Journal articles on the topic 'Neo-classical realism'

Realism, also known as political realism, is one of the most dominant theories of international relations. The school of thought in realism was established in the post-World War II era; however, it is widely associated with the ancient Greek studies, particularly, in the works of Thucydides who allows a more sophisticated analysis of the conception of power and its place in the anarchic international system. Unlike idealism and liberalism, which underline the idea of cooperation in international relations, realism stresses a competitive and confrontational side of human nature and argues that in global politics there is no space for morality. Thus, states show constant readiness to obtain power and achieve their political ends. The article aims at studying the basic approach, the theory of realism is based on. The study has been prepared as a result of examining articles and books written by dominant realist scholars who have influential opinions in the field.

<p>Neo-classical realism is result of foreign policy studies through studying both structure of international system and domestic factors and their complex interactions with each other. The main goal of neoclassical realism is to find out how distribution of power in international system, motivations and subjective structures of states toward international system shape their foreign policy. Neo-classical realists reject the idea of neo-realism in which it is argued that systemic pressures will immediately affect behaviours of units. They believe that the extend of systemic effects on states behaviour depends on relative power and also internal factors of states in anarchical system. This article is to study how neo-classical realism applies assumptions such as anarchy, effects of structure-agent, role of power in creating behaviours, national interests, survival and security in order to analyse international politics.</p>

Neorealism and some versions of realism seek to furnish nomothetic theories of the international system at the same time that they also strive to prescribe policy for political leaders. Insofar as practical advice is insufficiently articulated by means of either nomothesis or the structural theoretical framework that (neo-)realist paradigms supply, these two aspirations seem contradictory. This essay is an examination of what contemporary realism and, especially, neorealism require to make practical wisdom available for practitioners. It argues that narrative, which is exemplified in the so-called classical realism of Thucydides, remains a crucial component of practical realism and neorealism.

The classical realist world view places moral standards subservient to the power concerns of international actors. Realists did not make this valuation without some hesitation, as the issue of morality was addressed with seriousness and concern. The neo-realist thinking of today embraces with less hesitation the ultimate conclusion of the realist premises: statesmen never act according to moral precepts, thus such concerns need not be addressed by a political theory. Kegly argues the neo-idealist position that opposes this empirical observation: states consistently act according to values that are based on more than power concerns. Kegley's primary intent is to show that neo-realism ignores factors that influence international actors, and that a theory is needed that expands the notion of self-interest to include the moral sphere.

The subject of this research is one of the trends in the American legal thought &ndash; legal realism in the context of clarification of its specificity, key theoretical-methodological perspectives formed in the classical period, represented by the founders of this direction O. W. Holmes, R. Pound and K. Llewellyn. Studying the heritage of the classical American realists is important for the purpose of elucidation of their views, since many aspects remain unclear or simplified, and interpreted in form of patterns and schemes; as well as due to the fact that in the modern American legal science and well beyond it, more popularity multiple variations of &ldquo;clarification&rdquo; of realism in form of &ldquo;neo-&ldquo; versions, and realism itself is declared the symbol of modern age. Main attention is given to the question of overcoming simplifications with regards to legal views of the classical American realists. The scientific novelty of this work consists in elucidation of the perceptions of the nature and specificity of legal views of the representatives of classical American legal realism. This is primarily associated with the fact that orientation towards demythologization of conceptualism in the works of legal realists of the period of establishment of this trend is erroneously identified with the rejection of moral arguments in substantiation of law, which to a large extent was justified by the desire of some researchers to substantiate the meaning of radical pragmatism as a philosophical foundation of the modernized legal theory. Secondly, unjustified broadening of the concept of legal realism and its identification with naturalization of conceptual apparatus of law is one of the factors that led to multiple simplifications and distortions of the methodological importance of the fundamental principles of legal realism.

The school of thought known as Realism (with a large R) has been a central focus of debate in international theory. Nevertheless, its content and epistemological status (and therefore the criteria for its evaluation) remain elusive. In part this is due to the variety of contexts and debates within which Realism has been discussed in the field. In the 1930s and 1940s the debate was framed around a Realist-Idealist axis. In the 1970s Realism was contested by liberal analyses of the causes and consequences of an allegedly growing global interdependence. In the 1980s there emerged a three-cornered debate between competing Kuhnian ‘paradigms’, among which Realism dominated. Given that the meaning of Realism has been partly constructed by historically variable theoretical and political issues, its identity has also varied over time. If, however, one chooses to think about Realism outside of these various contexts within which it has been both defined and evaluated, it remains unclear how such diverse thinkers as Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Carr, Morgenthau and Kenneth Waltz can coherently be considered as part of a single tradition of thought. Sensitivity to their differences may be a virtue for the historian of ideas, but it runs the risk of undermining the point of the exercise! Despite these problems, which are only partially corrected by distinguishing between types of Realism (notably classical and ‘neo’ or ‘structural’ varieties), most scholars would agree with Alan James that Realism is a school whose members harbour shared assumptions about the primacy of states as international actors, the separation of domestic and international politics, and who describe the latter in terms of anarchy and a concomitant ubiquitous struggle for power and security.

Since the proclamation on the 1st October 1949, the People's Republic of China has gained an important role in international relations after World War II. The success of communism conquered China, has changed the dynamics of competition between the United States and the Soviet Union that lead the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc. The situation has forced the newly independent states in this era, like Indonesia and Malaysia, to determine their position. In addition to facing the same international politics pressures, the two countries also have relations in the domestic issues related to China, namely the existence of the local Communist Party and ethnic of "Chinese overseas". The external and domestic factors that ultimately affect the choice of the countries' foreign policy towards China. This article attempts to identify and explore the factors that influence the similarities and differences in Indonesia and Malaysia foreign policy towards China using the approach threat perception, leader perception and domestic legitimacy within the framework of neo-classical realism. This article is expected to provide scientific contributions to understanding the comparison of Indonesia and Malaysia foreign policy towards China. Keywords: Indonesia and Malaysia foreign policy, the existence of China, Cold War era, threatperception, leader perception, domestic legitimacy, neo-classical realism

George Edward Moore is the brightest philosopher of British neo-realism. During the first half of XX century he remained the undisputed leader of this philosophical movement, which organically and fruitfully combinedele-ments of classical British empiricism with new original tools for the conceptual analysis of ordinary language expressions. By the example of innovative ideas in moral philosophy, outlined by G.E. Moore in Principia Ethica, there is analyzed the intellectual context of the formation of philosophical metaethics in the XX century.

New Institutional Economics (NIE) has been celebrated as a path-breaking approach to the understanding of capitalism. This article advances a conceptual critique of NIE approaches to economic history. The author suggests that NIE cannot solve the underlying tension, that its economics remains ahistorical, and that when history, social relations and realism are invoked, the economics disappears, being replaced by various cultural and state-centred explanations. Therefore NIE is not so much a research programme in progress, but rather an indication of the degeneration of the tools of neo-classical economics.

This essay situates the political thought of the French Renaissance prose writer Jean Bodin within the dual tradition of political theory and epideictic rhetoric. Bodin's pragmatic reappraisal of superstition, as a bulwark against atheism and anarchy, represents a sort of convergence of paradoxical encomium and political realism in the service of religious pluralism and pacification of civil war. When juxtaposed with his more famous predecessor Niccolò Machiavelli and more renowned contemporary Michel de Montaigne, Bodin's treatment of superstition, both in his vernacular masterpiece Les six livres de la République and in his neo-Latin works, emerges as a timely intervention in confessional strife and a classical adaptation of epideictic wisdom.

Abstract Tasan Chŏng Yagyong’s (1762–1836) philosophy is often noted for its departure from the mainstream Neo-Confucian thought of his time, particularly for its conception of the human mind as being distinguished from the cosmos. This aspect of Tasan’s philosophy implies a new paradigm of human subjectivity, which would have ramifications for his creative work. Thus, the question: How does this new subjectivity manifest itself in Tasan’s poetry? This paper analyses the characteristics of Tasan’s social poems that reflect his distinctive paradigm as follows: ethnic self-consciousness, heightened realism, oppositional images, anthropocentric themes, and a poetics of subject-object independence. Tasan’s distinctive subjectivity differs from the mainstream poetic trends of his time, but its moral engagement with the object of social malaise nonetheless remains faithful to the ethical goals of classical Confucianism.

<p>A leitura de <strong>O príncipe com orelhas de burro </strong>de José Régio visa, principalmente, destacar duas questões: os compromissos estéticos de Presença c o recurso da alegoria, no sentido de Walter Benjamin. A apropriação de alguns procedimentos narrativos, da lógica mítica e das aventuras cavaleirescas do ciclo bretão inscrevem-se no projeto estético de Presença, que tem como meta incorporar, no presente, "tudo o que é vivo do passado para que se torne clássico no futuro". O recurso da alegoria, apontando para uma relação entre texto e contexto, totalmente diferente da concebida pelo neo-realismo, tece uma estória que se passa em um lugar fictício, onde se repetem os acontecimentos e as versões que cercaram o nascimento do rei D. Sebastião e que contribuíram para a formação do messianismo sebástico. <em> </em></p> <p><em> </em></p> <p>The reading of <strong>O príncipe com orelhas de burro, </strong>by José Régio, reaches two main points: the aesthetical commitment of "Presença" and the usage of alegory as resource, as it was defined by Walter Benjamin. The appropriation of some narrative procedures, the usage of mythical logic and cavalieresque adventures from the Breton cycles. These element automatically undertake the aesthetical arguments used by "Presença" that had itself the objective of incorporating, in present," ali alive remainings from past, in order that they become classical in future". The alegory establishes a link between text and context in a different way from the one conceived by neo-realism. It tells a story that takes place in a fictional site, in which facts and versions evoke the birth of the King Dom Sebastião, reinforcing the formation of messianic sebastianism.</p>

Harrison Birtwistle's musico-dramatic works all show a preoccupation with intricate formal design. Thus they fall firmly in the Modernist tradition, inherited on the one hand from the Second Viennese School (consider Webern's Piano Variations Op. 27 with its mirrors upon mirrors) and on the other from Stravinsky's later ballets (Birtwistle has acknowledged Agon as a major debt). But in works such as Punch and Judy, Yan Tan Tethera and The Mask of Orpheus, the self-conscious elevation of formal structure (sometimes to its extreme, ritual) distances us, even more than in neo-Classical Stravinsky, from any tendency to realism in the drama. In The Mask of Orpheus, Birtwistle's priorities are clear: he has said repeatedly that this opera is not about Orpheus; it is about writing a particular kind of work with a particular set of problems to solve. He could have just as easily chosen Faust for his libretto (and almost did). With Gawain, however, he seems to be moving in a new direction. Wagner's spirit (particularly as expressed in Parsifal) has entered the work; a new emphasis on drama in its naturalistic sense, and a new relationship between linear, narrative flow and closed forms has transported Gawain to new territory.

The influence of internal political processes in the USA and Germany on the evolution of US-German relations is analyzed in the article. The crisis of the mono-polar system of international relations was synchronized with changes in the global order. It affected relations between the US and Germany. The scientific literature has been dominated by the view that President Trump’s conservative-moderate foreign policy strategy is contrary to the traditions of liberal-democratic multilateral diplomacy. D. Trump’s views on the international positioning of the United States can be considered as a variant of foreign policy realism, in contrast to classical republican neo-conservatism or democratic liberal interventionism. The German foreign policy course in the time of the Bundes Chancellor A. Merkel is a manifestation of liberal-democratic globalism. Under President Obama and Chancellor A. Merkel, German-American relations remained at a high allied level. President Trump abolishes talks on Transatlantic Free Trade Area. German elites see the populist and nationalist policies of D. Trump as a challenge to European integration. They consider US European policy an attempt to split the European Union. In the domestic political dimension, German liberals consider the Alternative to Germany party as Trump’s ideological counterparts. The American liberal political elite accused A. Merkel of failing to prevent the spread of anti-American sentiment in Germany. Political sentiment in the US and Germany after the pandemic is unpredictable. A noticeable trend was the aggravation of the crisis of liberal globalization. This outlines the tendency for further political polarization of American and German societies.

This concise and important book deals with the dimensional change in internationalconflicts and security pertaining to the power of ideas: Do ideas and/or political ideologies threaten the security of regimes and states in ways thatdiffer from those conventionally attributed to the mere balance of militarypower? By studying the role of religious or transnational ideology in the MiddleEast in particular, the study aims to advance an understanding of “how,why, and when ideology affects threat perception and state policy” (p. vii) viatwo aspects, one related to ideational threat perception and the other toideational balancing. Together they provide an analytical framework for understandingstrategic interaction as an “ideational security dilemma” (p. vii)with a specific focus on how Egypt and Saudi Arabia have responded to threatperceptions emanating both from the rise and the activities of Iran and Sudan.These four dyads attempt to examine changes in threat perceptions before andafter Islamists came to power in the latter two countries (p. 4). The idea behind this dyadic approach is to show how threat perceptionsto national security are not altered due to increased hard power capabilities,but rather due to soft power projections. Rubin makes the interesting pointthat Egypt and Saudi Arabia felt more threatened by a militarily weak Sudanas well as a militarily degraded post-revolutionary Iran far more than theydid during the time of the militarily powerful Shah (pp. 2-3). Much of thishas to do with the point that it is not mere ideology or ideas that pose a threatto national security, but rather that they become so in their “projected” form(p. 4).The following six chapters elaborate on this simple and straightforward,yet highly significant and relevant, proposition. In the introductory chapter,Rubin develops his framework of analysis (the “ideational securitydilemma”) and makes it clear that one of the study’s main purposes is “totake ideology seriously.” This is done within the realist framework that acceptsthe centrality of the state, as well as that of neo-classical realism (p.124) which focuses on the foreign policy emanating from domestic culturaland perceptual variables (p. 18). The study refocuses attention on ideationalprojections that resonate with a foreign domestic audience and that may consequentlybring about a transnational response, thereby exacerbating internalsocietal unrest ...

Purpose &ndash; This paper aims to study the impact of the domestic environment&rsquo;s components in changing foreign policy. Therefore, the paper focuses on analyzing Russia&rsquo;s strategies, in the International arena, that has been structured by the domestic factors (leadership, military, security, economics, and identity). Design/methodology/approach &ndash; The paper follows three theories of studying the impact of domestic components into foreign policy in international relations; First it focuses on Foreign Policy Analysis as a traditional analysis in international relations; depending on &ldquo;Determinants&rdquo; influencing the foreign policy and the &ldquo;Instruments/Tools&rdquo; used to achieve the goals of foreign policy. Second, Neo-Classical Realism Theory, as it tried to explain the importance of internal factors in the foreign policy. Third, Constructivism Theory in International Relations as it concerns Non-state actors and refused the traditional viewing of main concepts in international relations. Findings &ndash; The domestic environment is the background context on which foreign policy is drawn. In general, the domestic environment is within the framework of society; according to it the decision-makers make decisions and include domestic policies (public opinion, geographical location, nature of the political system, main values of society, parties, lobbies&hellip;etc.); national expertise can be added in dealing with international political issues. Originality/Value &ndash; This paper proves that there are new forms for foreign policy variables related to the domestic environment and reflects the Economic capabilities, Military Power, Identity, and Leadership into the state&#39;s foreign policy.

In order to consider this topic, it was first necessary to discuss certain problems of terminology and periodisation relating to musical modernism in general. It is already familiar the extent to which the terms "new music", "modernist", "contemporary" and "avant-garde" music have been used interchangeably, as synonyms. For this reason, it was first important to outline the period of musical modernism as almost generally accepted, which is regarded as an epoch comprising three different periods: (I) period of early modernism (1890?1918), announced by a break with later romanticism and a turn towards French Impressionism, Austro-German Expressionism and Russian "folkloric Expressionism"; (II) period of "classical modernism"(1919?1945) that witnessed a diffusion of neo-classicism and serialism; (III) period of "high modernism" (1946?1972) characterized by highly experimental compositional techniques such as integral serialism and aleatoricism. In relation to this, avant-garde movements are seen as radically innovative and subversive tendencies within this modernist epoch, and while certain postmodernist ideas can be recognized as early as the 1950s, postmodernism as a movement hadn?t gained its full potency until the 1970s. Since then, it has assumed different forms of existence as well as having assimilated a continued form of ?modernist project?. The second part of the article proposes a periodisation of Serbian musical modernism, which is divided into four stages. The first stage (1908?1945) was a period where elements of Impressionism and German expressionism were creatively introduced into the works of several leading composers (Petar Konjovic, Stevan Hristic, Miloje Milojevic, Josip Slavenski, Marko Tajcevic). The second stage (1929?1945) was marked by a group of composers who studied in Prague and assimilated certain progressive compositional techniques such as free tonality, atonality dodecaphony, microtonality and athematicism (Mihovil Logar, Predrag Milosevic, Dragutin Colic, Ljubica Maric, Vojislav Vuckovic, Milan Ristic). The third stage (1951?1970) followed immediately after the era of Socialist Realism, which involved the rediscovery of the pre- World War II Western modernism and prepared the ground for contemporary avant-garde developments almost non-existent before 1961 (Milan Ristic, Dusan Radic, Dejan Despic Vladan Radovanovic, Enriko Josif, Stanojlo Rajicic, Vasilije Mokranjac Aleksandar Obradovic, Ljubica Maric, Rajko Maksimovic). The fourth stage (1956?1980) was the period during which the post-World War II avant-garde developments found their home amongst Serbian composers, some of them conceived almost simultaneously with but independent of the current progressive development in the rest of the world (Vladan Radovanovic Aleksandar Obradovic, Petar Ozgijan, Petar Bergamo, Srdjan Hofman, the group Opus 4).

The article deals with the research of axiological nature of the theory and practice of modern education. The problem is relevant in that education can be the key to solving the global problems of the modern world. The more popular the knowledge of people, their experience, abilities, skills, their professional and personal qualities in social development, the more important education is. Improvement and modernization of national education systems is becoming the leading direction of the sustainable development strategy of many states of the modern world. Consequently, the philosophical understanding of the educational process, in particular the definition of the values of education is relevant.The authors substantiate that, given the diversity of educational values, they can be divided into two main groups: the values of maintaining the existing order of things and the values of its transformation.In various worldview systems, the problem of the values of education is resolved in different ways. The article gives the basic ideas of representatives of such systems: classical realism, essentialism, perinalism, analytical philosophy, experimentalism, existentialism, neo-Freudianism.Analyzing the views of researchers, the authors of the article attribute free ideological self-determination to the cardinal values of education as the main mission, which provides the conditions for the free self-determination of each person in the worldview world to accept their own values in the form of life goals, main motives and interests, aspirations, needs, principles, etc.It is substantiated that the axiological guidelines of education should be associated primarily with the orientation of education towards the interests of the individual – a free, creative person, capable of self-realization. The mission of education is to find an individual approach to a person, to contribute to the realization of his personal potential, internal, unconscious, even irrational needs (otherwise this culturally unrealized potential can become destructive for both the individual and society). Thus, education should be aimed at the formation of fundamental foundations that will allow a person to solve worldview problems, make a moral, legal or ideological choice, navigate in the modern sociocultural situation.The authors emphasize that in a modern dynamic society, value-semantic variability and the influence of the accelerated development of education on the formation of social innovations are necessary. The dynamically changing conceptual field of modern educational practices, the desire and attempts to humanize education are favorable factors for the creation and implementation of the concept of modern education. The humanization of education is aimed at creating a sustainable and flexible value attitude to the world. The universal value horizon, the idea of universal values are not reflected in modern cultural practices. On the one hand, culture becomes value-oriented, its phenomena become subject to assessment, its values are structured and organized, on the other hand, obvious value pluralism, poly-paradigmalism, relativism and simplification of values as such.Thus, the analysis of theoretical studies on the value aspects of education, and the study of the possibilities that arise as a result of the humanization of education, allow us to state: only as a result of changes in the content of education in the context of its humanization it is possible to talk about the transition to understanding a specialist as a harmoniously developed personality, which is the ultimate purpose of education. The primary task is to eliminate the discrepancy between the generally accepted and declared values, on the one hand, and their implementation, primarily in the minds of participants in the educational process, on the other.

Designed by architect C. L. Engel (1778 – 1840), the Naval Barracks facility was originally built in the 1820´s for the Russian Navy and also served as a shipyard. The building of national heritage is a prime example of neo-classical architecture in Helsinki. Strengthening and underpinning work for this structure was realised from 1985 to 1988. It was a part of the larger renovation project, where the building was made suitable for the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland. The purpose of underpinning was to realise a new basement in its eastern part as well as to lower the basement floor level in other sectors. The ground engineering duties covered geotechnical and structural designs of temporary and permanent structures from the basement up to the ground floor.

Consumption is one of the central activity of an economy. It is perhaps the ultimate aim of all economic activity. The paper investigates Muslim consumer behaviour. The question that this study answers are what Muslim consumer behaviour is and how does it differ from Nep-Classical approach. This Study has adopted a realist ontological stance and interpretivist Epistemology. Units of data collection for the study were the Quranic verses and the texts of Hadith. The study found that an optimal Muslim consumer is confined in his consumption and spending to the boundaries of Sharia i.e., to stay away from Tabzir (pre-eminence) and Israf (extravagance) and follows the balanced approach, which is moderation and unlike modern day neo-classical Consumer theory, consumption is not the ultimate aim of human being. The paper suggests that the consumption behaviour of Muslim consumer must be guided by Islamic Principles. The paper also finds that the Muslim consumer should prioritize his/her expenditure within the domain of the Halal earning and spending. Thus, the findings of the paper show a compact Islamic consumer framework.

AbstractAt the December 1998 Saint-Malo summit, Britain and France promised to set aside past rivalries and work together on African issues. While brief indications were given as to possible areas of bilateral and ‘bi-multi’ cooperation, the terms and scope of this ‘partnership’ were not spelt out. Was this to involve only sporadic collaboration? Or was it to be an institutionalised partnership, such as the Franco-German tandem, or perhaps a more intuitive alliance, such as the Anglo-American ‘special relationship’? These questions are central to this article, which begins by showing how Anglo-French relations in Africa were largely marked by rivalry from the colonial era to the early post-Cold War period. Drawing upon extensive interviews, it demonstrates how, over the last decade or so, closer linkages have developed between the UK and French administrations and how there has been a greater degree of cooperation in response to the key challenges of Africa. It then uses a neo-classical realist framework to explain the readiness or reluctance of Britain and France to collaborate on Africa. It concludes by suggesting that, while there has been progress in ‘deconflictualising’ African policies, cooperation has been, and is likely to remain, limited.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to contribute to a discourse analytical understanding of the political economy. The term “crisis” is an important label in recent discussion in political economy. Yet the genuine discursive dimension of “the crisis” and the multiple linguistic layers of the crisis discourse remains an open issue. Design/methodology/approach – Realist perspectives usually believe in an external reality of crises independent of the language construction; in contrast, constructivist perspectives argue that a crisis is always the result of a socio-linguistic construction process. This contribution follows a critical-constructivist perspective, thereby taking into account powerful discursive actors which are able to “declare” a state in the world as a “crisis”. Findings – From a discourse analytical point of view, this paper examines the rules and logics of crisis management policy, arguing that a new politico-academic elite has appeared which is beyond the classical distinction between “Keynesians” and “neo-liberals”. By taking a position in the discourse of the recent debate on financial regulation, these new elite might be able to manage the crisis for a particular time, as they are constructed as “moderating actors” through academic and political discourses. Research limitations/implications – From a practical point of view, this analysis cannot offer economic solutions; from an analytical viewpoint, it will not give insights into discursive contexts. Practical implications – This analysis helps to understand current debates on economic policy and to improve the communicative efficiency of the participants. Originality/value – This paper combines a discourse analysis with a governmentality perspective and applies this analytical tool onto a political and economic topic currently prevailing in the global political economy.

The notion of public good has been reclaimed in recent times due to the pandemic as in many countries including the United States, the existing infrastructural, strategic and investment limitations have been realized. There is need for a debate on the notion of global public good especially with respect to health and to bring out the incommensurability of the notion. Along with these realizations and reclamations, issues related to the three A’s- accessibility, availability and affordability of health car have also been raised as a part of universal health coverage (UHC). The three A’s have become more relevant in the context of the pandemic. However, the ideological underpinnings of such conceptual reclamations and probable linkages need to be discussed. In fact, public good assumes the distribution of services equally to all members of the society which is problematic as it may not take care of equity issues in societies where some people suffer more and need special care and services. Public good is a ‘troubled’ notion which has its origin and also has been used in neo-classical and neoliberal approaches and it cannot be recommended without a proper understanding of the diverse ways in which the concept has been treated. The need for current claiming or reclaiming of such concepts started with environmental goods (although not many the so-called environmentalists realise it) to highlight destruction of global commons or resources which will result in loss of markets and therefore profits. The present reclaiming of the concept is also because of such a realisation as the pandemic has affected market interests. New approaches are evolving because of the so-called 'aid fatigue' of donors as they think that economic aids may be irrelevant at this time as the rich countries are also suffering and therefore, let them manage on their own!

AbstractTwo things long stood in the way of the erection of statues in public in the Northern Netherlands, on the one hand the lack of a strong central government and on the other the wrongly interpreted - Calvinist interdict on them (Note 1). The first statue of this kind, that of Erasmus in Rotterdam by De Keyser (1622), was attacked by strict Calvinists, but noted throughout Europe as an early paradigm (Note 3). Not until the 19th century did the Netherlands join in the nationalistic 'statue craze', which was just breaking out then, with two monuments to the supposed Dutch inventor of printing, Laurens Janszoon Coster. These statues of a private citizen had a predecessor in the 18th century, while a statue had already been demanded in the 17th-century eulogies of Coster. Cities had long honoured their famous inventors as important contributors to civilization and praise of the inventor was also a fundampental ingredient of the history of learning (e.g. in Pliny). In the Renaissance scientific inventions acquired a special emphasis, modern inventors being held up as evidence that the model of Antiquity could be not only equalled, but also surpassed, while both Christian civilization and the northern countries could also gain credit here (cf. Johannes Stradanus, Figs. 2, 3, Note 9, and Francis Bacon, Note 10). The significance of the invention of printing for Christianity was soon recognized, so that it was lauded above other inventions as 'divine', an attitude that was certainly also strengthened by its decisive role in the Reformation. In the Netherlands in particular, where religious and political developments were so closely interwoven, printing was regarded as an important aid to both (Notes 14, 15), while the young Dutch Republic, in which printing played such an important part, could claim the honour of counting the inventor of this important art among its citizens. This 'pious fraud' (Hellinga) is fundamental to the discussion of the history of the statues. The Coster tradition can only be traced back to about a century after the supposed invention, acquiring its definitive form at the end of the 16th century in Hadrianus Junius' Batavia Illustrata of 1598. The further enlargement on the merits of Coster also necessitated a portrait of him which, in de fault of an authentic one, had to be fabricated for the purpose, the features of the statue of Erasmus being taken over for a full-length portrait (Fig. 5), which served as a 'graphic monument'. A fictitious bust of Coster was also cited in the 17th century (Fig. 7) and this, like the early sculptural marks of honour to him (Fig. 16), belongs to the iconography of printing, the practitioners of the craft evoking their inventor. Such representations - a more or less life-size statue of Coster is still to be seen on the house of the Haarlem printer Enschedé - were not yet very public in character. The statue of Coster projected from the end of the 17th century for the garden of the Hortus Medicus in Haarlem did acquire greater publicity, however. This humanist garden of a bourgeois learned society (Note 28), reflected not only nature, but also the world of learning, as a microcosm of the arts, with sixteen busts of connoisseurs and scholars under the leadership of a full-length statue of Coster, since it was he who by his art had made the dissemination of learning possible, although he owed his place here largely to his Haarlem origins, of course. The designs made by Romeyn de Hooghe for this statue (Note 29) were only realized in 1722 in a statue by Gerrit van Heerstal, which tried to unite historical and classical features (Figs. 8-13). In the years thereafter, up to the tercentenary of the invention, the poems, medals and a weighty commemorative publication (Fig. 14, Note 35) celebrating the Haarlem inventor of printing all referred to this statue in his birthplace. Meanwhile Germany too had honoured her inventors of printing - Fust in addition to Gutenberg, initially - in 1640 and 1710 by centenary festivities often of a Protestant cast. Privileges relating to public statues may have been one of the reasons why no monuments were erected on these occasions. These privileges were, however, annulled by the French Revolution, just as the Enlightenment and political renewal furthered the cult of honouring leading civic 'geniuses'. Two Gutenberg cities under French rule took pride of pace here, but only in 1840 did Strasbourg acquire a statue of Gutenberg by David d'Angers, which illustrated his role as the enlightener of all mankind (Figs. 15-18, Note 39). In Mainz a private initiative of 1794 came to nothing (Note 40), as did a Napoleonic rebuilding plan centred on a Gutenberg Square with a statue. Not until 1829 was a semi-public statue by Joseph Stok set up there (Note 41), while in 1837 the Gutenberg monument designed by Bartel Thorwaldsen was unveiled with great ceremony (Fig. 19). The two last-mentioned statues in Mainz, like the many others erected after 1814, were the products of the nationalistic pride in the country's past history that flared up after the defeat of Napoleon. This pride in the past generally took on a nostalgic cast and served to compensate for the failure of current political ambitions: The unity of Germany long a dream, while the hoped-for great changes in the Kingdom of the Netherlands were dealt a bitter blow by the breakaway of the 'southern provinces' in 1831 (Note 44). This last event marked the start for the Northern Netherlands of a long-lasting rivalry with their Belgian neighbours, which was pursued by means of monumental art, from the statue of Rembrandt (1852) as an answer to that of Rubens (1840) to the Rijksmuseum (1885). The great importance attached to Coster in the 19th century was already manifested in 1801 by the removal of the statue in Haarlem from the Hortus Medicus to the marketplace (Note 45). National pride is abundantly evident in the prizewinning treatise published in 1816 by Jacobus Koning, who is a weighty investigation confirmed Coster's right to the invention and with it that of the Netherlands to a leading place among the civilized nations. The quatercentenary, fixed surprisingly early, in 1823, comprised every imaginable type of public entertainment and demonstration of scholarship. It is, however, striking that these expressions of national pride were still balanced by references to the elevating effect of the invention (Note 56). The most lasting mark of honour of the celebration of 1823, the abstract monument by the Haarlem sculptor D. Douglas, also looked back to the sensibilities of the 18th century in its placing on the spot where the invention had come into being in the Haarlem Wood (Fig. 23, Note 59). After this Haarlem monument of 1823 had been adduced in the discussions about the statue in Mainz before 1829, Thorwaldsen's statue, which attracted great international attention, became a greater source of annoyance to the Dutch adversaries of Gutenberg after 1829 than the statue to the Belgian inventor Dirck Martens in Aalst (Note 63) or the projected monument to William Caxton in England. Jan Jacob Frederik. Noordziek summed up this dissatisfaction in his call in 1847 to 'uphold the honour of the fatherland', in which he pleaded for a monument that would surpass the Gutenberg statue and thus serve as an argument that would establish the Dutch claim for good (Note 64). The erection of this statue was further expressly intended to be an exclusively national affair: the citizens of the Netherlands must raise the money and only Dutch artists be charged with the execution. The general discussion about the statues appears to have been less virulent than was usually the case in the preliminaries to other monuments (Note 66), Coster's merits evidently being little contested within the country itself. There were two notable critical voices, however (see Appendix). Professor M. Siegenbeek rang the changes on an old Calvinist argument in refusing a seat on the preparatory committee: in addition to the fact that there were certainly more people who deserved statues, he pointed out that the great expense involved merely evinced ostentation and that the money would be better spent on social ends. The Neo-Classicist Humbert de Superville, on the other hand, did express doubts as to Coster's right to the title, repeating aesthetic arguments which had been adduced before: statues ought, in his view, to be made in the form of durable stone herms, but he thought there was as little chance of that in this 'age of modish lay-figures' in the bronze of melted-down coins, as that the statue would be made by a Dutchman (Note 67). A typical Romantic historical controversy threw the organizers into turmoil, namely the authenticity of the representations of Coster. In particular Westreenen van Tielland unmasked the idealizing and forged portraits, arguing against the erection of a historicizing representational statue. But the defenders of Coster's honour opted for the usual historical realism (Note 68). The tenor of these polemics is found again in the conflict over the 'historical or allegorical' nature of the composition, which can be seen in the designs. Louis Royer, to whom the commission was given in 1848, wanted to show Coster walking with a winged letter A in his hand, as if on his way to show people his discovery, which was soon to wing its way round the world (cf. Fig. 22). However, this allegorical element disappeared completely in the final version, in which the choice fell on a realistic portrait, albeit Coster was still shown walking like a classical predecessor, Archimedes, who could not keep his discovery to himself (Fig. 23, Note 69). The architect H. M. Tetar van Elven was commissioned to make a base in the style of 'the last era of the Middle Ages'. The inscriptions also presented problems, but were finally agreed on in September 1855. The ceremonies, which after all manner of altercation between Royer and the main committee (Note 70) and various financial problems, were finally able to be staged from 15 to 17 July) 1856, included, in addition to the actual unveiling of the statue on the marketplace ( Van Heerstal's statue being returned to the garden again) , pageants, meetings, an exhibition and all sorts of popular entertainments. Everything was on a grander and more extensive scale than 33 years before and little remained of the motif of enlightenment through printing which had been so important then. Nalionalistic merry-making now predominated, along with expressions of devotion to the House of Orange. Less emphasis was also given to the 'darkness' of the Middle Ages, which were now beginning to be valued as part of the nation's history. The most monumental homage to this monument was a 360-page account of the events by the indefatigable Noordziek. His dream of the recognition of Coster and the nation as a whole seemed to have become a reality. But it was not to be so for long. Only fifteen years after the unveiling A. van de Linde unmasked the' 'Haarlem Coster legend' and called for the demolition of the statue, again in the interests of the nation (Note 81).

This article presents a theoretical explanation for Myanmar’s persistent and consistent choice of non-aligned foreign policy since independence in 1948. It focuses on exploring multiple causal factors in search for a comprehensive explanation, inspired by the analytic eclectic approach, including (1) geopolitical factors, (2) domestic factors, and (3) ideational factors, informed by neorealist, neo-classical realist, and social constructivist insights, respectively. Being a small country surrounded by big powers during the Cold War, struggling with internal conflicts, both ethnic and ideological, and guided by the Buddhist philosophy of the middle way, the newly established government of Myanmar chose non-alignment. Successive governments went between activism and passivism in their foreign policy and maintained the stance of non-alignment. This article argues that non-alignment could be a logical choice for weak powers such as those striving to find their way amid the ever-intensifying strategic rivalry between the USA and China.

Abstract The notion of strategic ambiguity has long guided the United States’ engagement in cross-strait relations, requiring that Washington is intentionally unclear about whether and how it would intervene in a China-Taiwan conflict in order to preserve a balance of assurance and deterrence for both sides. This article unpacks the US approach to strategic ambiguity under Trump. Adopting a neo-classical realist perspective, it argues that domestic and individual level drivers-in particular, US populism, Congress and the foreign policy establishment, and Trump's transactional and personalized approach to foreign policy-have interacted with the shifting US-China balance of power to produce a different mode of American strategic ambiguity in the Taiwan Strait. A common view is that as a function of the growing US-China power competition, the US has largely leaned towards Taiwan in recent years. Our analysis revises this assessment by revealing a form of strategic ambiguity under Trump that, despite appearing to upset the balance of ambiguity in favour of Taiwan-paradoxically and probably unintentionally-maintains assurances and warnings for both China and Taiwan. Yet, while Trump has arguably preserved the overall balance of strategic ambiguity, he has introduced greater volatility into cross-strait relations.

Theory is a set of principles of hypothesis, conceptual and pragmatic, which is connected to one another, forming a frame of reference for an area of knowledge. Accounting theory is defined as a logical reasoning in the form of a set of principles or the principles that (1) is a frame of reference to assess the accounting practices and (2) guidelines for the development of practices and procedures are new. normative accounting theory (prescription) is a statement or proposition that requires or require accountants in accounting practices. Positive accounting theory (description) aims to explain and predict accounting practice. Main problem is that current accounting practices and management attitudes towards such practices. Positive accounting theory realist ontology adopted a strong understanding and this determines epistemology and methodology. Methodologically, this is a positivist or modernism, it is committed to using methods of physics. As a result of this is rooted in empirical epistemology. Positive accounting theory bersandarkan utility maximization which has a central assumption of neo-classical ie, each individual has a goal to pursue personal interests. Thus there are several things that need to be done or that the theory should be developed to overcome the weakness of positive accounting theory. Not the goal to replace the existing positive theories, but to complement the existing deficiencies in order to improve the positive accounting theory in order to provide meaningful value. Proposed alternatives are: Integrated Utility, Value Free to Value Laden, S-Matrix Theory, Extention Maximation. <br /><br />Keywords: Theory of Accounting, Accounting Theory Normative, Positive accounting theory<br /><br />

Here at Queensland University of Technology, the former Arts Faculty has been replaced by a new Faculty of Creative Industries led by the internationally renowned scholar John Hartley. This has entailed a great deal of reorganisation, planning and debate - very little of which need concern us here. However there was one discussion that does bear fairly directly on my topic. This had to do with whether the discipline of journalism should be included within Creative Industries. Though this was eventually resolved in the affirmative some felt that to call a journalist 'creative' was tantamount to an insult. What was at stake here was the old issue of the relationship between the journalist and reality. When the word 'creative' is rejected as non-relevant to the practice of journalism what we have is a signal that the doctrine of empiricism is still alive and well. This remains the staple fare of journalist educators despite having been subjected to devastating attacks by Roy Bhaskar in The Possibilities of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences (1979) and in Scientific Realism & Human Emancipation (1986). As Bhaskar has pointed out for the empiricist "…the ultimate objects of knowledge are atomistic events. Such events constitute given facts and their conjunctions exhaust the objective content of our idea of natural necessity. Knowledge and the world may be viewed as surfaces whose points are in isomorphic correspondence…" (Bhaskar 24). Within the empiricist worldview the task of the journalist is to boldly go and find out the facts and report them back to the reader. Similarly within the same outlook the task of the documentary photography can be seen as the recording of what is. Outside the realm of the journalist educator few would today subscribe to such a view of the role of the photographer. Not only has theory advanced beyond classical empiricism, but such has been the strength of the reaction, that theorists such as Simon Watney have felt compelled to write an 'obituary notice' for the British Documentary tradition (12). Watney claimed that the activity of the photographers was motivated by a theoretical assumption that they recorded or reported the truth. For Watney it would seem that the truth is that there is no such thing as the truth and that the photographers served institutional and ideological interests. However drawing upon Bhaskarian Critical Realism it is a fairly easy task to refute scepticism in the strong form that Watney advances. To start with, the claim that it is true that there is no truth is itself self-cancelling. Nor can scepticism about the possibility of truth sustain an account of, for example, medical science where our knowledge is progressive and accumulative. More serious for the practice of documentary photography have been the technological advances that have called into question the very possibility of our ever knowing how 'creative' i.e. how much of a faker a photographer has been. It is to the consideration of just this one aspect of the impact of the new digital technology that I now turn. Photography in the Digital Age: Distinguishing between truth and evidence The digital camera would appear to have given the photographer the power of unlimited creativity and indeed to have put her in the position of Absolute Creator. Especially worrying to some is that the evidential status of the photograph has been definitively called into question. Commentators such as Dai Vaughan in For Documentary (1999) see this as the end of relationship between the camera and reality. Brian Winston has expressed similar views in Claiming the Real: The Documentary Film Revisited (1995). It is important to point out here that we need to avoid confusing the question of evidence and that of truth. The latter concept is ultimately an ontological matter while that of evidence belongs to the realm of epistemology. It is failure to make this distinction that has led to the apocalyptic tone adapted by Vaughan and others. Moreover photography has never had a simple relationship with reality. Photography and fakery have gone hand in hand since the inception of the medium. Dorothea Lange's touching up of her famous Migrant Mother and Robert Capa's faking of the death of the Spanish republican soldier are just two of the most famous examples. The latter produced one of the most famous of all war photographs. Entitled Falling Soldier, it was taken in September 1936 during the Spanish Civil War. It purports to show a soldier at the moment of death. He is thrown backward and his rifle has been flung out of his hand. Capa himself claimed that the photograph was taken when he and the man he was to photograph: …were on the Cordoba front, stranded there, the two of them, Capa with his precious camera and the soldier with his rifle. The soldier was impatient. He wanted to get back to the Loyalist lines. Time and again he climbed up and peered over the sandbags. Each time he would drop back at the warning rattle of machine-gun fire. Finally the soldier muttered something to the effect that he was going to take the long chance. He clambered out of the trench with Capa behind him. The machine guns rattled and Capa automatically snapped his camera, falling beside the body of his companion. Two hours later, when it was dark, and the guns were still, the photographer crept across the broken ground to safety. Later he discovered that he had taken one of the finest action shots of the Spanish war (Whelan 96). Capa's photograph went around the world and it was very effective in mobilising support for the anti-fascist Spanish Republican cause, that is Capa's photo helped the good guys. There has however been a fair deal of controversy over whether this photo was faked. The evidence seems to suggest that it was (Whelan 95-100). Does it matter? Richard Whelan in Robert Capa (1985) concludes: "To insist upon knowing whether the photograph actually shows a man at the moment he has been hit by a bullet is both morbid and trivialising, for the picture's greatness ultimately lies in its symbolic implications, not in its literal accuracy as a report on the death of a particular man" (100). Nigel Warburton in Varieties of Photographic representation: Documentary, Pictorial and Quasi-documentary (1991) however, strongly disagrees. He argues that a question of trust is involved between the photojournalist and her audience and violation of this is by no means a trivial matter. As he puts it: "The photojournalist's main responsibility is to aim to instil true beliefs in the viewers of their pictures. What is more, not all means are acceptable means of instilling these beliefs: the journalist and the photojournalist both have a duty to instil these beliefs by presenting evidence" (207). I am in agreement with Warburton here; trust between the photographer and her audience is crucial, especially if one's aesthetic practice is linked to claims that it is part of an emancipatory endeavour. Though of course the matter of truth cannot be reduced to a question of trust. What ultimately is at stake with regard to truth is the relationship of the photograph to the objective manifold, i.e. the ontological status of the photograph. This can be seen as isomorphic as in correspondence models. For example: Is the photograph of Carlo Giuliani, being shot in Genoa at the anti G8 demonstrations, a photograph of Carlo Giuliani being shot? A more satisfactory approach than the correspondence one is, I believe, to be found within Critical Realist model of truth advanced by Roy Bhaskar in Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom (1993). Here the question of truth ultimately comes down to the capacity of the photograph to uncover alethia - truth as the reason for things, not merely propositions. Complex as these issues are there is nevertheless a fairly simple moral behind the exposure of Capa's fakery. No matter how impressive the process of faking there is always the possibility that this will be at some time exposed. The subsequent exposure of the violation of trust can be a serious blow to a photographer's professional credibility. A somewhat different position on the relationship between digital technology and photography has recently been advanced by Pedro Meyer in an internet article The Renaissance of Photography (Oct 1 1995). He begins with Camille Silvy's 1858 photograph 'River Scene France'. He reveals that this painting is in fact a composite, or a fake if you wish. Silvy solved the technical problem of photographing clouds and a landscape by photographing them separately and joining them in the development process. Meyer concludes this analysis of Silvy's photograph with an endorsement from the grand daughter of Ansel Adams that he would have welcomed digital photography. The next example, which Meyer considers, is that of the two photographs of the Kent University murders in 1970. The recent publication of the photo in 1995 Life Magazine had the pole behind the student's head airbrushed out. No one knows who did this and the photo was reprinted without the pole many times and the elimination of the pole attracted no notice. As Meyer notes however a debate eventually ensued on the Internet. He cites a Brian Masck as arguing that the pole should not have been airbrushed out. Masck went on to make the claim that if photography is to be believed it must not be touched up. This opinion bore directly upon the normative fiduciary level or trust aspect of truth when Masck says: The photographer therefore has a huge burden of responsibility to maintain the credibility of his images, and the employer (publisher) in turn has a burden or responsibility to the photographer as well as the reader to do the same…Once the SOURCE cannot be believed photojournalism is dead." (n.pag) Meyer responds to this by pointing out that the criterion for truth here is more exact than in writing. In writing we need confirmation from a second source. All that has happened in photography is that we now need confirmation of the photograph. It can no longer stand alone as evidence. So photography for Meyer is now freed from the burden of being evidence and can take its place along side the other arts. He does however still fudge the truth question somewhat in his analogy with writing. The use of digital techniques is compared with proofreading in writing. Thus he writes: All pictures, such as with text, are confirmed from several different sources when in doubt; otherwise it's the photographer's responsibility to deliver an image with integrity towards the events, which in turn will be constantly monitored. We understand that integrity is not a matter of how the picture was made, but what it's supposed to communicate. Just as editors don't oversee if the writers do so by hand or type on a computer, our photographers are free to use any tool they want. The veracity of an image is not dependent on how it was produced, any more than a text is credible because no corrections were done on it. (n.pag) This I think will not do. To begin with it would be quite possible to imagine a set of circumstances in which a written text would have more credibility if it were uncorrected. More seriously the phrase 'integrity towards the events' need clarification. If this means that the photo claims to be a record or semiotic trace of an event then the advent of digital techniques mean that it is impossible to assume such 'integrity'. The evidential nature of photography has been irrevocably challenged. To repeat an earlier point it is important to make a clear distinction between evidence and truth. We must understand here that what has been challenged is our capacity to take the evidential status of a photograph for granted. Nevertheless photographs can still prove a record or a semiotic trace of an event, but we can no longer accept the photograph as proof. Despite what the constructionists would have us believe, the referent still lives! Meyer finishes his article with another interesting comparison between a photograph and a painting by Van Gogh. They may be of the same tree. In the painting the tree is transformed into something wonderful. It glows with a kind of transcendent spirituality. By contrast in the photograph the tree is simply a tree. It does though serve the purpose of alerting us to the contrast between recording reality and transforming it through the imagination. Here Meyer quotes the Mexican poet Veronica Volkow as saying: "With the digital revolution, the photograph breaks its loyalty with what is real, that unique marriage between the arts, only to fall into the infinite temptations of the imagination. It is now more the sister of fantasy and dreams than of presence" (n.pag) If Volkow were correct then photojournalism would indeed seem to be dead. But of course there will always be a place for documentary photography. Artistic expression will improve with digital techniques; that is true. But the photograph's ability to provide a semiotic trace will always be welcomed. However, with the growth and spread of digital photography what will gradually disappear is the naive belief in the transparency of the photograph. Conclusions Interrupting the Flow: Neo Heracliteanism and the Practice of Photography The avant-garde filmmaker, poet and theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha has argued in When The Moon Waxes Red: Presentation, Gender And Cultural Politics (1991) for an extreme irrealist position in documentary by claiming: 'Reality runs away, reality denies reality. Filmmaking is after all a question of "framing" reality in its course' (43). The first part of this quotation gives us the moment of Heraclitus, who argued : "You cannot step twice into the same rivers; for fresh waters are forever flowing in upon you." (Warner 26). However, there is an even more extreme element in Heraclitean thought and that is associated with his student and follower Cratylus, who seemingly claimed that it was impossible to step into the river at all. The flux of life was so thorough that it was impossible to capture. In Plato Etc Roy Bhaskar cites the anecdote by Aristotle, which has it that Cratylus eventually despaired so much of his ability to say anything about reality that he ended up as an elective mute and would merely point (52). It is the Cratylan position that lies behind Trinh T. Minh-ha's statement 'reality denies reality' (43) for if this phrase has any meaning it must be that it is impossible to know the real. Indeed to my mind Trinh T. Minh-ha's theoretical work is much closer to Cratylus than Heraclitus. If however Heraclitus' fragments 41 & 42 suggest unending flux, fragment 81, which says "We step and do not step into the same rivers: we are and are not" (Warner 26). gives us the moment of the intransitive structure which is relatively enduring underneath the flux of actuality. The distinction between the intransitive (i.e. ontological) dimension and the transitive (i.e. narrowly epistemological) dimensions was first advanced by Roy Bhaskar in his Realist Theory of Science (1978). This emphasis on the difference between the intransitive and transitive dimensions helps us to understand that it is the intransitive dimension or the enduring level of ontology or reality that is the domain of the creative photographer. When the photograph gives us access to this level of reality then we are in the presence of what Cartier Bresson has called 'the decisive moment' and the photographer as creator in the sense not of faking or recording but of revealing reality is born. References: Bkaskar, Roy. The Possibilities of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences. London: The Harvester Press, 1979. ____________. Scientific Realism & Human Emancipation. London: Verso, 1986. _____________. Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom. London: Verso, 1993. _______. Plato Etc. London: Verso, 1994. Meyer, P. "The Renaissance of Photography: A keynote address at the SPE Conference Los Angeles, California", Oct 1 1995 < http://zonezero.com/magazine/articles/meyer/01.htm>. Trinh T. Minh-ha. When The Moon Waxes Red: Presentation, Gender And Cultural Politics. New York: Routledge, 1991. Vaughan, Dai. For Documentary. Berkeley: University of California Press 1999. Warburton, Nigel. "Varieties of Photographic Representation: Documentary, Pictorial and Quasi-documentary," History of Photography. 15 (3), 1991: 207. Warner, Rex.. The Greek Philosophers. New York: Mentor, 1958. Watney, Simon. "The Documentary Forum," Creative Camera 254, 1986: 12. Whelan, Richard. Robert Capa. London: Faber, 1985. Winston, Brian . Claiming the Real: The Documentary Film Revisited. London: BFI, 1995.

IntroductionThe European will to modify the natural world emerged through English landscape design during the eighteenth century. Released from the neo-classical aesthetic dichotomy of the beautiful and the ugly, new categories of the picturesque and the sublime gestured towards an affective relationship to nature. Europeans began to see the world as a picture, the elements of which were composed as though part of a theatrical scene. Quite literally, as I shall discuss below, gardens were “composed with ‘pantomimic’ elements – ruins of castles and towers, rough hewn bridges, Chinese pagodas and their like” (McGillivray 134–35) transforming natural vistas into theatrical scenes. Such a transformation was made possible by a habit of spectating that was informed by the theatrical metaphor or theatrum mundi, one version of which emphasised the relationship between spectator and the thing seen. The idea of the natural world as an aesthetic object first developed in poetry and painting and then through English landscape garden style was wrought in three dimensions on the land itself. From representations of place a theatrical transformation occurred so that gardens became a places of representation.“The Genius of the Place in All”The eighteenth century inherited theatrum mundi from the Renaissance, although the genealogy of its key features date back to ancient times. Broadly speaking, theatrum mundi was a metaphorical expression of the world and humanity in two ways: dramaturgically and formally. During the Renaissance the dramaturgical metaphor was a moral emblem concerned with the contingency of human life; as Shakespeare famously wrote, “men and women [were] merely players” whose lives consisted of “seven ages” or “acts” (2.7.139–65). In contrast to the dramaturgical metaphor with its emphasis on role-playing humanity, the formalist version highlighted a relationship between spectator, theatre-space and spectacle. Rooted in Renaissance neo-Platonism, the formalist metaphor configured the world as a spectacle and “Man” its spectator. If the dramaturgical metaphor was inflected with medieval moral pessimism, the formalist metaphor was more optimistic.The neo-Platonist spectator searched in the world for a divine plan or grand design and spectatorship became an epistemological challenge. As a seer and a knower on the world stage, the human being became the one who thought about the world not just as a theatre but also through theatre. This is apparent in the etymology of “theatre” from the Greek theatron, or “seeing place,” but the word also shares a stem with “theory”: theaomai or “to look at.” In a graceful compression of both roots, Martin Heidegger suggests a “theatre” might be any “seeing place” in which any thing being beheld offers itself to careful scrutiny by the beholder (163–65). By the eighteenth century, the ancient idea of a seeing-knowing place coalesced with the new empirical method and aesthetic sensibility: the world was out there, so to speak, to provide pleasure and instruction.Joseph Addison, among others, in the first half of the century reconsidered the utilitarian appeal of the natural world and proposed it as the model for artistic inspiration and appreciation. In “Pleasures of the Imagination,” a series of essays in The Spectator published in 1712, Addison claimed that “there is something more bold and masterly in the rough careless strokes of nature, than in the nice touches and embellishments of art,” and compared to the beauty of an ordered garden, “the sight wanders up and down without confinement” the “wide fields of nature” and is “fed with an infinite variety of images, without any certain stint or number” (67).Yet art still had a role because, Addison argues, although “wild scenes [. . .] are more delightful than any artificial shows” the pleasure of nature increases the more it begins to resemble art; the mind experiences the “double” pleasure of comparing nature’s original beauty with its copy (68). This is why “we take delight in a prospect which is well laid out, and diversified, with fields and meadows, woods and rivers” (68); a carefully designed estate can be both profitable and beautiful and “a man might make a pretty landskip of his own possessions” (69). Although nature should always be one’s guide, nonetheless, with some small “improvements” it was possible to transform an estate into a landscape picture. Nearly twenty years later in response to the neo-Palladian architectural ambitions of Richard Boyle, the third Earl of Burlington, and with a similarly pictorial eye to nature, Alexander Pope advised:To build, to plant, whatever you intend,To rear the Column, or the Arch to bend,To swell the Terras, or to sink the Grot;In all, let Nature never be forgot.But treat the Goddess like a modest fair,Nor over-dress, nor leave her wholly bare;Let not each beauty ev’ry where be spy’d,Where half the skill is decently to hide.He gains all points, who pleasingly confounds,Surprizes, varies, and conceals the Bounds.Consult the Genius of the Place in all;That tells the Waters or to rise, or fall,Or helps th’ ambitious Hill the heav’ns to scale,Or scoops in circling theatres the Vale,Calls in the Country, catches opening glades, Joins willing woods, and varies shades from shades,Now breaks or now directs, th’ intending Lines;Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs. (Epistle IV, ll 47–64) Whereas Addison still gestured towards estate management, Pope explicitly advocated a painterly approach to garden design. His epistle articulated some key principles that he enacted in his own garden at Twickenham and which would inform later garden design. No matter what one added to a landscape, one needed to be guided by nature; one should be moderate in one’s designs and neither plant too much nor too little; one must be aware of the spectator’s journey through the garden and take care to provide variety by creating “surprises” that would be revealed at different points. Finally, one had to find the “spirit” of the place that gave it its distinct character and use this to create the cohesion in diversity that was aspired to in a garden. Nature’s aestheticisation had begun with poetry, developed into painting, and was now enacted on actual natural environments with the emergence of English landscape style. This painterly approach to gardening demanded an imaginative, emotional, and intellectual engagement with place and it stylistically rejected the neo-classical geometry and regularity of the baroque garden (exemplified by Le Nôtre’s gardens at Versailles). Experiencing landscape now took on a third dimension as wealthy landowners and their friends put themselves within the picture frame and into the scene. Although landscape style changed during the century, a number of principles remained more or less consistent: the garden should be modelled on nature but “improved,” any improvements should not be obvious, pictorial composition should be observed, the garden should be concerned with the spectator’s experience and should aim to provoke an imaginative or emotional engagement with it. During the seventeenth century, developments in theatrical technology, particularly the emergence of the proscenium arch theatre with moveable scenery, showed that poetry and painting could be spectacularly combined on the stage. Later in the eighteenth century the artist and stage designer Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg combined picturesque painting aesthetics with theatrical design in works such as The Wonders of Derbyshire in 1779 (McGillivray 136). It was a short step to shift the onstage scene outside. Theatricality was invoked when pictorial principles were applied three dimensionally; gardens became sites for pastoral genre scenes that ambiguously positioned their visitors both as spectators and actors. Theatrical SceneryGardens and theatres were explicitly connected. Like “theatre,” the word “garden” was sometimes used to describe a collection, in book form, which promised “a whole world of items” which was not always “redeemable” in “straightforward ways” (Hunt, Gardens 54–55). Theatrum mundi could be emblematically expressed in a garden through statues and architectural fabriques which drew spectators into complex chains of associations involving literature, art, and society, as they progressed through it.In the previous century, writes John Dixon Hunt, “the expectation of a fine garden [. . .] was that it work upon its visitor, involving him [sic] often insidiously as a participant in its dramas, which were presented to him as he explored its spaces by a variety of statues, inscriptions and [. . .] hydraulically controlled automata” (Gardens 54). Such devices, which featured heavily in the Italian baroque garden, were by the mid eighteenth century seen by English and French garden theorists to be overly contrived. Nonetheless, as David Marshall argues, “eighteenth-century garden design is famous for its excesses [. . .] the picturesque garden may have aimed to be less theatrical, but it aimed no less to be theater” (38). Such gardens still required their visitors’ participation and were designed to deliver an experience that stimulated the spectators’ imaginations and emotions as they moved through them. Theatrum mundi is implicit in eighteenth-century gardens through a common idea of the world reimagined into four geographical quadrants emblematically represented by fabriques in the garden. The model here is Alexander Pope’s influential poem, “The Temple of Fame” (1715), which depicted the eponymous temple with four different geographic faces: its western face was represented by western classical architecture, its east face by Chinese, Persian, and Assyrian, its north was Gothic and Celtic, and its south, Egyptian. These tropes make their appearance in eighteenth-century landscape gardens. In Désert de Retz, a garden created between 1774 and 1789 by François Racine de Monville, about twenty kilometres west of Paris, one can still see amongst its remaining fabriques: a ruined “gothic” church, a “Tartar” tent (it used to have a Chinese maison, now lost), a pyramid, and the classically inspired Temple of Pan. Similar principles underpin the design of Jardin (now Parc) Monceau that I discuss below. Retz: Figure 1. Tartar tent.Figure 2. Temple of PanStowe Gardens in Buckinghamshire has a similar array of structures (although the classical predominates) including its original Chinese pavillion. It, too, once featured a pyramid designed by the architect and playwright John Vanbrugh, and erected as a memorial to him after his death in 1726. On it was carved a quote from Horace that explicitly referenced the dramaturgical version of theatrum mundi: You have played, eaten enough and drunk enough,Now is time to leave the stage for younger men. (Garnett 19) Stowe’s Elysian Fields, designed by William Kent in the 1730s according to picturesque principles, offered its visitor two narrative choices, to take the Path of Virtue or the Path of Vice, just like a re-imagined morality play. As visitors progressed along their chosen paths they would encounter various fabriques and statues, some carved with inscriptions in either Latin or English, like the Vanbrugh pyramid, that would encourage associations between the ancient world and the contemporary world of the garden’s owner Richard Temple, Lord Cobham, and his circle. Stowe: Figure 3. Chinese Pavillion.Figure 4. Temple of VirtueKent’s background was as a painter and scene designer and he brought a theatrical sensibility to his designs; as Hunt writes, Kent particularly enjoyed designing “recessions into woodland space where ‘wings’ [were] created” (Picturesque 29). Importantly, Kent’s garden drawings reveal his awareness of gardens as “theatrical scenes for human action and interaction, where the premium is upon more personal experiences” and it this spatial dimension that was opened up at Stowe (Picturesque 30).Picturesque garden design emphasised pictorial composition that was similar to stage design and because a garden, like a stage, was a three-dimensional place for human action, it could also function as a set for that action. Unlike a painting, a garden was experiential and time-based and a visitor to it had an experience not unlike, to cautiously use an anachronism, a contemporary promenade performance. The habit of imaginatively wandering through a theatre in book-form, moving associatively from one item to the next, trying to discern the author’s pattern or structure, was one educated Europeans were used to, and a garden provided an embodied dimension to this activity. We can see how this might have been by visiting Parc Monceau in Paris which still contains remnants of the garden designed by Louis Carrogis (known as Carmontelle) for the Duc de Chartres in the 1770s. Carmontelle, like Kent, had a theatrical background and his primary role was as head of entertainments for the Orléans family; as such he was responsible for designing and writing plays for the family’s private theatricals (Hays 449). According to Hunt, Carmontelle intended visitors to Jardin de Monceau to take a specific itinerary through its “quantity of curious things”:Visitors entered by a Chinese gateway, next door to a gothic building that served as a chemical laboratory, and passed through greenhouses and coloured pavilions. Upon pressing a button, a mirrored wall opened into a winter garden painted with trompe-l’œil trees, floored with red sand, filled with exotic plants, and containing at its far end a grotto in which supper parties were held while music was played in the chamber above. Outside was a farm. Then there followed a series of exotic “locations”: a Temple of Mars, a winding river with an island of rocks and a Dutch mill, a dairy, two flower gardens, a Turkish tent poised, minaret-like, above an icehouse, a grove of tombs [. . .], and an Italian vineyard with a classical Bacchus at its center, regularly laid out to contrast with an irregular wood that succeeded it. The final stretches of the itinerary included a Naumachia or Roman water-theatre [. . .], more Turkish and Chinese effects, a ruined castle, yet another water-mill, and an island on which sheep grazed. (Picturesque 121) Monceau: Figure 5. Naumachia.Figure 6. PyramidIn its presentation of a multitude of different times and different places one can trace a line of descent from Jardin de Monceau to the great nineteenth-century World Expos and on to Disneyland. This lineage is not as trite as it seems once we realise that Carmontelle himself intended the garden to represent “all times and all places” and Pope’s four quadrants of the world were represented by fabriques at Monceau (Picturesque 121). As Jardin de Monceau reveals, gardens were also sites for smaller performative interventions such as the popular fêtes champêtres, garden parties in which the participants ate, drank, danced, played music, and acted in comedies. Role playing and masquerade were an important part of the fêtes as we see, for example, in Jean-Antoine Watteau’s Fêtes Vénitiennes (1718–19) where a “Moorishly” attired man addresses (or is dancing with) a young woman before an audience of young men and women, lolling around a fabrique (Watteau). Scenic design in the theatre inspired garden designs and gardens “featured prominently as dramatic locations in intermezzi, operas, and plays”, an exchange that encouraged visitors to gardens to see themselves as performers as much as spectators (Hunt, Gardens 64). A garden, particularly within the liminal aegis of a fête was a site for deceptions, tricks, ruses and revelations, assignations and seductions, all activities which were inherently theatrical; in such a garden visitors could find themselves acting in or watching a comedy or drama of their own devising. Marie-Antoinette built English gardens and a rural “hamlet” at Versailles. She and her intimate circle would retire to rustic cottages, which belied the opulence of their interiors, and dressed in white muslin dresses and straw hats, would play at being dairy maids, milking cows (pre-cleaned by the servants) into fine porcelain buckets (Martin 3). Just as the queen acted in pastoral operas in her theatre in the grounds of the Petit Trianon, her hamlet provided an opportunity for her to “live” a pastoral fantasy. Similarly, François Racine de Monville, who commissioned Désert de Retz, was a talented harpist and flautist and his Temple of Pan was, appropriately, a music room.Versailles: Figure 7. Hamlet ConclusionRichard Steele, Addison’s friend and co-founder of The Spectator, casually invoked theatrum mundi when he wrote in 1720: “the World and the Stage [. . .] have been ten thousand times observed to be the Pictures of one another” (51). Steele’s reiteration of a Renaissance commonplace revealed a different emphasis, an emphasis on the metaphor’s spatial and spectacular elements. Although Steele reasserts the idea that the world and stage resemble each other, he does so through a third level of abstraction: it is as pictures that they have an affinity. World and stage are both positioned for the observer within complementary picture frames and it is as pictures that he or she is invited to make sense of them. The formalist version of theatrum mundi invokes a spectator beholding the world for his (usually!) pleasure and in the process nature itself is transformed. No longer were natural landscapes wildernesses to be tamed and economically exploited, but could become gardens rendered into scenes for their aristocratic owners’ pleasure. Désert de Retz, as its name suggests, was an artfully composed wilderness, a version of the natural world sculpted into scenery. Theatrum mundi, through the aesthetic category of the picturesque, emerged in English landscape style and effected a theatricalised transformation of nature that was enacted in the aristocratic gardens of Europe.ReferencesAddison, Joseph. The Spectator. No. 414 (25 June 1712): 67–70. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.Garnett, Oliver. Stowe. Buckinghamshire. The National Trust, 2011.Hays, David. “Carmontelle's Design for the Jardin de Monceau: A Freemasonic Garden in Late-Eighteenth-Century France.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 32.4 (1999): 447–62.Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.Hunt, John Dixon. Gardens and the Picturesque: Studies in the History of Landscape Architecture. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992.———. The Picturesque Garden in Europe. London: Thames and Hudson, 2002.Marshall, David. The Frame of Art. Fictions of Aesthetic Experience, 1750–1815. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005.Martin, Meredith S. Dairy Queens: The Politics of Pastoral Architecture from Catherine de' Medici to Marie-Antoinette. Harvard: Harvard UP, 2011.McGillivray, Glen. "The Picturesque World Stage." Performance Research 13.4 (2008): 127–39.Pope, Alexander. “Epistle IV. To Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington.” Epistles to Several Persons. London, 1744. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.———. The Temple of Fame: A Vision. By Mr. Pope. 2nd ed. London, 1715. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Shakespeare, William. As You Like It. Ed. Agnes Latham. London: Routledge, 1991.Steele, Richard. The Theatre. No. 7 (23 January 1720).

I have decided to launch a campaign against the skyscraper, that hideous, mediocre form of architecture…. Today we only have an empty version of it, only competing in height.— Rem Koolhaas, “Kool Enough for Beijing?”Figure 1: The CCTV Headquarters—A Courtyard in the Air. Cher Coad, 2020.Introduction: An Anomaly within an Anomaly Construction of Beijing’s China Central Television Headquarters (henceforth CCTV Headquarters) began in 2004 and the building was officially completed in 2012. It is a project by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) headed by Rem Koolhaas (1944-), who has been called “the coolest, hippest, and most cutting-edge architect on the planet”(“Rem Koolhaas Biography”). The CCTV Headquarters is a distinctive feature of downtown Beijing and is heavily associated in the Western world with 21st-century China. It is often used as the backdrop for reports from the China correspondent for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), Bill Birtles. The construction of the CCTV Headquarters, however, was very much an international enterprise. Koolhaas himself is Dutch, and the building was one of the first projects the OMA did outside of America after 9/11. As Koolhaas describes it: we had incredible emphasis on New York for five years, and America for five years, and what we decided to do after September 11 when we realized that, you know, things were going to be different in America: [was] to also orient ourselves eastwards [Koolhaas goes on to describe two projects: the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia and the CCTV Headquarters]. (Rem Koolhaas Interview) Problematically, Koolhaas claims that the building we created for CCTV could never have been conceived by the Chinese and could never have been built by Europeans. It is a hybrid by definition. It was also a partnership, not a foreign imposition…. There was a huge Chinese component from the very beginning. We tried to do a building that conveys that it has emerged from the local situation. (Fraioli 117) Our article reinterprets this reading. We suggest that the OMA’s “incredible emphasis” on America—home of the world’s first skyscraper: the Home Insurance Building built in 1885 in Chicago, Illinois—pivotally spills over into its engagement with China. The emergence of the CCTV Headquarters “from the local situation”, such as it is, is more in spite of Koolhaas’s stated “hybrid” approach than because of it, for what’s missing from his analysis of the CCTV Headquarters’ provenance is the siheyuan or classical Chinese courtyard house. We will argue that the CCTV Headquarters is an anomaly within an anomaly in contemporary Beijing’s urban landscape, to the extent that it turns the typologies of both the (vertical, American) skyscraper and the (horizontal, Chinese) siheyuan on a 90 degree angle. The important point to make here, however, is that these two anomalous elements of the building are not of the same order. While the anomalous re-configuration of the skyscraper typology is clearly part of Koolhaas’s architectural manifesto, it is against his architectural intentionality that the CCTV Headquarters sustains the typology of the siheyuan. This bespeaks the persistent and perhaps functional presence of traditional Chinese architecture and urbanism in the building. Koolhaas’s building contains both starkly evident and more secretive anomalies. Ironically then, there is a certain truth in Koolhaas’s words, beneath the critique we made of it above as an example of American-dominated, homogenising globalisation. And the significance of the CCTV Headquarters’ hybridity as both skyscraper and siheyuan can be elaborated through Daniel M. Abramson’s thesis that a consideration of unbuilt architecture has the potential to re-open architecture to its historical conditions. Roberto Schwarz argues that “forms are the abstract of specific social relationships” (53). Drawing on Schwarz’s work and Abramson’s, we conclude that the historical presence—as secretive anomaly—of the siheyuan in the CCTV Headquarters suggests that the building’s formal debt to the siheyuan (more so than to the American skyscraper) may continue to unsettle the “specific social relationship” of Chinese to Western society (Schwarz 53). The site of this unsettlement, we suggest, is data. The CCTV Headquarters might well be the most data-rich site in all of China—it is, after all, a monumental television station. Suggestively, this wealth of airborne data is literally enclosed within the aerial “courtyard”, with its classical Chinese form, of the CCTV Headquarters. This could hardly be irrelevant in the context of the geo-politics of globalised data. The “form of data”, to coin a phrase, radiates through all the social consequences of data flow and usage, and here the form of data is entwined with a form always already saturated with social consequence. The secretive architectural anomaly of Koolhaas’s building is thus a heterotopic space within the broader Western engagement with China, so much of which relates to flows and captures of data. The Ubiquitous Siheyuan or Classical Chinese Courtyard House According to Ying Liu and Adenrele Awotona, “the courtyard house, a residential compound with buildings surrounding a courtyard on four (or sometimes three) sides, has been representative of housing patterns for over one thousand years in China” (248). Liu and Awotona state that “courtyard house patterns could be found in many parts of China, but the most typical forms are those located in the Old City in Beijing, the capital of China for over eight hundred years” (252). In their reading, the siheyuan is a peculiarly elastic architectural typology, whose influence is present as much in the Forbidden City as in the humble family home (252). Prima facie then, it is not surprising that it has also secreted itself within the architectural form of Koolhaas’s creation. It is important to note, however, that while the “most typical forms” of the siheyuan are indeed still to be found in Beijing, the courtyard house is an increasingly uncommon sight in the Chinese capital. An article in the China Daily from 2004 refers to the “few remaining siheyuan” (“Kool Enough for Beijing?”). That said, all is not lost for the siheyuan. Liu and Awotona discuss how the classical form of the courtyard house has been modified to more effectively house current residents in the older parts of Beijing while protecting “the horizontal planning feature of traditional Beijing” (254). “Basic design principles” (255) of the siheyuan have supported “a transition from the traditional single-household courtyard housing form to a contemporary multi-household courtyard housing form” (254). In this process, approaches of “urban renewal [involving] demolition” and “preservation, renovation and rebuilding” have been taken (255). Donia Zhang extends the work of Liu and Awotona in the elaboration of her thesis that “Chinese-Americans interested in building Chinese-style courtyard houses in America are keen to learn about their architectural heritage” (47). Zhang’s article concludes with an illustration that shows how the siheyuan may be merged with the typical American suburban dwelling (66). The final thing to emphasise about the siheyuan is what Liu and Awotona describe as its “special introverted quality” (249). The form is saturated with social consequence by virtue of its philosophical undergirding. The coincidence of philosophies of Daoism (including feng-shui) and Confucianism in the architecture and spatiality of the classical Chinese courtyard house makes it an exceedingly odd anomaly of passivity and power (250-51). The courtyard itself has a highly charged role in the management of family, social and cultural life, which, we suggest, survives its transposition into novel architectural environments. Figure 2: The CCTV Headquarters—Looking Up at “The Overhang”. Cher Coad, 2020. The CCTV Headquarters: A New Type of Skyscraper? Rem Koolhaas is not the only architect to interrogate the standard skyscraper typology. In his essay from 1999, “The Architecture of the Future”, Norman Foster argues that “the world’s increasing ecological crisis” (278) is in part a function of “unchecked urban sprawl” (279). A new type of skyscraper, he suggests, might at least ameliorate the sprawl of our cities: the Millennium Tower that we have proposed in Tokyo takes a traditional horizontal city quarter—housing, shops, restaurants, cinemas, museums, sporting facilities, green spaces and public transport networks—and turns it on its side to create a super-tall building with a multiplicity of uses … . It would create a virtually self-sufficient, fully self-sustaining community in the sky. (279) Koolhaas follows suit, arguing that “the actual point of the skyscraper—to increase worker density—has been lost. Skyscrapers are now only momentary points of high density spaced so far apart that they don’t actually increase density at all” (“Kool Enough for Beijing?”). Foster’s solution to urban sprawl is to make the horizontal (an urban segment) vertical; Koolhaas’s is to make the vertical horizontal: “we’ve [OMA] come up with two types: a very low-rise series of buildings, or a single, condensed hyperbuilding. What we’re doing with CCTV is a prototype of the hyperbuilding” (“Kool Enough for Beijing?”). Interestingly, the “low-rise” type mentioned here brings to mind the siheyuan—textual evidence, perhaps, that the siheyuan is always already a silent fellow traveller of the CCTV Headquarters project. The CCTV Headquarters is, even at over 200 metres tall itself, an anomaly of horizontalism amidst Beijing’s pervasive skyscraper verticality. As Paul Goldberger reports, “some Beijingers have taken to calling it Big Shorts”, which again evokes horizontality. This is its most obvious anomaly, and a somewhat melancholy reminder of “the horizontal planning feature of traditional Beijing” now mutilated by skyscrapers (Liu and Awotona 254). In the same gesture, however, with which it lays the skyscraper on its side, Koolhaas’s creation raises into the air the shape of the courtyard of a classical Chinese house. To our knowledge, no one has noticed this before, let alone written about it. It is, to be sure, a genuine courtyard shape—not merely an archway or a bridge with unoccupied space between. Pure building entirely surrounds the vertical courtyard shape formed in the air. Most images of the building provide an orientation that maximises the size of its vertical courtyard. To this extent, the (secret) courtyard shape of the building is hidden in plain sight. It is possible, however, to make the courtyard narrow to a mere slit of space, and finally to nothing, by circumnavigating the building. Certain perspectives on the building can even make it look like a more-or-less ordinary skyscraper. But, as a quick google-image search reveals, such views are rare. What seems to make the building special to people is precisely that part of it that is not building. Furthermore, anyone approaching the CCTV Headquarters with the intention of locating a courtyard typology within its form will be disappointed unless they look to its vertical plane. There is no hint of a courtyard at the base of the building. Figure 3: The CCTV Headquarters—View from “The Overhang”. Cher Coad, 2020.Figure 4: The CCTV Headquarters—Looking through the Floor of “The Overhang”. Cher Coad, 2020.Visiting the CCTV Headquarters: A “Special Introverted Quality?” In January 2020, we visited the CCTV Headquarters, ostensibly as audience members for a recording of a science spectacular show. Towards the end of the recording, we were granted a quick tour of the building. It is rare for foreigners to gain access to the sections of the building we visited. Taking the lift about 40 floors up, we arrived at the cantilever level—known informally as “the overhang”. Glass discs in the floor allow one to walk out over nothingness, looking down on ant-like pedestrians. Looking down like this was also to peer into the vacant “courtyard” of the building—into a structure “turned or pushed inward on itself”, which is the anatomical definition of “introverted” (Oxford Languages Dictionary). Workers in the building evinced no great affection for it, and certainly nothing of our wide-eyed wonder. Somebody said, “it’s just a place to work”. One of this article’s authors, Patrick West, seemed to feel the overhang almost imperceptibly vibrating beneath him. (Still, he has also experienced this sensation in conventional skyscrapers.) We were told the rumour that the building has started to tilt over dangerously. Being high in the air, but also high on the air, with nothing but air beneath us, felt edgy—somehow special—our own little world. Koolhaas promotes the CCTV Headquarters as (in paraphrase) “its own city, its own community” (“Kool Enough for Beijing?”). This resonated with us on our visit. Conventional skyscrapers fracture any sense of community through their segregated floor-upon-floor verticality; there is never enough room for a little patch of horizontal urbanism to unroll. Within “the overhang”, the CCTV Headquarters felt unlike a standard skyscraper, as if we were in an urban space magically levitated from the streets below. Sure, we had been told by one of the building’s inhabitants that it was “just a place to work”—but compared to the bleak sterility of most skyscraper work places, it wasn’t that sterile. The phrase Liu and Awotona use of the siheyuan comes to mind here, as we recall our experience; somehow, we had been inside a different type of building, one with its own “special introverted quality” (249). Special, that is, in the sense of containing just so much of horizontal urbanism as allows the building to retain its introverted quality as “its own city” (“Kool Enough for Beijing?”). Figure 5: The CCTV Headquarters—View from “The Overhang”. Cher Coad, 2020.Figure 6: The CCTV Headquarters—Inside “The Overhang”. Cher Coad, 2020. Unbuilt Architecture: The Visionary and the Contingent Within the present that it constitutes, built architecture is surrounded by unbuilt architecture at two interfaces: where the past ends; where the future begins. The soupy mix of urbanism continually spawns myriad architectural possibilities, and any given skyscraper is haunted by all the skyscrapers it might have been. History and the past hang heavily from them. Meanwhile, architectural programme or ambition—such as it is—pulls in the other direction: towards an idealised (if not impossible to practically realise) future. Along these lines, Koolhaas and the OMA are plainly a future-directed, as well as self-aware, architectural unit: at OMA we try to build in the greatest possible tolerance and the least amount of rigidity in terms of embodying one particular moment. We want our buildings to evolve. A building has at least two lives—the one imagined by its maker and the life it lives afterward—and they are never the same. (Fraioli 115) Koolhaas makes the same point even more starkly with regard to the CCTV Headquarters project through his use of the word “prototype”: “what we’re doing with CCTV is a prototype of the hyperbuilding” (“Kool Enough for Beijing?”). At the same time, however, as the presence of the siheyuan within the architecture of the CCTV Headquarters shows, the work of the OMA cannot escape from the superabundance of history, within which, as Roberto Schwarz claims, “forms are the abstract of specific social relationships” (53). Supporting our contentions here, Daniel M. Abramson notes that unbuilt architecture implies two sub-categories … the visionary unbuilt, and the contingent … . Visionary schemes invite a forward glance, down one true, vanguard path to a reformed society and discipline. The contingent unbuilts, conversely, invite a backward glance, along multiple routes history might have gone, each with its own likelihood and validity; no privileged truths. (Abramson)Introducing Abramson’s theory to the example of the CCTV Headquarters, the “visionary unbuilt” lines up with Koolhaas’ thesis that the building is a future-directed “prototype”. while the clearest candidate for the “contingent unbuilt”, we suggest, is the siheyuan. Why? Firstly, the siheyuan is hidden in plain sight, within the framing architecture of the CCTV Headquarters; secondly, it is ubiquitous in Beijing urbanism—little wonder then that it turns up, unannounced, in this Beijing building; thirdly, and related to the second point, the two buildings share a “special introverted quality” (Liu and Awotona 249). “The contingent”, in this case, is the anomaly nestled within the much more blatant “visionary” (or futuristic) anomaly—the hyperbuilding to come—of the Beijing-embedded CCTV Headquarters. Koolhaas’s building’s most fascinating anomaly relates, not to any forecast of the future, but to the subtle persistence of the past—its muted quotation of the ancient siheyuan form. Our article is, in part, a response to Abramson’s invitation to “pursue … the consequences of the unbuilt … [and thus] to open architectural history more fully to history”. We have supplemented Abramson’s idea with Schwarz’s suggestion that “forms are the abstract of specific social relationships” (53). The anomaly of the siheyuan—alongside that of the hyperbuilding—within the CCTV headquarters, opens the building up (paraphrasing Abramson) to a fuller analysis of its historical positioning within Western and Eastern flows of globalisation (or better, as we are about to suggest, of glocalisation). In parallel, its form (paraphrasing Schwarz) abstracts and re-presents this history’s specific social relationships. Figure 7: The CCTV Headquarters—A Courtyard of Data. Cher Coad, 2020.Conclusion: A Courtyard of Data and Tensions of Glocalisation Koolhaas proposes that the CCTV Headquarters was “a partnership, not a foreign imposition” and that the building “emerged from the local situation” (Fraioli 117). To us, this smacks of Pollyanna globalisation. The CCTV Headquarters is, we suggest, more accurately read as an imposition of the American skyscraper typology, albeit in anomalous form. (One might even argue that the building’s horizontal deviation from the vertical norm reinforces that norm.) Still, amidst a thicket of conventionally vertical skyscrapers, the building’s horizontalism does have the anomalous effect of recalling “the horizontal planning feature of traditional Beijing” (Liu and Awotona 254). Buried within its horizontalism, however, lies a more secretive anomaly in the form of a vertical siheyuan. This anomaly, we contend, motivates a terminological shift from “globalisation” to “glocalisation”, for the latter term better captures the notion of a lack of reconciliation between the “global” and the “local” in the building. Koolhaas’s visionary architectural programme explicitly advances anomaly. The CCTV Headquarters radically reworks the skyscraper typology as the prototype of a hyperbuilding defined by horizontalism. Certainly, such horizontalism recalls the horizontal plane of pre-skyscraper Beijing and, if faintly, that plane’s ubiquitous feature: the classical courtyard house. Simultaneously, however, the siheyuan has a direct if secretive presence within the morphology of the CCTV Headquarters, even as any suggestion of a vertical courtyard is strikingly absent from Koolhaas’s vanguard manifesto. To this extent, the hyperbuilding fits within Abramson’s category of “the visionary unbuilt”, while the siheyuan aligns with Abramson’s “contingent unbuilt” descriptor. The latter is the “might have been” that, largely under the pressure of its ubiquity as Beijing vernacular architecture, “very nearly is”. Drawing on Schwarz’s idea that “forms are the abstract of specific social relationships”, we propose that the siheyuan, as anomalous form of the CCTV Headquarters, is a heterotopic space within the hybrid global harmony (to paraphrase Koolhaas) purportedly represented by the building (53). In this space thus formed collides the built-up historical and philosophical social intensity of the classical Chinese courtyard house and the intensities of data flows and captures that help constitute the predominantly capitalist and neo-liberalist “social relationship” of China and the Western world—the world of the skyscraper (Schwarz). Within the siheyuan of the CCTV Headquarters, globalised data is literally enveloped by Daoism and Confucianism; it is saturated with the social consequence of local place. The term “glocalisation” is, we suggest, to be preferred here to “globalisation”, because of how it better reflects such vernacular interruptions to the hegemony of globalised space. Forms delineate social relationships, and data, which both forms and is formed by social relationships, may be formed by architecture as much as anything else within social space. Attention to the unbuilt architectural forms (vanguard and contingent) contained within the CCTV Headquarters reveals layers of anomaly that might, ultimately, point to another form of architecture entirely, in which glocal tensions are not only recognised, but resolved. Here, Abramson’s historical project intersects, in the final analysis, with a worldwide politics. Figure 8: The CCTV Headquarters—A Sound Stage in Action. Cher Coad, 2020. References Abramson, Daniel M. “Stakes of the Unbuilt.” Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative. 20 July 2020. <http://we-aggregate.org/piece/stakes-of-the-unbuilt>.Foster, N. “The Architecture of the Future.” The Architecture Reader: Essential Writings from Vitruvius to the Present. Ed. A. Krista Sykes. New York: George Braziller, 2007: 276-79. Fraioli, Paul. “The Invention and Reinvention of the City: An Interview with Rem Koolhaas.” Journal of International Affairs 65.2 (Spring/Summer 2012): 113-19. Goldberger, Paul. “Forbidden Cities: Beijing’s Great New Architecture Is a Mixed Blessing for the City.” The New Yorker—The Sky Line. 23 June 2008. <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/06/30/forbidden-cities>.“Kool Enough for Beijing?” China Daily. 2 March 2004. <https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-03/02/content_310800.htm>. Liu, Ying, and Adenrele Awotona. “The Traditional Courtyard House in China: Its Formation and Transition.” Evolving Environmental Ideals—Changing Way of Life, Values and Design Practices: IAPS 14 Conference Proceedings. IAPS. Stockholm, Sweden: Royal Institute of Technology, 1996: 248-60. <https://iaps.architexturez.net/system/files/pdf/1202bm1029.content.pdf>.Oxford Languages Dictionary. “Rem Koolhaas Biography.” Encyclopedia of World Biography. 20 July 2020. <https://www.notablebiographies.com/news/Ge-La/Koolhaas-Rem.html>. “Rem Koolhaas Interview.” Manufacturing Intellect. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. 2003. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oW187PwSjY0>.Schwarz, Roberto. Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture. New York: Verso, 1992. Zhang, Donia. “Classical Courtyard Houses of Beijing: Architecture as Cultural Artifact.” Space and Communication 1.1 (Dec. 2015): 47-68.

Iain Sinclair is a writer who is synonymous with a city. Sinclair’s sustained literary engagement with London from the mid 1960s has produced a singular account of place in that city (Bond; Baker; Seale “Iain Sinclair”). Sinclair is a leading figure in a resurgent and rebranded psychogeographic literature of the 1990s (Coverley) where on-foot wandering through the city brings forth narrative. Sinclair’s wandering, materialised as walking, is central to the claim of intimacy with the city that underpins his authority as a London writer. Furthermore, embodied encounters with the urban landscape through the experience of “getting lost” in urban environments are key to his literary methodology. Through works such as Lights Out for the Territory (2007), Sinclair has been repeatedly cast as a key chronicler of London, a city focused with capitalist determination on the future while redolent, even weighted, with a past that, as Sinclair says himself, is there for the wanderer to uncover (Dirda).In this essay, we examine how Sinclair’s wandering makes place in London. We are interested not only in Sinclair’s wandering as a spatial or cultural “intervention” in the city, as it is frequently positioned in critiques of his writing (Wolfreys). We are also interested in how Sinclair’s literary methodology of wandering undertakes its own work of placemaking in material ways that are often obscured because of how his work is positioned within particular traditions of wandering, including those of psychogeography and the flâneur. It is our contention that Sinclair’s wandering has an ambivalent relationship with place in London. It belongs to the tradition of the wanderer as a radical outsider with an alternative practice and perspective on place, but also contributes to contemporary placemaking in a global, neo-liberal London.Wandering as Literary MethodologyIain Sinclair’s writing about London is considered both “visionary” and “documentary” in its ambitions and has been praised as “giving voice to lost, erased, or forgotten histories or memories” (Baker 63). Sinclair is the “raging prophet” (Kerr) for a transforming and disappearing city. This perspective is promulgated by Sinclair himself, who in interviews refers to his practice as “bearing witness” to the erasures of particular place cultures, communities, and their histories that a rapidly gentrifying city entails (Sinclair quoted in O’Connell). The critical reception of Sinclair’s perambulation mostly follows Michel de Certeau’s observation that walking is a kind of reading/writing practice that “makes the invisible legible” (Baker 28). Sinclair’s wandering, and the encounters it mobilises, are a form of storytelling, which bring into proximity complex and forgotten narratives of place.Sinclair may “dive in” to the city, yet his work writing and rewriting urban space is usually positioned as representational. London is a text, “a system of signs […], the material city becoming the (non-material) map” (Baker 29). Sinclair’s wandering is understood as writing about urban transformation in London, rather than participating in it through making place. The materiality of Sinclair’s wandering in the city—his walking, excavating, encountering—may be acknowledged, but it is effectively dematerialised by the critical focus on his self-conscious literary treatment of place in London. Simon Perril has called Sinclair a “modernist magpie” (312), both because his mode of intertextuality borrows from Modernist experiments in form, style, and allusion, and because the sources of many of his intertexts are Modernist writers. Sinclair mines a rich seam of literature, Modernist and otherwise, that is produced in and about London, as well as genealogies of other legendary London wanderers. The inventory includes: “the rich midden of London’s sub-cultural fiction, terse proletarian narratives of lives on the criminous margin” (Sinclair Lights Out, 312) in the writing of Alexander Baron and Emanuel Litvinoff; the small magazine poetry of the twentieth century British Poetry Revival; and the forgotten suburban writings of David Gascoyne, “a natural psychogeographer, tracking the heat spores of Rimbaud, from the British Museum to Wapping and Limehouse” (Atkins and Sinclair 146). Sinclair’s intertextual “loiterature” (Chambers), his wayward, aleatory wandering through London’s archives, is one of two interconnected types of wandering in Sinclair’s literary methodology. The other is walking through the city. In a 2017 interview, Sinclair argued that the two were necessarily interconnected in writing about place in London:The idea of writing theoretical books about London burgeoned as a genre. At the same time, the coffee table, touristy books about London emerged—the kinds of books that can be written on Google, rather than books that are written by people of the abyss. I’m interested in someone who arrives and takes this journey into the night side of London in the tradition of Mayhew or Dickens, who goes out there and is constantly wandering and finding and having collisions and bringing back stories and shaping a narrative. There are other people who are doing things in a similar way, perhaps with a more journalistic approach, finding people and interviewing them and taking their stories. But many books about London are very conceptual and just done by doing research sitting at a laptop. I don’t think this challenges the city. It’s making a parallel city of the imagination, of literature. (Sinclair quoted in O'Connell)For Sinclair, then, walking is as much a literary methodology as reading, archival research, or intertextuality is.Wandering as Urban InterventionPerhaps one of Sinclair’s most infamous walks is recorded in London Orbital (2003), where he wandered the 127 miles of London’s M25 ring road. London Orbital is Sinclair’s monumental jeremiad against the realpolitik of late twentieth-century neo-liberalism and the politicised spatialisation and striation of London by successive national and local governments. The closed loop of the M25 motorway recommends itself to governmental bodies as a regulated form that functions as “a prophylactic, […] a tourniquet” (1) controlling the flow (with)in and (with)out of London. Travellers’ movements are impeded when the landscape is cut up by the motorway. Walking becomes a marginalised activity it its wake, and the surveillance and distrust to which Sinclair is subject realises the concerns foreshadowed by Walter Benjamin regarding the wanderings of the flâneur. In the Arcades Project, Benjamin quoted a 1936 newspaper article, pessimistically titled “Le dernier flâneur” [The last flâneur]:A man who goes for a walk ought not to have to concern himself with any hazards he may run into, or with the regulations of a city. […] But he cannot do this today without taking a hundred precautions, without asking the advice of the police department, without mixing with a dazed and breathless herd, for whom the way is marked out in advance by bits of shining metal. If he tries to collect the whimsical thoughts that may have come to mind, very possibly occasioned by sights on the street, he is deafened by car horns, [and] stupefied by loud talkers […]. (Jaloux, quoted in Benjamin 435)Susan Buck-Morss remarks that flâneurs are an endangered species in the contemporary city: “like tigers, or pre-industrial tribes, [they] are cordoned off on reservations, preserved within the artificially created environments of pedestrian streets, parks, and underground passages” (344). To wander from these enclosures, or from delineated paths, is to invite suspicion as the following unexceptional anecdote from London Orbital illustrates:NO PUBLIC RITE [sic] OF WAY. Footpaths, breaking towards the forest, have been closed off. You are obliged to stick to the Lee Navigation, the contaminated ash conglomerate of the Grey Way. Enfield has been laid out in grids; long straight roads, railways, fortified blocks. […] In a canalside pub, they deny all knowledge of the old trace. Who walks? “There used to be a road,” they admit. It’s been swallowed up in this new development, Enfield Island Village. […] The hard hat mercenaries of Fairview New Homes […] are suspicious of our cameras. Hands cover faces. Earth-movers rumble straight at us. A call for instruction muttered into their lapels: “Strangers. Travellers.” (69-70)There is an excess to wandering, leading to incontinent ideas, extreme verbiage, compulsive digression, excessive quotation. De Certeau in his study of the correlation between navigating urban and textual space speaks of “the unlimited diversity” of the walk, highlighting its improvised nature, and the infinite possibilities it proposes. Footsteps are equated with thoughts, multiplying unchecked: “They are myriad, but do not compose a series. […] Their swarming mass is an innumerable collection of singularities” (97). Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the erratic trajectories, digression, and diversion of Sinclair’s wanderings are aligned with a tradition of the flâneur as homo ludens (Huizinga) or practitioner of the Situationist derive, as theorised by Guy Debord:The dérive entails playful-constructive behaviour and awareness of psychogeographical effects, which completely distinguishes it from the classical notions of the journey or the stroll. In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. The element of chance is less determinant than one might think: from the dérive point of view, cities have a psychogeographical relief, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones. (“Theory of the dérive” 50)Like Charles Baudelaire’s painter of modern life, Sinclair is happily susceptible to distraction. The opening essay of Lights Out is a journey through London with the ostensible purpose of diligently researching and reporting on the language he detects on his travels. However, the map for the walk is only ever half-hearted, and Sinclair admits to “hoping for some accident to bring about a final revision” (5). Sinclair’s walks welcome the random and when he finds the detour to disfigure his route, he is content: “Already the purity of the [walk] has been despoiled. Good” (8). Wandering’s Double Agent: Sinclair’s Placemaking in LondonMuch has been made of the flâneur as he appears in Sinclair’s work (Seale “Eye-Swiping”). Nevertheless, Sinclair echoes Walter Benjamin in declaring the flâneur, as previously stereotyped, to be impossible in the contemporary city. The fugeur is one détournement (Debord “Détournement”) of the flâneur that Sinclair proposes. In London Orbital, Sinclair repeatedly refers to his wandering as a fugue. A fugue is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as a “flight from or loss of the awareness of one’s identity, sometimes involving wandering away from home, and often occurring as a reaction to shock or emotional stress.” As Sinclair explains:I found the term fugueur more attractive than the now overworked flâneur. Fugueur had the smack of a swear word […]. Fugueur was the right job description for our walk, our once-a-month episodes of transient mental illness. Madness as a voyage. […] The fugue is both drift and fracture. (London Orbital, 146)Herbert Marcuse observed that to refuse to comply with capitalist behaviour is to be designated irrational, and thus relegate oneself to the periphery of society (9). The neo-liberal city’s enforcement of particular spatial and temporal modalities that align with the logic of purpose, order, and productivity is antagonistic to wandering. The fugue state, then, can rupture the restrictive logic of capitalism’s signifying chains through regaining forcibly expurgated ideas and memories. The walk around the M25 has an unreason to it: the perversity of wandering a thoroughfare designed for cars. In another, oft-quoted passage from Lights Out, Sinclair proposes another avatar of the flâneur:The concept of “strolling”, aimless urban wandering […] had been superseded. We had moved into the age of the stalker; journeys made with intent—sharp-eyed and unsponsored. The stalker was our role model: purposed hiking, not dawdling, nor browsing. No time for the savouring of reflections in shop windows, admiration for Art Nouveau ironwork, attractive matchboxes rescued from the gutter. This was walking with a thesis. With a prey. […] The stalker is a stroller who sweats, a stroller who knows where he is going, but not why or how. (75)Not only has the flâneur evolved into something far more exacting and purposeful, but as we want to illuminate, the flâneur’s wandering has evolved into something more material than transforming urban experience and encounter into art or literature as Baudelaire described. In a recent interview, Sinclair stated: The walker exists in a long tradition, and, for me, it’s really vital to simply be out there every day—not only because it feels good, but because in doing it you contribute to the microclimate of the city. As you withdraw energy from the city, you are also giving energy back. People are noticing you. You’re doing something, you’re there, the species around you absorb your presence into it, and you become part of this animate entity called the city. (Sinclair quoted in O'Connell)Sinclair’s acknowledgement that he is acting upon the city through his wandering is also an acknowledgement of a material, grounded interplay between what Jonathan Raban has called the “soft” and the “hard” city: “The city as we might imagine it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate in maps and statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture” (quoted in Manley 6). Readers and critics may gravitate to the soft city of Sinclair, but as Donald puts it, “The challenge is to draw the connections between place, archive, and imagination, not only by tracing those links in literary representations of London, but also by observing and describing the social, cultural, and subjective functions of London literature and London imagery” (in Manley, 262).Sinclair’s most recent longform book, The Last London (2017), is bracketed at both beginning and end with the words from the diarist of the Great Fire of 1666, John Evelyn: “London was, but is no more.” Sinclair’s evocation of the disaster that razed seventeenth-century London is a declaration that twenty-first century London, too, has been destroyed. This time by an unsavoury crew of gentrifiers, property developers, politicians, hyper-affluent transplants, and the creative classes. Writers are a sub-category of this latter group. Ambivalence and complicity are always there for Sinclair. On the one hand, his wanderings have attributed cultural value to previously overlooked aspects of London by the very virtue of writing about them. On the other hand, Sinclair argues that the value of these parts of the city hinges on their neglect by the dominant culture, which, of course, is no longer possible when his writing illuminates them. Certainly, wandering the city excavating the secret histories of cities has acquired an elevated cultural currency since Sinclair started writing. In making the East End “so gothically juicy”, Sinclair inaugurated a stream of new imaginings from “young acolyte psychogeographers” (McKay). Moreover, McKay points out that “Sinclair once wryly noted that anywhere he ‘nominated’ soon became an estate agent vision of luxury lifestyle”.Iain Sinclair’s London wanderings, then, call for a recognition that is more-than-literary. They are what we have referred to elsewhere as “worldly texts” (Potter and Seale, forthcoming), texts that have more-than-literary effects and instead are materially entangled in generating transformative conditions of place. Our understanding sits alongside the insights of literary geography, especially Sheila Hones’s concept of the text as a “spatial event”. In this reckoning, texts are spatio-temporal happenings that are neither singular nor have one clear “moment” of emergence. Rather, texts come into being across time and space, and in this sense can be understood as assemblages that include geographical locations, material contexts, and networks of production and reception. Literary effects are materially, collaboratively, and spatially generated in the world and have “territorial consequences”, as Jon Anderson puts it (127). Sinclair’s writings, we contend, can be seen as materialising versions of place that operate outside the assemblage of “literary” production and realise spatial and socio-economic consequence.Sinclair’s work does more than mimetically reproduce a “lost” London, or angrily write against the grain of neo-liberal gentrification. It is, in a sense, a geographic constituent that cannot be disaggregated from the contemporary dynamics of the privileges and exclusions of city. This speaks to the author’s ambivalence about his role as a central figure in London writing. For example, it has been noted that Sinclair is “aware of the charge that he’s been responsible as anyone for the fetishization of London’s decrepitude, contributing to an aesthetic of urban decay that is now ubiquitous” (Day). Walking the East End in what he has claimed to be his “last” London book (2017), Sinclair is horrified by the prevalence of what he calls “poverty chic” at the erstwhile Spitalfields Market: a boutique called “Urban Decay” is selling high-end lipsticks with an optional eye makeover. Next door is the “Brokedown Palace […] offering expensive Patagonia sweaters and pretty colourful rucksacks.” Ironically, the aesthetics of decline and ruin that Sinclair has actively brought to public notice over the last thirty years are contributing to this urban renewal. It could also be argued that Sinclair’s wandering is guilty of “the violence of spokesmanship”, which sublimates the voices of others (Weston 274), and is surely no longer the voice of the wanderer as marginalised outsider. When textual actors become networked with place, there can be extra-textual consequences, such as Sinclair’s implication in the making of place in a globalised and gentrified London. It shifts understanding of Sinclair’s wandering from representational and hermeneutic interpretation towards materialism: from what wandering means to what wandering does. From this perspective, Sinclair’s wandering and writing does not end with the covers of his books. The multiple ontologies of Sinclair’s worldly texts expand and proliferate through the plurality of composing relations, which, in turn, produce continuous and diverse iterations in an actor-network with place in London. Sinclair’s wanderings produce an ongoing archive of the urban that continues to iteratively make place, through multiple texts and narrative engagements, including novels, non-fiction accounts, journalism, interviews, intermedia collaborations, and assembling with the texts of others—from the many other London authors to whom Sinclair refers, to the tour guides who lead Time Out walking tours of “Sinclair’s London”. Place in contemporary London therefore assembles across and through an actor-network in which Sinclair’s wandering participates. Ultimately, Sinclair’s wandering and placemaking affirm Manley’s statement that “the urban environment in which (and in response to which) so much of English literature has been written has itself been constructed in many respects by its representation in that literature—by the ideas, images, and styles created by writers who have experienced or inhabited it” (2).ReferencesAnderson, Jon. “Towards an Assemblage Approach to Literary Geography.” Literary Geographies 1.2 (2015): 120–137.Atkins, Marc and Iain Sinclair. Liquid City. London: Reaktion, 1999.Baker, Brian. Iain Sinclair. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007.Baudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. Trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne. London and New York: Phaidon, 1995.Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Ed. Rolf Tiedmann. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2002.Bond, Robert. Iain Sinclair. Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2005.Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989.Chambers, Russ. Loiterature. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.Coverley, Merlin. Psychogeography. Harpenden: Pocket Essentials, 2005.Day, Jon. “The Last London by Iain Sinclair Review—an Elegy for a City Now Lost.” The Guardian 27 Sep. 2017. 7 July 2017 <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/27/last-london-iain-sinclair-review>.Debord, Guy. “Theory of the Dérive.” Situationist International Anthology. Trans. and ed. Ken Knabb. Berkeley, Calif.: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981.———. “Détournement as Negation and Prelude.” Situationist International Anthology. Trans. and ed. Ken Knabb. Berkeley, Calif.: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981.De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.Dirda, Michael. “Modern Life, as Seen by a Writer without a Smart Phone.” The Washington Post 17 Jan. 2018. 4 July 2018 <https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/modern-life-as-seen-by-an-artist-without-a-phone/2018/01/17/6d0b779c-fb07-11e7-8f66-2df0b94bb98a_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.9333f36c6212>.Hones, Sheila. “Text as It Happens: Literary Geography.” Geography Compass 2.5 (2008): 301–1307.Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955.Kerr, Joe. “The Habit of Hackney: Joe Kerr on Iain Sinclair.” Architects’ Journal 11 Mar. 2009. 8 July 2017 <https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/home/the-habit-of-hackney-joe-kerr-on-iain-sinclair/1995066.article>.Manley, Lawrence, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. London and New York: Routledge, 2002.McKay, Sinclair. “Is It Time for All Lovers of London to Pack up?” The Spectator 2 Sep. 2017. 6 July 2018 <https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/09/is-it-time-for-all-lovers-of-london-to-pack-up/>.O’Connell, Teresa. “Iain Sinclair: Walking Is a Democracy.” Guernica 16 Nov. 2017. 7 July 2018 <https://www.guernicamag.com/iain-sinclair-walking-democracy/>.Perril, Simon. “A Cartography of Absence: The Work of Iain Sinclair.” Comparative Criticism 19 (1997): 309–339.Potter, Emily, and Kirsten Seale. “The Worldly Text and the Production of More-than-Literary Place: Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip and Melbourne’s ‘Inner North’”. Cultural Geographies (forthcoming 2019).Seale, Kirsten. “‘Eye-Swiping’ London: Iain Sinclair, Photography and the Flâneur.” Literary London 3.2 (2005).———. “Iain Sinclair’s Archive.” Sydney Review of Books. 10 Sep. 2018. 12 July 2019 <https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/sinclair-last-london/>.Sinclair, Iain. Dining on Stones, or, The Middle Ground. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2004.———. Lights Out for the Territory. London: Granta, 1997.———. London Orbital. London: Penguin, 2003.———. The Last London: True Fictions from an Unreal City. London: Oneworld Publications, 2017.Weston, Daniel. “‘Against the Grand Project’: Iain Sinclair’s Local London.” Contemporary Literature 56.2 (2015): 255–280. Wolfreys, Julian. Writing London: Materiality, Memory, Spectrality Volume 2. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

This article proposes that the growing popularity of reality television in the southernmost state of India, Kerala – disseminated locally and throughout the Indian diaspora – is not the product of an innocuous nostalgia for a fast-disappearing regional identity but rather a spectacular example of an emergent ideology that displaces cultural memory, collective identity, and secular nationalism with new, globalised forms of public sentiment. Further, it is arguable that this g/local media culture also displaces hard-won secular feminist constructions of gender and the contemporary modern “Indian woman.” Shows like Idea Star Singer (hereafter ISS) (Malayalam [the language spoken in Kerala] television’s most popular reality television series), based closely on American Idol, is broadcast worldwide to dozens of nations including the US, the UK, China, Russia, Sri Lanka, and several nations in the Middle East and the discussion that follows attempts both to account for this g/local phenomenon and to problematise it. ISS concentrates on staging the diversity and talent of Malayalee youth and, in particular, their ability to sing ‘pitch-perfect’, by inviting them to perform the vast catalogue of traditional Malayalam songs. However, inasmuch as it is aimed at both a regional and diasporic audience, ISS also allows for a diversity of singing styles displayed through the inclusion of a variety of other songs: some sung in Tamil, some Hindi, and some even English. This leads us to ask a number of questions: in what ways are performers who subscribe to regional or global models of televisual style rewarded or punished? In what ways are performers who exemplify differences in terms of gender, sexuality, religion, class, or ability punished? Further, it is arguable that this show—packaged as the “must-see” spectacle for the Indian diaspora—re-imagines a traditional past and translates it (under the rubric of “reality” television) into a vulgar commodification of both “classical” and “folk” India: an India excised of radical reform, feminists, activists, and any voices of multiplicity clamouring for change. Indeed, it is my contention that, although such shows claim to promote women’s liberation by encouraging women to realise their talents and ambitions, the commodification of the “stars” as televisual celebrities points rather to an anti-feminist imperial agenda of control and domination. Normalising Art: Presenting the Juridical as Natural Following Foucault, we can, indeed, read ISS as an apparatus of “normalisation.” While ISS purports to be “about” music, celebration, and art—an encouragement of art for art’s sake—it nevertheless advocates the practice of teaching as critiqued by Foucault: “the acquisition and knowledge by the very practice of the pedagogical activity and a reciprocal, hierarchised observation” (176), so that self-surveillance is built into the process. What appears on the screen is, in effect, the presentation of a juridically governed body as natural: the capitalist production of art through intense practice, performance, and corrective measures that valorise discipline and, at the end, produce ‘good’ and ‘bad’ subjects. The Foucauldian isomorphism of punishment with obligation, exercise with repetition, and enactment of the law is magnified in the traditional practice of music, especially Carnatic, or the occasional Hindustani refrain that separates those who come out of years of training in the Gury–Shishya mode (teacher–student mode, primarily Hindu and privileged) from those who do not (Muslims, working-class, and perhaps disabled students). In the context of a reality television show sponsored by Idea Cellular Ltd (a phone company with global outposts), the systems of discipline are strictly in line with the capitalist economy. Since this show depends upon the vast back-catalogue of film songs sung by playback singers from the era of big studio film-making, it may be seen to advocate a mimetic rigidity that ossifies artistic production, rather than offering encouragement to a new generation of artists who might wish to take the songs and make them their own. ISS, indeed, compares and differentiates the participants’ talents through an “opaque” system of evaluations which the show presents as transparent, merit-based and “fair”: as Foucault observes, “the perpetual penalty that traverses all points and supervises every instant in the disciplinary institutions compares, differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes, excludes. In short, it normalizes” (183). On ISS, this evaluation process (a panel of judges who are renowned singers and composers, along with a rotating guest star, such as an actor) may be seen as a scopophilic institution where training and knowledge are brought together, transforming “the economy of visibility into the exercise of power” (187). The contestants, largely insignificant as individuals but seen together, at times, upon the stage, dancing and singing and performing practised routines, represent a socius constituting the body politic. The judges, enthroned on prominent and lush seats above the young contestants, the studio audience and, in effect, the show’s televised transnational audience, deliver judgements that “normalise” these artists into submissive subjectivity. In fact, despite the incoherence of the average judgement, audiences are so engrossed in the narrative of “marks” (a clear vestige of the education and civilising mission of the colonial subject under British rule) that, even in the glamorous setting of vibrating music, artificial lights, and corporate capital, Indians can still be found disciplining themselves according to the values of the West. Enacting Keraleeyatham for Malayalee Diaspora Ritty Lukose’s study on youth and gender in Kerala frames identity formations under colonialism, nationalism, and capitalism as she teases out ideas of resistance and agency by addressing the complex mediations of consumption or consumptive practices. Lukose reads “consumer culture as a complex site of female participation and constraint, enjoyment and objectification” (917), and finds the young, westernised female as a particular site of consumer agency. According to this theory, the performers on ISS and the show’s MC, Renjini Haridas, embody this body politic. The young performers all dress in the garb of “authentic identity”, sporting saris, pawaadu-blouse, mundum-neertha, salwaar-kameez, lehenga-choli, skirts, pants, and so on. This sartorial diversity is deeply gendered and discursively rich; the men have one of two options: kurta-mundu or some such variation and the pant–shirt combination. The women, especially Renjini (educated at St Theresa’s College in Kochi and former winner of Ms Kerala beauty contest) evoke the MTV DJs of the mid-1990s and affect a pidgin-Malayalam spliced with English: Renjini’s cool “touching” of the contestants and airy gestures remove her from the regional masses; and yet, for Onam (festival of Kerala), she dresses in the traditional cream and gold sari; for Id (high holy day for Muslims), she dresses in some glittery salwaar-kameez with a wrap on her head; and for Christmas, she wears a long dress. This is clearly meant to show her ability to embody different socio-religious spheres simultaneously. Yet, both she and all the young female contestants speak proudly about their authentic Kerala identity. Ritty Lukose spells this out as “Keraleeyatham.” In the vein of beauty pageants, and the first-world practice of indoctrinating all bodies into one model of beauty, the youngsters engage in exuberant performances yet, once their act is over, revert back to the coy, submissive docility that is the face of the student in the traditional educational apparatus. Both left-wing feminists and BJP activists write their ballads on the surface of women’s bodies; however, in enacting the chethu or, to be more accurate, “ash-push” (colloquialism akin to “hip”) lifestyle advocated by the show (interrupted at least half a dozen times by lengthy sequences of commercials for jewellery, clothing, toilet cleaners, nutritious chocolate bars, hair oil, and home products), the participants in this show become the unwitting sites of a large number of competing ideologies. Lukose observes the remarkable development from the peasant labor-centered Kerala of the 1970s to today’s simulacrum: “Keraleeyatham.” When discussing the beauty contests staged in Kerala in the 1990s, she discovers (through analysis of the dress and Sanskrit-centred questions) that: “Miss Kerala must be a naden pennu [a girl of the native/rural land] in her dress, comportment, and knowledge. Written onto the female bodies of a proliferation of Miss Keralas, the nadu, locality itself, becomes transportable and transposable” (929). Lukose observes that these women have room to enact their passions and artistry only within the metadiegetic space of the “song and dance” spectacle; once they leave it, they return to a modest, Kerala-gendered space in which the young female performers are quiet to the point of inarticulate, stuttering silence (930). However, while Lukose’s term, Keraleeyatham, is useful as a sociological compass, I contend that it has even more complex connotations. Its ethos of “Nair-ism” (Nayar was the dominant caste identity in Kerala), which could have been a site of resistance and identity formation, instead becomes a site of nationalist, regional linguistic supremacy arising out of Hindu imaginary. Second, this ideology could not have been developed in the era of pre-globalised state-run television but now, in the wake of globalisation and satellite television, we see this spectacle of “discipline and punish” enacted on the world stage. Thus, although I do see a possibility for a more positive Keraleeyatham that is organic, inclusive, and radical, for the moment we have a hegemonic, exclusive, and hierarchical statist approach to regional identity that needs to be re-evaluated. Articulating the Authentic via the Simulacrum Welcome to the Malayalee matrix. Jean Baudrillard’s simulacrum is our entry point into visualising the code of reality television. In a state noted for its distinctly left-leaning politics and Communist Party history which underwent radical reversal in the 1990s, the political front in Kerala is still dominated by the LDF (Left Democratic Front), and resistance to the state is an institutionalised and satirised daily event, as marked by the marchers who gather and stop traffic at Palayam in the capital city daily at noon. Issues of poverty and corporate disenfranchisement plague the farming and fishing communities while people suffer transportation tragedies, failures of road development and ferry upkeep on a daily basis. Writers and activists rail against imminent aerial bombing of Maoists insurgent groups, reading in such statist violence repression of the Adivasi (indigenous) peoples scattered across many states of eastern and southern India. Alongside energy and ration supply issues, politics light up the average Keralaite, and yet the most popular “reality” television show reflects none of it. Other than paying faux multicultural tribute to all the festivals that come and go (such as Id, Diwaali, Christmas, and Kerala Piravi [Kerala Day on 1 November]), mainly through Renjini’s dress and chatter, ISS does all it can to remove itself from the turmoil of the everyday. Much in the same way that Bollywood cinema has allowed the masses to escape the oppressions of “the everyday,” reality television promises speculative pleasure produced on the backs of young performers who do not even have to be paid for their labour. Unlike Malayalam cinema’s penchant for hard-hitting politics and narratives of unaccounted for, everyday lives in neo-realist style, today’s reality television—with its excessive sound and light effects, glittering stages and bejewelled participants, repeat zooms, frontal shots, and artificial enhancements—exploits the paradox of hyper-authenticity (Rose and Wood 295). In her useful account of America’s top reality show, American Idol, Katherine Meizel investigates the fascination with the show’s winners and the losers, and the drama of an American “ideal” of diligence and ambition that is seen to be at the heart of the show. She writes, “It is about selling the Dream—regardless of whether it results in success or failure—and about the enactment of ideology that hovers at the edges of any discourse about American morality. It is the potential of great ambition, rather than of great talent, that drives these hopefuls and inspires their fans” (486). In enacting the global via the site of the local (Malayalam and Tamil songs primarily), ISS assumes the mantle of Americanism through the plain-spoken, direct commentaries of the singers who, like their US counterparts, routinely tell us how all of it has changed their lives. In other words, this retrospective meta-narrative becomes more important than the show itself. True to Baudrillard’s theory, ISS blurs the line between actual need and the “need” fabricated by the media and multinational corporations like Idea Cellular and Confident Group (which builds luxury homes, primarily for the new bourgeoisie and nostalgic “returnees” from the diaspora). The “New Kerala” is marked, for the locals, by extravagant (mostly unoccupied) constructions of photogenic homes in garish colours, located in the middle of chaos: the traditional nattumparathu (countryside) wooden homes, and traffic congestion. The homes, promised at the end of these shows, have a “value” based on the hyper-real economy of the show rather than an actual utility value. Yet those who move from the “old” world to the “new” do not always fare well. In local papers, the young artists are often criticised for their new-found haughtiness and disinclination to visit ill relatives in hospital: a veritable sin in a culture that places the nadu and kin above all narratives of progress. In other words, nothing quite adds up: the language and ideologies of the show, espoused most succinctly by its inarticulate host, is a language that obscures its distance from reality. ISS maps onto its audience the emblematic difference between “citizen” and “population”. Through the chaotic, state-sanctioned paralegal devices that allow the slum-dwellers and other property-less people to dwell in the cities, the voices of the labourers (such as the unions) have been silenced. It is a nation ever more geographically divided between the middle-classes which retreat into their gated neighbourhoods, and the shanty-town denizens who are represented by the rising class of religio-fundamentalist leaders. While the poor vote in the Hindu hegemony, the middle classes text in their votes to reality shows like ISS. Partha Chatterjee speaks of the “new segregated and exclusive spaces for the managerial and technocratic elite” (143) which is obsessed by media images, international travel, suburbanisation, and high technology. I wish to add to this list the artificially created community of ISS performers and stars; these are, indeed, the virtual and global extension of Chatterjee’s exclusive, elite communities, decrying the new bourgeois order of Indian urbanity, repackaged as Malayalee, moneyed, and Nayar. Meanwhile, the Hindu Right flexes its muscle under the show’s glittery surface: neither menacing nor fundamentalist, it is now “hip” to be Hindu. Thus while, on the surface, ISS operates according to the cliché, musicinu mathamilla (“music has no religion”), I would contend that it perpetuates a colonising space of Hindu-nationalist hegemony which standardises music appreciation, flattens music performance into an “art” developed solely to serve commercial cinema, and produces a dialectic of Keraleeyatham that erases the multiplicities of its “real.” This ideology, meanwhile, colonises from within. The public performance plays out in the private sphere where the show is consumed; at the same time, the private is inserted into the public with SMS calls that ultimately help seal the juridicality of the show and give the impression of “democracy.” Like the many networks that bring the sentiments of melody and melancholy to our dinner table, I would like to offer you this alternative account of ISS as part of a bid for a more vociferous, and critical, engagement with reality television and its modes of production. Somehow we need to find a way to savour, once again, the non-mimetic aspects of art and to salvage our darkness from the glitter of the “normalising” popular media. References Baudrillard, Jean. The Mirror of Production. Trans. Mark Poster. New York: Telos, 1975. ———. Selected Writings. Ed. Mark Poster. California: Stanford UP, 1988. Chatterjee, Partha. The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1995. Lukose, Ritty. “Consuming Globalization: Youth and Gender in Kerala, India.” Journal of Social History 38.4 (Summer 2005): 915-35. Meizel, Katherine. “Making the Dream a Reality (Show): The Celebration of Failure in American Idol.” Popular Music and Society 32.4 (Oct. 2009): 475-88. Rose, Randall L., and Stacy L. Wood. “Paradox and the Consumption of Authenticity through Reality Television.” Journal of Consumer Research 32 (Sep. 2005): 284-96.

The structuring of a film's plot as the trajectory of the goals and desires of a single protagonist can be seen as the most critical development in cinematic narrative. In addition to its commodity implications via the star system and its centrality to a range of important film theories about fantasy and pleasure, the single protagonist is the linchpin of the cinema's ability to transmit messages that confirm the most basic myths about the power of the individual in society. While Hollywood's use of the single protagonist as a model for the self is particularly detrimental in the United States, the international dominance of American cinema means that this narrative convention can affect the formation of the self around the world. As a result, the single protagonist is the element that is most often critiqued by filmmakers and theorists who want cinema to be more politically engaged. In fact, one way of identifying a film that is aggressively political is to examine its treatment of the protagonist function. In Potemkin, for example, Sergei Eisenstein substitutes a group protagonist for Hollywood's individual so that he can demonstrate the unity of the people against their oppressors. Roberto Rossellini's neo-realist films Roma città aperta and Paisà likewise contain structures that are meant to undermine traditional Hollywood modes of narration since both films use what I call a serial protagonist. These strategies have become noticeably common, as multi-protagonist films have appeared in France, Hong Kong, and in the United States. As is typical, however, a cinematic strategy that trumpets political engagement in Europe is reduced to a stylish ornament in Hollywood. In American multi-protagonist films, the single protagonist is jettisoned, not to make a political statement, but in order to emphasise emotion over intellect, to encourage the audience not to think, but to feel. The two main strategies for accomplishing this goal are narrative fragmentation and disrupted character attachment. There are basically two kinds of multi-protagonist films. Margrit Tröhler calls them "group films" and "mosaic films." Group films feature an ensemble, a single large group such as a family or a gang whose stories are linked spatially to some central meeting place. Mosaic films, on the other hand, present a number of small groups, couples, or single characters. Initially, these people are linked only insofar as they happen to live in the same city at the same time, though eventually, as the narrative goes on, their stories become enmeshed, largely through coincidence. As a further breakdown, I would separate the "mosaic films" into action films and emotive films. Amores Perros and Go would be examples of multi-protagonist action films, where the most intense episodes in the film are active and violent; Magnolia and Happiness are examples of multi-protagonist emotive films, films in which the moments of greatest intensity are reactive and emotional. These intense moments, which occur as a series rather than as the result of cause-and-effect, are assumed to provide the major source of pleasure for spectators. Magnolia, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson in 1999, is perhaps the most striking of all the recent group of American multi-protagonist emotive films. Like Pulp Fiction and American Beauty, Magnolia was meant to bridge the gap between independent film and mainstream studio production. From its inception, Magnolia was planned as a quality production, and Anderson sold himself to New Line as their entrée into the prestige market. New Line, "the only major studio that has never had an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture" (Hirschberg 55), thought that Anderson would be their Quentin Tarantino and gave him total creative control. Michael De Luca, head of production at New Line, agrees with Anderson that there is a link between films like Magnolia and the films of the New American Cinema on the 1970s: "People who grew up on the 70s movies now have power around town" (Hirschberg 55), explaining why we are seeing so many experimental and edgy films since the turn of the century. The other thing that these people grew up on was TV, and narrative forms developed explicitly for television have become increasingly common in mainstream American cinema. Classic film theory analysed the spectator/protagonist relationship as one based on identification and resulting in momentary coherence and empowerment. Because the viewing practices associated with television are so different from those supported by classic cinema, these new TV-influenced films can be expected to create a different model for the self. The narrative structure that these millennial multi-protagonist films most closely resemble is that of the American daytime soap opera. Ironically, despite the low esteem in which soap operas are held, their episodic narrative structure and emphasis on emotions rather than logic directly shape much of cinematic storytelling today. Also ironically, whenever a non-soap opera text adopts soap practices, that text is seen as doing something daring. For example, TV series like Hill St. Blues that adopted soap operas' ensemble casts and arc narrative structure were labeled "quality television" (Feuer et al.). In a similar way, the fragmented narratives of multi-protagonist films like Magnolia are seen as stylish and experimental. However, the strategy is risky, since adoption of these narrative structures disrupts the strong bond that the single protagonist is expected to secure and may undermine viewers' pleasure in the film if they are not accustomed to soap-opera conventions. Whether it is a segment, a day's episode, or the entire run of the programme, the most striking aspect of soap-opera narrative is the fact it begins and ends in medias res. Emphasis on the middle of a story means that less attention is given to its beginning and end. Another way to say this is that soap operas focus most of their attention on the present. The focus on the present means that, although the characters in Magnolia clearly have pasts, they do not have histories. We do not know why Jimmy Gator molested his daughter, why Earl Partridge deserted his dying wife and 14-year-old son, what has happened to Stanley's mother, whether his father is successful in his career, or why Jim Kurring has become a cop. This lack of history makes it difficult to make moral judgements about them. The single character in Magnolia who explicitly attempts to create a history for himself is Frank Mackey, the male-empowerment guru played by Tom Cruise. Mackey says that a focus on the past is an excuse for not progressing in the present, further thematising the importance of the present. Soap narratives are created specifically for a viewing situation that incorporates a range of institutionally required ruptures -- commercials, promos, and other imbedded messages. As a result, soaps incorporate devices designed to sustain interest during these enforced breaks. The most typical of these strategies is the narrative gap created by an interrupted action or an unanswered question. On a daytime soap, we may only have to wait five minutes or so before returning to a particular narrative thread, but films with longer running times often extend that period considerably. For example, Gwenovier asks Frank why he would lie about the facts of his background. We do not return to Frank for over thirteen minutes. Soap-opera viewers are comfortable with these often silly narrative breaks because they know that the narrative line will eventually pick up exactly where it left off. That is not always the case in these films, however, and, indeed, Frank changes the subject. These lengthy interruptions clearly pose a challenge to active spectatorship as well as to audience tolerance. Since soap operas are eternal middles, the end of a story is always construed as a new beginning. Happy couples are presumed to be boring, and so no relationship is coded as permanent and impregnable. This pressure to resist closure creates a problem for narrative construction in multi-protagonist films, many of which have to go to great lengths to create anything like an ending. Generally chance or coincidence must be involved, a break with an important classical convention of narrative construction. Robert Altman needed an earthquake in Short Cuts, and P. T. Anderson needed frogs to rain down from the skies in order to begin to end Magnolia. Interestingly, while the open ending has been linked to the importance of the sequel in the New Hollywood, none of these multi-protagonist films has been the basis of a sequel. Soap operas have huge casts, and often characters will not appear every day. As a result, soaps are marked by diffuse viewer-character attachment. To ensure that the viewer will stay involved with the widest range of characters, the most effective soap stories present events from the perspectives of all parties to a conflict. As a result, on most soaps, while characters may do bad things from time to time, they are rarely represented as out-and-out villains. Like daytime soap operas, there are no villains in multi-protagonist emotive films. The wickedest character in Magnolia is the beloved game-show host who may have abused his young daughter. The film tries to ameliorate our sense of disgust by withholding this information until near the end of the film, focusing our attention instead on the facts that he is dying of cancer and that his daughter, a shrill and unattractive cocaine addict, cannot stand the sight of him. As a result, characters are not obviously coded in ways that make it easy for us to make moral judgments about them. Moreover, while the characters are single-mindedly going about their business, we are continually distracted and directed toward someone else's story. Far from being victims relentlessly carried along by the plot, the characters in these films burst into and disrupt the narratives of others, demanding our attention. The spectator must therefore contend not only with narrative ruptures but also with the need to reacquaint him- or herself with the characters and to continually renegotiate his or her relationship with them. This relationship will be affected not only by what the character was doing when we last met him or her, but on what kind of experience we have had during the intervening action. Two of the most useful ways of conceptualising the process by which we interact with characters in film -- those of Murray Smith and Carl Plantinga -- are put at a disadvantage by the multi-protagonist film. Both of these cognitive approaches describe the stages that spectators go through in deciding who the characters are and how we feel about what they do, and both reject psychoanalytic identification as part of their model. Although I ordinarily find their approaches highly useful, studying the multi-protagonist film leads me to conclude that their approaches are applicable to these films only with great difficulty. Both Smith and Plantinga ground their analyses on the conscious, intellectual, and voluntary conclusions that we make about the personalities and activities of the characters in films. Both men emphasise the power that narrative has in the formation of these emotional responses, and both minimise the involuntary and autonomic responses that derive from cinematic techniques rather than from the narrative. However, the fragmented nature of the narrative in the multi-protagonist film, the difficulty that characters have in dominating either our consciousness or their own worlds, and the diffusion of interest keep the process from working as Smith and Plantinga describe. For example, Murray Smith suggests that character attachment occurs in three stages: recognition, alignment, and allegiance. Each of these stages is compromised in the experience of viewing a multi-protagonist film. Recognition is the name given to the stage in which we notice various traits of the character and arrange them into some kind of coherent personality, much as we do when we meet people in real life. Magnolia takes advantage of this process to set traps for us: since the characters have no histories, if we stereotype them, we will fall into a trap. For example, Phil Parma, the male nurse, includes several sex magazines in his grocery order. While we might assume that Phil wants the magazines only to "read the articles," he uses them to get in touch with Frank, who advertises in them. However, since we know nothing of Phil's history, we cannot exonerate him: he may have remembered seeing Frank's ad in a previous issue of the magazine, or his seeing the advertisement now could simply be the kind of serendipitous accident thematised by the film. Alignment, the next phase in the character-attachment process, is likewise compromised by the multi-protagonist film. A film's investment in aligning us to a character is seen as a function of the quantity of time we spend with the character, of the degree of narrative restriction, of the representational strategies used with the character, and of the degree of access that we are given to that character's mental and emotional states. Unlike films with single protagonists, no character dominates screen time or narration in a multi-protagonist film. Nor is one character particularly favored cinematically: all the main characters are given close-ups, camera movements, and compositional prominence. In Magnolia, Jim the cop could be said to dominate the narrative since the primary action of the film begins and ends with him, he is presented as the film's moral centre, and a voiceover allows us access to his thoughts. But, as a figure representing law and order, and thus as a vehicle for the imposition of narrative control, he is a failure. He loses his gun, never realises that Claudia is high on cocaine, and allows Donnie to return the money that he stole from the furniture store where he used to work. Moreover, the narrational authority of Jim's voiceover is undermined: voiceover shots segue seamlessly into shots in which he is shown clearly talking out loud to himself. While this is a common soap-opera technique, it is uncommon in cinema and is likely to make us wonder whether Jim is OK. Finally, allegiance occurs when we weigh everything that we know about the character against his or her actions and make a moral judgment about him or her. Smith calls this "the structure of sympathy" and sees our feelings as falling along a continuum from sympathy to antipathy. Since there are no villains, it is likely that, with the exception of Jimmy Gator, we have a certain amount of sympathy for all the characters in Magnolia. That said, it is unlikely that we really like any of them either. Thus, I would argue that, if one does derive pleasure from the experience of seeing a multi-protagonist film like Magnolia, empathy is likely to be one's primary response. Both Plantinga and Smith marginalise empathy since both see it as an involuntary response to the film's cinematic techniques rather than as a product of the conscious processing of a film's narrative. However, it is for that very reason that I see empathy as the desired response in the multi-protagonist film. The fragmented narrative and the difficulties that it causes for character attachment make any other response problematic. Like the characters in the film, we are not supposed to think, just to feel. These films (and the daytime soaps) thematise several key aspects of life as we live it now: First, the plenitude of these films is such that they cannot be brought to an ending in the classical Hollywood sense; they do not end, they simply stop, and their stopping place is construed as a new beginning. Second, like the characters in Magnolia, our real lives are ruled by chance in ways that Hollywood used to deny. Second, even though the past remains an important narrative element -- three different voices in Magnolia say that "We may think we're done with the past, but the past is not done with us" -- the intensity of the emotions expressed by the characters tells us that the tensions of the present moment are really all that matter. Multi-protagonist films present several advantages to their producers and creators (e.g., the role of chance makes plot construction easier, a star doesn't have to carry the entire picture, the film can appeal to a broader demographic, the structure is critically marked as daring), but they also compromise the film's ability to represent the power of the individual, the theme that is central in all mainstream American films. Unfortunately, the American multi-protagonist film does not interrogate that theme or even address its absence directly. By presenting the spectator with a string of narrative fragments, these films create a series of sensational episodes in which people's emotions explode instead of buildings. The emotive blockbuster supports rather than critiques the view of the self as isolated, solipsistic, and focused on personal rather than social distress. References Epstein, Seymour. "Controversial Issues in Emotion Theory." In P. Shaver, ed. Review of Personality and Social Psychology: emotions, Relationships, and Health. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1994: 66–68. Feuer, Jane, Paul Kerr, and Tise Vahimagi. MTM: "Quality Television." London: BFI, 1984. Hirschberg, Lynn. "His Way." [Profile of Paul Thomas Anderson] New York Times Magazine (19 December 1999): 52–56. Plantinga, Carl. "Affect, Cognition, and the Power of Movies." Post Script 13:1 (Fall 1993): 10–29. Smith, Murray. "Altered States: Character and Emotional Response in the Cinema." Cinema Journal 33:4 (Summer 1994): 34–56. Smith, Murray. "Cognition, Emotion, and Cinematic Narrative." Post Script 13:1 (Fall 1993): 30–45. Tröhler, Margrit. "Les films à protagonistes multiples et la logique des possibles." Iris 29 (Spring 2000): 85–102. Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Carmago, Sandy. "'Mind the Gap'" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.5 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Carmago.html &gt. Chicago Style Carmago, Sandy, "'Mind the Gap'" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 5 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Carmago.html &gt ([your date of access]). APA Style Carmago, Sandy. (2002) 'Mind the Gap'. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(5). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Carmago.html &gt ([your date of access]).

IntroductionFor over five years, Romanians have been using their bodies in public spaces to challenge politicians’ disregard for the average citizen. In a region low in standards of civic engagement, such as voter turnout and petition signing, Romanian people’s “citizenship of the streets” has stopped environmentally destructive mining in 2013, ousted a corrupt cabinet in 2015, and blocked legislation legalising abuse of public office in 2017 (Solnit 214). This article explores the democratic affordances of collective resistive walking, by focusing on Romania’s capital, Bucharest. I illustrate how walking in protest of political corruption cultivates a democratic public and reconfigures city spaces as spaces of democratic engagement, in the context of increased illiberalism in the region. I examine two sites of protest: the Parliament Palace and Victoriei Square. The former is a construction emblematic of communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu and symbol of an authoritarian regime, whose surrounding area protestors reclaim as a civic space. The latter—a central part of the city bustling with the life of cafes, museums, bike lanes, and nearby parks—hosts the Government and has become an iconic site for pro-democratic movements. Spaces of Democracy: The Performativity of Public Assemblies Democracies are active achievements, dependent not only on the solidity of institutions —e.g., a free press and a constitution—but on people’s ability and desire to communicate about issues of concern and to occupy public space. Communicative approaches to democratic theory, formulated as inquiries into the public sphere and the plurality and evolution of publics, often return to establish the significance of public spaces and of bodies in the maintenance of our “rhetorical democracies” (Hauser). Speech and assembly, voice and space are sides of the same coin. In John Dewey’s work, communication is the main “loyalty” of democracy: the heart and final guarantee of democracy is in free gatherings of neighbors on the street corner to discuss back and forth what is read in the uncensored news of the day, and in gatherings of friends in the living rooms of houses and apartments to converse freely with one another. (Dewey qtd. in Asen 197, emphasis added) Dewey asserts the centrality of communication in the same breath that he affirms the spatial infrastructure supporting it.Historically, Richard Sennett explains, Athenian democracy has been organised around two “spaces of democracy” where people assembled: the agora or town square and the theatre or Pnyx. While the theatre has endured as the symbol of democratic communication, with its ideal of concentrated attention on the argument of one speaker, Sennett illuminates the square as an equally important space, one without which deliberation in the Pnyx would be impossible. In the agora, citizens cultivate an ability to see, expect, and think through difference. In its open architecture and inclusiveness, Sennett explains, the agora affords the walker and dweller a public space to experience, in a quick, fragmentary, and embodied way, the differences and divergences in fellow citizens. Through visual scrutiny and embodied exposure, the square thus cultivates “an outlook favorable to discussion of differing views and conflicting interests”, useful for deliberation in the Pnyx, and the capacity to recognise strangers as part of the imagined democratic community (19). Also stressing the importance of spaces for assembly, Jürgen Habermas’s historical theorisation of the bourgeois public sphere moves the functions of the agora to the modern “third places” (Oldenburg) of the civic society emerging in late seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe: coffee houses, salons, and clubs. While Habermas’ conceptualization of a unified bourgeois public has been criticised for its class and gender exclusivism, and for its normative model of deliberation and consensus, such criticism has also opened paths of inquiry into the rhetorical pluralism of publics and into the democratic affordances of embodied performativity. Thus, unlike Habermas’s assumption of a single bourgeois public, work on twentieth and twenty-first century publics has attended to their wide variety in post-modern societies (e.g., Bruce; Butler; Delicath and DeLuca; Fraser; Harold and DeLuca; Hauser; Lewis; Mckinnon et al.; Pezzullo; Rai; Tabako). In contrast to the Habermasian close attention to verbal argumentation, such criticism prioritizes the embodied (performative, aesthetic, and material) ways in which publics manifest their attention to common issues. From suffragists to environmentalists and, most recently, anti-precarity movements across the globe, publics assemble and move through shared space, seeking to break hegemonies of media representation by creating media events of their own. In the process, Judith Butler explains, such embodied assemblies accomplish much more. They disrupt prevalent logics and dominant feelings of disposability, precarity, and anxiety, at the same time that they (re)constitute subjects and increasingly privatised spaces into citizens and public places of democracy, respectively. Butler proposes that to best understand recent protests we need to read collective assembly in the current political moment of “accelerating precarity” and responsibilisation (10). Globally, increasingly larger populations are exposed to economic insecurity and precarity through government withdrawal from labor protections and the diminishment of social services, to the profit of increasingly monopolistic business. A logic of self-investment and personal responsibility accompanies such structural changes, as people understand themselves as individual market actors in competition with other market actors rather than as citizens and community members (Brown). In this context, public assembly would enact an alternative, insisting on interdependency. Bodies, in such assemblies, signify both symbolically (their will to speak against power) and indexically. As Butler describes, “it is this body, and these bodies, that require employment, shelter, health care, and food, as well as a sense of a future that is not the future of unpayable debt” (10). Butler describes the function of these protests more fully:[P]lural enactments […] make manifest the understanding that a situation is shared, contesting the individualizing morality that makes a moral norm of economic self-sufficiency precisely […] when self-sufficiency is becoming increasingly unrealizable. Showing up, standing, breathing, moving, standing still, speech, and silence are all aspects of a sudden assembly, an unforeseen form of political performativity that puts livable life at the forefront of politics […] [T]he bodies assembled ‘say’ we are not disposable, even if they stand silently. (18)Though Romania is not included in her account of contemporary protest movements, Butler’s theoretical account aptly describes both the structural and ideological conditions, and the performativity of Romanian protestors. In Romania, citizens have started to assemble in the streets against austerity measures (2012), environmental destruction (2013), fatal infrastructures (2015) and against the government’s corruption and attempts to undermine the Judiciary (from February 2017 onward). While, as scholars have argued (Olteanu and Beyerle; Gubernat and Rammelt), political corruption has gradually crystallised into the dominant and enduring framework for the assembled publics, post-communist corruption has been part and parcel of the neoliberalisation of Central and Eastern-European societies after the fall of communism. In the region, Leslie Holmes explains, former communist elites or the nomenklatura, have remained the majority political class after 1989. With political power and under the shelter of political immunity, nomenklatura politicians “were able to take ethically questionable advantage in various ways […] of the sell-off of previously state-owned enterprises” (Holmes 12). The process through which the established political class became owners of a previously state-owned economy is known as “nomenklatura privatization”, a common form of political corruption in the region, Holmes explains (12). Such practices were common knowledge among a cynical population through most of the 1990s and the 2000s. They were not broadly challenged in an ideological milieu attached, as Mihaela Miroiu, Isabela Preoteasa, and Jerzy Szacki argued, to extreme forms of liberalism and neoliberalism, ideologies perceived by people just coming out of communism as anti-ideology. Almost three decades since the fall of communism, in the face of unyielding levels of poverty (Zaharia; Marin), the decaying state of healthcare and education (Bilefsky; “Education”), and migration rates second only to war-torn Syria (Deletant), Romanian protestors have come to attribute the diminution of life in post-communism to the political corruption of the established political class (“Romania Corruption Report”; “Corruption Perceptions”). Following systematic attempts by the nomenklatura-heavy governing coalition to undermine the judiciary and institutionalise de facto corruption of public officials (Deletant), protestors have been returning to public spaces on a weekly basis, de-normalising the political cynicism and isolation serving the established political class. Mothers Walking: Resignifying Communist Spaces, Imagining the New DemosOn 11 July 2018, a protest of mothers was streamed live by Corruption Kills (Corupția ucide), a Facebook group started by activist Florin Bădiță after a deadly nightclub fire attributed to the corruption of public servants, in 2015 (Commander). Organized protests at the time pressured the Social-Democratic cabinet into resignation. Corruption Kills has remained a key activist platform, organising assemblies, streaming live from demonstrations, and sharing personal acts of dissent, thus extending the life of embodied assemblies. In the mothers’ protest video, women carrying babies in body-wraps and strollers walk across the intersection leading to the Parliament Palace, while police direct traffic and ensure their safety (“Civil Disobedience”). This was an unusual scene for many reasons. Walkers met at the entrance to the Parliament Palace, an area most emblematic of the former regime. Built by Communist dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu and inspired by Kim Il-sung’s North Korean architecture, the current Parliament building and its surrounding plaza remain, in the words of Renata Salecl, “one of the most traumatic remnants of the communist regime” (90). The construction is the second largest administrative building in the world, after the Pentagon, a size matching the ambitions of the dictator. It bears witness to the personal and cultural sacrifices the construction and its surrounded plaza required: the displacement of some 40,000 people from old neighbourhood Uranus, the death of reportedly thousands of workers, and the flattening of churches, monasteries, hospitals, schools (Parliament Palace). This arbitrary construction carved out of the old city remains a symbol of an authoritarian relation with the nation. As Salecl puts it, Ceaușescu’s project tried to realise the utopia of a new communist “centre” and created an artificial space as removed from the rest of the city as the leader himself was from the needs of his people. Twenty-nine years after the fall of communism, the plaza of the Parliament Palace remains as suspended from the life of the city as it was during the 1980s. The trees lining the boulevard have grown slightly and bike lanes are painted over decaying stones. Still, only few people walk by the neo-classical apartment buildings now discoloured and stained by weather and time. Salecl remarks on the panoptic experience of the Parliament Palace: “observed from the avenue, [the palace] appears to have no entrance; there are only numerous windows, which give the impression of an omnipresent gaze” (95). The building embodies, for Salecl, the logic of surveillance of the communist regime, which “created the impression of omnipresence” through a secret police that rallied members among regular citizens and inspired fear by striking randomly (95).Against this geography steeped in collective memories of fear and exposure to the gaze of the state, women turn their children’s bodies and their own into performances of resistance that draw on the rhetorical force of communist gender politics. Both motherhood and childhood were heavily regulated roles under Ceaușescu’s nationalist-socialist politics of forced birth, despite the official idealisation of both. Producing children for the nationalist-communist state was women’s mandated expression of citizenship. Declaring the foetus “the socialist property of the whole society”, in 1966 Ceaușescu criminalised abortion for women of reproductive ages who had fewer than four children, and, starting 1985, less than five children (Ceaușescu qtd. in Verdery). What followed was “a national tragedy”: illegal abortions became the leading cause of death for fertile women, children were abandoned into inhumane conditions in the infamous orphanages, and mothers experienced the everyday drama of caring for families in an economy of shortages (Kligman 364). The communist politicisation of natality during communist Romania exemplifies one of the worst manifestations of the political as biopolitical. The current maternal bodies and children’s bodies circulating in the communist-iconic plaza articulate past and present for Romanians, redeploying a traumatic collective memory to challenge increasingly authoritarian ambitions of the governing Social Democratic Party. The images of caring mothers walking in protest with their babies furthers the claims that anti-corruption publics have made in other venues: that the government, in their indifference and corruption, is driving millions of people, usually young, out of the country, in a braindrain of unprecedented proportions (Ursu; Deletant; #vavedemdinSibiu). In their determination to walk during the gruelling temperatures of mid-July, in their youth and their babies’ youth, the mothers’ walk performs the contrast between their generation of engaged, persistent, and caring citizens and the docile abused subject of a past indexed by the Ceaușescu-era architecture. In addition to performing a new caring imagined community (Anderson), women’s silent, resolute walk on the crosswalk turns a lifeless geography, heavy with the architectural traces of authoritarian history, into a public space that holds democratic protest. By inhabiting the cultural role of mothers, protestors disarmed state authorities: instead of the militarised gendarmerie usually policing protestors the Victoriei Square, only traffic police were called for the mothers’ protest. The police choreographed cars and people, as protestors walked across the intersection leading to the Parliament. Drivers, usually aggressive and insouciant, now moved in concert with the protestors. The mothers’ walk, immediately modeled by people in other cities (Cluj-Napoca), reconfigured a car-dominated geography and an unreliable, driver-friendly police, into a civic space that is struggling to facilitate the citizens’ peaceful disobedience. The walkers’ assembly thus begins to constitute the civic character of the plaza, collecting “the space itself […] the pavement and […] the architecture [to produce] the public character of that material environment” (Butler 71). It demonstrates the possibility of a new imagined community of caring and persistent citizens, one significantly different from the cynical, disconnected, and survivalist subjects that the nomenklatura politicians, nested in the Panoptic Parliament nearby, would prefer.Persisting in the Victoriei Square In addition to strenuous physical walking to reclaim city spaces, such as the mothers’ walking, the anti-corruption public also practices walking and gathering in less taxing environments. The Victoriei Square is such a place, a central plaza that connects major boulevards with large sidewalks, functional bike lanes, and old trees. The square is the architectural meeting point of old and new, where communist apartments meet late nineteenth and early twentieth century architecture, in a privileged neighbourhood of villas, museums, and foreign consulates. One of these 1930s constructions is the Government building, hosting the Prime Minister’s cabinet. Demonstrators gathered here during the major protests of 2015 and 2017, and have walked, stood, and wandered in the square almost weekly since (“Past Events”). On 24 June 2018, I arrive in the Victoriei Square to participate in the protest announced on social media by Corruption Kills. There is room to move, to pause, and rest. In some pockets, people assemble to pay attention to impromptu speakers who come onto a small platform to share their ideas. Occasionally someone starts chanting “We See You!” and “Down with Corruption!” and almost everyone joins the chant. A few young people circulate petitions. But there is little exultation in the group as a whole, shared mostly among those taking up the stage or waving flags. Throughout the square, groups of familiars stop to chat. Couples and families walk their bikes, strolling slowly through the crowds, seemingly heading to or coming from the nearby park on a summer evening. Small kids play together, drawing with chalk on the pavement, or greeting dogs while parents greet each other. Older children race one another, picking up on the sense of freedom and de-centred but still purposeful engagement. The openness of the space allows one to meander and observe all these groups, performing the function of the Ancient agora: making visible the strangers who are part of the polis. The overwhelming feeling is one of solidarity. This comes partly from the possibilities of collective agency and the feeling of comfortably taking up space and having your embodiment respected, otherwise hard to come by in other spaces of the city. Everyday walking in the streets of Romanian cities is usually an exercise in hypervigilant physical prowess and self-preserving numbness. You keep your eyes on the ground to not stumble on broken pavement. You watch ahead for unmarked construction work. You live with other people’s sweat on the hot buses. You hop among cars parked on sidewalks and listen keenly for when others may zoom by. In one of the last post-socialist states to join the European Union, living with generalised poverty means walking in cities where your senses must be dulled to manage the heat, the dust, the smells, and the waiting, irresponsive to beauty and to amiable sociality. The euphemistic vocabulary of neoliberalism may describe everyday walking through individualistic terms such as “grit” or “resilience.” And while people are called to effort, creativity, and endurance not needed in more functional states, what one experiences is the gradual diminution of one’s lives under a political regime where illiberalism keeps a citizen-serving democracy at bay. By contrast, the Victoriei Square holds bodies whose comfort in each other’s presence allow us to imagine a political community where survivalism, or what Lauren Berlant calls “lateral agency”, are no longer the norm. In “showing up, standing, breathing, moving, standing still […] an unforeseen form of political performativity that puts livable life at the forefront of politics” is enacted (Butler 18). In arriving to Victoriei Square repeatedly, Romanians demonstrate that there is room to breathe more easily, to engage with civility, and to trust the strangers in their country. They assert that they are not disposable, even if a neoliberal corrupt post-communist regime would have them otherwise.ConclusionBecoming a public, as Michael Warner proposes, is an ongoing process of attention to an issue, through the circulation of discourse and self-organisation with strangers. For the anti-corruption public of Romania’s past years, such ongoing work is accompanied by persistent, civil, embodied collective assembly, in an articulation of claims, bodies, and spaces that promotes a material agency that reconfigures the city and the imagined Romanian community into a more democratic one. The Romanian citizenship of the streets is particularly significant in the current geopolitical and ideological moment. In the region, increasing authoritarianism meets the alienating logics of neoliberalism, both trying to reduce citizens to disposable, self-reliant, and disconnected market actors. Populist autocrats—Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, the Peace and Justice Party in Poland, and recently E.U.-penalized Victor Orban, in Hungary—are dismantling the system of checks and balances, and posing threats to a European Union already challenged by refugee debates and Donald Trump’s unreliable alliance against authoritarianism. In such a moment, the Romanian anti-corruption public performs within the geographies of their city solidarity and commitment to democracy, demonstrating an alternative to the submissive and disconnected subjects preferred by authoritarianism and neoliberalism.Author's NoteIn addition to the anonymous reviewers, the author would like to thank Mary Tuominen and Jesse Schlotterbeck for their helpful comments on this essay.ReferencesAnderson, Benedict R. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 2016.Asen, Robert. “A Discourse Theory of Citizenship.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90.2 (2004): 189-211. 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