culture of Democracy”. Democracy and New Media. Eds. Henry Jenkins and David Thorburn. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003. 1–20. Jones, Gareth Stedman. ‘Working-Class Culture and Working-Class Politics in London, 1870-1900: Notes on the Remaking of a Working Class’. Languages of Class: Studies in English Working-Class History, 1832–1982. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. 179–238. Joyce, Patrick. The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City. London: Verso, 2003. 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About half way through Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s film Home (2009) the narrator describes the fall of the Rapa Nui, the indigenous people of the Easter Islands. The narrator posits that the Rapa Nui culture collapsed due to extensive environmental degradation brought about by large-scale deforestation. The Rapa Nui cut down their massive native forests to clear spaces for agriculture, to heat their dwellings, to build canoes and, most importantly, to move their enormous rock sculptures—the Moai. The disappearance of their forests led to island-wide soil erosion and the gradual disappearance of arable land. Caught in the vice of overpopulation but with rapidly dwindling basic resources and no trees to build canoes, they were trapped on the island and watched helplessly as their society fell into disarray. The sequence ends with the narrator’s biting remark: “The real mystery of the Easter Islands is not how its strange statues got there, we know now; it's why the Rapa Nui didn't react in time.” In their unrelenting desire for development, the Rapa Nui appear to have overlooked the role the environment plays in maintaining a society. The island’s Moai accompanying the sequence appear as memento mori, a lesson in the mortality of human cultures brought about by their own misguided and short-sighted practices. Arthus-Bertrand’s Home, a film composed almost entirely of aerial photographs, bears witness to present-day environmental degradation and climate change, constructing society as a fragile structure built upon and sustained by the environment. Home is a call to recognise how contemporary practices of post-industrial societies have come to shape the environment and how they may impact the habitability of Earth in the near future. Through reflexivity and a ritualised structure the text invites spectators to look at themselves in a new light and remake their self-image in the wake of global environmental risk by embracing new, alternative core practices based on balance and interconnectedness. Arthus-Bertrand frames climate change not as a burden, but as a moment of profound realisation of the potential for change and humans ability to create a desirable future through hope and our innate capacity for renewal. This article examines how Arthus-Bertrand’s ritualised construction of climate change aims to remake viewers’ perception of present-day environmental degradation and investigates Home’s place in contemporary climate change communication discourse. Climate change, in its capacity to affect us globally, is considered a world risk. The most recent peer-reviewed Synthesis Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests that the concentration of atmospheric greenhouse gases has increased markedly since human industrialisation in the 18th century. Moreover, human activities, such as fossil fuel burning and agricultural practices, are “very likely” responsible for the resulting increase in temperature rise (IPPC 37). The increased global temperatures and the subsequent changing weather patterns have a direct and profound impact on the physical and biological systems of our planet, including shrinking glaciers, melting permafrost, coastal erosion, and changes in species distribution and reproduction patterns (Rosenzweig et al. 353). Studies of global security assert that these physiological changes are expected to increase the likelihood of humanitarian disasters, food and water supply shortages, and competition for resources thus resulting in a destabilisation of global safety (Boston et al. 1–2). Human behaviour and dominant practices of modernity are now on a path to materially impact the future habitability of our home, Earth. In contemporary post-industrial societies, however, climate change remains an elusive, intangible threat. Here, the Arctic-bound species forced to adapt to milder climates or the inhabitants of low-lying Pacific islands seeking refuge in mainland cities are removed from the everyday experience of the controlled and regulated environments of homes, offices, and shopping malls. Diverse research into the mediated and mediatised nature of the environment suggests that rather than from first-hand experiences and observations, the majority of our knowledge concerning the environment now comes from its representation in the mass media (Hamilton 4; Stamm et al. 220; Cox 2). Consequently the threat of climate change is communicated and constructed through the news media, entertainment and lifestyle programming, and various documentaries and fiction films. It is therefore the construction (the representation of the risk in various discourses) that shapes people’s perception and experience of the phenomenon, and ultimately influences behaviour and instigates social response (Beck 213). By drawing on and negotiating society’s dominant discourses, environmental mediation defines spectators’ perceptions of the human-nature relationship and subsequently their roles and responsibilities in the face of environmental risks. Maxwell Boykoff asserts that contemporary modern society’s mediatised representations of environmental degradation and climate change depict the phenomena as external to society’s primary social and economic concerns (449). Julia Corbett argues that this is partly because environmental protection and sustainable behaviour are often at odds with the dominant social paradigms of consumerism, economic growth, and materialism (175). Similarly, Rowan Howard-Williams suggests that most media texts, especially news, do not emphasise the link between social practices, such as consumerist behaviour, and their environmental consequences because they contradict dominant social paradigms (41). The demands contemporary post-industrial societies make on the environment to sustain economic growth, consumer culture, and citizens’ comfortable lives in air-conditioned homes and offices are often left unarticulated. While the media coverage of environmental risks may indeed have contributed to “critical misperceptions, misleading debates, and divergent understandings” (Boykoff 450) climate change possesses innate characteristics that amplify its perception in present-day post-industrial societies as a distant and impersonal threat. Climate change is characterised by temporal and spatial de-localisation. The gradual increase in global temperature and its physical and biological consequences are much less prominent than seasonal changes and hence difficult to observe on human time-scales. Moreover, while research points to the increased probability of extreme climatic events such as droughts, wild fires, and changes in weather patterns (IPCC 48), they take place over a wide range of geographical locations and no single event can be ultimately said to be the result of climate change (Maibach and Roser-Renouf 145). In addition to these observational obstacles, political partisanship, vested interests in the current status quo, and general resistance to profound change all play a part in keeping us one step removed from the phenomenon of climate change. The distant and impersonal nature of climate change coupled with the “uncertainty over consequences, diverse and multiple engaged interests, conflicting knowledge claims, and high stakes” (Lorenzoni et al. 65) often result in repression, rejection, and denial, removing the individual’s responsibility to act. Research suggests that, due to its unique observational obstacles in contemporary post-industrial societies, climate change is considered a psychologically distant event (Pawlik 559), one that is not personally salient due to the “perceived distance and remoteness [...] from one’s everyday experience” (O’Neill and Nicholson-Cole 370). In an examination of the barriers to behaviour change in the face of psychologically distant events, Robert Gifford argues that changing individuals’ perceptions of the issue-domain is one of the challenges of countering environmental inertia—the lack of initiative for environmentally sustainable social action (5). To challenge the status quo a radically different construction of the environment and the human-nature relationship is required to transform our perception of global environmental risks and ultimately result in environmentally consequential social action. Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s Home is a ritualised construction of contemporary environmental degradation and climate change which takes spectators on a rite of passage to a newfound understanding of the human-nature relationship. Transformation through re-imagining individuals’ roles, responsibilities, and practices is an intrinsic quality of rituals. A ritual charts a subjects path from one state of consciousness to the next, resulting in a meaningful change of attitudes (Deflem 8). Through a lifelong study of African rituals British cultural ethnographer Victor Turner refined his concept of rituals in a modern social context. Turner observed that rituals conform to a three-phased processural form (The Ritual Process 13–14). First, in the separation stage, the subjects are selected and removed from their fixed position in the social structure. Second, they enter an in-between and ambiguous liminal stage, characterised by a “partial or complete separation of the subject from everyday existence” (Deflem 8). Finally, imbued with a new perspective of the outside world borne out of the experience of reflexivity, liminality, and a cathartic cleansing, subjects are reintegrated into the social reality in a new, stable state. The three distinct stages make the ritual an emotionally charged, highly personal experience that “demarcates the passage from one phase to another in the individual’s life-cycle” (Turner, “Symbols” 488) and actively shapes human attitudes and behaviour. Adhering to the three-staged processural form of the ritual, Arthus-Bertrand guides spectators towards a newfound understanding of their roles and responsibilities in creating a desirable future. In the first stage—the separation—aerial photography of Home alienates viewers from their anthropocentric perspectives of the outside world. This establishes Earth as a body, and unearths spectators’ guilt and shame in relation to contemporary world risks. Aerial photography strips landscapes of their conventional qualities of horizon, scale, and human reference. As fine art photographer Emmet Gowin observes, “when one really sees an awesome, vast place, our sense of wholeness is reorganised [...] and the body seems always to diminish” (qtd. in Reynolds 4). Confronted with a seemingly infinite sublime landscape from above, the spectator’s “body diminishes” as they witness Earth’s body gradually taking shape. Home’s rushing rivers of Indonesia are akin to blood flowing through the veins and the Siberian permafrost seems like the texture of skin in extreme close-up. Arthus-Bertrand establishes a geocentric embodiment to force spectators to perceive and experience the environmental degradation brought about by the dominant social practices of contemporary post-industrial modernity. The film-maker visualises the maltreatment of the environment through suggested abuse of the Earth’s body. Images of industrial agricultural practices in the United States appear to leave scratches and scars on the landscape, and as a ship crosses the Arctic ice sheets of the Northwest Passage the boat glides like the surgeon’s knife cutting through the uppermost layer of the skin. But the deep blue water that’s revealed in the wake of the craft suggests a flesh and body now devoid of life, a suffering Earth in the wake of global climatic change. Arthus-Bertrand’s images become the sublime evidence of human intervention in the environment and the reflection of present-day industrialisation materially altering the face of Earth. The film-maker exploits spectators’ geocentric perspective and sensibility to prompt reflexivity, provide revelations about the self, and unearth the forgotten shame and guilt in having inadvertently caused excessive environmental degradation. Following the sequences establishing Earth as the body of the text Arthus-Bertrand returns spectators to their everyday “natural” environment—the city. Having witnessed and endured the pain and suffering of Earth, spectators now gaze at the skyscrapers standing bold and tall in the cityscape with disillusionment. The pinnacles of modern urban development become symbols of arrogance and exploitation: structures forced upon the landscape. Moreover, the images of contemporary cityscapes in Home serve as triggers for ritual reflexivity, allowing the spectator to “perceive the self [...] as a distanced ‘other’ and hence achieve a partial ‘self-transcendence’” (Beck, Comments 491). Arthus-Bertrand’s aerial photographs of Los Angeles, New York, and Tokyo fold these distinct urban environments into one uniform fusion of glass, metal, and concrete devoid of life. The uniformity of these cultural landscapes prompts spectators to add the missing element: the human. Suddenly, the homes and offices of desolate cityscapes are populated by none other than us, looking at ourselves from a unique vantage point. The geocentric sensibility the film-maker invoked with the images of the suffering Earth now prompt a revelation about the self as spectators see their everyday urban environments in a new light. Their homes and offices become blemishes on the face of the Earth: its inhabitants, including the spectators themselves, complicit in the excessive mistreatment of the planet. The second stage of the ritual allows Arthus-Bertrand to challenge dominant social paradigms of present day post-industrial societies and introduce new, alternative moral directives to govern our habits and attitudes. Following the separation, ritual subjects enter an in-between, threshold stage, one unencumbered by the spatial, temporal, and social boundaries of everyday existence. Turner posits that a subjects passage through this liminal stage is necessary to attain psychic maturation and successful transition to a new, stable state at the end of the ritual (The Ritual Process 97). While this “betwixt and between” (Turner, The Ritual Process 95) state may be a fleeting moment of transition, it makes for a “lived experience [that] transforms human beings cognitively, emotionally, and morally.” (Horvath et al. 3) Through a change of perceptions liminality paves the way toward meaningful social action. Home places spectators in a state of liminality to contrast geocentric and anthropocentric views. Arthus-Bertrand contrasts natural and human-made environments in terms of diversity. The narrator’s description of the “miracle of life” is followed by images of trees seemingly defying gravity, snow-covered summits among mountain ranges, and a whale in the ocean. Grandeur and variety appear to be inherent qualities of biodiversity on Earth, qualities contrasted with images of the endless, uniform rectangular greenhouses of Almeria, Spain. This contrast emphasises the loss of variety in human achievements and the monotony mass-production brings to the landscape. With the image of a fire burning atop a factory chimney, Arthus-Bertrand critiques the change of pace and distortion of time inherent in anthropocentric views, and specifically in contemporary modernity. Here, the flames appear to instantly eat away at resources that have taken millions of years to form, bringing anthropocentric and geocentric temporality into sharp contrast. A sequence showing a night time metropolis underscores this distinction. The glittering cityscape is lit by hundreds of lights in skyscrapers in an effort, it appears, to mimic and surpass daylight and thus upturn the natural rhythm of life. As the narrator remarks, in our present-day environments, “days are now the pale reflections of nights.” Arthus-Bertrand also uses ritual liminality to mark the present as a transitory, threshold moment in human civilisation. The film-maker contrasts the spectre of our past with possible visions of the future to mark the moment of now as a time when humanity is on the threshold of two distinct states of mind. The narrator’s descriptions of contemporary post-industrial society’s reliance on non-renewable resources and lack of environmentally sustainable agricultural practices condemn the past and warn viewers of the consequences of continuing such practices into the future. Exploring the liminal present Arthus-Bertrand proposes distinctive futurescapes for humankind. On the one hand, the narrator’s description of California’s “concentration camp style cattle farming” suggests that humankind will live in a future that feeds from the past, falling back on frames of horrors and past mistakes. On the other hand, the example of Costa Rica, a nation that abolished its military and dedicated the budget to environmental conservation, is recognition of our ability to re-imagine our future in the face of global risk. Home introduces myths to imbue liminality with the alternative dominant social paradigm of ecology. By calling upon deep-seated structures myths “touch the heart of society’s emotional, spiritual and intellectual consciousness” (Killingsworth and Palmer 176) and help us understand and come to terms with complex social, economic, and scientific phenomena. With the capacity to “pattern thought, beliefs and practices,” (Maier 166) myths are ideal tools in communicating ritual liminality and challenging contemporary post-industrial society’s dominant social paradigms. The opening sequence of Home, where the crescent Earth is slowly revealed in the darkness of space, is an allusion to creation: the genesis myth. Accompanied only by a gentle hum our home emerges in brilliant blue, white, and green-brown encompassing most of the screen. It is as if darkness and chaos disintegrated and order, life, and the elements were created right before our eyes. Akin to the Earthrise image taken by the astronauts of Apollo 8, Home’s opening sequence underscores the notion that our home is a unique spot in the blackness of space and is defined and circumscribed by the elements. With the opening sequence Arthus-Bertrand wishes to impart the message of interdependence and reliance on elements—core concepts of ecology. Balance, another key theme in ecology, is introduced with an allusion to the Icarus myth in a sequence depicting Dubai. The story of Icarus’s fall from the sky after flying too close to the sun is a symbolic retelling of hubris—a violent pride and arrogance punishable by nemesis—destruction, which ultimately restores balance by forcing the individual back within the limits transgressed (Littleton 712). In Arthus-Bertrand’s portrayal of Dubai, the camera slowly tilts upwards on the Burj Khalifa tower, the tallest human-made structure ever built. The construction works on the tower explicitly frame humans against the bright blue sky in their attempt to reach ever further, transgressing their limitations much like the ill-fated Icarus. Arthus-Bertrand warns that contemporary modernity does not strive for balance or moderation, and with climate change we may have brought our nemesis upon ourselves. By suggesting new dominant paradigms and providing a critique of current maxims, Home’s retelling of myths ultimately sees spectators through to the final stage of the ritual. The last phase in the rite of passage “celebrates and commemorates transcendent powers,” (Deflem 8) marking subjects’ rebirth to a new status and distinctive perception of the outside world. It is at this stage that Arthus-Bertrand resolves the emotional distress uncovered in the separation phase. The film-maker uses humanity’s innate capacity for creation and renewal as a cathartic cleansing aimed at reconciling spectators’ guilt and shame in having inadvertently exacerbated global environmental degradation. Arthus-Bertrand identifies renewable resources as the key to redeeming technology, human intervention in the landscape, and finally humanity itself. Until now, the film-maker pictured modernity and technology, evidenced in his portrayal of Dubai, as synonymous with excess and disrespect for the interconnectedness and balance of elements on Earth. The final sequence shows a very different face of technology. Here, we see a mechanical sea-snake generating electricity by riding the waves off the coast of Scotland and solar panels turning towards the sun in the Sahara desert. Technology’s redemption is evidenced in its ability to imitate nature—a move towards geocentric consciousness (a lesson learned from the ritual’s liminal stage). Moreover, these human-made structures, unlike the skyscrapers earlier in the film, appear a lot less invasive in the landscape and speak of moderation and union with nature. With the above examples Arthus-Bertrand suggests that humanity can shed the greed that drove it to dig deeper and deeper into the Earth to acquire non-renewable resources such as oil and coal, what the narrator describes as “treasures buried deep.” The incorporation of principles of ecology, such as balance and interconnectedness, into humanity’s behaviour ushers in reconciliation and ritual cleansing in Home. Following the description of the move toward renewable resources, the narrator reveals that “worldwide four children out of five attend school, never has learning been given to so many human beings” marking education, innovation, and creativity as the true inexhaustible resources on Earth. Lastly, the description of Antarctica in Home is the essence of Arthus-Bertrand’s argument for our innate capacity to create, not simply exploit and destroy. Here, the narrator describes the continent as possessing “immense natural resources that no country can claim for itself, a natural reserve devoted to peace and science, a treaty signed by 49 nations has made it a treasure shared by all humanity.” Innovation appears to fuel humankind’s transcendence to a state where it is capable of compassion, unification, sharing, and finally creating treasures. With these examples Arthus-Bertrand suggests that humanity has an innate capacity for creative energy that awaits authentic expression and can turn humankind from destroyer to creator. In recent years various risk communication texts have explicitly addressed climate change, endeavouring to instigate environmentally consequential social action. Home breaks discursive ground among them through its ritualistic construction which seeks to transform spectators’ perception, and in turn roles and responsibilities, in the face of global environmental risks. Unlike recent climate change media texts such as An Inconvenient Truth (2006), The 11th Hour (2007), The Age of Stupid (2009), Carbon Nation (2010) and Earth: The Operator’s Manual (2011), Home eludes simple genre classification. On the threshold of photography and film, documentary and fiction, Arthus-Bertrand’s work is best classified as an advocacy film promoting public debate and engagement with a universal concern—the state of the environment. The film’s website, available in multiple languages, contains educational material, resources to organise public screenings, and a link to GoodPlanet.info: a website dedicated to environmentalism, including legal tools and initiatives to take action. The film-maker’s approach to using Home as a basis for education and raising awareness corresponds to Antonio Lopez’s critique of contemporary mass-media communications of global risks. Lopez rebukes traditional forms of mediatised communication that place emphasis on the imparting of knowledge and instead calls for a participatory, discussion-driven, organic media approach, akin to a communion or a ritual (106). Moreover, while texts often place a great emphasis on the messenger, for instance Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth, Leonardo DiCaprio in The 11th Hour, or geologist Dr. Richard Alley in Earth: The Operator’s Manual, Home’s messenger remains unseen—the narrator is only identified at the very end of the film among the credits. The film-maker’s decision to forego a central human character helps dissociate the message from the personality of the messenger which aids in establishing and maintaining the geocentric sensibility of the text. Finally, the ritual’s invocation and cathartic cleansing of emotional distress enables Home to at once acknowledge our environmentally destructive past habits and point to a hopeful, environmentally sustainable future. While The Age of Stupid mostly focuses on humanity’s present and past failures to respond to an imminent environmental catastrophe, Carbon Nation, with the tagline “A climate change solutions movie that doesn’t even care if you believe in climate change,” only explores the potential future business opportunities in turning towards renewable resources and environmentally sustainable practices. The three-phased processural form of the ritual allows for a balance of backward and forward-looking, establishing the possibility of change and renewal in the face of world risk. The ritual is a transformative experience. As Turner states, rituals “interrupt the flow of social life and force a group to take cognizance of its behaviour in relation to its own values, and even question at times the value of those values” (“Dramatic Ritual” 82). Home, a ritualised media text, is an invitation to look at our world, its dominant social paradigms, and the key element within that world—ourselves—with new eyes. It makes explicit contemporary post-industrial society’s dependence on the environment, highlights our impact on Earth, and reveals our complicity in bringing about a contemporary world risk. The ritual structure and the self-reflexivity allow Arthus-Bertrand to transform climate change into a personally salient issue. This bestows upon the spectator the responsibility to act and to reconcile the spectre of the past with the vision of the future.Acknowledgments The author would like to thank Dr. Angi Buettner whose support, guidance, and supervision has been invaluable in preparing this article. 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In light of an ongoing debate over the authorship of the Redfern address (was it then Prime Minister Paul Keating or his speechwriter, Don Watson, who was responsible for this historic piece?), the authors of this article consider notions of ownership, authorship, and acknowledgement as they relate to the crafting, delivery, and reception of historical political speeches. There is focus, too, on the often-remarkable partnership that evolves between speechwriters and those who deliver the work. We argue that by drawing on the expertise of an artist or—in the case of the article at hand—speechwriter, collaboration facilitates the ‘translation’ of the politician’s or patron’s vision into a delivered reality. The article therefore proposes that while a speech, perhaps like a commissioned painting or sculpture, may be understood as the product of a highly synergistic collaboration between patron and producer, the power-bearer nonetheless retains essential ‘ownership’ of the material. This, we argue, is something other than the process of authorship adumbrated above. Leaving aside, for the present, the question of ownership, the context in which a speech is written and given may well intensify questions of authorship: the more politically significant or charged the context, the greater the potential impact of a speech and the more at stake in terms of its authorship. In addition to its focus on the latter, this article therefore also reflects on the considerable cultural resonance of the speech in question and, in so doing, assesses its significant impact on Australian reconciliation discourse. In arriving at our conclusions, we employ a method assemblage approach including analogy, comparison, historical reference, and interview. Comprising a range of investigative modalities such as those employed by us, John Law argues that a “method assemblage” is essentially a triangulated form of primary and secondary research facilitating the interrogation of social phenomena that do not easily yield to more traditional modes of research (Law 7). The approach is all the more relevant to this article since through it an assessment of the speech’s historical significance may be made. In particular, this article extensively compares the collaboration between Keating and Watson to that of United States President John F. Kennedy and Special Counsel and speechwriter Ted Sorensen. As the article reveals, this collaboration produced a number of Kennedy’s historic speeches and was mutually acknowledged as a particularly important relationship. Moreover, because both Sorensen and Watson were also key advisers to the leaders of their respective nations, the comparison is doubly fertile.On 10 December 1992 then Prime Minister Paul Keating launched the International Year of the World’s Indigenous People by delivering an address now recognised as a landmark in Australian, and even global, oratory. Alan Whiticker, for instance, includes the address in his Speeches That Shaped the Modern World. Following brief instruction from Keating (who was scheduled to give two orations on 10 December), the Prime Minister’s speechwriter and adviser, Don Watson, crafted the speech over the course of one evening. The oration that ensued was history-making: Keating became the first of all who held his office to declare that non-Indigenous Australians had dispossessed Aboriginal people; an unequivocal admission in which the Prime Minister confessed: “we committed the murders” (qtd. in Whiticker 331). The impact of this cannot be overstated. A personal interview with Jennifer Beale, an Indigenous Australian who was among the audience on that historic day, reveals the enormous significance of the address:I felt the mood of the crowd changed … when Keating said “we took the traditional lands” … . “we committed [the murders]” … [pauses] … I was so amazed to be standing there hearing a Prime Minister saying that… And I felt this sort of wave go over the crowd and they started actually paying attention… I’d never in my life heard … anyone say it like that: we did this, to you… (personal communication, 15 Dec. 2016)Later in the interview, when recalling a conversation in the Channel Seven newsroom where she formerly worked, Beale recalls a senior reporter saying that, with respect to Aboriginal history, there had been a ‘conservative cover up.’ Given the broader context (her being interviewed by the present authors about the Redfern Address) Beale’s response to that exchange is particularly poignant: “…it’s very rare that I have had these experiences in my life where I have been … [pauses at length] validated… by non-Aboriginal people” (op. cit.).The speech, then, is a crucial bookend in Australian reconciliation discourse, particularly as an admission of egregious wrongdoing to be addressed (Foye). The responding historical bookend is, of course, Kevin Rudd’s 2008 ‘Apology to the Stolen Generations’. Forming the focal point of the article at hand, the Redfern Address is significant for another reason: that is, as the source of a now historical controversy and very public (and very bitter) falling out between politician and speechwriter.Following the publication of Watson’s memoir Recollections of a Bleeding Heart, Keating denounced the former as having broken an unwritten contract that stipulates the speechwriter has the honour of ‘participating in the endeavour and the power in return for anonymity and confidentiality’ (Keating). In an opinion piece appearing in the Sydney Morning Herald, Keating argued that this implied contract is central to the speech-writing process:This is how political speeches are written, when the rapid business of government demands mass writing. A frequency of speeches that cannot be individually scripted by the political figure or leader giving them… After a pre-draft conference on a speech—canvassing the kind of things I thought we should say and include—unless the actual writing was off the beam, I would give the speech more or less off the printer… All of this only becomes an issue when the speechwriter steps from anonymity to claim particular speeches or words given to a leader or prime minister in the privacy of the workspace. Watson has done this. (Keating)Upon the release of After Words, a collection of Keating’s post-Prime Ministerial speeches, senior writer for The Australian, George Megalogenis opined that the book served to further Keating’s argument: “Take note, Don Watson; Keating is saying, ‘I can write’” (30). According to Phillip Adams, Keating once bluntly declared “I was in public life for twenty years without Don Watson and did pretty well” (154). On the subject of the partnership’s best-known speech, Keating claims that while Watson no doubt shared the sentiments invoked in the Redfern Address, “in the end, the vector force of the power and what to do with it could only come from me” (Keating).For his part, Watson has challenged Keating’s claim to being the rightfully acknowledged author of the Redfern Address. In an appearance on the ABC’s Q&A he asserted authorship of the material, listing other famous historical exponents of his profession who had taken credit for their place at the wheel of government: “I suppose I could say that while I was there, really I was responsible for the window boxes in Parliament House but, actually, I was writing speeches as speechwriters do; as Peggy Noonan did for Ronald Reagan; as Graham Freudenberg did for three or four Prime Ministers, and so on…” (Watson). Moreover, as Watson has suggested, a number of prominent speechwriters have gone on to take credit for their work in written memoirs. In an opinion piece in The Australian, Denis Glover observes that: “great speechwriters always write such books and have the good sense to wait until the theatre has closed, as Watson did.” A notable example of this after-the-era approach is Ted Sorensen’s Counselor in which the author nonetheless remains extraordinarily humble—observing that reticence, or ‘a passion for anonymity’, should characterise the posture of the Presidential speechwriter (131).In Counselor, Sorensen discusses his role as collaborator with Kennedy—likening the relationship between political actor and speechwriter to that between master and apprentice (130). He further observes that, like an apprentice, a speechwriter eventually learns to “[imitate] the style of the master, ultimately assisting him in the execution of the final work of art” (op. cit., 130-131). Unlike Watson’s claim to be the ‘speechwriter’—a ‘master’, of sorts—Sorensen more modestly declares that: “for eleven years, I was an apprentice” (op. cit., 131). At some length Sorensen focuses on this matter of anonymity, and the need to “minimize” his role (op. cit.). Reminiscent of the “unwritten contract” (see above) that Keating declares broken by Watson, Sorensen argues that his “reticence was [and is] the result of an implicit promise that [he] vowed never to break…” (op. cit.). In implying that the ownership of the speeches to which he contributed properly belongs to his President, Sorensen goes on to state that “Kennedy did deeply believe everything I helped write for him, because my writing came from my knowledge of his beliefs” (op. cit. 132). As Herbert Goldhamer observes in The Adviser, this knowing of a leader’s mind is central to the advisory function: “At times the adviser may facilitate the leader’s inner dialogue…” (15). The point is made again in Sorensen’s discussion of his role in the writing of Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage. In response to a charge that he [Sorensen] had ghost-written the book, Sorensen confessed that he might have privately boasted of having written much of it. (op. cit., 150) But he then goes on to observe that “the book’s concept was his [Kennedy’s], and that the selection of stories was his.” (op. cit.). “Like JFK’s speeches”, Sorensen continues, “Profiles in Courage was a collaboration…” (op. cit.).Later in Counselor, when discussing Kennedy’s inaugural address, it is interesting to note that Sorensen is somewhat less modest about the question of authorship. While the speech was and is ‘owned’ by Kennedy (the President requested its crafting, received it, edited the final product many times, and—with considerable aplomb—delivered it in the cold midday air of 20 January 1961), when discussing the authorship of the text Sorensen refers to the work of Thurston Clarke and Dick Tofel who independently conclude that the speech was a collaborative effort (op. cit. 227). Sorensen notes that while Clarke emphasised the President’s role and Tofel emphasised his own, the matter of who was principal craftsman will—and indeed should—remain forever clouded. To ensure that it will permanently remain so, following a discussion with Kennedy’s widow in 1965, Sorensen destroyed the preliminary manuscript. And, when pressed about the similarities between it and the final product (which he insists was revised many times by the President), he claims not to recall (op. cit. 227). Interestingly, Robert Dallek argues that while ‘suggestions of what to say came from many sources’, ‘the final version [of the speech] came from Kennedy’s hand’ (324). What history does confirm is that both Kennedy and Sorensen saw their work as fundamentally collaborative. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. records Kennedy’s words: “Ted is indispensable to me” (63). In the same volume, Schlesinger observes that the relationship between Sorensen and Kennedy was ‘special’ and that Sorensen felt himself to have a unique facility to know [Kennedy’s] mind and to ‘reproduce his idiom’ (op.cit.). Sorensen himself makes the point that his close friendship with the President made possible the success of the collaboration, and that this “could not later be replicated with someone else with whom [he] did not have that same relationship” (131). He refers, of course, to Lyndon Johnson. Kennedy’s choice of advisers (including Sorensen as Special Counsel) was, then, crucial—although he never ceded to Sorensen sole responsibility for all speechwriting. Indeed, as we shortly discuss, at critical junctures the President involved others (including Schlesinger, Richard Goodwin, and Myer Feldman) in the process of speech-craft and, on delivery day, sometimes departed from the scripts proffered.As was the case with Keating’s, creative tension characterised Kennedy’s administration. Schlesinger Jr. notes that it was an approach practiced early, in Kennedy’s strategy of keeping separate his groups of friends (71). During his Presidency, this fostering of creative tension extended to the drafting of speeches. In a special issue of Time, David von Drehle notes that the ‘Peace’ speech given 10 June 1963 was “prepared by a tight circle of advisers” (97). Still, even here, Sorensen’s role remained pivotal. One of those who worked on that speech (commonly regarded as Kennedy’s finest) was William Forster, Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. As indicated by the conditional “I think” in “Ted Sorensen, I think, sat up all night…”, Forster somewhat reluctantly concedes that while a group was involved, Sorensen’s contribution was central: “[Sorensen], with his remarkable ability to polish and write, was able to send each of us and the President the final draft about six or seven in the morning…” (op. cit.).In most cases, however, it fell on Sorensen alone to craft the President’s speeches. While Sorenson’s mind surely ‘rolled in unison’ with Kennedy’s (Schlesinger Jr. 597), and while Sorensen’s words dominated the texts, the President would nonetheless annotate scripts, excising redundant material and adding sentences. In the case of less formal orations, the President was capable of all but abandoning the script (a notable example was his October 1961 oration to mark the publication of the first four volumes of the John Quincy Adams papers) but for orations of national or international significance there remained a sense of careful collaboration between Kennedy and Sorensen. Yet, even in such cases, the President’s sense of occasion sometimes encouraged him to set aside his notes. As Arthur Schlesinger Jr. observes, Kennedy had an instinctive feel for language and often “spoke extemporaneously” (op. cit.). The most memorable example, of course, is the 1961 speech in Berlin where Kennedy (appalled by the erection of the Berlin Wall, and angry over the East’s churlish covering of the Brandenburg Gate) went “off-script and into dangerous diplomatic waters” (Tubridy 85). But the risky departure paid off in the form of a TKO against Chairman Khrushchev. In late 1960, following two independent phone calls concerning the incarceration of Martin Luther King, Kennedy had remarked to John Galbraith that “the best strategies are always accidental”—an approach that appears to have found its way into his formal rhetoric (Schlesinger Jr. 67).Ryan Tubridy, author of JFK in Ireland, observes that “while the original draft of the Berlin Wall speech had been geared to a sense of appeasement that acknowledged the Wall’s presence as something the West might have to accept, the ad libs suggested otherwise” (85). Referencing Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s account of the delivery, Tubridy notes that the President’s aides observed the orator’s rising emotion—especially when departing from the script as written:There are some who say that Communism is the way of the future. Let them come to Berlin. And there are some who say in Europe and elsewhere we can work with the Communists. Let them come to Berlin … Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put up a wall to keep our people in.That the speech defined Kennedy’s presidency even more than did his inaugural address is widely agreed, and the President’s assertion “Ich bin ein Berliner” is one that has lived on now for over fifty years. The phrase was not part of the original script, but an addition included at the President’s request by Kennedy’s translator Robert Lochner.While this phrase and the various additional departures from the original script ‘make’ the speech, they are nonetheless part of a collaborative whole the nature of which we adumbrate above. Furthermore, it is a mark of the collaboration between speechwriter and speech-giver that on Air Force One, as they flew from West Germany to Ireland, Kennedy told Sorensen: “We’ll never have another day like this as long as we live” (op. cit. 88; Dallek 625). The speech, then, was a remarkable joint enterprise—and (at least privately) was acknowledged as such.It seems unlikely that Keating will ever (even semi-publicly) acknowledge the tremendous importance of Watson to his Prime Ministership. There seems not to have been a ‘Don is indispensable to me’ moment, but according to the latter the former Prime Minister did offer such sentiment in private. In an unguarded moment, Keating allegedly said that Watson would “be able to say that [he, Watson, was] the puppet master for the biggest puppet in the land” (Watson 290). If this comment was indeed offered, then Keating, much like Kennedy, (at least once) privately acknowledged the significant role that his speechwriter played in his administration. Watson, for his part, was less reticent. On the ABC’s Q&A of 29 August 2011 he assessed the relationship as being akin to a [then] “requited” love. Of course, above and beyond private or public acknowledgement of collaboration is tangible evidence of such: minuted meetings between speechwriter and speech-giver and instructions to the speechwriter that appear, for example, in a politician’s own hand. Perhaps more importantly, the stamp of ownership on a speech can be signalled by marginalia concerning delivery and in the context of the delivery itself: the engagement of emphases, pause, and the various paralinguistic phenomena that can add so much character to—and very much define—a written text. By way of example we reference again the unique and impassioned delivery of the Berlin speech, above. And beyond this again, as also suggested, are the non-written departures from a script that further put the stamp of ownership on an oration. In the case of Kennedy, it is easy to trace such marginalia and resultant departures from scripted material but there is little evidence that Keating either extensively annotated or extemporaneously departed from the script in question. However, as Tom Clark points out, while there are very few changes to Watson’s words there are fairly numerous “annotations that mark up timing, emphasis, and phrase coherence.” Clark points out that Keating had a relatively systematic notational schema “to guide him in the speech performance” (op. cit.). In engaging a musical analogy (an assemblage device that we ourselves employ), he opines that these scorings, “suggest a powerful sense of fidelity to the manuscript as authoritative composition” (op. cit.). While this is so, we argue—and one can easily conceive Keating arguing—that they are also marks of textual ownership; the former Prime Minister’s ‘signature’ on the piece. This is a point to which we return. For now, we note that matters of stress, rhythm, intonation, gesture, and body language are crucial to the delivery of a speech and reaffirm the point that it is in its delivery that an adroitly rendered text might come to life. As Sorensen (2008) reflects:I do not dismiss the potential of the right speech on the right topic delivered by the right speaker in the right way at the right moment. It can ignite a fire, change men’s minds, open their eyes, alter their votes, bring hope to their lives, and, in all these ways, change the world. I know. I saw it happen. (143)We argue that it is in its delivery to (and acceptance by) the patron and in its subsequent delivery by the patron to an audience that a previously written speech (co-authored, or not) may be ‘owned’. As we have seen, with respect to questions of authorship or craftsmanship, analogies (another device of method assemblage) with the visual and musical arts are not uncommon—and we here offer another: a reference to the architectural arts. When a client briefs an architect, the architect must interpret the client’s vision. Once the blueprints are passed to the client and are approved, the client takes ownership of work that has been, in a sense, co-authored. Ownership and authorship are not the same, then, and we suggest that it is the interstices that the tensions between Keating and Watson truly lie.In crafting the Redfern address, there is little doubt that Watson’s mind rolled in unison with the Prime Minister’s: invisible, intuited ‘evidence’ of a fruitful collaboration. As the former Prime Minister puts it: “Watson and I actually write in very similar ways. He is a prettier writer than I am, but not a more pungent one. So, after a pre-draft conference on a speech—canvassing the kind of things I thought we should say and include—unless the actual writing was off the beam, I would give the speech more or less off the printer” (Keating). As one of the present authors has elsewhere observed, “Watson sensed the Prime Minister’s mood and anticipated his language and even the pattern of his voice” (Foye 19). Here, there are shades of the Kennedy/Sorensen partnership. As Schlesinger Jr. observes, Kennedy and Sorensen worked so closely together that it became impossible to know which of them “originated the device of staccato phrases … or the use of balanced sentences … their styles had fused into one” (598). Moreover, in responding to a Sunday Herald poll asking readers to name Australia’s great orators, Denise Davies remarked, “Watson wrote the way Keating thought and spoke” (qtd. in Dale 46). Despite an uncompromising, pungent, title—‘On that historic day in Redfern, the words I spoke were mine’—Keating’s SMH op-ed of 26 August 2010 nonetheless offers a number of insights vis-a-vis the collaboration between speechwriter and speech-giver. To Keating’s mind (and here we might reflect on Sorensen’s observation about knowing the beliefs of the patron), the inspiration for the Prime Minister’s Redfern Address came from conversations between he and Watson.Keating relates an instance when, on a flight crossing outback Western Australia, he told Watson that “we will never really get Australia right until we come to terms with them (Keating).” “Them”, Keating explains, refers to Aborigines. Keating goes on to suggest that by “come to terms”, he meant “owning up to dispossession” (op. cit.)—which is precisely what he did, to everyone’s great surprise, in the speech itself. Keating observes: I remember well talking to Watson a number of times about stories told to me through families [he] knew, of putting “dampers” out for Aborigines. The dampers were hampers of poisoned food provided only to murder them. I used to say to Watson that this stuff had to be owned up to. And it was me who established the inquiry into the Stolen Generation that Kevin Rudd apologised to. The generation who were taken from their mothers.So, the sentiments that “we did the dispossessing … we brought the diseases, the alcohol, that we committed the murders and took the children from their mothers” were my sentiments. P.J. Keating’s sentiments. They may have been Watson’s sentiments also. But they were sentiments provided to a speechwriter as a remit, as an instruction, as guidance as to how this subject should be dealt with in a literary way. (op. cit.)While such conversations might not accurately be called “guidance” (something more consciously offered as such) or “instruction” (as Keating declares), they nonetheless offer to the speechwriter a sense of the trajectory of a leader’s thoughts and sentiments. As Keating puts it, “the sentiments of the speech, that is, the core of its authority and authorship, were mine” (op. cit.). As does Sorensen, Keating argues that that such revelation is a source of “power to the speechwriter” (op. cit.). This he buttresses with more down to earth language: conversations of this nature are “meat and drink”, “the guidance from which the authority and authorship of the speech ultimately derives” (op. cit.). Here, Keating gets close to what may be concluded: while authorship might, to a significant extent, be contingent on the kind of interaction described, ownership is absolutely contingent on authority. As Keating asserts, “in the end, the vector force of the power and what to do with it could only come from me” (op. cit.). In other words, no Prime Minister with the right sentiments and the courage to deliver them publicly (i.e. Keating), no speech.On the other hand, we also argue that Watson’s part in crafting the Redfern Address should not be downplayed, requiring (as the speech did) his unique writing style—called “prettier” by the former Prime Minister. More importantly, we argue that the speech contains a point of view that may be attributed to Watson more than Keating’s description of the speechwriting process might suggest. In particular, the Redfern Address invoked a particular interpretation of Australian history that can be attributed to Watson, whose manuscript Keating accepted. Historian Manning Clark had an undeniable impact on Watson’s thinking and thus the development of the Redfern address. Per Keating’s claim that he himself had “only read bits and pieces of Manning’s histories” (Curran 285), the basis for this link is actual and direct: Keating hired Clark devotee Watson as a major speech writer on the same day that Clark died in 1991 (McKenna 71). McKenna’s examination of Clark’s history reveals striking similarities with the rhetoric at the heart of the Redfern address. For example, in his 1988 essay The Beginning of Wisdom, Clark (in McKenna) announces:Now we are beginning to take the blinkers off our eyes. Now we are ready to face the truth about our past, to acknowledge that the coming of the British was the occasion of three great evils: the violence against the original inhabitants of the of the country, the Aborigines, the violence against the first European labour force in Australia, the convicts and the violence done to the land itself. (71)As the above quote demonstrates, echoes of Clark’s denouncement of Australia’s past are evident in the Redfern Address’ rhetoric. While Keating is correct to suggest that Watson and he shared the sentiments behind the Address, it may be said that it took Watson—steeped as he was in Clark’s understanding of history and operating closely as he did with the Prime Minister—to craft the Redfern Address. Notwithstanding the concept of ownership, Keating’s claim that the “vector force” for the speech could only come from him unreasonably diminishes Watson’s role.ConclusionThis article has considered the question of authorship surrounding the 1992 Redfern Address, particularly in view of the collaborative nature of speechwriting. The article has also drawn on the analogous relationship between President Kennedy and his Counsel, Ted Sorensen—an association that produced historic speeches. Here, the process of speechwriting has been demonstrated to be a synergistic collaboration between speechwriter and speech-giver; a working partnership in which the former translates the vision of the latter into words that, if delivered appropriately, capture audience attention and sympathy. At its best, this collaborative relationship sees the emergence of a synergy so complete that it is impossible to discern who wrote what (exactly). While the speech carries the imprimatur and original vision of the patron/public actor, this originator nonetheless requires the expertise of one (or more) who might give shape, clarity, and colour to what might amount to mere instructive gesture—informed, in the cases of Sorensen and Watson, by years of conversation. While ‘ownership’ of a speech then ultimately rests with the power-bearer (Keating requested, received, lightly edited, ‘scored’, and delivered—with some minor ad libbing, toward the end—the Redfern text), the authors of this article consider neither Keating nor Watson to be the major scribe of the Redfern Address. Indeed, it was a distinguished collaboration between these figures that produced the speech: a cooperative undertaking similar to the process of writing this article itself. Moreover, because an Australian Prime Minister brought the plight of Indigenous Australians to the attention of their non-Indigenous counterparts, the address is seminal in Australian history. It is, furthermore, an exquisitely crafted document. And it was also delivered with style. As such, the Redfern Address is memorable in ways similar to Kennedy’s inaugural, Berlin, and Peace speeches: all products of exquisite collaboration and, with respect to ownership, emblems of rare leadership.ReferencesAdams, Phillip. Backstage Politics: Fifty Years of Political Memories. London: Viking, 2010.Beale, Jennifer. Personal interview. 15 Dec. 2016.Clark, Tom. “Paul Keating’s Redfern Park Speech and Its Rhetorical Legacy.” Overland 213 (Summer 2013). <https://overland.org.au/previous-issues/issue-213/feature-tom-clarke/ Accessed 16 January 2017>.Curran, James. The Power of Speech: Australian Prime Ministers Defining the National Image. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2004.Dale, Denise. “Speech Therapy – How Do You Rate the Orators.” Sun Herald, 9 Mar.2008: 48.Dallek, Robert. An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963. New York: Little Brown, 2003.Foye, Jonathan. Visions and Revisions: A Media Analysis of Reconciliation Discourse, 1992-2008. Honours Thesis. Sydney: Western Sydney University, 2009.Glover, Denis. “Redfern Speech Flatters Writer as Well as Orator.” The Australian 27 Aug. 2010. 15 Jan. 2017 <http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/opinion/redfern-speech-flatters-writer-as-well-as-orator/news-story/b1f22d73f67c29f33231ac9c8c21439b?nk=33a002f4d3de55f3508954382de2c923-1489964982>.Goldhamer, Herbert. The Adviser. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1978.Keating, Paul. “On That Historic Day in Redfern the Words I Spoke Were Mine.” Sydney Morning Herald 26 Aug. 2010. 15 Jan. 2017 <http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-opinion/on-that-historic-day-in-redfern-the-words-i-spoke-were-mine-20100825-13s5w.html>.———. “Redfern Address.” Address to mark the International Year of the World's Indigenous People. Sydney: Redfern Park, 10 Dec. 1992. Law, John. After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. New York: Routledge, 2004. McKenna, Mark. “Metaphors of Light and Darkness: The Politics of ‘Black Armband’ History.” Melbourne Journal of Politics 25.1 (1998): 67-84.Megalogenis, George. “The Book of Paul: Lessons in Leadership.” The Monthly, Nov. 2011: 28-34.Schlesinger Jr., Arthur M. A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House. Andre Deutsch, 1967.Sorensen, Ted. Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History. New York: Harper Collins, 2008.Tubridy, Ryan. JFK in Ireland. New York: Harper Collins, 2010.Watson, Don. Recollections of a Bleeding Heart: A Portrait of Paul Keating PM. Milsons Point: Knopf, 2002.———. Q&A. ABC TV, 29 Aug. 2011.Whiticker, Alan. J. Speeches That Shaped the Modern World. New York: New Holland, 2005.Von Drehle, David. JFK: His Enduring Legacy. Time Inc Specials, 2013.

IntroductionDreams feature frequently in poetry as framing devices for lyrical and narrative content. By contrast, Thom Gunn’s poem “The Annihilation of Nothing” (1958) theorises how dream, through its relationship to the states of sleeping and waking up, serves the creative process of practising poets. To this extent, Gunn is a challenging fellow traveller in the dream-poetry tradition. “The Annihilation of Nothing” is usually categorised by critics as a philosophical poem informed by Existentialist notions. This article supplements such a reading by showing how the poem’s Existentialism is related specifically to the creative process of writing poetry. Theory about the practice of writing poetry is potentially to be found as much in poetry itself as in commentary about poetry. Ultimately, Gunn’s poem sutures its philosophical concerns to the understanding of the poet’s creative process first theorised by John Keats as Negative Capability. Gunn’s poem suggests an abstract and structural approach to the use of dream to write poetry, informed by Keatsian negativity, which exploits that creatively fertile moment when sleep transforms into the waking state. Sigmund Freud’s assertion that sleep is the essential condition of dream supports the idea that, for Gunn, sleep in itself may have the power of dream for the writing of poetry. “The Annihilation of Nothing” offers practical guidance, informed by theory and philosophy, to poets keen to insert themselves into the dream-poetry tradition. Bolstering the reading of “The Annihilation of Nothing”, my article also considers an instance of Gunn’s non-fiction writing on poetry and dreams, in which he links “a series of anxiety dreams” to the writing of his poem “Jack Straw’s Castle” (1976). Dream Poetry and Thom Gunn The literature on the relationship of poetry and dreaming is massive, multi-faceted, and deeply impacted by the movement of history. A.C. Spearing’s Medieval Dream-Poetry reminds us that the literary combination of poetry and dreaming is many centuries old (Spearing passim). Since the late nineteenth century, the theories of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung have invited new ways of activating the interpretation and creation of dream poetry (Shafton passim). A more recent contribution to the field of dream-poetry studies is Night Errands: How Poets Use Dreams, which foregrounds the voices of contemporary American poets reflecting on matters of poetry and dreaming through the personal essay form (Townley passim). In his article “Dream Poetry as Dream Work”, Richard A. Russo observes that “poets use dreams in many different ways” (13). My article works from the premise that dream-poetry can be identified and discussed even when a poet does not explicitly identify as a dream poet. The Anglo-American poet Thom Gunn (1929-2004) is not usually thought of as a dream poet; still, in an interview conducted in 1977, he states that “I think everything significant that happens to me—whether it’s an event, an idea or a dream—gets into my poetry eventually” (Scobie 13; my emphasis). Nor, so far as I am aware, has Gunn’s 1958 poem “The Annihilation of Nothing” ever been interpreted as a dream poem (Gunn, “Annihilation” 4). Framing Gunn’s poetry as dream poetry is therefore an unusual move in the appreciation of his work, which by that very token seeds fresh opportunities to contribute to the ongoing scholarly and practice-based conversations about dream poetry in general. As I will show in what follows, Gunn’s method of using dreams is very different from that of most other poets. Rather than fixating on, and elaborating, the details of this or that particular dream, Gunn works at a more general level, to explore how dreams relate to the poetic creative process. For this article, I am particularly interested in exploring how the powerfully activated philosophical elements of “The Annihilation of Nothing” intersect with an engagement with the craft of poetry making as this is influenced, not only by dream itself, but by the sleeping, dreaming and waking routine of Gunn as a practising poet. Additionally, I will be arguing that—against the grain of most dream poetry—Gunn tends to work with dream as a structural principle of poetic creation. This is evident not only in “The Annihilation of Nothing” but in Gunn’s non-fiction writing about the 1976 poem “Jack Straw’s Castle” (Gunn, “Jack” 48-56). This is not, however, to privilege the non-fiction voice of the poet over the voice within their poetry, in matters of theory. As much as theory about the practice of writing poetry is to be found in commentary about poetry, it is also to be found, I suggest, in poetry itself. Ultimately, Gunn contributes as much to the tradition of the poetic strategy of Negative Capability, as first theorised by the poet John Keats (“Negative Capability”), as to the tradition of dream poetry. “The Annihilation of Nothing”, Existentialism and the Craft of Poetry Writing “The Annihilation of Nothing” is a relatively short poem, and my reading of it for this article necessarily assumes close working knowledge of its nuances and complexities (if not its paradoxes) in the reader. For these reasons, I am including the text of the poem here, in full: Nothing remained: Nothing, the wanton nameThat nightly I rehearsed till led awayTo a dark sleep, or sleep that held one dream.In this a huge contagious absence lay,More space than space, over the cloud and slime,Defined but by the encroachments of its sway.Stripped to indifference at the turns of time,Whose end I knew, I woke without desire,And welcomed zero as a paradigm.But now it breaks—images burst with fireInto the quiet sphere where I have bided,Showing the landscape holding yet entire:The power that I envisaged, that presidedUltimate in its abstract devastations,Is merely change, the atoms it dividedComplete, in ignorance, new combinations.Only an infinite finitude I seeIn those peculiar lovely variations.It is despair that nothing cannot beFlares in the mind and leaves a smoky markOf dread. Look upward. Neither firm nor free,Purposeless matter hovers in the dark. (Gunn, “Annihilation” 4) “The Annihilation of Nothing” has been categorised by literary critics as one of Gunn’s philosophical poems and it is generally interpreted using an Existentialist lens. B.J.C. Hinton, for example, states that the poem “is based on an existentialist problem and adopts its terminology” (131). Additionally, “the poem is based on the paradox that nothingness, itself often a subject of terror, is seen first as comforting and then as illusory. This fusing of philosophical inquiry and genuine passion is typical of Gunn at his best, and gives the poem great force” (Hinton 143-144). Curiously, I have not been able to locate any reading of Gunn’s poem that unpacks what is arguably the poem’s most obvious detail: that is, the narrator falls asleep, experiences “a dark sleep, or sleep that held one dream”, then wakes up. Hinton notes that the poem’s “very title is based on terms common in [Jean-Paul] Sartre’s L’Etre et le neant” (143) but he overlooks the fact that the poem’s key term, “nothing”, is part of the narrator’s method of falling asleep: “Nothing, the wanton name / That nightly I rehearsed till led away / To a dark sleep.” When the word (“wanton name”) has served its purpose and the narrator has fallen asleep, precisely “Nothing remained”; the word has been replaced by the state it describes. Such a pointed differentiation of the word and the state invites the reader to grapple with that most intriguing of concepts: nothingness as a something that is nothing. The last line of the first stanza deepens the poetic meaning of nothingness in Gunn’s hands. “To a dark sleep, or sleep that held one dream” suggests an equivalence between “sleep” and “dream”. The comma before the “or” implies that a “sleep that held one dream” is just another way of saying “a dark sleep,” while the notion of “one dream” strengthens this implication—one sleep and one dream coincide with each other in their matching singularity. Dream, Gunn seems to be suggesting, is what “darkens” sleep; all the same, sleep always already retains strong cultural associations with darkness, which suggests that the poet is actually more concerned to hollow out the concept of dream, as a marker of nothingness. Dream, in this reading, thus exists in an ambiguous overlap with the notion of sleep itself; within this overlap, furthermore, dream’s nothingness consists in its absorption into sleep. In other words, the Existentialist philosophy of the poem is activated as a dialogue between the concepts of a dream that is nothing—one reduced, as it were, to the status of mere (dream-less) sleep—and the freshly waking state of the narrator, which identifies the period when Sartrean being rushes in to replace dream-sleep nothingness. Being and nothingness are overlaid onto, and to an extent replaced by, the twin states of waking from sleep and of a dream that, far from being any dream in particular, is characterised only as “a dark sleep”. When the philosophical or Existentialist framework for the reading of “The Annihilation of Nothing” is nudged to one side, though not abandoned, and the dream and waking-from-sleep elements of the poem are given their appropriate weight in the interpretation of the poem, an affiliation with the tradition of dream poetry emerges. Certainly, Gunn’s poem exhibits features linked to Sartre’s philosophical preoccupations, but its Existentialist engagement, I suggest, is narrowed to a concern with the borderline between sleep and the waking state as the condition of a certain mode of poetic creation. In this lies the connection to the tradition of dream poetry, and the distinctiveness of Gunn’s intervention into that tradition. To this extent, “The Annihilation of Nothing” straddles philosophy and the craft of poetry writing. The discussion of dream in an abstract or philosophical sense is precisely what makes Gunn’s poem a practical resource for other poets, with their own dreams to transform into poetry. Poetic creation, for Gunn, relates to the activation of those energies present at the borderline of sleep and being awake. These energies, in turn, relate to the theory of Negative Capability. Negative Capability in “The Annihilation of Nothing” To continue to unpack Gunn’s lesson in poetry-making, I underscore how odd it is, in the first place, that Hinton links Gunn’s poem to a work of prose philosophy by Jean-Paul Sartre rather than to a more poetically cognate antecedent. A more appropriate companion text to Gunn’s poem than Sartre’s Existentialist masterpiece, I suggest, is the poetic strategy known as Negative Capability. The Glossary of Poetic Terms managed by the Poetry Foundation discusses Negative Capability in terms of “the artist’s access to truth without the pressure and framework of logic or science” and defines it, in part, as “the [poet’s] power to bury self-consciousness [and] dwell in a state of openness to all experience” (“Negative Capability”). The poet John Keats was, of course, the first to articulate the theory of Negative Capability (“Negative Capability”). What evidence is there that Negative Capability, rather than Existentialism, is a more relevant accompaniment to Gunn’s poem? Stanzas two and three describe the nothingness of a dream that is only “a dark sleep” through reference to “a huge contagious absence” and to the comment “And welcomed zero as a paradigm.” Notice what is happening here. The absence is deemed “contagious”, and a “paradigm” is usually defined as a typical example or pattern of something. What appears to be going on here is an attempt to show how creation is triggered by concepts aligned with negativity, such as absence and zero. Such concepts further align, like unconscious sleep itself, with Keats’s “[buried] self-consciousness”. In mirror image, the same pattern shows up later on in the poem. Whereas the first three stanzas of “The Annihilation of Nothing” detail the descent into sleep, dream and nothingness, the stanzas after the fourth stanza are all about the creation that occurs upon waking, at the end of dream, with the advent of what might be called (creative) somethingness. Crucially, this period of creation possesses an element that mirrors the “contagious absence” and “zero as a paradigm” gestures from earlier in the poem. Previously, nothingness was expressed as a prompt to creation (“contagious” and “a paradigm”); here, in a 180 degree switch, somethingness is only indirectly expressed by reference to its polar opposite. The key line is “It is despair that nothing cannot be.” Creation is shadowed by a sort of negative energy; it comes about only through the annihilation of nothing, or “in [self-?] ignorance”: “The power that I envisaged, that presided / Ultimate in its abstract devastations, / Is merely change, the atoms it divided / Complete, in ignorance, new combinations.” The negative with a positive charge has been replaced by the positive with a negative charge, twin movements which reassert Keats’s theory of poetic creation. Nothingness prompts the creation of somethingness while somethingness always retains its debt to nothingness. Negative Capability thus tarries between the lines of “The Annihilation of Nothing.” Creation simmers away even in the midst of nothingness and absence (in the early stages of the poem), without the support of self-consciousness. Reversing and reinforcing this, the activism of poetic creation (which is conventionally based in self-consciousness) is strangely inverted in the final sections of the poem, where the somethingness of poetic creation is figured merely as a by-product of the “despair that nothing cannot be.” In fine, Gunn’s poem transfigures Existentialism in such a way that it produces a new version of Keats’s theory of Negative Capability. And Gunn’s intervention is precisely a theoretical intervention, to the extent that it produces transferable knowledge, about the production of poetry, related to how the writing of poetry may be structured in relationship to the division—at heart Existentialist—between sleeping (configured in Gunn’s poem as a new form of dreaming) and creatively waking up. There is an interesting crossover here between Gunn’s poem and Freud’s idea from The Interpretation of Dreams that “at bottom dreams are nothing other than a particular form of thinking, made possible by the conditions of the state of sleep” (Freud 510, fn. 1; my emphasis second). As part of his contribution to a theory of the creative practice of poetry writing, Gunn draws out something not always given its due weight in Freudian theory: that is, the crucial if not essential connection between sleep and dream. It is this connection, I suggest, that Gunn sees as vital to the practice of writing poetry in the tradition of dream poetry. The moment of waking from sleep is when (dream-like) Negative Capability may be most fruitfully activated. Indeed, Gunn comes close to suggesting, in “The Annihilation of Nothing”, that whether one dreams or not is inconsequential, so long as one has—quite mysteriously—“a dark sleep.” The sleep state itself—necessarily accompanied by the waking from sleep—may possess the creative power of dream when it comes to the writing of poetry. “Jack Straw’s Castle” and Dream-Poetry Structure Further theoretical knowledge may be harvested from another moment in Gunn’s discourse, in which he responds to an interviewer’s question about the process of writing “Jack Straw’s Castle”. As suggested above, I do not see a distinction, and certainly not a hierarchy, between theory about poetry writing to be found within poetry itself and theory about poetry writing constructed within a non-fictional context, as in the interview containing this exchange: WS [W.I. Scobie]: Why are there so many references to rooms in your poetry—not only rooms, but dungeons, cellars, cells—confining spaces?…TG [Thom Gunn]: While I was writing Jack Straw’s Castle I was moving from a house I’d lived in for ten years into this place [Gunn’s house in San Francisco], and I had a series of anxiety dreams. I had moved into the wrong house. I had moved in with the wrong people. Once to my horror I found I was sharing an apartment with [Richard] Nixon. Very often I would keep discovering new rooms in the house that I’d known nothing about. All this became very much the scheme for the nightmare world of Jack Straw’s Castle. (Scobie 11; my emphasis) Gunn’s theoretical attitude to dream in this non-fiction commentary bears similarities, I suggest, to his theorisation of dream in “The Annihilation of Nothing”. Rather than stressing the content of his “anxiety dreams” (for example, individual houses or Richard Nixon), Gunn characteristically emphasises the structural aspect of dream. His choice of words is significant: Gunn’s dreams become a “scheme” for the production of poetry. Granted, the content of “Jack Straw’s Castle” does include many references to rooms and the like, but Gunn segues, in this interview extract, from content to form. Notably, in this context, “Jack Straw’s Castle” is divided into eleven sections, as if the poet (in writing the poem) and the reader (in reading it) were moving from one section to the next the way one moves from one room to the next. (It is perhaps no coincidence that Gunn’s best-known poem is entitled “On the Move”.) The Existentialist and person-focused structural approach to the writing of poetry of “The Annihilation of Nothing” is replaced here by a more formal type of structure. Conclusion This article has attempted to locate Thom Gunn within the tradition of dream poetry even as he challenges the mainstream of that tradition. His challenge lies in how he constructs dream as a structural prompt to the writing of poetry, in a way that departs from the more familiar dream-poetry approach of elaborating the lyrical or narrative content of this or that particular dream. Gunn is both a practitioner of dream poetry and also, in the footsteps of John Keats and others, a theorist of the writing of poetry. Theory about the practice of writing poetry is potentially to be found as much in poetry itself as in commentary about poetry. The main focus of the article has been Gunn’s poem “The Annihilation of Nothing”. My intent has not been to show that the Existentialist reading of this poem is wrong, so much as to show that it must be supplemented by attention to the poem’s concern with dreaming, sleeping and waking and, by extension, to the specific Existentialism of the practising writer of poetry. Read this way, the poem presents itself as a text in the tradition of Negative Capability. References Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. New York: Basic Books, 2010. Gunn, Thom. “Jack Straw’s Castle.” Jack Straw’s Castle. London: Faber and Faber, 1976. 48-56. ———. “On the Move.” Poetry Foundation, 1957. 3 Feb. 2020 <https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57037/on-the-move>. ———. “The Annihilation of Nothing.” Poetry 93.1 (Oct. 1958): 4. 3 Feb. 2020 <https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=27820>. Hinton, B.J.C. The Poetry of Thom Gunn. M.A. thesis. Faculty of Arts, Birmingham University, 1975. 3 Feb. 2020 <https://etheses.bham.ac.uk/id/eprint/5366/1/Hinton1975MA.pdf>.“Negative Capability.” Glossary of Poetic Terms. Poetry Foundation, 2020. 3 Feb. 2020 <https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/negative-capability>. Russo, Richard A. “Dream Poetry as Dream Work.” Dreaming 13.1 (Mar. 2003): 13-27. 3 Feb. 2020 <https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1022134200865>. Scobie, W.I. “Gunn in America.” London Magazine (Dec. 1977): 5-15. Shafton, Anthony. Dream Reader: Contemporary Approaches to the Understanding of Dreams. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. Spearing, A.C. Medieval Dream-Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Townley, Roderick. Night Errands: How Poets Use Dreams. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999.

Introduction: Shock WavesAs I carefully unfold the delicate piece of crisp white paper, three rogue words wildly jump up off the page before sinking deeply into my skin: “Cold and condescending.” A charge of anger surges up my spine, as these words begin to now expand and affectively resonate: “I found the instructor to be cold and condescending.” Somehow, these words impact me both emotionally and physiologically (Brennan 3): my heart beats faster, my body temperature rises, my stomach aches. Yet, despite how awful I feel, I keep on reading, as if compelled by some inexplicable force. It is not long before I devour the entire evaluation—or perhaps it devours me?—reading every last jarring word over and over and over again. And pretty soon, before I can even think about it, I begin to come undone ...How is it possible that an ordinary, everyday object can pull at us, unravel us even? And, how do such objects linger, register intensities, and contribute to our harm or good? In this paper, we draw upon our collective teaching experiences at college and high school level in order to explore how teacher evaluations actively work/ed to orient our bodies in molar and molecular ways (Deleuze and Guattari 3), thereby diminishing or enhancing our capacity to act. We argue that these textual objects are anything but dead and lifeless, and are vitally invested with “thing-power,” which is the “ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle” (Bennett 6).Rather than producing a linear critique that refuses “affective associations” (Felski para. 6) and the “bodily entanglements of language” (MacLure, Qualitative 1000), we offer up a mobile conversation that pulls readers into an assemblage of (shape)shifting moments they can connect with (Rajchman 4) and question. While we attend to our own affective experiences with teacher evaluations, we wish to disrupt the idea that the self is both autonomous and affectively contained (Brennan 2). Instead, we imagine a self that extends into other bodies, spaces, and things, and highlight how teacher evaluations, as a particular thing, curiously animate (Chen 30) and affect our social worlds—altering our life course for a minute, a day, or perhaps, indefinitely (Stewart 12).* * *“The autobiographical is not the personal. […] Publics presume intimacy” (Berlant, The Female vii). Following Berlant, we propose that our individual narratives are always tangled up in other social bodies and are, therefore, not quite our own. Although we do use the word “I” to recount our specific experiences of teacher evaluations, we by no means wish to suggest that we are self-contained subjects confessing some singular life history or detached truth. Rather, together we examine the tensions, commonalities, possibilities, and threats that encounters with teacher evaluations produce within and around collective bodies (Stewart). We consider the ways in which these material objects seep deeply into our skin, re/animate moving forces (e.g. neoliberalism, patriarchy), and even trigger us emotionally by transporting us back to different times and places (S. Jones 525). And, we write to experiment (Deleuze and Guattari 1; Stewart 1) with the kind of “unpredictable intimacy” that Berlant (Intimacy 281; Structures 191) speaks of. We resist (as best we can) telos-driven tales that do not account for messiness, disorientation, surprise, or wonder (MacLure, Classification 180), as we invite readers to move right along beside (Sedgwick 8) us in this journey to embrace the complexities and implications (Nelson 111; Talburt 93) of teacher evaluations as corporeal matters. The “self” is no match for such affective entanglements (Stewart 58).Getting Un/Stuck “Cold and condescending.” I cannot help but get caught up in these words—no matter how hard I try. A million thoughts begin to bubble up: Am I a good teacher? A bad person? Uncaring? Arrogant? And, just like that, the ordinary turns on me (Stewart 106), triggering intense sensations that refuse to stay buried. What began as my reaction to a teacher evaluation soon becomes something else, somewhere else. Childhood wounds unexpectedly well up—leaking into the present, spreading uncontrollably, causing my body to get stuck in long ago and far away.In a virtual flash (Deleuze and Guattari 94), I am somehow in my grandmother’s kitchen once more, which even now smells of avgolemono soup, warm bread rising, home. Something sparks, as distant memories come flooding back to change my course and set me straight (or so I think). When I was a little girl and could not let something go, my yiayia (grandmother) Vasiliki would tell me, quite simply, to get “unstuck” (ξεκολλά). The Greeks, it seems, know something about the stickiness of affective attachments. Even though it has been over twenty years since my grandmother’s passing, her words, still alive, affectively ring in my ear. Out of some kind of charged habit (Stewart 16), her words now escape my mouth: “ξεκολλά,” I command, “ξεκολλά!” I repeat this phrase so many times that it becomes a mantra, but its magic has sadly lost all effect. No matter what I say or what I do, my body, stuck in repetition, “closes in on itself, unable to transmit its intensities differently” (Grosz 171). In an act of desperation (or perhaps survival), I rip the evaluation to shreds and throw the tattered remains down the trash chute. Yet, my actions prove futile. The evaluation lives on in a kind of afterlife, with its haunting ability to affect where my thoughts will go and what my body can do. And so, my agency—my ability to act, think, become (Deleuze and Guattari 361)—is inextricably twisted up in this evaluation, with its affective capacity to connect many “bodies” at once (both material and semiotic, human and non-human, living and dead).A View from Nowhere?At both college and school-level, formal teacher evaluations promise anonymity. Why is it, though, that students get to be voices without bodies: a voice that does not emerge from a complex, contradictory, and messy body, but rather “from above, from nowhere” (Haraway 589)? Once disembodied, students become god-like (Haraway 589), able to “objectively” dissect, judge, and even criticise teachers, while they themselves receive “panoptic immunity” (MacLure, Classification 168).This immunity has its consequences. Within formal and informal evaluations, students write of and about bodies in ways that often feel violating. Teachers’ bodies become spectacle, and anything goes:“Professor is kinda hot—not bad to look at!”“She dresses like a bag lady. [...] Her hair and clothing need an update.”“There's absolutely nothing redeeming about her as a person [...] but she has nice shoes.”(PrawfsBlog)Amid these affective violations, voices without bodies re/assemble into “voices without organs” (Mazzei 732)—a voice that emanates from an assemblage of bodies, not a singular subject. In this process, patriarchal discourses, as bodies of thought, dangerously spring up and swirl about. The voyeuristic gaze of patriarchy (see de Beauvoir; Mulvey) becomes habitual, shaping our stories, encounters, and sense of self.Female teachers, in particular, cannot deny its pull. The potential to create and/or transmit knowledge turns us into “risky subjects” in need of constant surveillance (Falter 29). Teacher evaluations do their part. As a metaphoric panopticon (see Foucault), they transform female teachers into passive spectacles—objects of the gaze—and students into active spectators who have “all the power to determine our teaching success” (Falter 30). The effects linger, do real damage (Stewart), and cause our pedagogical performances to fail every now and then. After all, a “good” female teacher is also a “good female subject” who is called upon to impart knowledge in ways that do not betray her otherwise feminine or motherly “nature” (Falter 28). This pressure to be both knowledgeable and nurturing, while displaying a “visible fragility [...] a kind of conventional feminine vulnerability” (McRobbie 79), pervades the social and is intense. Although it is not easy to navigate, the fact that unrecognisable bodies are subject to punishment (Butler, Performative 528) helps keep power dynamics firmly in place. These forces permeate my body, as well, making me “cold” and “unfair” in one evaluation and “kind” and “sweet” in another—but rarely smart or intelligent. Like clockwork, this bodily visibility and regulation brings with it never-ending self-critique and self-discipline (Harris 9). Absorbing these swarming intensities, I begin to question my capacity to effectively teach and form relationships with my students. Days later, weeks later, years later, I continue to wonder: if even one student leaves my class feeling “bad,” do I have any business being a teacher? Ugh, the docile, good girl (Harris 19) rears her ugly (or is it pretty?) head once again. TranscorporealityEven though the summer sun invites me in, I spend the whole day at home, in bed, unable to move. At one point, a friend arrives, forcing me to get up and get out. We grab a bite to eat, and it is not long before I confess my deepest fear: that my students are right about me, that these evaluations somehow mark me as a horrible teacher and person. She seems surprised that I would let a few comments defeat me and asks me what this is really all about. I shrug my shoulders, unwilling to go there.Later that night, I find myself re-reading my spring evaluations online. The positive ones electrify the screen, filling me with joy, as the constructive ones get me brainstorming about ways I might do things differently. And while I treasure these comments, I do not focus too much on them. Instead, I spend most of the evening replaying a series of negative tapes over and over in my head. Somewhat defeated, I slip slowly back into my bed and find that it surprisingly offers me a kind of comfort that my friend does not. I wonder, “What body am I now in the arms of” (Chen 202)? The bed and I become “interporous” (Chen 203), intimate even. There is much solace in the darkness of those lively, billowy blue covers: a peculiar solace made possible by these evaluations—a thing which compels me to find comfort somewhere, anywhere, beyond the human body.The GhostAs a high school teacher, I was accustomed to being reviewed. Some reviews were posted onto the website ratemyteacher.com, a platform of anonymously submitted reviews of kindergarten through 12th-grade teachers on easiness, helpfulness, clarity, knowledge, textbook use, and exam difficulty. Others were less official; irate commentary posted on social media platforms or baldly concise characterisations of our teaching styles that circulated among students and bounded back to us as hearsay and whispered asides. In these reviews, our teacher-selves were constructed: One became the easy teacher, the mean teacher, the fun teacher, or the hard-but-good teacher. The teacher who could not control her class; the teacher who controlled her class excessively.Sometimes, we googled ourselves because it was tempting to do so (and near-impossible not to). One day, I searched various forms of my name followed by the name of the school. One of my students, a girl with hot pink streaks in her hair and pointy studs shooting out of her belt and necklaces, had written a complaint on Facebook about a submission of a final writing portfolio. The student wrote on the publicly visible wall of another student in my class, noting how much she still had left to do on the assignment. Dotting the observation with expletives, she bemoaned the portfolio as requiring too much work. Then, she observed that I had an oily complexion and wrote that I was a “dyke.” After I read the comment, I closed my laptop and an icy wave passed through me. That night, I went to dinner with friends. I ruminated aloud over the comments: How could this student—with whom I had thought I had a good relationship—write about me in such a derisive manner? And what, in particular, about my appearance conveyed that I was lesbian? My friends laughed; they found the student’s comments funny and indicative of the blunt astuteness of teenagers. As I thought about the comments, I realised the pain lay in the comments’ specificity. They demonstrated the ability of the student to perceive and observe a bodily attribute about which I was particularly insecure. It made me wonder about the countless other eyes and glances directed at me each day, taking in, noticing, and dissecting my bodily self (McRobbie 63).The next morning, before school, I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror and dabbed toner on my skin. Today, I thought, today will be a day in which both my skin texture and my lesson plans will be in good order. After this day, I could no longer bring myself to look this student directly in the eye. I was officious in our interactions. I read her poetry and essays with guarded ambivalence. I decided that I would no longer google myself. I would no longer click on links that were pointedly reviews of me as a teacher.The reviewed-self is a ghost-self. It is a shadow, an underbelly. The comments—perhaps posted in a moment of anger or frustration—linger. Years later, though I have left full-time classroom teaching, I still think about them. I have not recovered from the comments though I should, apparently, have already recuperated from their sharp effects. I wonder if the reviews will ceaselessly follow me, if they will shape the impressions of those who google me, if my reviewed-self will become the first and most formidable impression of those who might come to know me, if my reviewed-self will be the lasting and most formidable way I see myself.Trigger Happy In 2014, a teacher at a California public high school posts a comment on Twitter about wishing to pour coffee on her students. Some of her students this year, she writes, make her “trigger finger itchy” (see Oakley). She already “wants to stab” them a mere two weeks into the school year. “Is that bad?” she asks. One of her colleagues screen-captures her tweets and sends them to the school principal and to a local newspaper. They go viral, resulting in widespread condemnation on the Internet. She is named the “worst teacher ever” by one online media outlet (Parker). The media swarm the school. The reporters interview parents in minivans who are picking up their children from school. One parent, from behind the steering wheel, expresses her disapproval of the teacher. She says, “As a teacher, I think she should be held to a higher accountability than other people” (Louie). In the comments section of an article, a commenter declares that the “mutant should be fired” (Oakley). Others are more forgiving. They cite their boyfriends and sisters who are teachers and who also air grievances, though somewhat less violently and in the privacy of their homes (A. Jones). All teachers have these thoughts, some of the commenters argue, they just are not stupid enough to tweet them.In her own defence, the teacher tells a local paper that she “never expected anyone would take me seriously” (Oakley). As a teacher, she is often “forced to cultivate a ‘third-person consciousness,’ to be an ‘objectified subject’” (Chen 33) on display, so can we really blame her? If she had thought people would take her seriously, “you'd better believe I would have been much more careful with what I've said” (Oakley). The students are the least offended party because, as their teacher had hoped, they do not take her tweets seriously. In fact, they are “laughing it off,” according to a local news channel (Newark Teacher). In a news interview, one female student says she finds the teacher’s tweets humorous. They are fond of this teacher and believe she cares about her students. Seemingly, they do not mind that their teacher—jokingly, of course—harbours homicidal thoughts about them or that she wishes to splash hot coffee in their faces.There is a certain wisdom in the teacher’s observational, if foolhardy, tweeting. In a tweet tagged #secretlyhateyou, the teacher explains that while students may have their own negative feelings towards their teachers, teachers also have such feelings for their students. But, she tweets, “We are just not allowed to show it” (Oakley). At parties and social gatherings, we perform the cheerful educator by leaving our bodies at the door and giving into “the politics of emotion, the unwritten rules that feelings are to be ‘privatised’ and ‘pathologised’ rather than aired” (Thiel 39). At times, we are allowed a certain level of dissatisfaction, an eye roll or shrug of the shoulders, a whimsical, breathy sigh: “Oh you know! Kids today! Instagram! Sexting!” But we cannot express dislike for our own students.One evening, I was on the train with a friend who does not work as a teacher. We observed a pack of teenagers, screaming and grabbing at each other’s cell phones. The friend said, “Aren’t they so fascinating, teenagers?” Grumpily, I disagreed. On that day, no, I was not fascinated by teenagers. My friend responded, shocked, “But don’t you work as a teacher…?” It is an unspoken requirement of the job. We maintain relentless expressions of joy, an earnest wonderment towards those whom we teach. And we are, too, appalled by those who do not exhibit a constant stream of cheerfulness. The teachers’ lunchroom is the repository for “bad” feelings about students, a site of negative feelings that can somehow stick (Ahmed, Happy 29) to those who choose to eat their lunch within this space. Only the most jaded battle-axes would opt to eat in the lunchroom. Good teachers—happy and caring ones—would never choose to eat lunch in this room. Instead, they eat lunch in their classrooms, alone, prepare dutifully for the afternoon’s classes, and try to contain all of their murderous inclinations. But (as the media love to remind us), whether intended or not, our corporeal bodies with all their “unwanted affects” (Brennan 3, 11) have a funny way of “surfacing” (Ahmed, Communities 14).Conclusion: Surging BodiesAffects surge within everyday conversations of teacher evaluations. In fact, it is almost impossible to talk about evaluations without sparking some sort of heated response. Recent New York Times articles echo the more popular sentiments: from the idea that evaluations are gendered and raced (Pratt), to the prevailing notion that students are informed consumers entitled to “the best return out of their educational investments” (Stankiewicz). Evidently, education is big business. So, we take our cues from neoliberal ideologies, as we struggle to make sense of all the fissures and leaks. Teachers’ bodies now become commodified objects within a market model that promises customer satisfaction—and the customer is always right.“Develop a thicker skin,” they say, as if a thicker skin could contain my affects or prevent other affects from seeping in; “my body is and is not mine” (Butler, Precarious 26). Leaky bodies, with their permeable borders (Renold and Mellor 33), affectively flow into all kinds of “things.” Likewise, teacher evaluations, as objects, extend into human bodies, sending eruptive charges that both register within the body and transmit outward into the environment. These charges emerge as upset, judgment, wonder, sadness, confusion, annoyance, pleasure, and everything in between. They embody an intensity that animates our social worlds, working to enhance energies and/or diminish them. Affects, then, do not just come from, and stay within, bodies (Brennan 10). A body, as an assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari 4), is neither self-contained nor disconnected from other bodies, spaces, and things.As a collection of sticky, “material, physiological things” (Brennan 6), teacher evaluations are very much alive: vibrantly shifting and transforming teachers’ affective capacities and life trajectories. Attending to them as such offers a way in which to push back against our own bodily erasure or “the screaming absence in [American] education of any attention to the inner life of teachers” (Taubman 3). While affect itself has become a recent hot-topic across American university campuses (e.g. see “trigger warnings” debates, Halberstam), conversations tend to exclude teachers’ bodies. So, for example, we can talk of creating “safe [classroom] spaces” in order to safeguard students’ feelings. We can even warn learners if material might offend, as well as watch what we say and do in an effort to protect students from any potential trauma. But we cannot, it would seem, matter, too. Instead, we must (if good and caring) be on affective autopilot, where we can only have “good” thoughts about students. We are not really allowed to feel what we feel, express raw emotion, have a body—unless, of course, that body transmits feel-good intensities.And, feeling bad about teacher evaluations ... well, for the most part, that needs to remain a dirty little secret, because, how can you possibly let yourself get so hot and bothered over a thing—a mere object? Yet, teacher evaluations can and do impact our lives, often in ways that are harmful: by inflicting pain, triggering trauma, encouraging sexism and objectification. But maybe, just maybe, they even offer up some good. After all, if teacher evaluations teach us anything, it is this: you are not simply a body, but rather, an “array of bodies” (Bennett 112, emphasis added)—and your body, my body, our bodies “must be heard” (Cixous 880).ReferencesAhmed, Sara. “Happy Objects.” The Affect Theory Reader. Eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth. 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