Journal articles on the topic 'New York-New Jersey Trail Conference'

Abstract Background: The Temple University Fox Chase Cancer Center and Hunter College Cancer Health Disparity Partnership (TUFCCC/HC Cancer Partnership) is a comprehensive collaborative cancer health research infrastructure in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York City (PNN) Region. Its goals are to enhance equity in cancer health through rigorous and sustainable cancer research, train the next generation of researchers, and establish community outreach programs. Establishing and strengthening a bidirectional academic-community partnership is a key component of this partnership. While such collaborative relationships have been strongly endorsed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), little has been documented demonstrating how such partnership can be created and maintained. Objectives: Building on previous established collaborative relationships with the community-based organizations (CBOs), we created and expanded a bidirectional, academic–community partnership in African American, Asian American, and Latinx communities in the PNN region to (1) assess the level of awareness of cancer prevention knowledge; (2) identify community needs and barriers to cancer prevention healthcare services; (3) jointly develop and implement community-based educational initiatives to promote cancer prevention in medically underserved communities. Methods: In this presentation, we established a comprehensive evaluation metric to assess the bidirectional partnership. The metric, its outputs, and outcomes were adapted from the Evaluation Metrics Manual published by the National Institute of Environmental Health Services of NIH. We also formed a Community Advisory Board (CAB) to guide our bidirectional communication and jointly develop a community-driven cancer education agenda. Results: The CAB played a critical role in the development of the bidirectional partnership. They provided key inputs in identifying the goals and benchmarks of the educational initiative, and in facilitating the recruitment and implementation of the initiative. Our evaluation indicated that a bidirectional partnership is an interactive and non-linear process that requires constant feedback and communication. We identified several successes and challenges during our co-learning and co-implementing process. We also identified areas for improvement, specifically, establishing a more efficient channel for information and resource sharing, and greater efforts on dissemination of scientific findings to the community. Conclusions: Actively engaging CAB and CBOs in the cancer prevention educational initiatives from the onset enhanced the efficacy of the initiatives and strengthened the research training capacity of the academic institutions. We will share best practices in our bidirectional, academic–community partnership building and discuss next steps in adaptation and further development of the partnership. Citation Format: Lin Zhu, Ellen J. Kim, Steven Zhu, Nathaly Rubio-Torio, Evelyn González, Marilyn A. Fraser, Ming-chin Yeh, Marsha Zibalese-Crawford, Grace X. Ma, Olorunseun O. Ogunwobi, Yin Tan. Evaluating a bidirectional academic–community partnership with multiple racial/ethnic communities for cancer prevention initiatives and cancer health disparities research [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 15th AACR Conference on the Science of Cancer Health Disparities in Racial/Ethnic Minorities and the Medically Underserved; 2022 Sep 16-19; Philadelphia, PA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2022;31(1 Suppl):Abstract nr PR010.

This issue of Laser and Particle Beams contains 27 contributed articles based on presentations given at the eighth International Workshop on the Physics of Compressible Turbulent Mixing (IWPCTM) (see http://www.llnl.gov/IWPCTM), held at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California from December 9 to 14, 2001, and organized jointly by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and the California Institute of Technology. This conference is the eighth in a biennial series of conferences on the general subject of experimental, numerical, and theoretical studies of compressible turbulent mixing, initiated by LLNL in the late 1980s. Previous conferences were held in Princeton, New Jersey (1988), Pleasanton, California (1989), Royaumont, France (1991), Cambridge, United Kingdom (1993), Stony Brook, New York (1995), Marseille, France (1997), and St. Petersburg, Russia (1999). The ninth IWPCTM is to be held at the University of Cambridge in 2004.

For the English abstract and full text of the article please see the attached PDF-File (English version follows Russian version).ABSTRACT The duration of sorting of the train on the turnout track is determined by the known formula Tsort = A•g + B•m. At the same time, the duration of all semi-trips - arrival of the locomotive behind the part of the train, its extension to the turnout track, sorting and reverse pulling of the remaining cars - were calculated according to the formula ts/t = a + bm, which is now replaced by a new method for adjusting the shunting operations. The article presents the results of a study that made it possible to derive a formula for calculating the duration of the sorting of a train on the turnout track based on a different calculation of the duration of semi-trips. Keywords: railway, turnout track, duration of sorting, duration of semi-trip, calculation formulas. REFERENCES 1.Time norms for shunting operations performed at railway stations of JSC Russian Railways, standards for the number of shunting locomotive crews (2007) [Normy vremeni na manevrovye raboty, vypolnjaemye na zheleznodorozhnyh stancijah OAO «RZhD», normativy chislennosti brigad manevrovyh lokomotivov (2007 g.)]. 2.Order of the Ministry of Railways of the Russian Federation dated September 29, 2003, No.67 «On approval of the procedure for developing and determining the technological terms of turnover of cars and technological norms for loading cargo into cars and unloading cargo from cars» [Prikaz MPS RF ot 29 sentjabrja 2003 g. № 67 «Ob utverzhdenii porjadka razrabotki i opredelenija tehnologicheskih srokov oborota vagonov i tehnologicheskih norm pogruzki gruzov v vagony i vygruzki gruzov iz vagonov»]. 3.Kochnev, F.P., Sotnikov, I. B. Management of the operational work of railways: educational guide for universities [Upravlenie ekspluatacionnoj rabotoj zheleznyh dorog: Ucheb. posobie dlja vuzov].Moscow, Transport publ., 1990, 424 p. 4.Shmulevich, M.I., Starikov, A. E. Features of Regulation of Shunting Operations in the Station Simulation Model.World of Transport and Transportation, Vol.13, Iss.5, pp.198-212. 5.Shmulevich, M.I., Starikov, A. E. Structure of the simulation model of an industrial railway station and its implementation in the AnyLogic system [Struktura imitacionnoj modeli promyshlennoj zheleznodorozhnoj stancii i ee realizacija v sisteme AnyLogic].Promyshlennyj transport XXI vek, 2016, Iss.3-4, pp.20-24. 6.The AnyLogic Company.2015.AnyLogic - Multimethod Simulation Software.[Electronic resource]: http://www.anylogic.com.Last accessed 29.10.2015. 7.Petersen, E.R.Railyard Modeling: Part I.Prediction of Put-Through Time, Transportation Science, 1977, vol.11, no.1, February. 8.Baugher, R.Application of Any Logic to Railroad Operation Analysis.Any Logic Conference, December, 2013. 9.Lin, E., Cheng, C.Yard Sim.A Rail Yard Simulation Framework and its Implementation in a Major Railroad in the U.S.Proceedings of the 2009 Winter Simulation Conference // Edited by M.D.Rossetti, R.R.Hill, B.Johansson, A.Dunkin, R.G.Ingalls.Piscataway, New Jersey, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.2009, pp.2532-2541. 10.Clausen, U., Goedicke, I.Simulation of Yard Operations and Management in Transshipment Terminals.Proceedings of the 2012 Winter Simulation Conference.2012. 11.Kiseleva, M. V. Simulation modeling of systems in Anylogic environment.Teaching-methodical manual [Imitacionnoe modelirovanie sistem v srede Anylogic. Uchebno-metodicheskoe posobie].Ykaterinburg, USTU-UPI, 2009, 88 p.

On February 27, 1999, the International Institute of Islamic Thought0 hosted a symposium titled “Islam and Epistemology.” The seminarinvited many scholars and philosophers to discuss Mehdi Ha’iri Yazdi’sbook, The Principles of Epistemology in Islamic Philosophy.‘ The mpe ofthe presentation and discussion was not limited to the contents of the book.Indeed, the book was used as 8 launching pad for discussions on issuesrelated to epistemology, Islamic sciences, Islamic philosophy, the tensionsbetween reason and nxelation, and the differences between the legalisticapproach and the philosophical approach. It also raised interesting debatesabout the similarities and differences between Westem-secular and humanist-social sciences and the theocentric discourses of Muslims.The seminar also doubled as the Second Conference of the ContemporaryIslamic Philosophers. Two doctoml students, myself from GeorgetownUniversity and Ejaz Akram from Catholic University, organized the firstconference in May 1998, at which time we called for a new discourse? Weargued that contemporary Islamic philosophy had become too engagedwith writing and rewriting the history of medieval Islamic philosophy withoutactually doing philosophy. So we invited Muslim intellectuals andphilosophers to reflect on the present and advance discourses that willenlighten and improve the present human condition. We argued thatIslamic philosophers should play the role of social critics and public intellectualsand assist in thinking of old ideas in new terms and new ideas inold terms. This seminar, in a similar vein, was designed to point the attentionof Islamic thinkers toward the need for an empowering and transformativeepistemology for contemporary Muslims?At the seminar, five speakem, each from a different backgmund, madeformal presentations. Over 35 students of Islamic philosophy came to theseminar from Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, North Carolina, New York &and California. Each presentation sought to explore the relationship ...

INTRODUCTION Scenic Hudson's Long Dock Park is a resilient living work of art and a vibrant community asset for the Hudson River Valley. A 23-acre peninsula on the east side of the Hudson at Beacon, New York, the site includes the Peter J. Sharp Park and the Klara Sauer Hudson River Trail. Two decades in the making, beginning in 1997, it took a decade to plan and remediate, and, by its completion in early 2017, it will have taken just as long to build and recover. In 1997, nonprofit Scenic Hudson, the largest environmental and land preservation group focused on the Hudson River Valley, started assembling the different ownership parcels of the Long Dock site. From 1999 to 2003, they engaged the Beacon community through a series of community meetings and workshops to articulate its vision for its waterfront and cleanup of the site began. From 2003 to 2007, the design team developed the architectural and site program for the project, restoration measures, and its physical expression with the client. Working with the City and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC), the project completed the State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQR) process, filing a Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) and received approval of the final EIS ensuring that there was significant environmental, social, or economic value. The NYSDEC and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) were also directly involved in oversight of the brownfield remediation and work within the Hudson River and site wetlands. With the SEQR process complete and approval of a mitigation plan from the USACE, the team worked with the City of Beacon to complete the site plan application process for construction. Our mandate was clear from the start—build resilience, but realize it incrementally. The project's first phase, opened in 2009, included additional remediation and removal of contaminated soils, removal of invasive species, stabilization of the south shoreline, a test plot for different materials, a wetland boardwalk and interior pathways, installation of native plantings, and site-specific artwork. By 2014, the landscape's multiple character zones were complete: the established meadow, the connective network of trails and boardwalks, the working site infrastructure of wetlands with swales and seeps, the dynamic intertidal zone, and earthen buttresses. A new pavilion for kayak storage and rentals and an arts and environmental education center in the historic Red Barn were significant additions for the program and community engagement of the park (refer to Figure 1). Over the past summer of 2016, portions of the site originally designed as a LEED platinum eco-hotel and conference center are now being remediated and reconceived as a new civic plaza, amphitheater, overlook west deck, boardwalk at Quiet Harbor, and a shade structure with an area for food trucks. Long Dock Park will continue to adjust and adapt to changing circumstances of ecology, climate change, flooding and sea level rise, and culture. Our original goals of renewing and revealing the historic waterfront, increasing public access to the river, restoring degraded environmental conditions, and demonstrating exemplary, environmentally sensitive development—these are complete. And the park was one of the first pilot projects for the Sustainable-SITES certification program and subsequently received SITES's highest rating of a SITES project at the time. Even as we considered program, spatial organization, and aesthetics, our work also sought to create in Long Dock a functional and sustainable ecosystem. The park's design needed to initiate natural processes for the degraded post-industrial brownfield to function and sustain ecosystem services that had not existed before. The design of healthy soils, the integration of hydrology, and the establishment of native plant communities form the true story of the site's transformation from postindustrial ruin into a significant waterfront park.

Abstract Background Hispanic, Asian, and African Americans experience greater burden of liver cancer, and research has shown that these three populations experience multiple level barriers to liver cancer awareness and prevention. Chronic infections with hepatitis B (HBV) and hepatitis C virus (HCV) are the most common risk factors of liver cancer. As a critical component of The Synergistic Partnership for Enhancing Equity in Cancer Health (SPEECH), Community Outreach Core (COC) aims to (1) strengthen community engagement in cancer outreach research through evidence-based community cancer education initiatives and outreach activities, and (2) provide a robust and sustainable community-based participatory research (CBPR) infrastructure for the SPEECH Partnership. Objectives This presentation aims to describe the use of CBPR principles and how these methods impacted the planning and implementation of multilevel community initiatives on liver cancer prevention through community engagement to address liver cancer disparities in low-income, underserved minority communities. Methods Guided by CBPR principles and built on well-established collaboration with community-based organizations in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York City, the COC team actively engaged community advisory board (CAB), healthcare workers, and community members in multiple phases of (1) liver cancer prevention educational initiative, (2) city-wide bus campaign with on-bus posters advertising HBV/HCV screening and liver cancer prevention, and (3) community health fairs, in which information and education about HBV, HCV, and liver cancer was provided to the community member attendees. Results The educational workshops in the community initiative significantly improved community members’ knowledge about HBV/HCV, behaviors on HBV/HCV screening, as well as dietary patterns. Specifically, 21% of the patients who did not have an HBV test at baseline had a test at 6 months, while 11% of the patients who did not have an HCV test at baseline had a test at 6 months. In the bus campaign, the COC team collected evaluation forms from bus riders. Among the 173 respondents, 22.7% reported seeing the ad. Riders who saw the ad were significantly more likely to get screened for HBV/HCV than those who did not (86.5% vs 58.3%). Regarding the community health fair, among 44 participants who received our on-site education, 77.3% of them reported that they would talk to their doctors about getting HBV/HCV screenings. The comprehensive engagement of CAB, healthcare workers, and community members significantly benefited community capacity building on cancer research and health promotion. Conclusions Our findings indicate that CBPR-guided community initiative, campaign, and health fairs have remarkable positive impacts on promoting liver cancer awareness and prevention among underserved racial/ethnic minorities. Moreover, community participation was built on trust and previous relationships, which would finally empower the community with increased health promotion capacity. Citation Format: Wenyue Lu, Lin Zhu, Di Zhu, Evelyn Gonzalez, Marilyn A. Fraser, Ming-chin Yeh, Steven Zhu, Grace X. Ma, Olorunseun O. Ogunwobi, Yin Tan. Promoting liver cancer awareness and prevention initiative in underserved racial/ethnic minority populations via community-based participatory research strategies [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 15th AACR Conference on the Science of Cancer Health Disparities in Racial/Ethnic Minorities and the Medically Underserved; 2022 Sep 16-19; Philadelphia, PA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2022;31(1 Suppl):Abstract nr B040.

This article presents the results of the first implementation of map literacy learning model in middle school classes - this is the preliminary test. The implementation of this learning model will gain optimal results when it is conducted by following all the component of the model such as the syntax, theoretical framework, social system, teachers' roles, and support system. After the model implementation has been completed, the results showed that there was significantly different in students' spatial thinking skills before and after the treatment. However, the implementation also revealed that the model has some technical issues and thus to be improved. In a social system revision, the teacher has to be flexibly provide scaffolding every time he/she sees that the students need it. Teacher's book is significantly important to help a teacher lead the learning process. After improvement of the model has been completed, then it is ready to be implemented in the main field testing stage. 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Character education in early childhood is not new, and character education is also not just a transfer of knowledge, but something that needs to be built early on through various stimula- tions. This study aims to develop the character of early childhood through audio-visual media with traditional Javanese songs. Using educational design-based research to develop audio-visual media from traditional songs, this media was tested in the field with an experimental design with a control group. Respondents involved 71 kindergarten students from one experimental class in one control class. The data revealed that character education in children shows the average value of the experi- mental class is higher than the control group, this means character education in children can be built through traditional songs. Further research can be done to improve the character of early childhood through a variety of media that interests children. 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By the time you read this, it will be wrong. Things seemed to be moving so fast in these first days after airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the Pennsylvania earth. Each certainty is as carelessly dropped as it was once carelessly assumed. The sounds of lower Manhattan that used to serve as white noise for residents—sirens, screeches, screams—are no longer signs without a referent. Instead, they make folks stare and stop, hurry and hustle, wondering whether the noises we know so well are in fact, this time, coefficients of a new reality. At the time of writing, the events themselves are also signs without referents—there has been no direct claim of responsibility, and little proof offered by accusers since the 11th. But it has been assumed that there is a link to US foreign policy, its military and economic presence in the Arab world, and opposition to it that seeks revenge. In the intervening weeks the US media and the war planners have supplied their own narrow frameworks, making New York’s “ground zero” into the starting point for a new escalation of global violence. We want to write here about the combination of sources and sensations that came that day, and the jumble of knowledges and emotions that filled our minds. Working late the night before, Toby was awoken in the morning by one of the planes right overhead. That happens sometimes. I have long expected a crash when I’ve heard the roar of jet engines so close—but I didn’t this time. Often when that sound hits me, I get up and go for a run down by the water, just near Wall Street. Something kept me back that day. Instead, I headed for my laptop. Because I cannot rely on local media to tell me very much about the role of the US in world affairs, I was reading the British newspaper The Guardian on-line when it flashed a two-line report about the planes. I looked up at the calendar above my desk to see whether it was April 1st. Truly. Then I got off-line and turned on the TV to watch CNN. That second, the phone rang. My quasi-ex-girlfriend I’m still in love with called from the mid-West. She was due to leave that day for the Bay Area. Was I alright? We spoke for a bit. She said my cell phone was out, and indeed it was for the remainder of the day. As I hung up from her, my friend Ana rang, tearful and concerned. Her husband, Patrick, had left an hour before for work in New Jersey, and it seemed like a dangerous separation. All separations were potentially fatal that day. You wanted to know where everyone was, every minute. She told me she had been trying to contact Palestinian friends who worked and attended school near the event—their ethnic, religious, and national backgrounds made for real poignancy, as we both thought of the prejudice they would (probably) face, regardless of the eventual who/what/when/where/how of these events. We agreed to meet at Bruno’s, a bakery on La Guardia Place. For some reason I really took my time, though, before getting to Ana. I shampooed and shaved under the shower. This was a horror, and I needed to look my best, even as men and women were losing and risking their lives. I can only interpret what I did as an attempt to impose normalcy and control on the situation, on my environment. When I finally made it down there, she’d located our friends. They were safe. We stood in the street and watched the Towers. Horrified by the sight of human beings tumbling to their deaths, we turned to buy a tea/coffee—again some ludicrous normalization—but were drawn back by chilling screams from the street. Racing outside, we saw the second Tower collapse, and clutched at each other. People were streaming towards us from further downtown. We decided to be with our Palestinian friends in their apartment. When we arrived, we learnt that Mark had been four minutes away from the WTC when the first plane hit. I tried to call my daughter in London and my father in Canberra, but to no avail. I rang the mid-West, and asked my maybe-former novia to call England and Australia to report in on me. Our friend Jenine got through to relatives on the West Bank. Israeli tanks had commenced a bombardment there, right after the planes had struck New York. Family members spoke to her from under the kitchen table, where they were taking refuge from the shelling of their house. Then we gave ourselves over to television, like so many others around the world, even though these events were happening only a mile away. We wanted to hear official word, but there was just a huge absence—Bush was busy learning to read in Florida, then leading from the front in Louisiana and Nebraska. As the day wore on, we split up and regrouped, meeting folks. One guy was in the subway when smoke filled the car. Noone could breathe properly, people were screaming, and his only thought was for his dog DeNiro back in Brooklyn. From the panic of the train, he managed to call his mom on a cell to ask her to feed “DeNiro” that night, because it looked like he wouldn’t get home. A pregnant woman feared for her unborn as she fled the blasts, pushing the stroller with her baby in it as she did so. Away from these heart-rending tales from strangers, there was the fear: good grief, what horrible price would the US Government extract for this, and who would be the overt and covert agents and targets of that suffering? What blood-lust would this generate? What would be the pattern of retaliation and counter-retaliation? What would become of civil rights and cultural inclusiveness? So a jumble of emotions came forward, I assume in all of us. Anger was not there for me, just intense sorrow, shock, and fear, and the desire for intimacy. Network television appeared to offer me that, but in an ultimately unsatisfactory way. For I think I saw the end-result of reality TV that day. I have since decided to call this ‘emotionalization’—network TV’s tendency to substitute analysis of US politics and economics with a stress on feelings. Of course, powerful emotions have been engaged by this horror, and there is value in addressing that fact and letting out the pain. I certainly needed to do so. But on that day and subsequent ones, I looked to the networks, traditional sources of current-affairs knowledge, for just that—informed, multi-perspectival journalism that would allow me to make sense of my feelings, and come to a just and reasoned decision about how the US should respond. I waited in vain. No such commentary came forward. Just a lot of asinine inquiries from reporters that were identical to those they pose to basketballers after a game: Question—‘How do you feel now?’ Answer—‘God was with me today.’ For the networks were insistent on asking everyone in sight how they felt about the end of las torres gemelas. In this case, we heard the feelings of survivors, firefighters, viewers, media mavens, Republican and Democrat hacks, and vacuous Beltway state-of-the-nation pundits. But learning of the military-political economy, global inequality, and ideologies and organizations that made for our grief and loss—for that, there was no space. TV had forgotten how to do it. My principal feeling soon became one of frustration. So I headed back to where I began the day—The Guardian web site, where I was given insightful analysis of the messy factors of history, religion, economics, and politics that had created this situation. As I dealt with the tragedy of folks whose lives had been so cruelly lost, I pondered what it would take for this to stop. Or whether this was just the beginning. I knew one thing—the answers wouldn’t come from mainstream US television, no matter how full of feelings it was. And that made Toby anxious. And afraid. He still is. And so the dreams come. In one, I am suddenly furloughed from my job with an orchestra, as audience numbers tumble. I make my evening-wear way to my locker along with the other players, emptying it of bubble gum and instrument. The next night, I see a gigantic, fifty-feet high wave heading for the city beach where I’ve come to swim. Somehow I am sheltered behind a huge wall, as all the people around me die. Dripping, I turn to find myself in a media-stereotype “crack house” of the early ’90s—desperate-looking black men, endless doorways, sudden police arrival, and my earnest search for a passport that will explain away my presence. I awake in horror, to the realization that the passport was already open and stamped—racialization at work for Toby, every day and in every way, as a white man in New York City. Ana’s husband, Patrick, was at work ten miles from Manhattan when “it” happened. In the hallway, I overheard some talk about two planes crashing, but went to teach anyway in my usual morning stupor. This was just the usual chatter of disaster junkies. I didn’t hear the words, “World Trade Center” until ten thirty, at the end of the class at the college I teach at in New Jersey, across the Hudson river. A friend and colleague walked in and told me the news of the attack, to which I replied “You must be fucking joking.” He was a little offended. Students were milling haphazardly on the campus in the late summer weather, some looking panicked like me. My first thought was of some general failure of the air-traffic control system. There must be planes falling out of the sky all over the country. Then the height of the towers: how far towards our apartment in Greenwich Village would the towers fall? Neither of us worked in the financial district a mile downtown, but was Ana safe? Where on the college campus could I see what was happening? I recognized the same physical sensation I had felt the morning after Hurricane Andrew in Miami seeing at a distance the wreckage of our shattered apartment across a suburban golf course strewn with debris and flattened power lines. Now I was trapped in the suburbs again at an unbridgeable distance from my wife and friends who were witnessing the attacks first hand. Were they safe? What on earth was going on? This feeling of being cut off, my path to the familiar places of home blocked, remained for weeks my dominant experience of the disaster. In my office, phone calls to the city didn’t work. There were six voice-mail messages from my teenaged brother Alex in small-town England giving a running commentary on the attack and its aftermath that he was witnessing live on television while I dutifully taught my writing class. “Hello, Patrick, where are you? Oh my god, another plane just hit the towers. Where are you?” The web was choked: no access to newspapers online. Email worked, but no one was wasting time writing. My office window looked out over a soccer field to the still woodlands of western New Jersey: behind me to the east the disaster must be unfolding. Finally I found a website with a live stream from ABC television, which I watched flickering and stilted on the tiny screen. It had all already happened: both towers already collapsed, the Pentagon attacked, another plane shot down over Pennsylvania, unconfirmed reports said, there were other hijacked aircraft still out there unaccounted for. Manhattan was sealed off. George Washington Bridge, Lincoln and Holland tunnels, all the bridges and tunnels from New Jersey I used to mock shut down. Police actions sealed off the highways into “the city.” The city I liked to think of as the capital of the world was cut off completely from the outside, suddenly vulnerable and under siege. There was no way to get home. The phone rang abruptly and Alex, three thousand miles away, told me he had spoken to Ana earlier and she was safe. After a dozen tries, I managed to get through and spoke to her, learning that she and Toby had seen people jumping and then the second tower fall. Other friends had been even closer. Everyone was safe, we thought. I sat for another couple of hours in my office uselessly. The news was incoherent, stories contradictory, loops of the planes hitting the towers only just ready for recycling. The attacks were already being transformed into “the World Trade Center Disaster,” not yet the ahistorical singularity of the emergency “nine one one.” Stranded, I had to spend the night in New Jersey at my boss’s house, reminded again of the boundless generosity of Americans to relative strangers. In an effort to protect his young son from the as yet unfiltered images saturating cable and Internet, my friend’s TV set was turned off and we did our best to reassure. We listened surreptitiously to news bulletins on AM radio, hoping that the roads would open. Walking the dog with my friend’s wife and son we crossed a park on the ridge on which Upper Montclair sits. Ten miles away a huge column of smoke was rising from lower Manhattan, where the stunning absence of the towers was clearly visible. The summer evening was unnervingly still. We kicked a soccer ball around on the front lawn and a woman walked distracted by, shocked and pale up the tree-lined suburban street, suffering her own wordless trauma. I remembered that though most of my students were ordinary working people, Montclair is a well-off dormitory for the financial sector and high rises of Wall Street and Midtown. For the time being, this was a white-collar disaster. I slept a short night in my friend’s house, waking to hope I had dreamed it all, and took the commuter train in with shell-shocked bankers and corporate types. All men, all looking nervously across the river toward glimpses of the Manhattan skyline as the train neared Hoboken. “I can’t believe they’re making us go in,” one guy had repeated on the station platform. He had watched the attacks from his office in Midtown, “The whole thing.” Inside the train we all sat in silence. Up from the PATH train station on 9th street I came onto a carless 6th Avenue. At 14th street barricades now sealed off downtown from the rest of the world. I walked down the middle of the avenue to a newspaper stand; the Indian proprietor shrugged “No deliveries below 14th.” I had not realized that the closer to the disaster you came, the less information would be available. Except, I assumed, for the evidence of my senses. But at 8 am the Village was eerily still, few people about, nothing in the sky, including the twin towers. I walked to Houston Street, which was full of trucks and police vehicles. Tractor trailers sat carrying concrete barriers. Below Houston, each street into Soho was barricaded and manned by huddles of cops. I had walked effortlessly up into the “lockdown,” but this was the “frozen zone.” There was no going further south towards the towers. I walked the few blocks home, found my wife sleeping, and climbed into bed, still in my clothes from the day before. “Your heart is racing,” she said. I realized that I hadn’t known if I would get back, and now I never wanted to leave again; it was still only eight thirty am. Lying there, I felt the terrible wonder of a distant bystander for the first-hand witness. Ana’s face couldn’t tell me what she had seen. I felt I needed to know more, to see and understand. Even though I knew the effort was useless: I could never bridge that gap that had trapped me ten miles away, my back turned to the unfolding disaster. The television was useless: we don’t have cable, and the mast on top of the North Tower, which Ana had watched fall, had relayed all the network channels. I knew I had to go down and see the wreckage. Later I would realize how lucky I had been not to suffer from “disaster envy.” Unbelievably, in retrospect, I commuted into work the second day after the attack, dogged by the same unnerving sensation that I would not get back—to the wounded, humbled former center of the world. My students were uneasy, all talked out. I was a novelty, a New Yorker living in the Village a mile from the towers, but I was forty-eight hours late. Out of place in both places. I felt torn up, but not angry. Back in the city at night, people were eating and drinking with a vengeance, the air filled with acrid sicklysweet smoke from the burning wreckage. Eyes stang and nose ran with a bitter acrid taste. Who knows what we’re breathing in, we joked nervously. A friend’s wife had fallen out with him for refusing to wear a protective mask in the house. He shrugged a wordlessly reassuring smile. What could any of us do? I walked with Ana down to the top of West Broadway from where the towers had commanded the skyline over SoHo; downtown dense smoke blocked the view to the disaster. A crowd of onlookers pushed up against the barricades all day, some weeping, others gawping. A tall guy was filming the grieving faces with a video camera, which was somehow the worst thing of all, the first sign of the disaster tourism that was already mushrooming downtown. Across the street an Asian artist sat painting the street scene in streaky black and white; he had scrubbed out two white columns where the towers would have been. “That’s the first thing I’ve seen that’s made me feel any better,” Ana said. We thanked him, but he shrugged blankly, still in shock I supposed. On the Friday, the clampdown. I watched the Mayor and Police Chief hold a press conference in which they angrily told the stream of volunteers to “ground zero” that they weren’t needed. “We can handle this ourselves. We thank you. But we don’t need your help,” Commissioner Kerik said. After the free-for-all of the first couple of days, with its amazing spontaneities and common gestures of goodwill, the clampdown was going into effect. I decided to go down to Canal Street and see if it was true that no one was welcome anymore. So many paths through the city were blocked now. “Lock down, frozen zone, war zone, the site, combat zone, ground zero, state troopers, secured perimeter, national guard, humvees, family center”: a disturbing new vocabulary that seemed to stamp the logic of Giuliani’s sanitized and over-policed Manhattan onto the wounded hulk of the city. The Mayor had been magnificent in the heat of the crisis; Churchillian, many were saying—and indeed, Giuliani quickly appeared on the cover of Cigar Afficionado, complete with wing collar and the misquotation from Kipling, “Captain Courageous.” Churchill had not believed in peacetime politics either, and he never got over losing his empire. Now the regime of command and control over New York’s citizens and its economy was being stabilized and reimposed. The sealed-off, disfigured, and newly militarized spaces of the New York through which I have always loved to wander at all hours seemed to have been put beyond reach for the duration. And, in the new post-“9/11” post-history, the duration could last forever. The violence of the attacks seemed to have elicited a heavy-handed official reaction that sought to contain and constrict the best qualities of New York. I felt more anger at the clampdown than I did at the demolition of the towers. I knew this was unreasonable, but I feared the reaction, the spread of the racial harassment and racial profiling that I had already heard of from my students in New Jersey. This militarizing of the urban landscape seemed to negate the sprawling, freewheeling, boundless largesse and tolerance on which New York had complacently claimed a monopoly. For many the towers stood for that as well, not just as the monumental outposts of global finance that had been attacked. Could the American flag mean something different? For a few days, perhaps—on the helmets of firemen and construction workers. But not for long. On the Saturday, I found an unmanned barricade way east along Canal Street and rode my bike past throngs of Chinatown residents, by the Federal jail block where prisoners from the first World Trade Center bombing were still being held. I headed south and west towards Tribeca; below the barricades in the frozen zone, you could roam freely, the cops and soldiers assuming you belonged there. I felt uneasy, doubting my own motives for being there, feeling the blood drain from my head in the same numbing shock I’d felt every time I headed downtown towards the site. I looped towards Greenwich Avenue, passing an abandoned bank full of emergency supplies and boxes of protective masks. Crushed cars still smeared with pulverized concrete and encrusted with paperwork strewn by the blast sat on the street near the disabled telephone exchange. On one side of the avenue stood a horde of onlookers, on the other television crews, all looking two blocks south towards a colossal pile of twisted and smoking steel, seven stories high. We were told to stay off the street by long-suffering national guardsmen and women with southern accents, kids. Nothing happening, just the aftermath. The TV crews were interviewing worn-out, dust-covered volunteers and firemen who sat quietly leaning against the railings of a park filled with scraps of paper. Out on the West Side highway, a high-tech truck was offering free cellular phone calls. The six lanes by the river were full of construction machinery and military vehicles. Ambulances rolled slowly uptown, bodies inside? I locked my bike redundantly to a lamppost and crossed under the hostile gaze of plainclothes police to another media encampment. On the path by the river, two camera crews were complaining bitterly in the heat. “After five days of this I’ve had enough.” They weren’t talking about the trauma, bodies, or the wreckage, but censorship. “Any blue light special gets to roll right down there, but they see your press pass and it’s get outta here. I’ve had enough.” I fronted out the surly cops and ducked under the tape onto the path, walking onto a Pier on which we’d spent many lazy afternoons watching the river at sunset. Dust everywhere, police boats docked and waiting, a crane ominously dredging mud into a barge. I walked back past the camera operators onto the highway and walked up to an interview in process. Perfectly composed, a fire chief and his crew from some small town in upstate New York were politely declining to give details about what they’d seen at “ground zero.” The men’s faces were dust streaked, their eyes slightly dazed with the shock of a horror previously unimaginable to most Americans. They were here to help the best they could, now they’d done as much as anyone could. “It’s time for us to go home.” The chief was eloquent, almost rehearsed in his precision. It was like a Magnum press photo. But he was refusing to cooperate with the media’s obsessive emotionalism. I walked down the highway, joining construction workers, volunteers, police, and firemen in their hundreds at Chambers Street. No one paid me any attention; it was absurd. I joined several other watchers on the stairs by Stuyvesant High School, which was now the headquarters for the recovery crews. Just two or three blocks away, the huge jagged teeth of the towers’ beautiful tracery lurched out onto the highway above huge mounds of debris. The TV images of the shattered scene made sense as I placed them into what was left of a familiar Sunday afternoon geography of bike rides and walks by the river, picnics in the park lying on the grass and gazing up at the infinite solidity of the towers. Demolished. It was breathtaking. If “they” could do that, they could do anything. Across the street at tables military policeman were checking credentials of the milling volunteers and issuing the pink and orange tags that gave access to ground zero. Without warning, there was a sudden stampede running full pelt up from the disaster site, men and women in fatigues, burly construction workers, firemen in bunker gear. I ran a few yards then stopped. Other people milled around idly, ignoring the panic, smoking and talking in low voices. It was a mainly white, blue-collar scene. All these men wearing flags and carrying crowbars and flashlights. In their company, the intolerance and rage I associated with flags and construction sites was nowhere to be seen. They were dealing with a torn and twisted otherness that dwarfed machismo or bigotry. I talked to a moustachioed, pony-tailed construction worker who’d hitched a ride from the mid-west to “come and help out.” He was staying at the Y, he said, it was kind of rough. “Have you been down there?” he asked, pointing towards the wreckage. “You’re British, you weren’t in World War Two were you?” I replied in the negative. “It’s worse ’n that. I went down last night and you can’t imagine it. You don’t want to see it if you don’t have to.” Did I know any welcoming ladies? he asked. The Y was kind of tough. When I saw TV images of President Bush speaking to the recovery crews and steelworkers at “ground zero” a couple of days later, shouting through a bullhorn to chants of “USA, USA” I knew nothing had changed. New York’s suffering was subject to a second hijacking by the brokers of national unity. New York had never been America, and now its terrible human loss and its great humanity were redesignated in the name of the nation, of the coming war. The signs without a referent were being forcibly appropriated, locked into an impoverished patriotic framework, interpreted for “us” by a compliant media and an opportunistic regime eager to reign in civil liberties, to unloose its war machine and tighten its grip on the Muslim world. That day, drawn to the river again, I had watched F18 fighter jets flying patterns over Manhattan as Bush’s helicopters came in across the river. Otherwise empty of air traffic, “our” skies were being torn up by the military jets: it was somehow the worst sight yet, worse than the wreckage or the bands of disaster tourists on Canal Street, a sign of further violence yet to come. There was a carrier out there beyond New York harbor, there to protect us: the bruising, blustering city once open to all comers. That felt worst of all. In the intervening weeks, we have seen other, more unstable ways of interpreting the signs of September 11 and its aftermath. Many have circulated on the Internet, past the blockages and blockades placed on urban spaces and intellectual life. Karl-Heinz Stockhausen’s work was banished (at least temporarily) from the canon of avant-garde electronic music when he described the attack on las torres gemelas as akin to a work of art. If Jacques Derrida had described it as an act of deconstruction (turning technological modernity literally in on itself), or Jean Baudrillard had announced that the event was so thick with mediation it had not truly taken place, something similar would have happened to them (and still may). This is because, as Don DeLillo so eloquently put it in implicit reaction to the plaintive cry “Why do they hate us?”: “it is the power of American culture to penetrate every wall, home, life and mind”—whether via military action or cultural iconography. All these positions are correct, however grisly and annoying they may be. What GK Chesterton called the “flints and tiles” of nineteenth-century European urban existence were rent asunder like so many victims of high-altitude US bombing raids. As a First-World disaster, it became knowable as the first-ever US “ground zero” such precisely through the high premium immediately set on the lives of Manhattan residents and the rarefied discussion of how to commemorate the high-altitude towers. When, a few weeks later, an American Airlines plane crashed on take-off from Queens, that borough was left open to all comers. Manhattan was locked down, flown over by “friendly” bombers. In stark contrast to the open if desperate faces on the street of 11 September, people went about their business with heads bowed even lower than is customary. Contradictory deconstructions and valuations of Manhattan lives mean that September 11 will live in infamy and hyper-knowability. The vengeful United States government and population continue on their way. Local residents must ponder insurance claims, real-estate values, children’s terrors, and their own roles in something beyond their ken. New York had been forced beyond being the center of the financial world. It had become a military target, a place that was receiving as well as dispatching the slings and arrows of global fortune. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Deer, Patrick and Miller, Toby. "A Day That Will Live In … ?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.1 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/adaythat.php>. Chicago Style Deer, Patrick and Miller, Toby, "A Day That Will Live In … ?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 1 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/adaythat.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Deer, Patrick and Miller, Toby. (2002) A Day That Will Live In … ?. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(1). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/adaythat.php> ([your date of access]).

The environmental-ecological problem that humanity faces today is believed to be as ‘the ultimate life issue.’Such is the rationale for the study. This research investigates the said issue thru descriptive-historical research. Lonergan’smethod is used as a framework of the study. Lonergan distinguishes four realms of meaning as: (1) common sense, (2) theory, (3) interiority, and (4) transcendence. The investigation covers the gamut of the ecological problem, the causes and origins, the present environmental situation, its encompassing effects, and the different paradigmatic responses to it. The environmental crisis can be traced from how the people’s mindset and cultural attitudes operate in relationto how nature can be used in the pursuit of science, modernization, growth, and progress. The sad state of theenvironmental degradation includes the prevalence of continued deforestation, uncontrolled flooding, topsoil erosion,heavily silted inland waterways, destruction of coral reefs, and various forms of pollution. Amidst the crisis, hope can be seenfrom the moral values and beliefs of Filipinos. Social principles can be transformed into practice through authentic humanfunctioning associated with knowledge and choice. References Boff, L. Cry of the poor, cry of the earth. New York: Orbis Books. Bokenkotter, T. 1992. Dynamic Catholicism: A historical catechism. New York: ImageBooks, 1997. Byrne, B. Inheriting the Earth: The Pauline basis of a spirituality of our time. NewYork: Alba House, 1990. Cajes, P.A. Anitism and Perichoresis: Towards a Filipino Christian Eco-theology ofNature. Quezon City: Our Lady of Angel Seminary, 2002. Cane, B. Circles of hope: Breathing life and spirit into a wounded world.Makati: St.Paul Philippines, 1997. Christiansen, D. & Grazer, W. 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The body of God: An ecological theology. London: SCM Press, Ltd, 1993. Natividad, E.L. Chaos Theory and Theology: Scientific perspectives on Divine action.Unpublished doctoral dissertation, De La Salle University, Manila, 2000. Northcott, M.S. The environment and Christian ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1999. Robbins, O., & Solomon, S. Choices for our future: A generation rising for the life onearth. Tennessee: Book Publishing Company, 1994. Romero, S.E. Changing Filipino values and the re-democratization of governance.In Han Sung-Joo. (1999). (Ed.). Changing values in Asia: Their impact ongovernance and development. Tokyo: Japan Center for International Exchange, 1999. Ruether, R.R. (Ed.). Women healing earth: Third world women on ecology,feminism,and religion. New York: Orbis Books, 1996. ______________. Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a feminist theology. New York: PaulistPress, 1983. Ruether, R.R. The biblical vision of ecological crisis. 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On the back cover of The Art Forger’s Handbook, Eric Hebborn proclaims No drawing can lie of itself, it is only the opinion of the expert which can deceive. (Hebborn) Well certainly, but like many forgers Hebborn was dedicated to ensuring the experts have ample material with which to work. The debate about authenticity rolls into the debate about originality rolls into the debate about excellence, slipping between the verifiable and the subjective, shadowed by the expert assessing, categorising, and delivering verdicts. Yet the proclamation ‘This is authentic’ is not straightforward. It is impossible to prove that the statement ‘This is a painting by Sir Arthur Streeton’ is true. It is always possible (though not probable) that the work in question is an excellent copy, manufactured with materials identical to those employed by Streeton, with brushstrokes reflecting Streeton’s manipulation of paint, applied in the kind of sequence Streeton used and with a provenance crafted to simulate perfectly an acceptable provenance for a work by Streeton. Much easier to prove that a work is not by a particular artist; one very obvious anomaly will suffice (Sloggett 298). But an anomaly requires a context, the body of material against which to assess the new find. John Drew’s manipulation of the art market was successful not because of the quality of the pictures he paid John Myatt to produce (after all they were painted with household emulsion paint often extended with K-Y Jelly). His success lay in his ability to alter the identities of these works by penetrating the archives of the Tate and the Victoria and Albert Museum and manufacturing an archival history that virtually copied the history of works by his target artists, Nicholson, Giocometti, Chagall, Epstein, Dubeffet, and de Stals. While the paintings mimicked works by these artists, without a provenance (an identity and identity trail) they were nothing more than approximate copies, many which were initially rejected by the dealers and auction houses (Landesman 38). Identity requires history and context: for something to be deemed ‘real’, both need to be verifiable. The plight of stateless refugees lies in their inability to verify their history (who am I?) and their context (I exist here because…). Drew’s ability to deliver a history is only one way in which works can slip identities (or in the case of Drew’s works – can be pushed). Drew’s intention and his ability to profit by the deception denoted fraud. But authentication is more often sought to support not fraud but optimism. ‘Can you please look at this painting which hung in my grandfather’s lounge room for over 50 years? It was given to him by the artist. I remember it as a small boy, and my father also remembers it when he was a child. But I can’t sell it because someone said it didn’t look right. Can you tell if it is by the artist?’ Such a problem needs to be approached on two fronts. Firstly, how strong is the evidence that this work is by the artist and secondly, what is the hypothesis of best fit for this work? The classic authentication process examines a picture and, against a framework of knowns (usually based on securely provenanced works) looks for points of identification between the proffered work and provenanced works. From these points of identification a theory of best fit is developed. For example, a painting with the inscription ‘Arthur Streeton/1896’ is analysed for its pigment content in order to test the proposition that this is a work by Arthur Streeton from 1896. Pigment analysis indicates that titanium white (a pigment not available commercially until 1920) is found in the clouds. So the proposition must be modified: either this is a work by Streeton that has been heavily reworked after 1920, or this is not a work by Streeton, or this is a work by Streeton but the date is wrong. The authentication process will define and redefine each proposition until there is one that best fits the evidence at hand. Fluorescing the date to establish whether it is a recent addition would be part of this process. Examining other whites in the painting to check if the clouds had been added later would be another. Checking the veracity of the provenance would also be critical. We may decide that this is not an 1896 work by Streeton based on the evidence of the pigment. But what if an art historian discovers a small pigment manufacturer in Box Hill whose records show they produced titanium dioxide as a pigment in 1890? The new evidence may affect the conclusion. But more likely we would want to verify such evidence before we altered our conclusion. Between the extremes of Drew’s manufactured identities and the optimism of a third generation is the strengthened work, combining identity shift and hope. Dali pulled a reverse strengthening when he signed 20,000 blank sheets of paper for lithographs that had not yet been executed (Hebborn 79), but more usually it is the inscription not the image that is missing. Of course a signature is good, but signature works may not have, and do not need signatures. A signature may be a picture of a certain place (Heidelberg) at a certain time of day (moonrise); optimism will soon join the dots, producing a David Davies Moonrise. Often an inscription helps; a nondescript clean-shaven Victorian gentleman can become a bearded founding father, an anonymous nag the first winner of the Melbourne Cup. And if the buyer is not convinced, then a signature may win the day. Unlike Drew’s fabricated histories these changes in identity are confined to transformations of the object itself and then, by association, to its context. Art fraud is an endearing topic, partly because it challenges the subjective nature of expertise. When van Meegeren manufactured his most successful ‘Vermeer’ The Supper at Emmaus (1937) he explored the theories of experts, and then set about producing a work that copied not an existing Vermeer, but the critic’s theory of what an as-yet-undiscovered Vermeer would look like. Hannema, van Schendel and finally Bredius subscribed to the theory that Vermeer’s trip to Italy resulted in Caravaggio’s influence on the artist (Dutton 25). Van Meegeren obligingly produced such a work. So does it matter? Is an identical work as good a work? Is a sublime copyist of great artists a great artist? (Not that van Meegeren was either.) Authentication is a process of assessing claims about identity. It involves reputation, ownership, relationships and truth. When an artist executes a copy it is homage to the skill of the master. When Miss Malvina Manton produced a scene of dead poultry in 1874, she was copying the most popular painting in the fledgling collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, Schendel’s The Poultry Vendor (Inglis 63), and joined a league of copyists including Henry Gritten and Nicholas Chevalier who sought permission to copy the Gallery’s paintings. When John O’Loughlin copied works by Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri and passed them off as original the impact on the artist was less benign (Gotting). Sid Nolan refused to identify problematic paintings attributed to his oeuvre claiming that to acknowledge such paintings would cast doubt on his entire oeuvre. Bob Dickerson assiduously tracks down and ‘outs’ problematic paintings from his oeuvre, claiming that not to do so would leave the thin edge of the wedge firmly embedded for future opportunists. Both are concerned with their identity. Creation is a fraught business, simply because the act of creation is the act of giving an identity. Whether we create a child, a musical score, a painting or a t-shirt brand, the newly created entity is located within a lineage and context that means more than the single individual creation. This is why identity theft is such a major crime. If someone steals an identity they also steal the collateral developed around that identity, the ability to deal in credit, to drive a car, to travel overseas, to purchase a house. Identity is a valuable commodity; for an artist it is their tool of trade. There is no doubt that the public celebrates the fake. Perhaps it is a celebration of the power of the object over the critic or the theoretician. But it is an extraordinarily costly celebration. Despite the earlier assertion that it is possible to make the perfect copy, very few even approximate the vibrancy and intelligence of an original. Most, if accepted, would seriously dilute the strength of the artist’s oeuvre. Forging Aboriginal art is even more disgraceful. In a society where cultural transmission has traditionally been based on complex relationships of dance, song, painting and objects to customary rights, laws and obligations, art fraud impacts on the very fabric of society. There will always be works that slip identities, and many are not pulled back. False works do damage; they dull our perceptions, dilute our ability to understand an artist’s contribution to society, and are usually no more than blunt instruments used for financial gain. References Australian Institute of Criminology. “Art Crime: Protecting Art, Protecting Artists and Protecting Consumers.” 2-3 Decembeer 1999. 1 May 2005 http://www.aic.gov.au/conferences/artcrime/>. Catterall, L. The Great Dali Art Fraud and Other Deceptions. Fort Lee, New Jersey: Barricade, 1992. Dutton, Denis, ed. The Forger’s Art Forgery and the Philosophy of Art. California: U of California P, 1983 Gotting, Peter. “Shame of Aboriginal Art Fakes.” 16 July 2000. 31 May 2005 http://www.museum-security.org/00/112.html#3>. Hebborn, Eric. The Art Forger’s Handbook. London: Cassell, 1997. Inglis, Alison. “What Did the Picture’s Surface Convey? Copies and Copying in the National Gallery of Victoria during the Colonial Period.” The Articulate Surface: Dialogues on Paintings between Conservators, Curators and Art Historians. Ed. Sue-Anne Wallace, with Jacqueline Macnaughtan and Jodi Parvey. Canberra: The Humanities Research Centre, the Australian National University and the National Gallery of Australia, 1996. 55-69. Landesman, Peter. “A 20th-Century Master Scam.” The New York Times Magazine (18 July 1999): 31-63. Sloggett, Robyn. “The Truth of the Matter: Issues and Procedures in the Authentication of Artwork.” Arts, Antiquity and Law 5.3 (September 2000): 295-303. Tallman, Susan. “Report from London Faking It.” Art in America (November 1990): 75-81. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Sloggett, Robyn. "Slipping and Sliding: Blind Optimism, Greed and the Effect of Fakes on Our Cultural Understanding." M/C Journal 8.3 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0507/09-sloggett.php>. APA Style Sloggett, R. (Jul. 2005) "Slipping and Sliding: Blind Optimism, Greed and the Effect of Fakes on Our Cultural Understanding," M/C Journal, 8(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0507/09-sloggett.php>.

This paper will identify significant roles of Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines as a critical collaborator with the State. Instead of retribution and legal execution, the leaders of the Church in the Philippines are calling the government to encourage non-retribution-based justice; a non-retaliatory principle based on love, mercy and justice being taught by Jesus. Other than theological and Biblical perspectives to support above key points, multi-disciplinary approaches such as juridical, sociological, psychological, criminal justice and other fields of thought will also be used to explain the relevance of the statement of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines as a willing yet critical cooperator with the affairs of the State. References 1997. Catehism of the Catholic Church. 2nd. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana. http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p3s. 2010. “The New American Bible.” Vatican Website. http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0839/_INDEX.HTM. Adams & Bastoy. 2010. “Sentenced to Serving the Good Life in Norway.” Time Magazine. July 12. http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2000920,00.html. Ager, Maila. 2017. “”Pacquiao invokes Bible to defend death penalty.”.” Philippine Daily Inquirer. January 17. http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/863105/ pacquiao-invokes-bible-to-defend-death-penalty. Amnesty International. 2017. “Amnesty International Global Report: Death Sentences and Executions 2016.” Accessed January 2019. https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/ACT5057402017ENGLISH.PDF. Angeles, Albert Lee G. 2013. “Wrongful Conviction and the Case for Forensic Evidence in the Philippine Criminal Justice System .” Ateneo Law Journal 1155-1174. Asian Network of People who Use Drugs (ANPUD). 2017. “An open letter to Tim Cook: Immediately remove apps that are promoting war on drugs in the Philippines.” Asian Network of People who Use Drugs (ANPUD). October 10. http://www.anpud.org/an-open-letter-to-apple-ceo-mr-tim-cookimmediately-remove-apps-that-are-promotingwar-on-drugs-in-the-philippines/. Aurelio, Julie. 2017. “Pope lauds parish-based drug rehab: ‘This is the path to take’.” Philippine Daily Inquirer. October 22. Accessed July 6, 2019. https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/939723/war-on-drugs-drug-rehabilitation-drug-killingsextrajudicial-killings-sanlakbay-luis-antoniocardinal-tagle-oscar-albayalde-pope-francis. Bandura, Albert. 1977. Social learning theory. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall. Barkan, Steven E. 2012. Criminology: A Sociological Understanding (5th edition). New Jersey: Prentice Hall. Bernas, Joaquin G. 2009. The 1987 Constitution of the Philippines: A Commentary. Quezon City: Rex Bookstore, Inc. Bureau of Corrections. n.d. Bureau of Corrections. Accessed July 6, 2019. http://bucor.gov.ph. Catholic Biishops Conference of the Philippines. n.d. “Catholic Biishops Conference of the Philippines News.” Catholic Biishops Conference of the Philippines Statements. Accessed June 25, 2019. http://cbcpnews.net/cbcpnews/category/statements/cbcp-statements/. _______________ 1998. “Catechism on the Church and Politics.” CBCP Documents. May 11. Accessed January 16, 2019. http://www.cbcponline.org/documents/1990s/1998-church_politics.html. _______________ 1998. CBCP Media Office. May 11. http://www.cbcponline.net/documents/1990s/1998-church_politics.html. _______________ 2017. “CBCP Pastoral Statement on Death Penalty.” CBCP News. March 19. http://cbcpnews.net/cbcpnews/cbcp-pastoral-statementon-death-penalty/. _______________ “Preamble / Constitution.” CBCP Online. Accessed February 17, 2018. http://cbcpwebsite.com/preamble.html. Delaney, Tim. 2016. Classical and Contemporary Social Theory: Investigation and Application. New York: Routledge. Fair Punishment Project. 2016. “Too Broken to Fix: Part I, An In-depth Look at America’s Outlier Death Penalty Counties.” Fair Punishment Project.August. http://fairpunishment.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/FPP-TooBroken.pdf. Falcon, Florio R. February 4, 1991. The Separation of Church and State in the Philippine Constitution: A Myth or a Reality? Manila: unpublished thesis presented to the Faculty of Canon Law. Francis. 2017. “Address to participants in the meeting promoted by the Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelization.” Vatican Website. October 11. Accessed July 4, 2019. https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2017/october/documents/papa-francesco_20171011_convegnonuova-evangelizzazione.html. Gould, Jon, Julia Carrano, Richard Leo, and Katie Hail-Jares. 2014. “Predicting Erroneous Convictions.” 99 Iowa Law Review 471 489. Hass, Moloney, Chambliss. 2017. Criminology: Connecting Theory, Research and Practice. London: Routledge. Hill, John Lawrence. 2016. After the Natural Law: How the Classical Worldview Supports Our Modern Moral and Political Values. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. Hontiveros, Romeo. 2016. “What is the true meaning of separation of Church and State?” PagadianDiocese. org . May 26. http://www.pagadiandiocese.org/2016/05/26/what-is-the-true-meaning-ofseparation-of-church-and-state/. John Paul II. 1995. Encyclical Letter Evangelium Vitae. http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_25031995_evangelium-vitae.html. _______________ 2000. “Jubillee in Prisons.” Vatican Website. July 9. Accessed January 15, 2019. http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/homilies/2000/documents/hf_jp-ii_hom_20000709_jubilprisoners.html. John XXIII. 1963. Pacem in Terris. April 11. http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-xxiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_j-xxiii_enc_11041963_pacem.html. Kendall, Diana. 2016. Sociology in Our Times. Boston, MA: Cengage Learning. McCrudden, Christopher. 2008. “Human Dignity and Judicial Interpretation of Human Rights.” The European Journal of International Law 19 (4): 656-657.

In the third episode of the British sci-fi/thriller television series Torchwood (BBC3, 2007-) the team are investigating a portable ‘ghost machine’, which allows its users to see events which occurred in the past. After visiting an old man whose younger self the device may have allowed them to witness, the team’s medic, Owen Harper, spots Bernie Harris, who’d previously been in possession of the machine. A chase ensues; they run past a park, between a gang of kids playing football, over a railway bridge, through a housing estate, and eventually Bernie is cornered in a back garden and taken away for questioning. The scene demonstrates the series’ intention to be a fast-paced, modern, glossy thriller, with loud incidental music, fast cuts, and energetic camerawork. Yet for me the scene has quite a different meaning. The housing estate they run through is the one in which I used to live; the railway bridge they run over is the one I crossed every day on my way to and from work; the street they run down is my street; and there, in the background, clear and apparent and obvious for all to see, is my home. Yes; my house was on Torchwood. As Blunt and Dowling note, “home does not simply exist, but is made … [and] … this process has both material and imaginative elements” (23). It is through such imaginative elements that we turn ‘spaces’ that are “unnamed, unhistoried, unnarativized” into ‘places’ that are “indubitably bound up with personal experience” (Darby 50). Such experiences may be ‘real’ (as in things that actually happened there) or ‘representational’ (as in seen on television); my relationship to ‘home’ is here being inflected through the “indexical bond” (Kilborn and Izod 29) that links both of these strategies. In using a scene from Torchwood to say something about my personal history, I’m taking what is, in essence, a televisual ‘space’ and converting it into a ‘place’ which is not only defined by my “profilmic” (Ward 8) relationship to it, but also helps express that relationship. Telling everyone that my house was on Torchwood certainly says something about the programme; but more fundamentally I’m engaging in a process intended to say something about me. A bit of autobiography. The house is in Splott, a residential area of Cardiff, the capital of Wales, where Torchwood is set and filmed. I lived in Cardiff from 2000 to 2006, when I worked at the University of Glamorgan. For much of that time I lived in rented accommodation in Cathays, the student area of Cardiff. But in 2005 I bought a house in Splott, and this was the first property I ever owned. A year later I moved to Norwich (virtually the other side of the UK from Cardiff) to take a job at the University of East Anglia, but I kept the house in Cardiff and now rent it out. It was while living in Norwich that my house appeared on Torchwood, and I had no idea that the programme had been filming in that area. This means that, strictly speaking, at the time it was on television the property was no longer my ‘home’, but was instead my tenants’. Yet what I want to examine here is the “geography of feeling and emotion” (Rodaway 263) which is central to the idea of ‘home’, and which has been kick-started in me since some fictional television characters ran down the street I used to live in and the ‘real’ and the ‘representational’ began to intersect. There certainly is something personal which is required in order to turn a ‘space’ into a ‘place’, but what is it that then transforms it into ‘home’? That is, for me Cardiff is more than a ‘place’ which I know. Owning a property there makes a difference, but that is to too easily equate a commercial transaction with an emotive sense of feeling. Indeed, Cardiff felt like ‘home’ before I’d bought a house, and the majority of my memories of the city are connected to other properties I’ve lived in. In a capitalist society it’s tempting to equate ‘home’ with the property we own, and this probably is the case for the majority of people (Morley 19). Nevertheless, something emotive stirred in me when I saw my house in a chase sequence on a science-fiction television programme when I live in an entirely different city. Tuan defines this as ‘topophilia’, which is “the affective bond between people and place or setting” (Topophilia 4), and it’s clear that such bonds can be highly emotionally charged and a significant aspect of one’s sense of self. This is noticeable because of the ways in which I’ve used my house’s appearance on television. I’ve not been quiet about it; I was telling everyone at work the day after it appeared. Whenever people mention Torchwood it’s something I point out. This might not sound as if that is likely to occur very often, but considering the programme is a spin-off from the highly successful revival of Doctor Who (BBC1, 1963-89, 1996, 2005-) it is part of a well-known media landscape. Both Doctor Who and Torchwood are predominantly filmed in Cardiff and the surrounding areas of South Wales, but whereas Torchwood is also narratively set in Cardiff, Doctor Who merely uses the locations to represent other places, most often London. Yet many of these places are distinctive and therefore obviously Cardiff for those who know the area. For example, the hospital in the episode ‘New Earth’ (2006) is recognisably the interior of the Wales Millennium Centre, just as the exterior location where the Tardis lands at the beginning of the episode is clearly Rhossili on the Gower Peninsula. Inevitably, the use of such locations has often disrupted my understanding of the story being told. That is, it’s hard to accept that this episode is taking place on a planet at the other end of the galaxy thousands of years into the future if the characters are standing on a cliff you recognise because you’ve been camping there. Of course, the use of locations to represent other places is necessary in media fictions, and I’m not trying to carry out some kind of trainspotter location identification in an attempt to undermine the programme’s diegesis. But it is important to note that while “remembering is a process that today is increasingly media-afflicted” (Hoskins 110), media texts can also be affected by the memories, whether communal or individual, that we bring to bear on them. A ‘real’ relationship with a place can be so intimate that it refuses to be ignored when ‘representations’ require it to be unnecessary. I’m a fan of Doctor Who and would rather not recognise the places so I can just get on with enjoying the programme. But it’s not possible to simply erase “Expressions of community” (Moores 368) which bring together identity and place, especially when that place is your home. Importantly, my idea of ‘home’ is inextricably bound up in the past. As it is a place I no longer live in, the ways in which I feel towards it are predicated on the notion that I used to live there, but no longer do. It’s clear that notions of home – especially those related to nation – are often predicated on ideas of history with significant emotional resonance (Anderson; Blunt and Dowling 140-195; Calhoun). This is a place that is an emotional rather than geographical home, even if it used to also be my home geographically. In buying a house, and engaging in the consumer culture which dominates the ways in which we turn a house into a home (oh, those endless hours at Ikea), I spent a lot of time wondering what it was that this sofa, or those lampshades, or that rug, said about me. The idea that the buildings that we own are a key way of creating and demonstrating a particular kind of identity or affiliation with a certain social group is necessary to consumer capitalism. But as I no longer live in it, the inside of this house can no longer be used as something I can show to other people hoping that they’ll ‘read’ my home how I want them to. Instead, the sense of home invigorated by my house’s appearance on Torchwood is one centred on location, related to the city and the housing estate where my house is, rather than what I did to it. ‘Home’ here becomes something symbolised by the bricks and mortar of the house I bought, but is instead more accurately located in the city and area which the house sits in; Cardiff. More importantly, Cardiff and my house become emotionally meaningful because I’m no longer there. That is, while it’s clear I had a particular relationship to Cardiff when I was a resident, this has altered since my move to Norwich. In moving to a new city – one which I had never visited before, and had no family or friends living in – it seems that my understanding of Cardiff as my ‘home’ has become intensified. This might be because continuing to own property there gives me an investment in the city, both emotionally and financially. But this idea of ‘home’ would, I think, have existed even if I’d sold my house. Instead, Cardiff-as-home is predicated on an idea of personal history and nostalgia (Wheeler; Massey). Academics are used to moving great distances in order to get jobs; indeed, “To spend an entire working career in a single department may seem to be a failure of geographical imagination” (Ley 182). The labour market insists that “All people may now be wanderers” (Bauman, Globalization 87), and hence geographical origins become something to be discussed with new colleagues. For me, like most people, this is a complicated question; does it mean where I was born, or where I grew up, or where I studied, or where I have lived most of my life? In the choices I make to answer this question, I’m acknowledging that “migration is a complex process of cultural negotiation, resistance, and adaptation” (Sinclair and Cunningham 14). As Freeman notes, “the history one tells, via memory, assumes the form of a narrative of the past that charts the trajectory of how one’s self came to be” (33, italics in original). Importantly, this narrative must be seen to make sense; that is, it must help explain the present, conforming to narrative ideas of cause and effect. In constructing a “narratable self” (Caravero 33, italics in original) I’m demonstrating how I think I came to end up where I am now, doing the job I’m doing. In order to show that “I am more than what the thin present defines” (Tuan, Space and Place 186) it’s necessary to reiterate a notion of ‘home’ which supports and illustrates the desired identity narrative. This narrative is as much about “the reflexive project of the self” (Gauntlett 99) in these “liquid times” (Bauman, Liquid Times), as it is a “performance” (Goffman) for others. The coherence and stability of my performance was undercut in a recent episode of Doctor Who – ‘Smith and Jones’ (2007) – in which a family row occurred outside a pub. I became quite distraught that I couldn’t work out where that pub was, and was later reassured to discover that it was in Pontypridd, a town a good few miles from Cardiff, and therefore it wasn’t surprising that I couldn’t recognise it. But in being distraught at not recognising locations I was demonstrating how central knowledge is to an idea of ‘home’. Knowing your way around, knowing where certain shops are, knowing the history of the place; these are all aspects of home, all parts of what Crouch calls “lay knowledge” (217). Ignorance of a space marks the outsider, who must stand on street corners with a map and ask locals for directions. For someone like me who prides himself on his sense of direction (who says I conform to gender stereotypes?) an inability to recognise a pub that I thought I should know suggested my knowledge of the area was dissipating, and so perhaps my ability to define that city as my home was becoming less valid. This must be why I take pleasure in noting that Torchwood’s diegesis is often geographically correct, for the ‘representational’ helps demonstrate my knowledge of the ‘real’ place’s layout. As Tuan notes, “When space feels thoroughly familiar to us, it has become place” (Space and Place 73), and the demonstration of that familiarity is one of the ways of reasserting one’s relationship to home. In demonstrating a knowledge of the place I’m defining as home, I’m also insisting that I’m not a tourist. Urry shows how visitors use a “tourist gaze” (The Tourist Gaze), arguing viewing is the most important activity when encountering a place, just as Tuan (Space and Place 16) and Strain (3) do. To visit somewhere is to employ “a dominance of the eye” (Urry, “Sensing the City” 71); this is why photography has become the dominant manner for recording tourist activity. Strain sees the tourist gaze as one “trained for consumerism” (15) with tourist activity defined primarily by commerce. Since Doctor Who returned Cardiff has promoted its association with the programme, opening an ‘Up Close’ exhibition and debating whether to put together a tourist trail of locations. As a fan of these programmes I’m certainly excited by all of this, and have been to the exhibition. Yet it feels odd being a tourist in a place I want to call home, and some of my activity seems an attempt to demonstrate that it was my home before it became a place I might want to visit for its associations with a television programme. For example, I never went and watched the programme being filmed, even though much of it was shot within walking distance of my house, and “The physical places of fandom clearly have an extraordinary importance for fans” (Sandvoss 61). While some of this was due to not wanting to know what was going to happen in the programme, I was uncomfortable with carrying out an activity that would turn a “landscape” into a “mediascape” (Jansson 432), replacing the ‘real’ with the ‘representational’. In insisting on seeing Cardiff, and my house, as something which existed prior to the programmes, I’m attempting to maintain the “imagined community” (Anderson) I have for my home, distinguishing it from the taint of commerce, no matter how pointless or naïve such an act is in effect. Hence, home is resolutely not a commercial place; or, at least, it is a location whose primary emotive aspects are not defined by consumerism. When houses are seen as nothing more than aspects of commerce, that’s when they remain ‘houses’ or ‘properties’; the affective aspects of ‘homes’ are instead emotionally detached from the commercial factors which bring them about. I think this is why I’m keen to demonstrate that my associations with Cardiff existed before Doctor Who started being made there, for if the place only meant anything to me because of the programme that would define me as a tourist and therefore undermine those emotional and personal aspects of the city which allow me to call it ‘home’. It also means I can be proud that such a cultural institution is being made in ‘my’ city. But it’s a city I can no longer claim residence in. This means that Torchwood and Doctor Who have become useful ways for me to ‘visit’ Cardiff. It seems I have started to adopt a ‘tourist gaze’, for the programmes visually recreate the locations and all I can do is view them, no matter how much I use my knowledge of location in an attempt to interpret those images differently from a tourist. It’s tempting to suggest that this shows how there is a “perpetual negotiation between the real event and its representation” (Bruzzi 9), and how willing I am to engage in the “mobile privatization” that Williams saw as a defining aspect of television (26). But this would be to accept the “unhomeyness” which results from “the ultimate failures of the home in postmodern times” (Lewis and Cho 74). In adopting an autobiographical approach to these issues, I hope I’ve demonstrated the ways in which individuals can experience emotional resonances related to ‘home’ which, while clearly inflected through the social, cultural, and technological aspects I’ve outlined, are nevertheless meaningful and maintain a dominance of the ‘real’ over the ‘representational’. Furthermore, my job tells me I shouldn’t feel this way about my home; or, at least, it reminds me that such emotionality can be explained away through cultural analysis. But that doesn’t in any way make ‘home’ any less powerful nor fully explain how such dry criteria mutate into humanist, emotional significance. So, I can tell you what my home is: but I’m not sure I can get you to understand how seeing my home on television makes me feel. In that sense it’s almost too neat that the episode which kick-started all of this is called ‘Ghost Machine’, for television has become the technology through which the ghosts of my home haunt me on a weekly basis, and ghosts have always been difficult to make sense of. References Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 1983. Bauman, Zygmunt. Globalization: The Human Consequences. Cambridge: Polity, 1998. ———. Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity, 2007. Blunt, Alison, and Robyn Dowling. Home. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Bruzzi, Stella. New Documentary: A Critical Introduction. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Calhoun, Craig. Nations Matter: Culture, History, and the Cosmopolitan Dream. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Caravero, Adriana. Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood. Trans. Paul A. Kottman. London and New York: Routledge, 2000/1997. Crouch, David. “Surrounded by Place: Embodied Encounters.” Tourism: Between Place and Performance. Eds. Simon Coleman and Mike Crang. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2002. 207-18. Darby, Wendy Joy. Landscape and Identity: Geographies of Nation and Class in England. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2000. Freeman, Mark. Rewriting the Self: History, Memory, Narrative. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Gauntlett, David. Media, Gender and Identity: An Introduction. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Goffmann, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin, 1959. Hoskins, Andrew. “Television and the Collapse of Memory.” Time and Society 13.1 (2004): 109-27. Jansson, André. “Spatial Phantasmagoria: the Mediatization of Tourism Experience.” European Journal of Communication 17.4 (2002): 429-43. Kilborn, Richard, and John Izod. An Introduction to Television Documentary: Confronting Reality. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1997. Lewis, Tyson, and Daniel Cho. “Home Is Where the Neurosis Is: A Topography of the Spatial Unconscious.” Cultural Critique 64.1 (2006): 69-91. Ley, David. “Places and Contexts.” Approaches to Human Geography. Eds. Stuart Aitken and Gill Valentine. London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage, 2006. 178-83. Massey, Doris. For Space. London: Sage, 2005. Moores, Shaun. “Television, Geography and ‘Mobile Privatization’.” European Journal of Communication 8.4 (1993): 365-79. Morley, David. Home Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Rodaway, Paul. “Humanism and People-Centred Methods.” Approaches to Human Geography. Eds. Stuart Aitken and Gill Valentine. London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage, 2006. 263-72. Sandvoss, Cornel. Fans: The Mirror of Consumption. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. Sinclair, John, and Stuart Cunningham. “Go with the Flow: Diasporas and the Media.” Television and New Media 1.1 (2000): 11-31. Strain, Ellen. Public Places, Private Journeys: Ethnography, Entertainment, and the Tourist Gaze. New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Rutgers UP, 2003. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. New York: Columbia UP, 1974. ———. Space and Place: the Perspective of Experience. London: Edward Arnold, 1977. Urry, John. “Sensing the City.” The Tourist City. Eds. Dennis R. Judd and Susan S. Fainstein. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1999. 71-86. ———. The Tourist Gaze. 2nd ed. London: Sage, 2002. Ward, Paul. Documentary: The Margins of Reality. London and New York: Wallflower, 2005. Wheeler, Wendy. A New Modernity: Change in Science, Literature and Politics. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1999. Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Mills, Brett. "What Happens When Your Home Is on Television?." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/08-mills.php>. APA Style Mills, B. (Aug. 2007) "What Happens When Your Home Is on Television?," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/08-mills.php>.

Introduction This article is a study in anxiety with regard to social online spaces (SOS) conceived of as dark. There are two possible ways to define ‘dark’ in this context. The first is that communication is dark because it either has limited distribution, is not open to all users (closed groups are a case example) or hidden. The second definition, linked as a result of the first, is the way that communication via these means is interpreted and understood. Dark social spaces disrupt the accepted top-down flow by the ‘gazing elite’ (data aggregators including social media), but anxious users might need to strain to notice what is out there, and this in turn destabilises one’s reception of the scene. In an environment where surveillance technologies are proliferating, this article examines contemporary, dark, interconnected, and interactive communications for the entangled affordances that might be brought to bear. A provocation is that resistance through counterveillance or “sousveillance” is one possibility. An alternative (or addition) is retreating to or building ‘dark’ spaces that are less surveilled and (perhaps counterintuitively) less fearful. This article considers critically the notion of dark social online spaces via four broad socio-technical concerns connected to the big social media services that have helped increase a tendency for fearful anxiety produced by surveillance and the perceived implications for personal privacy. It also shines light on the aspect of darkness where some users are spurred to actively seek alternative, dark social online spaces. Since the 1970s, public-key cryptosystems typically preserved security for websites, emails, and sensitive health, government, and military data, but this is now reduced (Williams). We have seen such systems exploited via cyberattacks and misappropriated data acquired by affiliations such as Facebook-Cambridge Analytica for targeted political advertising during the 2016 US elections. Via the notion of “parasitic strategies”, such events can be described as news/information hacks “whose attack vectors target a system’s weak points with the help of specific strategies” (von Nordheim and Kleinen-von Königslöw, 88). In accord with Wilson and Serisier’s arguments (178), emerging technologies facilitate rapid data sharing, collection, storage, and processing wherein subsequent “outcomes are unpredictable”. This would also include the effect of acquiescence. In regard to our digital devices, for some, being watched overtly—through cameras encased in toys, computers, and closed-circuit television (CCTV) to digital street ads that determine the resonance of human emotions in public places including bus stops, malls, and train stations—is becoming normalised (McStay, Emotional AI). It might appear that consumers immersed within this Internet of Things (IoT) are themselves comfortable interacting with devices that record sound and capture images for easy analysis and distribution across the communications networks. A counter-claim is that mainstream social media corporations have cultivated a sense of digital resignation “produced when people desire to control the information digital entities have about them but feel unable to do so” (Draper and Turow, 1824). Careful consumers’ trust in mainstream media is waning, with readers observing a strong presence of big media players in the industry and are carefully picking their publications and public intellectuals to follow (Mahmood, 6). A number now also avoid the mainstream internet in favour of alternate dark sites. This is done by users with “varying backgrounds, motivations and participation behaviours that may be idiosyncratic (as they are rooted in the respective person’s biography and circumstance)” (Quandt, 42). By way of connection with dark internet studies via Biddle et al. (1; see also Lasica), the “darknet” is a collection of networks and technologies used to share digital content … not a separate physical network but an application and protocol layer riding on existing networks. Examples of darknets are peer-to-peer file sharing, CD and DVD copying, and key or password sharing on email and newsgroups. As we note from the quote above, the “dark web” uses existing public and private networks that facilitate communication via the Internet. Gehl (1220; see also Gehl and McKelvey) has detailed that this includes “hidden sites that end in ‘.onion’ or ‘.i2p’ or other Top-Level Domain names only available through modified browsers or special software. Accessing I2P sites requires a special routing program ... . Accessing .onion sites requires Tor [The Onion Router]”. For some, this gives rise to social anxiety, read here as stemming from that which is not known, and an exaggerated sense of danger, which makes fight or flight seem the only options. This is often justified or exacerbated by the changing media and communication landscape and depicted in popular documentaries such as The Social Dilemma or The Great Hack, which affect public opinion on the unknown aspects of internet spaces and the uses of personal data. The question for this article remains whether the fear of the dark is justified. Consider that most often one will choose to make one’s intimate bedroom space dark in order to have a good night’s rest. We might pleasurably escape into a cinema’s darkness for the stories told therein, or walk along a beach at night enjoying unseen breezes. Most do not avoid these experiences, choosing to actively seek them out. Drawing this thread, then, is the case made here that agency can also be found in the dark by resisting socio-political structural harms. 1. Digital Futures and Anxiety of the Dark Fear of the darkI have a constant fear that something's always nearFear of the darkFear of the darkI have a phobia that someone's always there In the lyrics to the song “Fear of the Dark” (1992) by British heavy metal group Iron Maiden is a sense that that which is unknown and unseen causes fear and anxiety. Holding a fear of the dark is not unusual and varies in degree for adults as it does for children (Fellous and Arbib). Such anxiety connected to the dark does not always concern darkness itself. It can also be a concern for the possible or imagined dangers that are concealed by the darkness itself as a result of cognitive-emotional interactions (McDonald, 16). Extending this claim is this article’s non-binary assertion that while for some technology and what it can do is frequently misunderstood and shunned as a result, for others who embrace the possibilities and actively take it on it is learning by attentively partaking. Mistakes, solecism, and frustrations are part of the process. Such conceptual theorising falls along a continuum of thinking. Global interconnectivity of communications networks has certainly led to consequent concerns (Turkle Alone Together). Much focus for anxiety has been on the impact upon social and individual inner lives, levels of media concentration, and power over and commercialisation of the internet. Of specific note is that increasing commercial media influence—such as Facebook and its acquisition of WhatsApp, Oculus VR, Instagram, CRTL-labs (translating movements and neural impulses into digital signals), LiveRail (video advertising technology), Chainspace (Blockchain)—regularly changes the overall dynamics of the online environment (Turow and Kavanaugh). This provocation was born out recently when Facebook disrupted the delivery of news to Australian audiences via its service. Mainstream social online spaces (SOS) are platforms which provide more than the delivery of media alone and have been conceptualised predominantly in a binary light. On the one hand, they can be depicted as tools for the common good of society through notional widespread access and as places for civic participation and discussion, identity expression, education, and community formation (Turkle; Bruns; Cinque and Brown; Jenkins). This end of the continuum of thinking about SOS seems set hard against the view that SOS are operating as businesses with strategies that manipulate consumers to generate revenue through advertising, data, venture capital for advanced research and development, and company profit, on the other hand. In between the two polar ends of this continuum are the range of other possibilities, the shades of grey, that add contemporary nuance to understanding SOS in regard to what they facilitate, what the various implications might be, and for whom. By way of a brief summary, anxiety of the dark is steeped in the practices of privacy-invasive social media giants such as Facebook and its ancillary companies. Second are the advertising technology companies, surveillance contractors, and intelligence agencies that collect and monitor our actions and related data; as well as the increased ease of use and interoperability brought about by Web 2.0 that has seen a disconnection between technological infrastructure and social connection that acts to limit user permissions and online affordances. Third are concerns for the negative effects associated with depressed mental health and wellbeing caused by “psychologically damaging social networks”, through sleep loss, anxiety, poor body image, real world relationships, and the fear of missing out (FOMO; Royal Society for Public Health (UK) and the Young Health Movement). Here the harms are both individual and societal. Fourth is the intended acceleration toward post-quantum IoT (Fernández-Caramés), as quantum computing’s digital components are continually being miniaturised. This is coupled with advances in electrical battery capacity and interconnected telecommunications infrastructures. The result of such is that the ontogenetic capacity of the powerfully advanced network/s affords supralevel surveillance. What this means is that through devices and the services that they provide, individuals’ data is commodified (Neff and Nafus; Nissenbaum and Patterson). Personal data is enmeshed in ‘things’ requiring that the decisions that are both overt, subtle, and/or hidden (dark) are scrutinised for the various ways they shape social norms and create consequences for public discourse, cultural production, and the fabric of society (Gillespie). Data and personal information are retrievable from devices, sharable in SOS, and potentially exposed across networks. For these reasons, some have chosen to go dark by being “off the grid”, judiciously selecting their means of communications and their ‘friends’ carefully. 2. Is There Room for Privacy Any More When Everyone in SOS Is Watching? An interesting turn comes through counterarguments against overarching institutional surveillance that underscore the uses of technologies to watch the watchers. This involves a practice of counter-surveillance whereby technologies are tools of resistance to go ‘dark’ and are used by political activists in protest situations for both communication and avoiding surveillance. This is not new and has long existed in an increasingly dispersed media landscape (Cinque, Changing Media Landscapes). For example, counter-surveillance video footage has been accessed and made available via live-streaming channels, with commentary in SOS augmenting networking possibilities for niche interest groups or micropublics (Wilson and Serisier, 178). A further example is the Wordpress site Fitwatch, appealing for an end to what the site claims are issues associated with police surveillance (fitwatch.org.uk and endpolicesurveillance.wordpress.com). Users of these sites are called to post police officers’ identity numbers and photographs in an attempt to identify “cops” that might act to “misuse” UK Anti-terrorism legislation against activists during legitimate protests. Others that might be interested in doing their own “monitoring” are invited to reach out to identified personal email addresses or other private (dark) messaging software and application services such as Telegram (freeware and cross-platform). In their work on surveillance, Mann and Ferenbok (18) propose that there is an increase in “complex constructs between power and the practices of seeing, looking, and watching/sensing in a networked culture mediated by mobile/portable/wearable computing devices and technologies”. By way of critical definition, Mann and Ferenbok (25) clarify that “where the viewer is in a position of power over the subject, this is considered surveillance, but where the viewer is in a lower position of power, this is considered sousveillance”. It is the aspect of sousveillance that is empowering to those using dark SOS. One might consider that not all surveillance is “bad” nor institutionalised. It is neither overtly nor formally regulated—as yet. Like most technologies, many of the surveillant technologies are value-neutral until applied towards specific uses, according to Mann and Ferenbok (18). But this is part of the ‘grey area’ for understanding the impact of dark SOS in regard to which actors or what nations are developing tools for surveillance, where access and control lies, and with what effects into the future. 3. Big Brother Watches, So What Are the Alternatives: Whither the Gazing Elite in Dark SOS? By way of conceptual genealogy, consideration of contemporary perceptions of surveillance in a visually networked society (Cinque, Changing Media Landscapes) might be usefully explored through a revisitation of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, applied here as a metaphor for contemporary surveillance. Arguably, this is a foundational theoretical model for integrated methods of social control (Foucault, Surveiller et Punir, 192-211), realised in the “panopticon” (prison) in 1787 by Jeremy Bentham (Bentham and Božovič, 29-95) during a period of social reformation aimed at the improvement of the individual. Like the power for social control over the incarcerated in a panopticon, police power, in order that it be effectively exercised, “had to be given the instrument of permanent, exhaustive, omnipresent surveillance, capable of making all visible … like a faceless gaze that transformed the whole social body into a field of perception” (Foucault, Surveiller et Punir, 213–4). In grappling with the impact of SOS for the individual and the collective in post-digital times, we can trace out these early ruminations on the complex documentary organisation through state-controlled apparatuses (such as inspectors and paid observers including “secret agents”) via Foucault (Surveiller et Punir, 214; Subject and Power, 326-7) for comparison to commercial operators like Facebook. Today, artificial intelligence (AI), facial recognition technology (FRT), and closed-circuit television (CCTV) for video surveillance are used for social control of appropriate behaviours. Exemplified by governments and the private sector is the use of combined technologies to maintain social order, from ensuring citizens cross the street only on green lights, to putting rubbish in the correct recycling bin or be publicly shamed, to making cashless payments in stores. The actions see advantages for individual and collective safety, sustainability, and convenience, but also register forms of behaviour and attitudes with predictive capacities. This gives rise to suspicions about a permanent account of individuals’ behaviour over time. Returning to Foucault (Surveiller et Punir, 135), the impact of this finds a dissociation of power from the individual, whereby they become unwittingly impelled into pre-existing social structures, leading to a ‘normalisation’ and acceptance of such systems. If we are talking about the dark, anxiety is key for a Ministry of SOS. Following Foucault again (Subject and Power, 326-7), there is the potential for a crawling, creeping governance that was once distinct but is itself increasingly hidden and growing. A blanket call for some form of ongoing scrutiny of such proliferating powers might be warranted, but with it comes regulation that, while offering certain rights and protections, is not without consequences. For their part, a number of SOS platforms had little to no moderation for explicit content prior to December 2018, and in terms of power, notwithstanding important anxiety connected to arguments that children and the vulnerable need protections from those that would seek to take advantage, this was a crucial aspect of community building and self-expression that resulted in this freedom of expression. In unearthing the extent that individuals are empowered arising from the capacity to post sexual self-images, Tiidenberg ("Bringing Sexy Back") considered that through dark SOS (read here as unregulated) some users could work in opposition to the mainstream consumer culture that provides select and limited representations of bodies and their sexualities. This links directly to Mondin’s exploration of the abundance of queer and feminist pornography on dark SOS as a “counterpolitics of visibility” (288). This work resulted in a reasoned claim that the technological structure of dark SOS created a highly political and affective social space that users valued. What also needs to be underscored is that many users also believed that such a space could not be replicated on other mainstream SOS because of the differences in architecture and social norms. Cho (47) worked with this theory to claim that dark SOS are modern-day examples in a history of queer individuals having to rely on “underground economies of expression and relation”. Discussions such as these complicate what dark SOS might now become in the face of ‘adult’ content moderation and emerging tracking technologies to close sites or locate individuals that transgress social norms. Further, broader questions are raised about how content moderation fits in with the public space conceptualisations of SOS more generally. Increasingly, “there is an app for that” where being able to identify the poster of an image or an author of an unknown text is seen as crucial. While there is presently no standard approach, models for combining instance-based and profile-based features such as SVM for determining authorship attribution are in development, with the result that potentially far less content will remain hidden in the future (Bacciu et al.). 4. There’s Nothing New under the Sun (Ecclesiastes 1:9) For some, “[the] high hopes regarding the positive impact of the Internet and digital participation in civic society have faded” (Schwarzenegger, 99). My participant observation over some years in various SOS, however, finds that critical concern has always existed. Views move along the spectrum of thinking from deep scepticisms (Stoll, Silicon Snake Oil) to wondrous techo-utopian promises (Negroponte, Being Digital). Indeed, concerns about the (then) new technologies of wireless broadcasting can be compared with today’s anxiety over the possible effects of the internet and SOS. Inglis (7) recalls, here, too, were fears that humanity was tampering with some dangerous force; might wireless wave be causing thunderstorms, droughts, floods? Sterility or strokes? Such anxieties soon evaporated; but a sense of mystery might stay longer with evangelists for broadcasting than with a laity who soon took wireless for granted and settled down to enjoy the products of a process they need not understand. As the analogy above makes clear, just as audiences came to use ‘the wireless’ and later the internet regularly, it is reasonable to argue that dark SOS will also gain widespread understanding and find greater acceptance. Dark social spaces are simply the recent development of internet connectivity and communication more broadly. The dark SOS afford choice to be connected beyond mainstream offerings, which some users avoid for their perceived manipulation of content and user both. As part of the wider array of dark web services, the resilience of dark social spaces is reinforced by the proliferation of users as opposed to decentralised replication. Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) can be used for anonymity in parallel to TOR access, but they guarantee only anonymity to the client. A VPN cannot guarantee anonymity to the server or the internet service provider (ISP). While users may use pseudonyms rather than actual names as seen on Facebook and other SOS, users continue to take to the virtual spaces they inhabit their off-line, ‘real’ foibles, problems, and idiosyncrasies (Chenault). To varying degrees, however, people also take their best intentions to their interactions in the dark. The hyper-efficient tools now deployed can intensify this, which is the great advantage attracting some users. In balance, however, in regard to online information access and dissemination, critical examination of what is in the public’s interest, and whether content should be regulated or controlled versus allowing a free flow of information where users self-regulate their online behaviour, is fraught. O’Loughlin (604) was one of the first to claim that there will be voluntary loss through negative liberty or freedom from (freedom from unwanted information or influence) and an increase in positive liberty or freedom to (freedom to read or say anything); hence, freedom from surveillance and interference is a kind of negative liberty, consistent with both libertarianism and liberalism. Conclusion The early adopters of initial iterations of SOS were hopeful and liberal (utopian) in their beliefs about universality and ‘free’ spaces of open communication between like-minded others. 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IntroductionI have been studying the creation of Metro style train travel in Sydney for over a decade. My focus has been on the impact that media has had on the process (see Richardson, “Curatorial”; “Upheaval”; “Making”). Through extensive expert, public, and media research, I have investigated the coalitions and alliances that have formed (and disintegrated) between political, bureaucratic, news media, and public actors and the influences at work within these actor-networks. As part of this project, I visited an underground Métro turning fifty in Montreal, Canada. After many years studying the development of a train that wasn’t yet tangible, I wanted to ask a functional train the simple ethnomethodological/Latourian style question, “what do you do for a city and its people?” (de Vries). Therefore, in addition to research conducted in Montreal, I spent ten days wandering through many of the entrances, tunnels, staircases, escalators, mezzanines, platforms, doorways, and carriages of which the Métro system consists. The purpose was to observe the train in situ in order to broaden potential conceptualisations of what a train does for a city such as Montreal, with a view of improving the ideas and messages that would be used to “sell” future rapid rail projects in other cities such as Sydney. This article outlines a selection of the pathways wandered, not only to illustrate the power of social research based on physical wandering, but also the potential power the metaphorical and conceptual wandering an Actor-Network Theory (ANT) assemblage affords social research for media communications.Context, Purpose, and ApproachANT is a hybrid theory/method for studying an arena of the social, such as the significance of a train to a city like Montreal. This type of study is undertaken by following the actors (Latour, Reassembling 12). In ANT, actors do something, as the term suggests. These actions have affects and effects. These might be contrived and deliberate influences or completely circumstantial and accidental impacts. Actors can be people as we are most commonly used to understanding them, and they can also be texts, technological devices, software programs, natural phenomena, or random occurrences. Most significantly though, actors are their “relations” (Harman 17). This means that they are only present if they are relating to others. These relations and the resulting influences and impacts are called networks. A network in the ANT sense is not as simple as the lines that connect train stations on a rail map. Without actions, relations, influences, and impacts, there are no actors. Hence the hyphen in actor-network; the actor and the network are symbiotic. The network, rendered visible through actor associations, consists of the tenuous connections that “shuttle back and forth” between actors even in spite of the fact their areas of knowledge and reality may be completely separate (Latour Modern 3). ANT, therefore, may be considered an empirical practice of tracing the actors and the network of influences and impacts that they both help to shape and are themselves shaped by. To do this, central ANT theorist Bruno Latour employs a simple research question: “what do you do?” This is because in the process of doing, somebody or something is observed to be affecting other people or things and an actor-network becomes identifiable. Latour later learned that his approach shared many parallels with ethnomethodology. This was a discovery that more concretely set the trajectory of his work away from a social science that sought explanations “about why something happens, to ontological ones, that is, questions about what is going on” (de Vries). So, in order to make sense of people’s actions and relations, the focus of research became asking the deceptively simple question while refraining as much as possible “from offering descriptions and explanations of actions in terms of schemes taught in social theory classes” (14).In answering this central ANT question, studies typically wander in a metaphorical sense through an array or assemblage (Law) of research methods such as formal and informal interviews, ethnographic style observation, as well as the content analysis of primary and secondary texts (see Latour, Aramis). These were the methods adopted for my Montreal research—in addition to fifteen in-depth expert and public interviews conducted in October 2017, ten days were spent physically wandering and observing the train in action. I hoped that in understanding what the train does for the city and its people, the actor-network within which the train is situated would be revealed. Of course, “what do you do?” is a very broad question. It requires context. In following the influence of news media in the circuitous development of rapid rail transit in Sydney, I have been struck by the limited tropes through which the potential for rapid rail is discussed. These tropes focus on technological, functional, and/or operational aspects (see Budd; Faruqi; Hasham), costs, funding and return on investment (see Martin and O’Sullivan; Saulwick), and the potential to alleviate peak hour congestion (see Clennell; West). As an expert respondent in my Sydney research, a leading Australian architect and planner, states, “How boring and unexciting […] I mean in Singapore it is the most exciting […] the trains are fantastic […] that wasn’t sold to the [Sydney] public.” So, the purpose of the Montreal research is to expand conceptualisations of the potential for rapid rail infrastructure to influence a city and improve communications used to sell projects in the future, as well as to test the role of both physical and metaphorical ANT style wanderings in doing so. Montreal was chosen for three reasons. First, the Métro had recently turned fifty, which made the comparison between the fledgling and mature systems topical. Second, the Métro was preceded by decades of media discussion (Gilbert and Poitras), which parallels the development of rapid transit in Sydney. Finally, a different architect designed each station and most stations feature art installations (Magder). Therefore, the Métro appeared to have transcended the aforementioned functional and numerically focused tropes used to justify the Sydney system. Could such a train be considered a long-term success?Wandering and PathwaysIn ten days I rode the Montreal Métro from end to end. I stopped at all the stations. I wandered around. I treated wandering not just as a physical research activity, but also as an illustrative metaphor for an assemblage of research practices. This assemblage culminates in testimony, anecdotes, stories, and descriptions through which an actor-network may be glimpsed. Of course, it is incomplete—what I have outlined below represents only a few pathways. However, to think that an actor-network can ever be traversed in its entirety is to miss the point. Completion is a fallacy. Wandering doesn’t end at a finish line. There are always pathways left untrodden. I have attempted not to overanalyse. I have left contradictions unresolved. I have avoided the temptation to link paths through tenuous byways. Some might consider that I have meandered, but an actor-network is never linear. I can only hope that my wanderings, as curtailed as they may be, prove nuanced, colourful, and rich—if not compelling. ANT encourages us to rethink social research (Latour, Reassembling). Central to this is acknowledging (and becoming comfortable with) our own role as researcher in the illumination of the actor-network itself.Here are some of the Montreal pathways wandered:First Impressions I arrive at Montreal airport late afternoon. The apartment I have rented is conveniently located between two Métro stations—Mont Royal and Sherbrooke. I use my phone and seek directions by public transport. To my surprise, the only option is the bus. Too tired to work out connections, I decide instead to follow the signs to the taxi rank. Here, I queue. We are underway twenty minutes later. Travelling around peak traffic, we move from one traffic jam to the next. The trip is slow. Finally ensconced in the apartment, I reflect on how different the trip into Montreal had been, from what I had envisaged. The Métro I had travelled to visit was conspicuous in its total absence.FloatingIt is a feeling of floating that first strikes me when riding the Métro. It runs on rubber tyres. The explanation for the choice of this technology differs. There are reports that it was the brainchild of strong-willed mayor, Jean Drapeau, who believed the new technology would showcase Montreal as a modern world-scale metropolis (Gilbert and Poitras). However, John Martins-Manteiga provides a less romantic account, stating that the decision was made because tyres were cheaper (47). I assume the rubber tyres create the floating sensation. Add to this the famous warmth of the system (Magder; Hazan, Hot) and it has a thoroughly calming, even lulling, effect.Originally, I am planning to spend two whole days riding the Métro in its entirety. I make handwritten notes. On the first day, at mid-morning, nausea develops. I am suffering motion sickness. This is a surprise. I have always been fine to read and write on trains, unlike in a car or bus. It causes a moment of realisation. I am effectively riding a bus. This is an unexpected side-effect. My research program changes—I ride for a maximum of two hours at a time and my note taking becomes more circumspect. The train as actor is influencing the research program and the data being recorded in unexpected ways. ArtThe stained-glass collage at Berri-Uquam, by Pierre Gaboriau and Pierre Osterrath, is grand in scale, intricately detailed and beautiful. It sits above the tunnel from which the trains enter and leave the platform. It somehow seems wholly connected to the train as a result—it frames and announces arrivals and departures. Other striking pieces include the colourful, tiled circles from the mezzanine above the platform at station Peel and the beautiful stained-glass panels on the escalator at station Charlevoix. As a public respondent visiting from Chicago contends, “I just got a sense of exploration—that I wanted to have a look around”.Urban FormAn urban planner asserts that the Métro is responsible for the identity and diversity of urban culture that Montreal is famous for. As everyone cannot live right above a Métro station, there are streets around stations where people walk to the train. As there is less need for cars, these streets are made friendlier for walkers, precipitating a cycle. Furthermore, pedestrian-friendly streets promote local village style commerce such as shops, cafes, bars, and restaurants. So, there is not only more access on foot, but also more incentive to access. The walking that the Métro induces improves the dynamism and social aspects of neighbourhoods, a by-product of which is a distinct urban form and culture for different pockets of the city. The actor-network broadens. In following the actors, I now have to wander beyond the physical limits of the system itself. The streets I walk around station Mont Royal are shopping and restaurant strips, rich with foot traffic at all times of day; it is a vibrant and enticing place to wander.Find DiningThe popular MTL blog published a map of the best restaurants the Métro provides access to (Hazan, Restaurant).ArchitectureStation De La Savane resembles a retro medieval dungeon. It evokes thoughts of the television series Game of Thrones. Art and architecture work in perfect harmony. The sculpture in the foyer by Maurice Lemieux resembles a deconstructed metal mace hanging on a brutalist concrete wall. It towers above a grand staircase and abuts a fence that might ring a medieval keep. Up close I realise it is polished, precisely cut cylindrical steel. A modern fence referencing another time and place. Descending to the platform, craggy concrete walls are pitted with holes. I get the sense of peering through these into the hidden chambers of a crypt. Overlaying all of this is a strikingly modern series of regular and irregular, bold vertical striations cut deeply into the concrete. They run from floor to ceiling to add to a cathedral-like sense of scale. It’s warming to think that such a whimsical train station exists anywhere in the world. Time WarpA public respondent describes the Métro:It’s a little bit like a time machine. It’s a piece of the past and piece of history […] still alive now. I think that it brings art or form or beauty into everyday life. […] You’re going from one place to the next, but because of the history and the story of it you could stop and breathe and take it in a little bit more.Hold ups and HostagesA frustrated General Manager of a transport advocacy group states in an interview:Two minutes of stopping in the Métro is like Armageddon in Montreal—you see it on every media, on every smartphone [...] We are so captive in the Métro [there is a] loss of control.Further, a transport modelling expert asserts:You’re a hostage when you’re in transportation. If the Métro goes out, then you really are stuck. Unfortunately, it does go out often enough. If you lose faith in a mode of transportation, it’s going to be very hard to get you back.CommutingIt took me a good week before I started to notice how tired some of the Métro stations had grown. I felt my enthusiasm dip when I saw the estimated arrival time lengthen on the electronic noticeboard. Anger rose as a young man pushed past me from behind to get out of a train before I had a chance to exit. These tendrils of the actor-network were not evident to me in the first few days. Most interview respondents state that after a period of time passengers take less notice of the interesting and artistic aspects of the Métro. They become commuters. Timeliness and consistency become the most important aspects of the system.FinaleI deliberately visit station Champ-de-Mars last. Photos convince me that I am going to end my Métro exploration with an experience to savour. The station entry and gallery is iconic. Martins-Manteiga writes, “The stained-glass artwork by Marcelle Ferron is almost a religious experience; it floods in and splashes down below” (306). My timing is off though. On this day, the soaring stained-glass windows are mostly hidden behind protective wadding. The station is undergoing restoration. Travelling for the last time back towards station Mont Royal, my mood lightens. Although I had been anticipating this station for some time, in many respects this is a revealing conclusion to my Métro wanderings.What Do You Do?When asked what the train does, many respondents took a while to answer or began with common tropes around moving people. As a transport project manager asserts, “in the world of public transport, the perfect trip is the one you don’t notice”. A journalist gives the most considered and interesting answer. He contends:I think it would say, “I hold the city together culturally, economically, physically, logistically—that’s what I do […] I’m the connective tissue of this city”. […] How else do you describe infrastructure that connects poor neighbourhoods to rich neighbourhoods, downtown to outlying areas, that supports all sorts of businesses both inside it and immediately adjacent to it and has created these axes around the city that pull in almost everybody [...] And of course, everyone takes it for granted […] We get pissed off when it’s late.ConclusionNo matter how real a transportation system may be, it can always be made a little less real. Today, for example, the Paris metro is on strike for the third week in a row. Millions of Parisians are learning to get along without it, by taking their cars or walking […] You see? These enormous hundred-year-old technological monsters are no more real than the four-year-old Aramis is unreal: They all need allies, friends […] There’s no inertia, no irreversibility; there’s no autonomy to keep them alive. (Latour, Aramis 86)Through ANT-based physical and metaphorical wanderings, we find many pathways that illuminate what a train does. We learn from various actors in the actor-network through which the train exists. We seek out its “allies” and “friends”. We wander, piecing together as much of the network as we can. The Métro does lots of things. It has many influences and it influences many. It is undeniably an actor in an actor-network. Transport planners would like it to appear seamless—commuters entering and leaving without really noticing the in-between. And sometimes it appears this way. However, when the commuter is delayed, this appearance is shattered. If a signal fails or an engine falters, the Métro, through a process mediated by word of mouth and/or social and mainstream media, is suddenly rendered tired and obsolete. Or is it historic and quaint? Is the train a technical problem for the city of Montreal or is it characterful and integral to the city’s identity? It is all these things and many more. The actor-network is illusive and elusive. Pathways are extensive. The train floats. The train is late. The train makes us walk. The train has seeded many unique villages, much loved. The train is broken. The train is healthy for its age. The train is all that is right with Montreal. The train is all that is wrong with Montreal. The artwork and architecture mean nothing. The artwork and architecture mean everything. Is the train overly limited by the tyres that keep it underground? Of course, it is. Of course, it isn’t. Does 50 years of history matter? Of course, it does. Of course, it doesn’t. It thrives. It’s tired. It connects. It divides. It’s functional. It’s dirty. It’s beautiful. It’s something to be proud of. It’s embarrassing. A train offers many complex and fascinating pathways. It is never simply an object; it lives and breathes in the network because we live and breathe around it. It stops being effective. It starts becoming affective. Sydney must learn from this. My wanderings demonstrate that the Métro cannot be extricated from what Montreal has become over the last half century. In May 2019, Sydney finally opened its first Metro rail link. And yet, this link and other ongoing metro projects continue to be discussed through statistics and practicalities (Sydney Metro). This offers no affective sense of the pathways that are, and will one day be, created. By selecting and appropriating relevant pathways from cities such as Montreal, and through our own wanderings and imaginings, we can make projections of what a train will do for a city like Sydney. We can project a rich and vibrant actor-network through the media in more emotive and powerful ways. Or, can we not at least supplement the economic, functional, or technocratic accounts with other wanderings? Of course, we can’t. Of course, we can. 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The rise of expertise in the lives of women is a complex and prolonged process that began when the old networks through which women had learned from each other were being discredited or destroyed (Ehrenreich and English). Enclosed spaces of expert power formed separately from political control, market logistics and the pressures exerted by their subjects (Rose and Miller). This, however, was not a question of imposing expertise on women and forcing them to adhere to expert proclamations: “the experts could not have triumphed had not so many women welcomed them, sought them out, and … organised to promote their influence” (Ehrenreich and English 28). Women’s continuing enthusiasm for self-help books – and it is mainly women who buy them (Wood) – attests to the fact that they are still welcoming expertise into their lives. This paper argues that a major factor in the popularity of self-help is the reversal of the conventional ‘priestly’ relationship and ethic of confession, in a process of conversion that relies on the enthusiasm and active participation of the reader.Miller and Rose outline four ways in which human behaviour can be transformed: regulation (enmeshing people in a code of standards); captivation (seducing people with charm or charisma); education (training, convincing or persuading people); and conversion (transforming personhood, and ways of experiencing the world so that people understand themselves in fundamentally new ways). Of these four ways of acting upon others, it is conversion that is the most potent, because it changes people at the level of their own subjectivity – “personhood itself is remade” (Miller and Rose 35). While theories of conversion cannot be adequately discussed here, one aspect held in common by theories of religious conversion as well as those from psychological studies of ‘brainwashing’ is enthusiasm. Rambo’s analysis of the stages of religious conversion, for example, includes ‘questing’ in an active and engaged way, and a probable encounter with a passionately enthusiastic believer. Melia and Ryder, in their study of ‘brainwashing,’ state that two of the end stages of conversion are euphoria and proselytising – a point to which I will return in the conclusion. In order for a conversion to occur, then, the reader must be not only intellectually convinced of the truth, but must feel it is an important or vital truth, a truth she needs – in short, the reader must be enthused. The popularity of self-help books coincides with the rise of psy expertise more generally (Rose, "Identity"; Inventing), but self-help putatively offers escape from the experts, whilst simultaneously immersing its readers in expertise. Readers of self-help view themselves as reading sceptically (Simonds), interpretively (Rosenblatt) and resistingly (Fetterly, Rowe). They choose to read books as an educational activity (Dolby), rather than attending counselling or psychotherapy sessions in which they might be subject to manipulation, domination and control by a therapist (Simonds). I have discussed the nature of the advice in relationship manuals elsewhere (Hazleden, "Relationship"; "Pathology"), but the intention of this paper is to investigate the ways in which the authors attempt to enthuse and convert the reader.Best-Selling ExpertiseIn common with other best-selling genres, popular relationship manuals begin trying to enthuse the reader on the covers, which are intended to attract the reader, to establish the professional – or ‘priestly’ – credentials of the author and to assert the merit of the book, presenting the authors as experienced professionally-qualified experts, and advertising their bestseller status. These factors form part of the marketing ‘buzz’ or collective enthusiasm about a particular author or book.As part of the process of establishing themselves in the priestly role, the authors emphasise their professional qualifications and experience. Most authors use the title ‘Dr’ on the cover (Hendrix, McGraw, Forward, Gray, Cowan and Kinder, Schlessinger) or ‘PhD’ after their names (Vedral, DeAngelis, Spezzano). Further claims on the covers include assertions of the prominence of the authors in their field. Typical are DeAngelis’s claim to being “America’s foremost relationships expert,” and Hendrix’s claim to being “the world’s leading marital therapist.” Clinical and professional experience is mentioned, such as Spezzano’s “twenty-three years of counseling experience” (1) and Forward’s experience as “a consultant in many southern California Medical and psychiatric facilities” (iii). The cover of Spezzano’s book claims that he is a “therapist, seminar leader, author, lecturer and visionary leader.” McGraw emphasises his formal qualifications throughout his book, saying, “I had more degrees than a thermometer” (McGraw 6), and he refers to himself throughout as “Dr. Phil,” much like “Dr Laura” (Schlessinger). Facts and SecretsThe authors claim their ideas are based on clinical practice, research, and evidence. One author claims, “In this book, there is a wealth of tried and accurate information, which has worked for thousands of people in my therapeutic practice and seminars over the last two decades” (Spezzano 1). Another claims that he “worked with hundreds of couples in private practice and thousands more in workshops and seminars” and subsequently based his ideas on “research and clinical observations” (Hendrix xviii). Dowling refers to “four years of research … interviewing professionals who work with and study women.” She went to all this trouble because, she assures us, “I wanted facts” (Dowling, dust-jacket, 30).All this is in order to assure the reader of the relevance and build her enthusiasm about the importance of the book. McGraw (226) says he “reviewed case histories of literally thousands and thousands of couples” in order “to choose the right topics” for his book. Spezzano (7) claims that his psychological exercises come from clinical experience, but “more importantly, I have tested them all personally. Now I offer them to you.” This notion of being in possession of important new knowledge of which the reader is unaware is common, and expressed most succinctly by McGraw (15): “I have learned what you know and, more important, what you don't know.” This knowledge may be referred to as ‘secret’ (e.g. DeAngelis), or ‘hidden’ (e.g. Dowling) or as a recent discovery. Readers seem to accept this – they often assume that self-help books spring ‘naturally’ from clinical investigation as new information is ‘discovered’ about the human psyche (Lichterman 432).The Altruistic AuthorOn the assumption that readers will be familiar with other self-help books, some authors find it necessary to explain why they felt motivated to write one themselves. Usually these take the form of a kind of altruistic enthusiasm to share their great discoveries. Cowan and Kinder (xiv) claim that “one of the wonderful, intrinsic rewards of working with someone in individual psychotherapy is the rich and intense relationship that is established, [but] one of the frustrations of individual work is that in a whole lifetime it is impossible to touch more than a few people.” Morgan (26) assures us that “the results of applying certain principles to my marriage were so revolutionary that I had to pass them on in the four lesson Total Woman course, and now in this book.”The authors justify their own addition to an overcrowded genre by delineating what is distinctive about their own book, or what other “books, articles and surveys missed” (Dowling 30) or misinterpreted. Beattie (98-102) devotes several pages to a discussion of Dowling to assert that Dowling’s ‘Cinderella Complex’ is more accurately known as ‘codependency.’ The authors of another book admit that their ideas are not new, but claim to make a unique contribution because they are “writing from a much-needed male point of view” (Cowan and Kinder, back cover). Similarly, Gray suggests “many books are one-sided and unfortunately reinforce mistrust and resentment toward the opposite sex.” This meant that “a definitive guide was needed for understanding how healthy men and women are different,” and he promises “This book provides that vision” (Gray 4,7).Some authors are vehement in attacking other experts’ books as “gripe sessions,” “gobbledegook” (Schlessinger 51, 87), or “ridiculous” (Vedral 282). McGraw (9) writes “it is amazing to me how this country is overflowing with marital therapists, psychiatrists and psychologists, counselors, healers, advice columnists, and self-help authors – and their approach to relationships is usually so embarrassing that I want to turn my head in shame.” His own book, by contrast, will be quite different from anything the reader has heard before, because “it differs from what relationship ‘experts’ tell you” (McGraw 45).Confessions of an Author Because the authors are writing about intimate relationships, they are also keen to establish their credentials on a more personal level. “Loving, losing, learning the lessons, and reloving have been my path” (Carter-Scott 247-248), says one, and another asserts that, “It’s taken me a long time to understand men. It’s been a difficult and often painful journey and I’ve made a lot of mistakes along the way in my own relationships” (DeAngelis xvi). The authors are even keen to admit the mistakes they made in their previous relationships. Gray says, “In my previous relationships, I had become indifferent and unloving at difficult times … As a result, my first marriage had been very painful and difficult” (Gray 2). Others describe the feelings of disappointment with their marriages: We gradually changed. I was amazed to realize that Charlie had stopped talking. He had become distant and preoccupied. … Each evening, when Charlie walked in the front door after work, a cloud of gloom and tension floated in with him. That cloud was almost tangible. … this tension cloud permeated our home atmosphere … there was a barrier between us. (Morgan 18)Doyle (14) tells a similar tale: “While my intentions were good, I was clearly on the road to marital hell. … I was becoming estranged from the man who had once made me so happy. Our marriage was in serious trouble and it had only been four years since we’d taken our vows.” The authors relate the bewilderment they felt in these failing relationships: “My confusion about the psychology of love relationships was compounded when I began to have problems with my own marriage. … we gave our marriage eight years of intensive examination, working with numerous therapists. Nothing seemed to help” (Hendrix xvii).Even the process of writing the relationship manual itself can be uncomfortable: This was the hardest and most painful chapter for me to write, because it hit so close to home … I sat down at my computer, typed out the title of this chapter, and burst into tears. … It was the pain of my own broken heart. (DeAngelis 74)The Worthlessness of ExpertiseThus, the authors present their confessional tales in which they have learned important lessons through their own suffering, through the experience of life itself, and not through the intervention of any form of external or professional expertise. Furthermore, they highlight the failure of their professional training. Susan Forward (4) draws a comparison between her professional life as a relationship counsellor and the “Susan who went home at night and twisted herself into a pretzel trying to keep her husband from yelling at her.” McGraw tells of a time when he was counselling a couple, and: Suddenly all I could hear myself saying was blah, blah, blah. Blah, blah, blah, blah. As I sat there, I asked myself, ‘Has anybody noticed over the last fifty years that this crap doesn’t work? Has it occurred to anyone that the vast majority of these couples aren’t getting any better? (McGraw 6)The authors go to some lengths to demonstrate that their new-found knowledge is unlike anything else, and are even prepared to mention the apparent contradiction between the role the author already held as a relationship expert (before they made their important discoveries) and the failure of their own relationships (the implication being that these relationships failed because the authors themselves were not yet beneficiaries of the wisdom contained in their latest books). Gray, for example, talking about his “painful and difficult” first marriage (2), and DeAngelis, bemoaning her “mistakes” (xvi), allude to the failure of their marriage to each other, at a time when both were already well-known relationship experts. Hendrix (xvii) says: As I sat in the divorce court waiting to see the judge, I felt like a double failure, a failure as a husband and as a therapist. That very afternoon I was scheduled to teach a course on marriage and the family, and the next day, as usual, I had several couples to counsel. Despite my professional training, I felt just as confused and defeated as the other men and women who were sitting beside me.Thus the authors present the knowledge they have gained from their experiences as being unavailable through professional marital therapy, relationship counselling, and other self-help books. Rather, the advice they impart is presented as the hard-won outcome of a long and painful process of personal discovery.Peace and PassionOnce the uniqueness of the advice is established, the authors attempt to enthuse the reader by describing the effects of following it. Norwood (Women 4) says her programme led to “the most rewarding years of my life,” and Forward (10) says she “discovered enormous amounts of creativity and energy in myself that hadn't been available to me before.” Gray (268) asserts that, following his discoveries “I personally experienced this inner transformation,” and DeAngelis (126) claims “I am compassionate where I used to be critical; I am patient where I used to be judgmental.” Doyle (23) says, “practicing the principles described in this book has transformed my marriage into a passionate, romantic union.” Similarly, in discussing the effects of her ideas on her marriage, Morgan (26) speaks of “This brand new love between us” that “has given us a brand new life together.” Having established the success of their ideas and techniques on their own lives, the authors go on to relate stories about their successful application to the lives and relationships of their clients. One author writes that “When I began implementing my ideas … The divorce rate in my practice sharply declined, and the couples … reported a much deeper satisfaction in their marriages” (Hendrix xix). Another claims “Repeatedly I have heard people say that they have benefited more from this new understanding of relationships than from years of therapy” (Gray 7). Morgan, describing the effects of her ‘Total Woman’ classes, says: Attending one of the first classes in Miami were wives of the Miami Dolphin football players … it is interesting to note that their team won every game that next season and became the world champions! … Gals, I wouldn’t dream of taking credit for the Superbowl … (Morgan 188)In case we are still unconvinced, the authors include praise and thanks from their inspired clients: “My life has become exciting and wonderful. Thank you,” writes one (Vedral 308). Gray (6) talks of the “thousands of inspirational comments that people have shared” about his advice. Vedral (307) says “I have received thousands of letters from women … thanking me for shining a beam of light on their situations.” If these clients have transformed their lives, the authors claim, so can the reader. They promise that the future will be “exceptional” (Friedman 242) and “wonderful” (Norwood, Women 257). It will consist of “self fulfilment, love, and joy” (Norwood, Women 26), “peace and joy” (Hendrix xx), “freedom and a lifetime of healing, hope and happiness” (Beattie), “peace, relief, joy, and passion that you will never find any other way” (Doyle 62) – in short, “happiness for the rest of your life” (Spezzano 77).SummaryIn order to effect the conversion of their readers, the authors seek to create enthusiasm about their books. First, they appeal to the modern tradition of credentialism, making claims about their formal professional qualifications and experience. This establishes them as credible ‘priests.’ Then they make calculable, factual, evidence-based claims concerning the number of books they have sold, and appeal to the epistemological authority of the methodology involved in establishing the findings of their books. They provide evidence of the efficacy of their own unique methods by relating the success of their ideas when applied to their own lives and relationships, and those of their clients and their readers. The authors also go to some lengths to establish that they have personal experience of relationship problems, especially those the reader is currently presumed to be experiencing. This establishes the ‘empathy’ essential to Rogerian therapy (Rogers), and an informal claim to lay knowledge or insight. In telling their own personal stories, the authors establish an ethic of confession, in which the truth of oneself is sought, unearthed and revealed in “the infinite task of extracting from the depths of oneself, in between the words, a truth which the very form of the confession holds out like a shimmering mirage” (Foucault, History 59). At the same time, by claiming that their qualifications were not helpful in solving these personal difficulties, the authors assert that much of their professional training was useless or even harmful, suggesting that they are aware of a general scepticism towards experts (cf. Beck, Giddens), and share these doubts. By implying that it is other experts who are perhaps not to be trusted, they distinguish their own work from anything offered by other relationship experts, thereby circumventing “the paradox of self-help books’ existence” (Cheery) and proliferation. Thus, the authors present their motives as altruistic, whilst perhaps questioning the motives of others. Their own book, they promise, will be the one (finally) that brings a future of peace, passion and joy. Conversion, Enthusiasm and the Reversal of the Priestly RelationshipAlthough power relations between authors and readers are complex, self-help is evidence of power in one of its most efficacious forms – that of conversion. This is a relationship into which one enters voluntarily and enthusiastically, in the name of oneself, for the benefit of oneself. Such power enthuses, persuades, incites, invites, provokes and entices, and it is therefore a strongly subjectifying power, and most especially so because the relationship of the reader to the author is one of choice. Because the reader can choose between authors, and skip or skim sections, she can concentrate on the parts of the therapeutic diagnosis that she believes specifically apply to her. For example, Grodin (414) found it was common for a reader to attach excerpts from a book to a bathroom mirror or kitchen cabinet, and to re-read and underline sections of a book that seemed most relevant. In this way, through her enthusiastic participation, the reader becomes her own expert, her own therapist, in control of certain aspects of the encounter, which nonetheless must always take place on psy terms.In many conversion studies, the final stage involves the assimilation and embodiment of new practices (e.g. Paloutzian et al. 1072), whereby the convert employs or utilises her new truths. I argue that in self-help books, this stage occurs in the reversal of the ‘priestly’ relationship. The ‘priestly’ relationship between client and therapist, is one in which in which the therapist remains mysterious while the client confesses and is known (Rose, "Power"). In the self-help book, however, this relationship is reversed. The authors confess their own ‘sins’ and imperfections, by relating their own disastrous experiences in relationships and wrong-thinking. They are, of course, themselves enthusiastic converts, who are enmeshed within the power that they exercise (cf. Foucault History; Discipline), as these confessions illustrate. The reader is encouraged to go through this process of confession as well, but she is expected to do so privately, and to play the role of priest and confessor to herself. Thus, in a reversal of the priestly relationship, the person who ‘is knowledge’ within the book itself is the author. It is only if the reader takes up the invitation to perform for herself the priestly role that she will become an object of knowledge – and even then, only to herself, albeit through a psy diagnostic gaze provided for her. Of course, this instance of confession to the self still places the individual “in a network of relations of power with those who claim to be able to extract the truth of these confessions through their possession of the keys to interpretation” (Dreyfus and Rabinow 174), but the keys to interpretation are provided to the reader by the author, and left with her for her own safekeeping and future use. As mentioned in the introduction, conversion involves questing in an active and engaged way, and may involve joy and proselytising. Because the relationship must be one of active participation, the enthusiasm of the reader to apply these truths to her own self-understanding is critical. Indeed, the convert is, by her very nature, an enthusiast.ConclusionSelf-help books seek to bring about a transformation of subjectivity from powerlessness to active goal-setting, personal improvement and achievement. This is achieved by a process of conversion that produces particular choices and types of identity, new subjectivities remade through the production of new ethical truths. Self-help discourses endow individuals with new enthusiasms, aptitudes and qualities – and these can then be passed on to others. Indeed, the self-help reader is invited, by means of the author’s confessions, to become, in a limited way, the author’s own therapist – ie, she is invited to perform an examination of the author’s (past) mistakes, to diagnose the author’s (past) condition and to prescribe an appropriate (retrospective) cure for this condition. Through the process of diagnosing the author and the author’s clients, using the psy gaze provided by the author, the reader is rendered an expert in therapeutic wisdom and is converted to a new belief system in which she will become an enthusiastic participant in her own subjectification. ReferencesBeattie, M. 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In Victorian times, when female travel narratives were read as excursions rather than expeditions, it was common for women authors to preface their travels with an apology. “What this book wants,” begins Mary Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa, “is not a simple preface but an apology, and a very brilliant and convincing one at that” (4). This tendency of the woman writer to depreciate her travel with an acknowledgment of its presumptuousness crafted her apology essentially as an admission of guilt. “Where I have offered my opinions,” Isabella Bird writes in The Englishwoman in America, “I have done so with extreme diffidence, giving impressions rather than conclusions” (2). While Elizabeth Howells has since argued the apologetic preface was in fact an opposing strategy that allowed women writers to assert their authority by averting it, it is certainly telling of the time and genre that a female writer could only defend her work by first excusing it. The personal apology may have emerged as the natural response to social restrictions but it has not been without consequence for female travel. The female position, often constructed as communal, is still problematised in contemporary travel texts. While there has been a traceable shift from apology to affirmation since the first women travellers abandoned their embroidery, it seems some sense of lingering culpability still remains. In many ways, the modern female traveller, like the early lady traveller, is still a displaced woman. She still sets out cautiously, guide book in hand. Often she writes, like the female confessant, in an attempt to recover what Virginia Woolf calls “the lives of the obscure”: those found locked in old diaries, stuffed away in old drawers or simply unrecorded (44). Often she speaks insistently of the abstract things which Kingsley, ironically, wrote so easily and extensively about. She is, however, even when writing from within the confines of her own home, still writing from abroad. Women’s solitary or “unescorted” travel, even in contemporary times, is considered less common in the Western world, with recurrent travel warnings constantly targeted at female travellers. Travelling women are always made aware of the limits of their body and its vulnerabilities. Mary Morris comments on “the fear of rape, for example, whether crossing the Sahara or just crossing a city street at night” (xvii). While a certain degree of danger always exists in travel for men and women alike and while it is inevitable that some of those risks are gender-specific, travel is frequently viewed as far more hazardous for women. Guide books, travel magazines and online advice columns targeted especially at female readers are cramped with words of concern and caution for women travellers. Often, the implicit message that women are too weak and vulnerable to travel is packaged neatly into “a cache of valuable advice” with shocking anecdotes and officious chapters such as “Dealing with Officials”, “Choosing Companions” or “If You Become a Victim” (Swan and Laufer vii). As these warnings are usually levelled at white, middle to upper class women who have the freedom and financing to travel, the question arises as to what is really at risk when women take to the road. It seems the usual dialogue between issues of mobility and issues of safety can be read more complexly as confusions between questions of mobility and morality. As Kristi Siegel explains, “among the various subtexts embedded in these travel warnings is the long-held fear of ‘women on the loose’” (4). According to Karen Lawrence, travel has always entailed a “risky and rewardingly excessive” terrain for women because of the historical link between wandering and promiscuity (240). Paul Hyland has even suggested that the nature of travel itself is “gloriously” promiscuous: “the shifting destination, arrival again and again, the unknown possessed, the quest for an illusory home” (211). This construction of female travel as a desire to wander connotes straying behaviours that are often cast in sexual terms. The identification of these traits in early criminological research, such as 19th century studies of cacogenic families, is often linked to travel in a broad sense. According to Nicolas Hahn’s study, Too Dumb to Know Better, contributors to the image of the “bad” woman frequently cite three traits as characteristic. “First, they have pictured her as irresolute and all too easily lead. Second, they have usually shown her to be promiscuous and a good deal more lascivious than her virtuous sister. Third, they have often emphasised the bad woman’s responsibility for not only her own sins, but those of her mate and descendents as well” (3). Like Eve, who wanders around the edge of the garden, the promiscuous woman has long been said to have a wandering disposition. Interestingly, however, both male and female travel writers have at different times and for dissimilar reasons assumed hermaphroditic identities while travelling. The female traveller, for example, may assume the figure of “the observer” or “the reporter with historical and political awareness”, while the male traveller may feminise his behaviours to confront inevitabilities of confinement and mortality (Fortunati, Monticelli and Ascari 11). Female travellers such as Alexandra David-Neel and Isabelle Eberhardt who ventured out of the home and cross-dressed for safety or success, deliberately and fully appropriated traditional roles of the male sex. Often, this attempt by female wanderers to fulfil their own intentions in cognito evaded their dismissal as wild and unruly women and asserted their power over those duped by their disguise. Those women who did travel openly into the world were often accused of flaunting the gendered norms of female decorum with their “so-called unnatural and inappropriate behaviour” (Siegel 3). The continued harnessing of this cultural taboo by popular media continues to shape contemporary patterns of female travel. In fact, as a result of perceived connections between wandering and danger, the narrative of the woman traveller often emerges as a self-conscious fiction where “the persona who emerges on the page is as much a character as a woman in a novel” (Bassnett 234). This process of self-fictionalising converts the travel writing into a graph of subliminal fears and desires. In Tracks, for example, which is Robyn Davidson’s account of her solitary journey by camel across the Australian desert, Davidson shares with her readers the single, unvarying warning she received from the locals while preparing for her expedition. That was, if she ventured into the desert alone without a guide or male accompaniment, she would be attacked and raped by an Aboriginal man. In her opening pages, Davidson recounts a conversation in the local pub when one of the “kinder regulars” warns her: “You ought to be more careful, girl, you know you’ve been nominated by some of these blokes as the next town rape case” (19). “I felt really frightened for the first time,” Davidson confesses (20). Perhaps no tale better depicts this gendered troubling than the fairytale of Little Red Riding Hood. In the earliest versions of the story, Little Red outwits the Wolf with her own cunning and escapes without harm. By the time the first printed version emerges, however, the story has dramatically changed. Little Red now falls for the guise of the Wolf, and tricked by her captor, is eaten without rescue or escape. Charles Perrault, who is credited with the original publication, explains the moral at the end of the tale, leaving no doubt to its intended meaning. “From this story one learns that children, especially young lasses, pretty, courteous and well-bred, do very wrong to listen to strangers, and it is not an unheard thing if the Wolf is thereby provided with his dinner” (77). Interestingly, in the Grimm Brothers’ version which emerges two centuries later an explicit warning now appears in the tale, in the shape of the mother’s instruction to “walk nicely and quietly, and not run off the path” (144). This new inclusion sanitises the tale and highlights the slippages between issues of mobility and morality. Where Little Red once set out with no instruction not to wander, she is now told plainly to stay on the path; not for her own safety but for implied matters of virtue. If Little Red strays while travelling alone she risks losing her virginity and, of course, her virtue (Siegel 55). Essentially, this is what is at stake when Little Red wanders; not that she will get lost in the woods and be unable to find her way, but that in straying from the path and purposefully disobeying her mother, she will no longer be “a dear little girl” (Grimm 144). In the Grimms’ version, Red Riding Hood herself critically reflects on her trespassing from the safe space of the village to the dangerous world of the forest and makes a concluding statement that demonstrates she has learnt her lesson. “As long as I live, I will never by myself leave the path, to run into the wood, when my mother has forbidden me to do so” (149). Red’s message to her female readers is representative of the social world’s message to its women travellers. “We are easily distracted and disobedient, we are not safe alone in the woods (travelling off the beaten path); we are fairly stupid; we get ourselves into trouble; and we need to be rescued by a man” (Siegel 56). As Siegel explains, even Angela Carter’s Red Riding Hood, who bursts out laughing when the Wolf says “all the better to eat you with” for “she knew she was nobody’s meat” (219), still shocks readers when she uses her virginity to take power over the voracious Wolf. In Carter’s world “children do not stay young for long,” and Little Red, who has her knife and is “afraid of nothing”, is certainly no exception (215). Yet in the end, when Red seduces the Wolf and falls asleep between his paws, there is still a sense this is a twist ending. As Siegel explains, “even given the background Carter provides in the story’s beginning, the scene startles. We knew the girl was strong, independent, and armed. However, the pattern of woman-alone-travelling-alone-helpless-alone-victim is so embedded in our consciousness we are caught off guard” (57). In Roald Dahl’s revolting rhyme, Little Red is also awarded agency, not through sexual prerogative, but through the enactment of traits often considered synonymous with male bravado: quick thinking, wit and cunning. After the wolf devours Grandmamma, Red pulls a pistol from her underpants and shoots him dead. “The small girl smiles. One eyelid flickers. She whips a pistol from her knickers. She aims it at the creature’s head and bang bang bang, she shoots him dead” (lines 48—51). In the weeks that follow Red’s triumph she even takes a trophy, substituting her red cloak for a “furry wolfskin coat” (line 57). While Dahl subverts female stereotypes through Red’s decisive action and immediacy, there is still a sense, perhaps heightened by the rhyming couplets, that we are not to take the shooting seriously. Instead, Red’s girrrl-power is an imagined celebration; it is something comical to be mused over, but its shock value lies in its impossibility; it is not at all believable. While the sexual overtones of the tale have become more explicit in contemporary film adaptations such as David Slade’s Hard Candy and Catherine Hardwicke’s Red Riding Hood, the question that arises is what is really at threat, or more specifically who is threatened, when women travel off the well-ordered path of duty. As this problematic continues to surface in discussions of the genre, other more nuanced readings have also distorted the purpose and practice of women’s travel. Some psychoanalytical theorists, for example, have adopted Freud’s notion of travel as an escape from the family, particularly the father figure. In his essay A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis, Freud explains how his own longing to travel was “a wish to escape from that pressure, like the force which drives so many adolescent children to run away from home” (237). “When one first catches sight of the sea,” Freud writes, “one feels oneself like a hero who has performed deeds of improbable greatness” (237). The inherent gender trouble with such a reading is the suggestion women only move in search of a quixotic male figure, “fleeing from their real or imaginary powerful fathers and searching for an idealised and imaginary ‘loving father’ instead” (Berger 55). This kind of thinking reduces the identities of modern women to fragile, unfinished selves, whose investment in travel is always linked to recovering or resisting a male self. Such readings neglect the unique history of women’s travel writing as they dismiss differences in the male and female practice and forget that “travel itself is a thoroughly gendered category” (Holland and Huggan 111). Freud’s experience of travel, for example, his description of feeling like a “hero” who has achieved “improbable greatness” is problematised by the female context, since the possibility arises that women may travel with different e/motions and, indeed, motives to their male counterparts. For example, often when a female character does leave home it is to escape an unhappy marriage, recover from a broken heart or search for new love. Elizabeth Gilbert’s best selling travelogue, Eat, Pray, Love (which spent 57 weeks at the number one spot of the New York Times), found its success on the premise of a once happily married woman who, reeling from a contentious divorce, takes off around the world “in search of everything” (1). Since its debut, the novel has been accused of being self-absorbed and sexist, and even branded by the New York Post as “narcissistic New Age reading, curated by Winfrey” (Callahan par 13). Perhaps most interesting for discussions of travel morality, however, is Bitch magazine’s recent article Eat, Pray, Spend, which suggests that the positioning of the memoir as “an Everywoman’s guide to whole, empowered living” typifies a new literature of privilege that excludes “all but the most fortunate among us from participating” (Sanders and Barnes-Brown par 7). Without seeking to limit the novel with separatist generalisations, the freedoms of Elizabeth Gilbert (a wealthy, white American novelist) to leave home and to write about her travels afterwards have not always been the freedoms of all women. As a result of this problematic, many contemporary women mark out alternative patterns of movement when travelling, often moving deliberately in a variety of directions and at varying paces, in an attempt to resist their placelessness in the travel genre and in the mappable world. As Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson, speaking of Housekeeping’s Ruthie and Sylvie, explains, “they do not travel ever westward in search of some frontier space, nor do they travel across great spaces. Rather, they circle, they drift, they wander” (199). As a result of this double displacement, women have to work twice as hard to be considered credible travellers, particularly since travel is traditionally a male discursive practice. In this tradition, the male is often constructed as the heroic explorer while the female is mapped as a place on his itinerary. She is a point of conquest, a land to be penetrated, a site to be mapped and plotted, but rarely a travelling equal. Annette Kolodny considers this metaphor of “land-as-woman” (67) in her seminal work, The Lay of the Land, in which she discusses “men’s impulse to alter, penetrate and conquer” unfamiliar space (87). Finally, it often emerges that even when female travel focuses specifically on an individual or collective female experience, it is still read in opposition to the long tradition of travelling men. In their introduction to Amazonian, Dea Birkett and Sara Wheeler maintain the primary difference between male and female travel writers is that “the male species” has not become extinct (vii). The pair, who have theorised widely on New Travel Writing, identify some of the myths and misconceptions of the female genre, often citing their own encounters with androcentrism in the industry. “We have found that even when people are confronted by a real, live woman travel writer, they still get us wrong. In the time allowed for questions after a lecture, we are regularly asked, ‘Was that before you sailed around the world or after?’ even though neither of us has ever done any such thing” (xvii). The obvious bias in such a comment is an archaic view of what qualifies as “good” travel and a preservation of the stereotypes surrounding women’s intentions in leaving home. As Birkett and Wheeler explain, “the inference here is that to qualify as travel writers women must achieve astonishing and record-breaking feats. Either that, or we’re trying to get our hands down some man’s trousers. One of us was once asked by the president of a distinguished geographical institution, ‘What made you go to Chile? Was it a guy?’” (xviii). In light of such comments, there remain traceable difficulties for contemporary female travel. As travel itself is inherently gendered, its practice has often been “defined by men according to the dictates of their experience” (Holland and Huggan 11). As a result, its discourse has traditionally reinforced male prerogatives to wander and female obligations to wait. Even the travel trade itself, an industry that often makes its profits out of preying on fear, continues to shape the way women move through the world. While the female traveller then may no longer preface her work with an explicit apology, there are still signs she is carrying some historical baggage. It is from this site of trouble that new patterns of female travel will continue to emerge, distinguishably and defiantly, towards a much more colourful vista of general misrule. References Bassnett, Susan. “Travel Writing and Gender.” The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, eds. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 225-40. Berger, Arthur Asa. Deconstructing Travel: Cultural Perspectives on Tourism. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 2004. Bird, Isabella. The Englishwoman in America. London: John Murray, 1856. Birkett, Dea, and Sara Wheeler, eds. Amazonian: The Penguin Book of New Women’s Travel Writing. London: Penguin, 1998. Callahan, Maureen. “Eat, Pray, Loathe: Latest Self-Help Bestseller Proves Faith is Blind.” New York Post 23 Dec. 2007. Carter, Angela. “The Company of Wolves.” Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories. London: Vintage, 1995. 212-20. Dahl, Roald. Revolting Rhymes. London: Puffin Books, 1982. Davidson, Robyn. Tracks. London: Jonathan Cape, 1980. Fortunati, Vita, Rita Monticelli, and Maurizio Ascari, eds. Travel Writing and the Female Imaginary. Bologna: Patron Editore, 2001. Freud, Sigmund. “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XXII. New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis and Other Works, 1936. 237-48. Gilbert, Elizabeth. Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia. New Jersey: Penguin, 2007. Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm Grimm. “Little Red Riding Hood.” Grimms’ Fairy Tales, London: Jonathan Cape, 1962. 144-9. Hahn, Nicolas. “Too Dumb to Know Better: Cacogenic Family Studies and the Criminology of Women.” Criminology 18.1 (1980): 3-25. Hard Candy. Dir. David Slade. Lionsgate. 2005. Holland, Patrick, and Graham Huggan. Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2003. Howells, Elizabeth. “Apologizing for Authority: The Rhetoric of the Prefaces of Eliza Cook, Isabelle Bird, and Hannah More.” Professing Rhetoric: Selected Papers from the 2000 Rhetoric Society of America Conference, eds. F.J. Antczak, C. Coggins, and G.D. Klinger. London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002. 131-7. Hyland, Paul. The Black Heart: A Voyage into Central Africa. New York: Paragon House, 1988. Kingsley, Mary. Travels in West Africa. Middlesex: The Echo Library, 2008. Kolodny, Annette. The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters. USA: U of North Carolina P, 1975. Lawrence, Karen. Penelope Voyages: Women and Travel in the British Literary Tradition. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994. Morris, Mary. Maiden Voyages: Writings of Women Travellers. New York: Vintage Books, 1993. Perrault, Charles. Perrault’s Complete Fairytales. Trans. A.E. Johnson and others. London: Constable & Company, 1961. Red Riding Hood. Dir. Catherine Hardwicke. Warner Bros. 2011. Sanders, Joshunda, and Diana Barnes-Brown. “Eat, Pray, Spend: Priv-Lit and the New, Enlightened American Dream” Bitch Magazine 47 (2010). 10 May, 2011 < http://bitchmagazine.org/article/eat-pray-spend >. Siegel, Kristi. Ed. Gender, Genre, and Identity in Women’s Travel Writing. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. Slettedahl Macpherson, Heidi. “Women’s Travel Writing and the Politics of Location: Somewhere In-Between.” Gender, Genre, and Identity in Women’s Travel Writing, ed. Kristi Siegel. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. 194-207. Swan, Sheila, and Peter Laufer. Safety and Security for Women who Travel. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Travelers’ Tales, 2004. Woolf, Virginia. Women and Writing. London: The Women’s Press, 1979.

Since its return in 2005 the science fiction series Doctor Who (BBC1) has featured many alien creatures which bear a striking similarity to non-human Earth species: the Judoon in “Smith and Jones” (2007) have heads like rhinoceroses; the nurses in “New Earth” (2006) are cats in wimples; the Tritovores in “Planet of the Dead” (2009) are giant flies in boilersuits. Yet only one non-human animal has appeared twice in the series, in unrelated stories: the pig. Furthermore, alien races such as the Judoon and the Tritovores simply happen to look like human species, and the series offers no narrative explanation as to why such similarities exist. When the pig has appeared, however, it has instead been as the consequence of experimentation and mutation, and in both cases the appearance of such porcine hybrids is signalled as horrific, unsettling and, in the end, to be pitied. The fact that the pig has appeared in this way twice suggests there is something about the human understanding of this animal which means it can fulfil a role in fiction unavailable to other Earth species. The pig’s appearance has been in two stories, both two-parters. In “Aliens of London”/“World War Three” (2005) a spaceship crashes into London’s Thames river, and the pilot inside, thought to be dead, is sent to be scientifically examined. Alone in the laboratory, the pathologist Doctor Sato is startled to find the creature is alive and, during its attempt to escape, it is shot by the military. When the creature is examined The Doctor reveals it is “an ordinary pig, from Earth.” He goes on to explain that, “someone’s taken a pig, opened up its brain, stuck bits on, then they’ve strapped it in that ship and made it dive-bomb. It must have been terrified. They’ve taken this animal and turned it into a joke.” The Doctor’s concern over the treatment of the pig mirrors his earlier reprimand of the military for shooting it; as he cradles the dying creature he shouts at the soldier responsible, “What did you do that for? It was scared! It was scared.” On the commentary track for the DVD release of this episode Julie Gardner (executive producer) and Will Cohen (visual effects producer) note how so many people told them they had a significant emotional reaction to this scene, with Gardner adding, “Bless the pig.” In that sense, what begins as a moment of horror in the series becomes one of empathy with a non-human being, and the pig moves from being a creature of terror to one whose death is seen to be an immoral act. This movement from horror to empathy can be seen in the pig’s other appearance, in “Daleks in Manhattan”/“Evolution of the Daleks” (2007). Here the alien Daleks experiment on humans in order to develop the ability to meld themselves with Earthlings, in order to repopulate their own dwindling numbers. Humans are captured and then tested; as Laszlo, one of the outcomes of the experimentation, explains, “They’re divided into two groups: high intelligence and low intelligence. The low intelligence are taken to becomes Pig Slaves, like me.” These Pig Slaves look and move like humans except for their faces, which have prolonged ears and the pig signifier of a snout. At no point in the story is it made clear why experimentations on low intelligence humans should result in them looking like pigs, and a non-hybrid pig is not seen throughout the story. The appearance of the experiments’ results is therefore not narratively explained, and it does not draw on the fact that “in digestive apparatus and nutrient requirements pigs resemble humans in more ways than any mammal except monkeys and apes, which is why pigs are much in demand for [human] medical research” (Harris 70); indeed, considering the story is set in the 1930s such a justification would be anachronistic. The use of the pig, therefore, draws solely on its cultural, not its scientific, associations. These associations are complex, and the pig has been used to connote many things in Western culture. Children’s books such as The Sheep-Pig (King-Smith) and Charlotte’s Web (White) suggest the close proximity of humans and pigs can result in an affinity capable of communication. The use of pigs to represent Poles in Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (Spiegelman), on the other hand, has been read as offensive, drawing on the animal’s association with dirt and greed (Weschler). These depictions are informed by debates about pigs in the real world, whereby an animal which, as mentioned above, is similar enough to humans to be useful in medical research can also, for the food industry, go through a slaughtering process described by Bob Torres as “horribly cruel” (47). Such cruelty can only be justified if the boundaries between the pig and the human are maintained, and this is why pig-human representations are capable of being shocking and horrific. The hybrid nature of the human-pig creature draws on the horror trope that Noël Carroll refers to as “fusion” which works because it “unites attributes held to be categorically distinct” such as “inside/outside, living/dead, insect/human, flesh/machine” (43). He explains that this is why characters in horror narratives do not find such creatures simply fearful, but also “repellent, loathsome, disgusting, repulsive and impure” (54); their failure to conform to accepted cultural categories destabilises assumed norms and, perhaps most horrifically, undermines ‘the human’ as a stable, natural and superior category. As Donna Haraway notes, “‘The species’ often means the human race, unless one is attuned to science fiction, where species abound” (18). Science fiction therefore commonly plays with ideas of species because it is often interested in “the image of the scientist ‘playing god’” (Jones 51) and the horrific outcomes of “the total severing of scientific concerns from ethical concerns” (53). That the result of human/non-human experimentation should be regarded as horrific is evidence of the need to maintain the distinctions between humans and other creatures; after all, a pig/human can only be thought of as horrific if it as assumed that there is something unnatural about the destabilisation of the human category. And it is precisely the human which matters in this equation; it is not really as if anyone cares about the pig’s categorical stability in all of this. In both these stories, the appearance of the pig-creature is narratively structured to be surprising and shocking, and is withheld from the audience for as long as possible. The first appearance of a Pig Slave in “Daleks in Manhattan” constitutes that episode’s pre-credits cliff-hanger, with the creature appearing out of the shadows and bearing down upon the camera, directly towards the audience viewing at home. At this point, the audience has no idea why such a creature exists; the meaning of the pig-human hybrid is contained purely in its visual appearance, with the horrific fact of its contradictory appearance perhaps drawing on the pig’s historical association with evil and the Devil (Sillar and Meyler 82). Similarly, in “Aliens of London” we see Sato’s shocked reaction to the pig far earlier than we actually see the creature ourselves, and Sato’s scream is clearly intended to construct what we have yet to encounter as horrific. The Doctor’s search for the creature is similarly signalled, as he roams dimly-lit corridors trying to find it, following the trail of the grunts and noises that it makes. That the pig might constitute a horrific—or at least unsettling—site for humans is unsurprising considering the cultural roles it has often played. There is, after all, an “opposition between civilization and piggishness” (Ashley, Hollows, Jones and Taylor 2) in which (incorrect) assumptions about pigs’ filthy behaviour helps mark out humanity’s cleaner and more civilised way of living. While this is true of all human/non-human interactions, it is argued that the pig occupies a particular role within this system as it is a “familiar beast” (4) because for centuries it has been a domesticated animal which has often lived alongside humans, usually in quite close proximity. In that sense, humans and pigs are very similar. Demarcating the human as a stable and natural “conceptual category ... in which we place all members of our own species and from which we exclude all non-members” (Milton 265-66) has therefore required the denigration of non-humans, at least partly to justify the dominion humans have decided they have the right to hold over other creatures such as pigs. The difficulties in maintaining this demarcation can be seen in the documentary The Private Life of Pigs (BBC2 2010) in which the farmer Jimmy Docherty carries out a number of tests on animals in order to better understand the ‘inner life’ of the pig. Docherty acknowledges the pig’s similarity to humans in his introductory piece to camera; “When you look in their piggy little eyes with their piggy little eyelashes you see something that reflects back to you—I don’t know—it makes you feel there’s a person looking back.” However, this is quickly followed by a statement which works to reassert the human/non-human boundary; “I know we have this close relationship [with pigs], but I’m often reminded that just beneath the surface of their skin, they’re a wild animal.” Perhaps the most telling revelation in the programme is that pigs have been found to make certain grunting noises only when humans are around, which suggests they have developed a language for ‘interacting’ with humans. That Docherty is uncomfortably startled by this piece of information shows how the idea of communication troubles ideas of human superiority, and places pigs within a sphere hitherto maintained as strictly human. Of course, humans often willingly share domestic spaces with other species, but these are usually categorised as pets. The pet exists “somewhere between the wild animal and the human” (Fudge 8), and we often invest them with a range of human characteristics and develop relationships with such animals which are similar, but not identical, to those we have with other humans. The pig, however, like other food animals, cannot occupy the role afforded to the pet because it is culturally unacceptable to eat pets. In order to legitimise the treatment of the pig as a “strictly utilitarian object; a thing for producing meat and bacon” (Serpell 7) it must be distinguished from the human realm as clearly as possible. It is worth noting, though, that this is a culturally-specific process; Dwyer and Minnegal, for example, show how in New Guinea “pigs commonly play a crucial role in ceremonial and spiritual life” (37-8), and the pig is therefore simultaneously a wild animal, a source of food, and a species with which humans have an “attachment” (45-54) akin to the idea of a pet. Western societies commonly (though not completely) have difficulty uniting this range of animal categories, and analogous ideas of “civilization” often rest on assumptions about animals which require them to play specific, non-human roles. That homo sapiens define their humanity in terms of civilization is demonstrated by the ways in which ideas of brutality, violence and savagery are displaced onto other species, often quite at odds with the truth of such species’ behaviour. The assumption that non-human species are violent, and constitute a threat, is shown in Doctor Who; the pig is shot in “Aliens of London” for assumed security reasons (despite it having done nothing to suggest it is a threat), while humans run in fear from the Pig Slaves in “Evolution of the Daleks” purely because of their non-human appearance. Mary Midgley refers to this as “the Beast Myth” (38) by which humans not only reduce other species to nothing other than “incarnations of wickedness, … sets of basic needs, … crude mechanical toys, … [and] idiot children” (38), but also lump all non-human species together thereby ignoring the specificity of any particular species. Midgley also argues that “man shows more savagery to his own kind than most other mammal species” (27, emphasis in original), citing the need for “law or morality to restrain violence” (26) as evidence of the social structures required to uphold a myth of human civilization. In that sense, the use of pigs in Doctor Who can be seen as conforming to centuries-old depictions of non-human species, by which the loss of humanity symbolised by other species can be seen as the ultimate punishment. After all, when the Daleks’ human helper, Mr Diagoras, fears that the aliens are going to experiment on him, he fearfully exclaims, “What do you mean? Like those pig-men things? You’re not going to turn me into one of those? Oh, God, please don’t!” In the next episode, when all the Pig Slaves are killed by the actions of the Doctor’s companion Martha, she regrets her actions, only to be told, “No. The Daleks killed them. Long ago”, for their mutation into a ‘pig-man thing’ is seen to be a more significant loss of humanity than death itself. The scene highlights how societies are often “confused about the status of such interspecies beings” (Savulescu 25). Such confusion is likely to recur considering we are moving into a “posthumanist” age defined by the “decentering of the human” (Wolfe xv), whereby critiques of traditional cultural categories, alongside scientific developments that question the biological certainty of the human, result in difficulties in defining precisely what it is that is supposedly so special about homo sapiens. This means that it is far too easy to write off these depictions in Doctor Who as merely drawing on, and upholding, those simplistic and naturalised human/non-human distinctions which have been criticised, in a manner similar to sexism and racism, as “speciesist” (Singer 148-62). There is, after all, consistent sympathy for the pig in these episodes. The shooting of the pig in “Aliens of London” is outrageous not merely because it gives evidence of the propensity of human violence: the death of the pig itself is presented as worth mourning, in a manner similar to the death of any living being. Throughout the series the Doctor is concerned over the loss of life for any species, always aiming to find a non-violent method for solving conflicts and repeatedly berating other characters who resort to bloodshed for solutions. Indeed, the story’s narrative can be read as one in which the audience is invited to reassess its own response to the pig’s initial appearance, shifting from fear at its alien-ness to sympathy for its demise. This complication of the cultural meanings of pigs is taken even further in the two-part Dalek story. One of the key plots of the story is the relationship between Laszlo, who has been transmuted into a Pig Slave, and his former lover Tallulah. Tallulah spends much of the story thinking Laszlo has disappeared, when he has, in fact, gone into hiding, certain that she will reject him because of his post-experimentation porcine features. When they finally reunite, Laszlo apologises for what has happened to him, while Tallulah asks, “Laszlo? My Laszlo? What have they done to you?” At the end of the story they decide to try re-establishing their relationship, despite Laszlo’s now-complicated genetic make-up. In response to this Martha asks the Doctor, “Do you reckon it’s going to work, those two?” The Doctor responds that while such an odd pairing might be problematic pretty much anywhere else, as they were in New York they might just get away with it. He reflects, “That’s what this city’s good at. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, and maybe the odd Pig Slave Dalek mutant hybrid too.” While there is an obvious playfulness to this scene, with the programme foregrounding the kinds of narrative available to the science fiction genre, it is also clear that we are invited to find this a good narrative conclusion, a suitable resolution to all that has preceded it. In that sense, the pig and the human come together, dissolving the human/non-human divide at a stroke, and this is offered to the audience as something to be pleased about. In both narratives, then, the pig moves from being understood as alien and threatening to something if not quite identical to human, then certainly akin to it. Certainly, the narratives suggest that the lives, loves and concerns of pigs—even if they have been experimented upon—matter, and can constitute significant emotional moments in primetime mainstream family television. This development is a result of the text’s movement from an interest in the appearance of the pig to its status as a living being. As noted above, the initial appearances of the pigs in both stories is intended to be frightening, but such terror is dependent on understanding non-human species by their appearance alone. What both of these stories manage to do is suggest that the pig—like all non-human living things, whether of Earth or not—is more than its physical appearance, and via acknowledgment of its own consciousness, and its own sense of identity, can become something with which humans are capable of having sympathy; perhaps more than that, that the pig is something with which humans should have sympathy, for to deny the interior life of such a species is to engage in an inhuman act in itself. This could be seen as an interesting—if admittedly marginal—corrective to the centuries of cultural and physical abuse the pig, like all animals, has suffered. Such representations can be seen as evoking “the dreaded comparison” (Spiegel) which aligns maltreatment of animals with slavery, a comparison that is dreaded by societies because to acknowledge such parallels makes justifying humans’ abusive treatment of other species very difficult. These two Doctor Who stories repeatedly make such comparisons, and assume that to morally and emotionally distinguish between living beings based on categories of species is nonsensical, immoral, and fails to acknowledge the significance and majesty of all forms of life. That we might, as Gardner suggests, “Bless the pig”—whether it has had its brain stuffed full of wires or been merged with a human—points towards complex notions of human/non-human interaction which might helpfully destabilise simplistic ideas of the superiority of the human race. References Ashley, Bob, Joanne Hollows, Steve Jones and Ben Taylor. Food and Cultural Studies. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. Carroll, Noël. The Philosophy of Horror, or, Paradoxes of the Heart. New York and London: Routledge, 1990. Dwyer, Peter D. and Monica Minnegal. “Person, Place or Pig: Animal Attachments and Human Transactions in New Guinea.” Animals in Person: Cultural Perspectives on Human-Animal Intimacies. Ed. John Knight. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005. 37-60. Fudge, Erica. Pets. Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008. Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Harris, Marvin. “The Abominable Pig.” Food and Culture: A Reader. Ed. Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik. New York and London: Routledge, 1997. 67-79. Jones, Darryl. Horror: A Thematic History in Fiction and Film. London: Arnold, 2002. King-Smith, Dick. The Sheep-Pig. London: Puffin, 1983. Midgley, Mary. Beast and Man. London and New York: Routledge, 1979/2002. Milton, Kay. “Anthropomorphism or Egomorphism? The Perception of Non-Human Persons by Human Ones.” Animals in Person: Cultural Perspectives on Human-Animal Intimacies. Ed. John Knight. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005. 255-71. Savulescu, Julian. “Human-Animal Transgenesis and Chimeras Might be an Expression of our Humanity.” The American Journal of Bioethics 3.3 (2003): 22-5. Serpell, James. In the Company of Animals: A Study of Human-Animal Relationships. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Sillar, Frederick Cameron and Ruth Mary Meyler. The Symbolic Pig: An Anthology of Pigs in Literature and Art. Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1961. Singer, Peter. “All Animals are Equal.” Animal Rights and Human Obligations. Ed. Tom Regan and Peter Singer. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1989. 148-62. Spiegel, Marjorie. The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery. London and Philadelphia: Heretic Books, 1988. Speigelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986/1991. Torres, Bob. Making a Killing: The Political Economy of Animal Rights. Edinburgh, Oakland and West Virginia: AK Press, 2007. Weschler, Lawrence. “Pig Perplex.” Lingua France: The Review of Academic Life 11.5 (2001): 6-8. White, E.B. Charlotte’s Web. London: Harper Collins, 1952. Wolfe, Cary. What is Posthumanism? Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

Political activity is expected to be of interest to a knowledgeable electorate, citizenry or ‘public’. Performance and entertainment have, on the other hand, been considered the domain of the ‘audience’. The line between active electorate and passive audience has been continually blurred, and as more political communication is designed along the lines of entertainment, the less likely it seems that the distinction will become clearer any time soon. The following article will attempt to thoroughly evaluate the contemporary implications of terms related to ‘public’ and ‘audience’, and to suggest a path forward in understanding the now intertwined roles of these two entities. In political commentary of all kinds, the term ‘audience’ has come to be regularly used in place of the more traditionally political terms ‘public’, ‘electorate’, ‘constituency’ or even ‘mass’, ‘mob’ and ‘multitude’. (Bratich 249) This slight alteration of language would seem to suggest an ongoing, and occasionally unintentional debate as to whether or not our increasingly mediated society has become incapable of true political discourse – an audience to be courted and won solely on the basis of visual and aural stimulation. In some instances, the debate goes unacknowledged, with authors using the term interchangeably with that of voter or public. Others seem to be making a more definite statement, as do the authors of Campaign Craft, wherein the term ‘audience’ is often used to refer to the voting population. (Shea and Burton) In either case, it is clear that the ‘public’ and the ‘audience’ are no longer to be considered two entirely separate entities. To understand the significance of this shift, it is necessary to identify the traditional distinctions of these sometimes problematic terms. To do so we must look briefly at how the original and contemporary meanings have developed. Herbert Blau writes that “audiences, such as they are, are nothing like a public, certainly nothing like the capitalised Public of another time” (Blau 22). That “capitalised Public” he refers to is perhaps the ideal state envisioned by Greek and Roman philosophers in which the community, as a whole, is maintained by and for its own members, and each individual plays a significant and specific role in its maintenance. The “audiences”, however, can be popularly defined as “the assembled spectators or listeners at a public event such as a play, film, concert, or meeting” or “the people giving attention to something”. (Soanes & Stevenson) The difference is subtle but significant. The public is expected to take some active interest in its own maintenance and growth, while the audience is not expected to offer action, just attention. The authors of Soundbite Culture, who would seem to see the blurring between audience and public as a negative side effect of mass media, offer this description of the differences between these two entities: Audiences are talked to; publics are talked with. Audiences are entertained; publics are engaged. Audiences live in the moment; publics have both memory and dreams. Audiences have opinions, publics have thoughts. (Slayden & Whillock 7) A ‘public’ is joined by more than their attendance at or attention to a single performance and responsible for more than just the experience of that performance. While an audience is expected to do little more than consume the performance before them, a public must respond to an experience with appropriate action. A public is a community, bound together by activity and mutual concerns. An audience is joined together only by their mutual interest in, or presence at, a performance. Carpini and Williams note that the term ‘public’ is no longer an adequate way to describe the complex levels of interaction that form contemporary political discourse: “people, politics, and the media are far more complex than this. Individuals are simultaneously citizens, consumers, audiences…and so forth” (Carpini & Williams in Bennett & Entman 161). Marshall sees the audience as both a derivative of and a factor in the larger, more political popular body called the “masses”. These masses define the population largely as an unorganised political power, while audiences emerge in relation to consumer products, as rationalised and therefore somewhat subdued categories within that scope. He notes that although the audience, in the twentieth century, has emerged as a “social category” of its own, it has developed as such in relation to both the unharnessed political power of the masses and the active political power of the public (Marshall 61-70). The audience, then, can be said to be a separate but overlapping state that rationalises and segments the potential of the masses, but also informs the subsequent actions of the public. An audience without some degree of action or involvement is not a public. Such a definition provides important insights into the debate from the perspective of political communication. The cohesiveness of the group that is to define the public can be undermined by mass media. It has been argued that mass media, in particular the internet, have removed all sense of local community and instead provided an information outlet that denies individual response. (Franklin 23; Postman 67-69) It can certainly be argued that with media available on such an instant and individual basis, the necessity of group gathering for information and action has been greatly reduced. Thus, one of the primary functions of the public is eliminated, that of joining together for information. This lack of communal information gathering can eliminate the most important functions of the public: debate and personal action. Those who tune-in to national broadcasts or even read national newspapers to receive political information are generally not invited to debate and pose solutions to the problems that are introduced to them, or to take immediate steps to resolve the conflicts addressed. Instead, they are asked only to fulfill that traditional function of the audience, to receive the information and either absorb or dismiss it. Media also blur the audience/public divide by making it necessary to change the means of political communication. Previous to the advent of mass media, political communication was separated from entertainment by its emphasis on debate and information. Television has led a turn toward more ‘emotion’ and image-based campaigning both for election and for support of a particular political agenda. This subsequently implies that this public has increasingly become primarily an audience. Although this attitude is one that has been adopted by many critics and observers, it is not entirely correct to say that there are no longer any opportunities for the audience to regain their function as a public. On a local level, town hall meetings, public consultations and rallies still exist and provide an opportunity for concerned citizens to voice their opinions and assist in forming local policy. Media, often accused of orchestrating the elimination of the active public, occasionally provide opportunities for more traditional public debate. In both Canada and the US, leaders are invited to participate in ‘town hall’ style television debates in which audience members are invited to ask questions. In the UK, both print media and television tend to offer opportunities for leaders to respond to the questions and concerns of individuals. Many newspapers publish responses and letters from many different readers, allowing for public debate and interaction. (McNair 13) In addition, newspapers such as The Washington Post and The Globe and Mail operate Websites that allow the public to comment on articles published in the paper text. In Canada, radio is often used as a forum for public debate and comment. The Canadian Broadcast Corporation’s Cross Country Check Up and Cross Talk allows mediated debate between citizens across the country. Regional stations offer similar programming. Local television news programmes often include ‘person on the street’ interviews on current issues and opportunities for the audience to voice their arguments on-air. Of course, in most of these instances, the information received from the audience is moderated, and shared selectively. This does not, however, negate the fact that there is interaction between that audience and the media. Perhaps the greatest challenge to traditional interpretations of media-audience response is the proliferation of the internet. As McNair observes, “the emergence of the internet has provided new opportunities for public participation in political debate, such as blogging and ‘citizen journalism’. Websites such as YouTube permit marginal political groups to make statements with global reach” (McNair 13). These ‘inter-networks’ not only provide alternative information for audiences to seek out, but also give audience members the ability to respond to any communication in an immediate and public way. Therefore, the audience member can exert potentially wide reaching influence on the public agenda and dialogue, clearly altering the accept-or-refuse model often applied to mediated communication. Opinion polls provide us with an opportunity to verify this shift away from the ‘hypodermic needle’ approach to communication theory (Sanderson King 61). Just as an audience can be responsible for the success of a theatre or television show based on attendance or viewing numbers, so too have public opinion polls been designed to measure, without nuance, only whether the audience accepts or dismisses what is presented to them through the media. There is little place for any measure of actual thought or opinion. The first indications of an upset in this balance resulted in tremendous surprise, as was the case during the US Clinton/Lewinsky scandal (Lawrence & Bennett 425). Stephanopoulos writes that after a full year of coverage of the Monica Lewinsky ‘scandal’, Clinton’s public approval poll numbers were “higher than ever” while the Republican leaders who had initiated the inquiry were suffering from a serious lack of public support (Stephanopoulos 442). Carpini and Williams also observed that public opinion polls taken during the media frenzy showed very little change of any kind, although the movement that did occur was in the direction of increased support for Clinton. This was in direct contrast to what “…traditional agenda-setting, framing, and priming theory would predict” (Carpini & Williams in Bennett & Entman 177). Zaller confirms that the expectation among news organisations, journalists, and political scientists was never realised; despite being cast by the media in a negative role, and despite the consumption of that negative media, the audience refused to judge the President solely on his framed persona (Zaller in Bennett & Entman 255). It was clear that the majority of the population in the US, and in other countries, were exposed to the information regarding the Clinton scandal. At the height of the scandal, it was almost unavoidable (Zaller in Bennett & Entman 254). Therefore it cannot be said that the information the media provided was not being consumed. Rather, the audience did not agree with the media’s attempts to persuade them, and communicated this through opinion polls, creating something resembling a mass political dialogue. As Lawrence and Bennett discuss in their article regarding the Lewinsky/Clinton public opinion “phenomenon”, it should not be assumed by polling institutions or public opinion watchers that the projected angle of the media will be immediately adopted by the public (Lawerence & Bennett 425). Although the media presented a preferred reading of the text, it could not ensure that the audience would interpret that meaning (Hall in Curran, Gurevitch & Harris 343). The audience’s decoding of the media’s message would have to depend on each audience member’s personal experiences and their impression of the media that was presenting the communication. This kind of response is, in fact, encouraging. If the audience relies on mainstream media to provide a frame and context to all political communication, then they are giving up their civic responsibility and placing complete authority in the hands of those actively involved in the process of communicating events. It could be suggested that the reported increase in the perceived reliabilty of internet news sources (Kinsella 251) can be at least partially attributed to the audience’s increasing awareness of these frames and limitations on mainstream media presentation. With the increase in ‘backstage’ reporting, the audience has become hyper-aware of the use of these strategies in communications. The audience is now using its knowledge and media access to decipher information, as it is presented to them, for authenticity and context. While there are those who would lament the fact that the community driven public is largely in the past and focus their attention on finding ways to see the old methods of communication revived, others argue that the way to move forward is not to regret the existence of an audience, but to alter our ideas about how to understand it. It has been suggested that in order to become a more democratic society we must now “re-conceive audiences as citizens” (Golding in Ferguson 98). And despite Blau’s pronouncement that audiences are “nothing like a public”, he later points out that there is still the possibility of unity even in the most diverse of audiences. “The presence of an audience is in itself a sign of coherence”(Blau 23). As Rothenbuhler writes: There is too much casualness in the use of the word spectator…A spectator is almost never simply looking at something. On the contrary, most forms of spectatorship are socially prescribed and performed roles and forms of communication…the spectator, then, is not simply a viewer but a participant in a larger system. (Rothenbuhler 65) We cannot regress to a time when audiences are reserved for the theatre and publics for civic matters. In a highly networked world that relies on communicating via the methods and media of entertainment, it is impossible to remove the role of the audience member from the role of citizen. This does not necessarily need to be a negative aspect of democracy, but instead a step in its constant evolution. There are positive aspects to the audience/public as well as potential negatives. McNair equates the increase in mediated communication with an increase in political knowledge and involvement, particularly for those on the margins of society who are unlikely to be exposed to national political activity in person. He notes that the advent of television may have limited political discourse to a media-friendly sound bite, but that it still increases the information dispensed to the majority of the population. Despite the ideals of democracy, the majority of the voting population is not extremely well informed as to political issues, and prior to the advent of mass media, were very unlikely to have an opportunity to become immersed in the details of policy. Media have increased the amount of political information the average citizen will be exposed to in their lifetime (McNair 41). With this in mind, it is possible to equate the faults of mass media not with their continued growth, but with society’s inability to recognise the effects of the media as technologies and to adjust education accordingly. While the quality of information and understanding regarding the actions and ideals of national political leaders may be disputed, the fact that they are more widely distributed than ever before is not. They have an audience at all times, and though that audience may receive information via a filtered medium, they are still present and active. As McNair notes, if the purpose of democracy is to increase the number of people participating in the political process, then mass media have clearly served to promote the democratic ideal (McNair 204). However, these positives are qualified by the fact that audiences must also possess the skills, the interests and the knowledge of a public, or else risk isolation that limits their power to contribute to public discourse in a meaningful way. The need for an accountable, educated audience has not gone unnoticed throughout the history of mass media. Cultural observers such as Postman, McLuhan, John Kennedy, and even Pope Pius XII have cited the need for education in media. As McLuhan aptly noted, “to the student of media, it is difficult to explain the human indifference to the social effect of these radical forces”(McLuhan 304). In 1964, McLuhan wrote that, “education will become recognised as civil defence against media fallout. The only medium for which our education now offers some civil defence is the print medium”(McLuhan 305). Unfortunately, it is only gradually and usually at an advanced level of higher education that the study and analysis of media has developed to any degree. The mass audiences, those who control the powers of the public, often remain formally uneducated as to the influence that the mediating factors of television have on the distribution of information. Although the audience may have developed a level of sophistication in their awareness of media frames, the public has not been taught how to translate this awareness into any real political or social understanding. The result is a community susceptible to being overtaken by manipulations of any medium. Those who attempt to convey political messages have only added to that confusion by being unclear as to whether or not they are attempting to address an audience or engage a public. In some instances, politicians and their teams focus their sole attention on the public, not taking into consideration the necessities of communicating with an audience, often to the detriment of political success. On the other hand, some focus their attentions on attracting and maintaining an audience, often to the detriment of the political process. This confusion may be a symptom of the mixed messages regarding the appropriate attitude toward performance that is generated by western culture. In an environment where open attention to performance is both demanded and distained, communication choices can be difficult. Instead we are likely to blindly observe the steady increase in the entertainment style packaging of our national politics. Until the audience fully incorporates itself with the public, we will see an absence of action, and excess of confused consumption (Kraus 18). Contemporary society has moved far beyond the traditional concepts of exclusive audience or public domains, and yet we have not fully articulated or defined what this change in structure really means. Although this review does suggest that contemporary citizens are both audience and public simultaneously, it is also clear that further discussion needs to occur before either of those roles can be fully understood in a contemporary communications context. References Bennett, Lance C., and Robert M. Entman. Mediated Politics: Communication in the Future of Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Blau, Herbert. The Audience. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990. Bratich, Jack Z. “Amassing the Multitude: Revisiting Early Audience Studies”. Communication Theory 15 (2005): 242-65. Curran, J., M. Gurevitch, and D. Janet Harris, eds. Mass Communication and Society. Beverley Hills: Sage, 1977. DeLuca, T., and J. Buell. Liars! Cheaters! Evildoers! Demonization and the End of Civil Debate in American Politics. New York: New York UP, 2005. Ferguson, Marjorie, ed. Public Communication: The New Imperatives. London: Sage, 1990. Franklin, Bob. Packaging Politics. London: Edward Arnold, 1994. Gamson, Joshua. Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994. Keown, Leslie-Anne. “Keeping Up with the Times: Canadians and Their News Media Diets.” Canadian Social Trends June 2007. Government of Canada. Kinsella, Warren. The War Room. Toronto: Dunduran Group, 2007. Kraus, Sidney. Televised Presidential Debates and Public Policy. New Jersey: Lawerence Erlbaum Associates, 2000. Lawrence, Regina, and Lance Bennett. “Rethinking Media Politics and Public Opinion: Reactions to the Clinton-Lewinsky Scandal”. Political Science Quarterly 116 (Fall 2001): 425-46. Marland, Alex. Political Marketing in Modern Canadian Federal Elections. Dalhousie University: Canadian Political Science Association Conference, 2003. Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. New ed. London: ARK Paperbacks, 1987 [1964]. McNair, Brian. An Introduction to Political Communication. 4th ed. London: Routledge, 2007. The Oxford Dictionary of English. Eds. Catherine Soanes and Angus Stevenson. Rev. ed. Oxford UP, 2005. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford UP. 1 Mar. 2008. http://www.oxfordreference.com.qe2aproxy.mun.ca/views/ ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t140.e4525>. Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death. New York: Penguin, 1985. Rothenbuhler, Eric W. Ritual Communication. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage, 1998. Sanderson King, Sarah. Human Communication as a Field of Study. New York: State U of New York P, 1990. Schultz, David A., ed. It’s Show Time! Media, Politics and Popular Culture. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. Shea, Daniel, and Michael John Burton. Campaign Craft. 3rd ed. Westport: Praeger, 2006. Slayden, D., and R.K. Whillock. Soundbite Culture: The Death of Discourse in a Wired World. London: Sage, 1999. Stephanopoulos, George. All Too Human. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1999. Webster, James C. “Beneath the Veneer of Fragmentation: Television Audience Polarization in a Multichannel World.” Journal of Communication 55 (June 2005): 366-82. Woodward, Gary C. Center Stage: Media and the Performance of American Politics. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007. Xenos, Michael, and Kirsten Foot. “Not Your Father’s Internet: The Generation Gap in Online Politics.” Civic Life Online: Learning How Digital Media Can Engage Youth. Cambridge: MIT P, 2008. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Mullins, Kimberley. "The Voting Audience." M/C Journal 10.6/11.1 (2008). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/03-mullins.php>. APA Style Mullins, K. (Apr. 2008) "The Voting Audience," M/C Journal, 10(6)/11(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/03-mullins.php>.

Political activity is expected to be of interest to a knowledgeable electorate, citizenry or ‘public’. Performance and entertainment have, on the other hand, been considered the domain of the ‘audience’. The line between active electorate and passive audience has been continually blurred, and as more political communication is designed along the lines of entertainment, the less likely it seems that the distinction will become clearer any time soon. The following article will attempt to thoroughly evaluate the contemporary implications of terms related to ‘public’ and ‘audience’, and to suggest a path forward in understanding the now intertwined roles of these two entities. In political commentary of all kinds, the term ‘audience’ has come to be regularly used in place of the more traditionally political terms ‘public’, ‘electorate’, ‘constituency’ or even ‘mass’, ‘mob’ and ‘multitude’. (Bratich 249) This slight alteration of language would seem to suggest an ongoing, and occasionally unintentional debate as to whether or not our increasingly mediated society has become incapable of true political discourse – an audience to be courted and won solely on the basis of visual and aural stimulation. In some instances, the debate goes unacknowledged, with authors using the term interchangeably with that of voter or public. Others seem to be making a more definite statement, as do the authors of Campaign Craft, wherein the term ‘audience’ is often used to refer to the voting population. (Shea and Burton) In either case, it is clear that the ‘public’ and the ‘audience’ are no longer to be considered two entirely separate entities. To understand the significance of this shift, it is necessary to identify the traditional distinctions of these sometimes problematic terms. To do so we must look briefly at how the original and contemporary meanings have developed. Herbert Blau writes that “audiences, such as they are, are nothing like a public, certainly nothing like the capitalised Public of another time” (Blau 22). That “capitalised Public” he refers to is perhaps the ideal state envisioned by Greek and Roman philosophers in which the community, as a whole, is maintained by and for its own members, and each individual plays a significant and specific role in its maintenance. The “audiences”, however, can be popularly defined as “the assembled spectators or listeners at a public event such as a play, film, concert, or meeting” or “the people giving attention to something”. (Soanes & Stevenson) The difference is subtle but significant. The public is expected to take some active interest in its own maintenance and growth, while the audience is not expected to offer action, just attention. The authors of Soundbite Culture, who would seem to see the blurring between audience and public as a negative side effect of mass media, offer this description of the differences between these two entities: Audiences are talked to; publics are talked with. Audiences are entertained; publics are engaged. Audiences live in the moment; publics have both memory and dreams. Audiences have opinions, publics have thoughts. (Slayden & Whillock 7) A ‘public’ is joined by more than their attendance at or attention to a single performance and responsible for more than just the experience of that performance. While an audience is expected to do little more than consume the performance before them, a public must respond to an experience with appropriate action. A public is a community, bound together by activity and mutual concerns. An audience is joined together only by their mutual interest in, or presence at, a performance. Carpini and Williams note that the term ‘public’ is no longer an adequate way to describe the complex levels of interaction that form contemporary political discourse: “people, politics, and the media are far more complex than this. Individuals are simultaneously citizens, consumers, audiences…and so forth” (Carpini & Williams in Bennett & Entman 161). Marshall sees the audience as both a derivative of and a factor in the larger, more political popular body called the “masses”. These masses define the population largely as an unorganised political power, while audiences emerge in relation to consumer products, as rationalised and therefore somewhat subdued categories within that scope. He notes that although the audience, in the twentieth century, has emerged as a “social category” of its own, it has developed as such in relation to both the unharnessed political power of the masses and the active political power of the public (Marshall 61-70). The audience, then, can be said to be a separate but overlapping state that rationalises and segments the potential of the masses, but also informs the subsequent actions of the public. An audience without some degree of action or involvement is not a public. Such a definition provides important insights into the debate from the perspective of political communication. The cohesiveness of the group that is to define the public can be undermined by mass media. It has been argued that mass media, in particular the internet, have removed all sense of local community and instead provided an information outlet that denies individual response. (Franklin 23; Postman 67-69) It can certainly be argued that with media available on such an instant and individual basis, the necessity of group gathering for information and action has been greatly reduced. Thus, one of the primary functions of the public is eliminated, that of joining together for information. This lack of communal information gathering can eliminate the most important functions of the public: debate and personal action. Those who tune-in to national broadcasts or even read national newspapers to receive political information are generally not invited to debate and pose solutions to the problems that are introduced to them, or to take immediate steps to resolve the conflicts addressed. Instead, they are asked only to fulfill that traditional function of the audience, to receive the information and either absorb or dismiss it. Media also blur the audience/public divide by making it necessary to change the means of political communication. Previous to the advent of mass media, political communication was separated from entertainment by its emphasis on debate and information. Television has led a turn toward more ‘emotion’ and image-based campaigning both for election and for support of a particular political agenda. This subsequently implies that this public has increasingly become primarily an audience. Although this attitude is one that has been adopted by many critics and observers, it is not entirely correct to say that there are no longer any opportunities for the audience to regain their function as a public. On a local level, town hall meetings, public consultations and rallies still exist and provide an opportunity for concerned citizens to voice their opinions and assist in forming local policy. Media, often accused of orchestrating the elimination of the active public, occasionally provide opportunities for more traditional public debate. In both Canada and the US, leaders are invited to participate in ‘town hall’ style television debates in which audience members are invited to ask questions. In the UK, both print media and television tend to offer opportunities for leaders to respond to the questions and concerns of individuals. Many newspapers publish responses and letters from many different readers, allowing for public debate and interaction. (McNair 13) In addition, newspapers such as The Washington Post and The Globe and Mail operate Websites that allow the public to comment on articles published in the paper text. In Canada, radio is often used as a forum for public debate and comment. The Canadian Broadcast Corporation’s Cross Country Check Up and Cross Talk allows mediated debate between citizens across the country. Regional stations offer similar programming. Local television news programmes often include ‘person on the street’ interviews on current issues and opportunities for the audience to voice their arguments on-air. Of course, in most of these instances, the information received from the audience is moderated, and shared selectively. This does not, however, negate the fact that there is interaction between that audience and the media. Perhaps the greatest challenge to traditional interpretations of media-audience response is the proliferation of the internet. As McNair observes, “the emergence of the internet has provided new opportunities for public participation in political debate, such as blogging and ‘citizen journalism’. Websites such as YouTube permit marginal political groups to make statements with global reach” (McNair 13). These ‘inter-networks’ not only provide alternative information for audiences to seek out, but also give audience members the ability to respond to any communication in an immediate and public way. Therefore, the audience member can exert potentially wide reaching influence on the public agenda and dialogue, clearly altering the accept-or-refuse model often applied to mediated communication. Opinion polls provide us with an opportunity to verify this shift away from the ‘hypodermic needle’ approach to communication theory (Sanderson King 61). Just as an audience can be responsible for the success of a theatre or television show based on attendance or viewing numbers, so too have public opinion polls been designed to measure, without nuance, only whether the audience accepts or dismisses what is presented to them through the media. There is little place for any measure of actual thought or opinion. The first indications of an upset in this balance resulted in tremendous surprise, as was the case during the US Clinton/Lewinsky scandal (Lawrence & Bennett 425). Stephanopoulos writes that after a full year of coverage of the Monica Lewinsky ‘scandal’, Clinton’s public approval poll numbers were “higher than ever” while the Republican leaders who had initiated the inquiry were suffering from a serious lack of public support (Stephanopoulos 442). Carpini and Williams also observed that public opinion polls taken during the media frenzy showed very little change of any kind, although the movement that did occur was in the direction of increased support for Clinton. This was in direct contrast to what “…traditional agenda-setting, framing, and priming theory would predict” (Carpini & Williams in Bennett & Entman 177). Zaller confirms that the expectation among news organisations, journalists, and political scientists was never realised; despite being cast by the media in a negative role, and despite the consumption of that negative media, the audience refused to judge the President solely on his framed persona (Zaller in Bennett & Entman 255). It was clear that the majority of the population in the US, and in other countries, were exposed to the information regarding the Clinton scandal. At the height of the scandal, it was almost unavoidable (Zaller in Bennett & Entman 254). Therefore it cannot be said that the information the media provided was not being consumed. Rather, the audience did not agree with the media’s attempts to persuade them, and communicated this through opinion polls, creating something resembling a mass political dialogue. As Lawrence and Bennett discuss in their article regarding the Lewinsky/Clinton public opinion “phenomenon”, it should not be assumed by polling institutions or public opinion watchers that the projected angle of the media will be immediately adopted by the public (Lawerence & Bennett 425). Although the media presented a preferred reading of the text, it could not ensure that the audience would interpret that meaning (Hall in Curran, Gurevitch & Harris 343). The audience’s decoding of the media’s message would have to depend on each audience member’s personal experiences and their impression of the media that was presenting the communication. This kind of response is, in fact, encouraging. If the audience relies on mainstream media to provide a frame and context to all political communication, then they are giving up their civic responsibility and placing complete authority in the hands of those actively involved in the process of communicating events. It could be suggested that the reported increase in the perceived reliabilty of internet news sources (Kinsella 251) can be at least partially attributed to the audience’s increasing awareness of these frames and limitations on mainstream media presentation. With the increase in ‘backstage’ reporting, the audience has become hyper-aware of the use of these strategies in communications. The audience is now using its knowledge and media access to decipher information, as it is presented to them, for authenticity and context. While there are those who would lament the fact that the community driven public is largely in the past and focus their attention on finding ways to see the old methods of communication revived, others argue that the way to move forward is not to regret the existence of an audience, but to alter our ideas about how to understand it. It has been suggested that in order to become a more democratic society we must now “re-conceive audiences as citizens” (Golding in Ferguson 98). And despite Blau’s pronouncement that audiences are “nothing like a public”, he later points out that there is still the possibility of unity even in the most diverse of audiences. “The presence of an audience is in itself a sign of coherence”(Blau 23). As Rothenbuhler writes: There is too much casualness in the use of the word spectator…A spectator is almost never simply looking at something. On the contrary, most forms of spectatorship are socially prescribed and performed roles and forms of communication…the spectator, then, is not simply a viewer but a participant in a larger system. (Rothenbuhler 65) We cannot regress to a time when audiences are reserved for the theatre and publics for civic matters. In a highly networked world that relies on communicating via the methods and media of entertainment, it is impossible to remove the role of the audience member from the role of citizen. This does not necessarily need to be a negative aspect of democracy, but instead a step in its constant evolution. There are positive aspects to the audience/public as well as potential negatives. McNair equates the increase in mediated communication with an increase in political knowledge and involvement, particularly for those on the margins of society who are unlikely to be exposed to national political activity in person. He notes that the advent of television may have limited political discourse to a media-friendly sound bite, but that it still increases the information dispensed to the majority of the population. Despite the ideals of democracy, the majority of the voting population is not extremely well informed as to political issues, and prior to the advent of mass media, were very unlikely to have an opportunity to become immersed in the details of policy. Media have increased the amount of political information the average citizen will be exposed to in their lifetime (McNair 41). With this in mind, it is possible to equate the faults of mass media not with their continued growth, but with society’s inability to recognise the effects of the media as technologies and to adjust education accordingly. While the quality of information and understanding regarding the actions and ideals of national political leaders may be disputed, the fact that they are more widely distributed than ever before is not. They have an audience at all times, and though that audience may receive information via a filtered medium, they are still present and active. As McNair notes, if the purpose of democracy is to increase the number of people participating in the political process, then mass media have clearly served to promote the democratic ideal (McNair 204). However, these positives are qualified by the fact that audiences must also possess the skills, the interests and the knowledge of a public, or else risk isolation that limits their power to contribute to public discourse in a meaningful way. The need for an accountable, educated audience has not gone unnoticed throughout the history of mass media. Cultural observers such as Postman, McLuhan, John Kennedy, and even Pope Pius XII have cited the need for education in media. As McLuhan aptly noted, “to the student of media, it is difficult to explain the human indifference to the social effect of these radical forces”(McLuhan 304). In 1964, McLuhan wrote that, “education will become recognised as civil defence against media fallout. The only medium for which our education now offers some civil defence is the print medium”(McLuhan 305). Unfortunately, it is only gradually and usually at an advanced level of higher education that the study and analysis of media has developed to any degree. The mass audiences, those who control the powers of the public, often remain formally uneducated as to the influence that the mediating factors of television have on the distribution of information. Although the audience may have developed a level of sophistication in their awareness of media frames, the public has not been taught how to translate this awareness into any real political or social understanding. The result is a community susceptible to being overtaken by manipulations of any medium. Those who attempt to convey political messages have only added to that confusion by being unclear as to whether or not they are attempting to address an audience or engage a public. In some instances, politicians and their teams focus their sole attention on the public, not taking into consideration the necessities of communicating with an audience, often to the detriment of political success. On the other hand, some focus their attentions on attracting and maintaining an audience, often to the detriment of the political process. This confusion may be a symptom of the mixed messages regarding the appropriate attitude toward performance that is generated by western culture. In an environment where open attention to performance is both demanded and distained, communication choices can be difficult. Instead we are likely to blindly observe the steady increase in the entertainment style packaging of our national politics. Until the audience fully incorporates itself with the public, we will see an absence of action, and excess of confused consumption (Kraus 18). Contemporary society has moved far beyond the traditional concepts of exclusive audience or public domains, and yet we have not fully articulated or defined what this change in structure really means. Although this review does suggest that contemporary citizens are both audience and public simultaneously, it is also clear that further discussion needs to occur before either of those roles can be fully understood in a contemporary communications context. References Bennett, Lance C., and Robert M. Entman. Mediated Politics: Communication in the Future of Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Blau, Herbert. The Audience. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990. Bratich, Jack Z. “Amassing the Multitude: Revisiting Early Audience Studies”. Communication Theory 15 (2005): 242-65. Curran, J., M. Gurevitch, and D. Janet Harris, eds. Mass Communication and Society. Beverley Hills: Sage, 1977. DeLuca, T., and J. Buell. Liars! Cheaters! Evildoers! Demonization and the End of Civil Debate in American Politics. New York: New York UP, 2005. Ferguson, Marjorie, ed. Public Communication: The New Imperatives. London: Sage, 1990. Franklin, Bob. Packaging Politics. London: Edward Arnold, 1994. Gamson, Joshua. Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994. Keown, Leslie-Anne. “Keeping Up with the Times: Canadians and Their News Media Diets.” Canadian Social Trends June 2007. Government of Canada. Kinsella, Warren. The War Room. Toronto: Dunduran Group, 2007. Kraus, Sidney. Televised Presidential Debates and Public Policy. New Jersey: Lawerence Erlbaum Associates, 2000. Lawrence, Regina, and Lance Bennett. “Rethinking Media Politics and Public Opinion: Reactions to the Clinton-Lewinsky Scandal”. Political Science Quarterly 116 (Fall 2001): 425-46. Marland, Alex. Political Marketing in Modern Canadian Federal Elections. Dalhousie University: Canadian Political Science Association Conference, 2003. Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. New ed. London: ARK Paperbacks, 1987 [1964]. McNair, Brian. An Introduction to Political Communication. 4th ed. London: Routledge, 2007. The Oxford Dictionary of English. Eds. Catherine Soanes and Angus Stevenson. Rev. ed. Oxford UP, 2005. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford UP. 1 Mar. 2008. < http://www.oxfordreference.com.qe2aproxy.mun.ca/views/ ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t140.e4525 >. Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death. New York: Penguin, 1985. Rothenbuhler, Eric W. 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Central within the discourses that have surrounded the commercial internet during its emergence has been an underlying promise of disorder. The claims for consumer empowerment with which e-commerce was promoted and discussed within industry and academic literature (Flamberg; Gates; Horton; Levine et al. for instance), coupled with recurring claims that the emergence of e-commerce was as profound a shift as that occasioned by the Industrial Revolution (Dancer; Sullivan; Lynch for instance), established an underlying sense of chaotic upheaval – a clear and present danger to the established order. And on the surface it would appear as if the commercial internet does serve as a challenge to established authority. User interfaces function by offering a degree of autonomy and informal control to the user. However, the infrastructure supporting e-commerce is multi-layered. It is here that the friendly interface cedes to a vast data structure: an ordered and ordering database. Using an August 2002 sample of the corporate portal ninemsn extensively analysed as part of a broader PhD project, this paper explores the tension between front end disorder and back end order. Its goal is to indicate how the surface forms of this site are superimposed on a machinery which orders, or perhaps disciplines, consumer activity. The ninemsn Interface The ninemsn website is typified by a dominance of written text over graphic images. It is constituted primarily by complex noun phrases (the most commonly occurring utterance type) followed by imperative formations. Less often used are statements and interrogatives. The preponderance of noun phrases is readily explained by the metafunction of these utterances as hypertext anchors. Content analyses conducted by Haas and Grams indicate a typical use of noun phrases as anchor text on websites. But it is the fact that all of the phrase types are used on the ninemsn website as hypertext which renders the distinction between utterance types redundant. Despite their different surface forms, the status of the utterances as hypertext anchors makes them similar in terms of function. All of the utterances become actionable, open to activation and engagement by the consumer, thereby challenging their function as direct commands or statements. By inviting the act of linking, hypertext presupposes that there is ‘something else’ which lies behind those pieces of text. They are, therefore, never merely utterances which can be interpreted solely at their surface but are marked by the immanent existence of what Chomsky calls deep structure, layers of significance beyond that revealed in the surface form. None of the linguistic features previously identified is therefore a simple utterance. Each has an alternative form and function by virtue of the fact that it is constituted within a logic of hypertext. On ninemsn all the utterances have the performative (illocutionary) force (Austin) of offers. The surface forms can be read as the result of a transformation (Chomsky) of this underlying linguistic structure. The base form best associated with a commercial institution operating within a hypertextual medium is the interrogative “would you like …?” Consequently, the noun phrase “Bust-shaping bodysuit” (ninemsn Home Page 12 Aug 2002) is a transformation of the underlying interrogative “Would you like a bust-shaping bodysuit?”, or the humble statement “I [ninemsn] offer you [the user] a bust-shaping bodysuit”. But what is significant is that for the site to make sense and serve as something other than a random collection of statements and imperatives, this underlying form must be recovered by the user. And it would be a naïve user indeed who did not recognise the polite offers of hypertext which underpin the commands appearing at the surface of the ninemsn website. These transformative effects mitigate the power, or control, being obviously exerted by the company over the user’s experience of ninemsn. Firstly they do this by transforming commands and bold declaratives into polite inquiries. But the very nature of hypertext alone works to this end. As Miles has argued, the illocutionary force of hypertext, in this case the act of offering, is contained within the relationship between anchor text and the destination site. “It is not in the nodes that hypertext ‘happens’, but in the causal connections and pathways made between nodes” (Miles “Cinematic Paradigms” n.pag.). Thus, for Miles, what becomes important in a hypertextual document is the ‘event of connection’ (“Hypertext Structure” n.pag.) – an act performed by the user. Thus, hypertext and the performative power it extends to the statements on the ninemsn website, make the user the key active agent in the determination of meaning on the site rather than the company. By denying control of the site, both in the form of user activated hypertext and through the underlying invitational nature of its utterances, ninemsn opens itself to random and chaotic interaction. It becomes a site not for the direct and strict ordering of users – neither in the form of direct imperatives nor in the form of control of practice. Rather it is a site for the de-control of user activity. The interactivity enabled by hypertext here becomes a tool for disorder. The ninemsn Database However thus far we have only examined the surface structures of the site, the user-friendly interface of the corporate entity that is ninemsn. Below this lies the infrastructure of the site: the database. ninemsn is a database in two senses. Firstly it is a collection of sites, pages, and links which cohere under the ninemsn brand umbrella. Pages which are marked with the ninemsn brand, and to which links are directly offered from the site, do not constitute the entire World Wide Web. This occurs despite the site’s description as a portal implying that it functions as a window onto the system. At this level, ninemsn can be conceived as a particular ordering through selection and collation of the information system that is the Web. But it is also an active ordering of the activities of the user. By only offering a limited set of links to strategic partners, and offering paid listings foremost in its Web-wide search function, the site delimits the autonomy which it appears to offer at the hypertextual interface. At the level of the database, it becomes an attenuated autonomy, ordered by strategic hyperlinking (Jackson). But ninemsn is also a database of consumers and consumer traffic patterns which are then onsold to advertisers and strategic partners. The site invites users to personalise the interface by entering preferences which effectively expose their consumer behaviour. They are offered memberships which result in extra rewards but involve filling in a proforma listing personal details remarkably similar to the demographic information the site offers advertisers about its consumers. By entering data into the system in these ways – a voluntary act of choice lured by the personalisation options it enables – the consumer becomes ordered. Online consumer activity here becomes organised into a set of pre-ordained fields which constitute that user for the purposes of that transaction (Poster). They become known, not through the self-directed, disorderly conduct of surfing, but through the pre-defined and orderly fields of the marketing database. This effect can be traced further in the commercial Web. By similarly mapping the behaviours of users, cookies and other forms of more passively activated ‘spyware’ also reduce the behaviour of users to pre-constituted fields of value. As the consumer interacts with the system following the polite invitations of hypertext, the system orders this trail into valuable marketing data. Thus, it is the same hypertext which offers the illusion of autonomy at the site interface which enables the increasing surveillance and ordering of consumers at the lower levels of the database. Interactivity as an Ordering Practice Interactivity and its e-commerce companion, the promise of personalisation, here become disciplining practices, seductively drawing the consumer further into the ordering machinery of the site. They encourage the user to submit more and more of their Self – their interests, the trajectory of their logic – to the ordering gaze of the market. Using Virilio’s terms, we can therefore understand interactivity in e-commerce as both an accelerator and a brake on human movement, in this instance the movement of hypertext as the manifestation of individual choice. It is both a technology which ‘empowers’ the user to move in their personally determined disordered fashion, mimicking the radical potential of dynamic bodies, and a delimiting of that potential into the regimented service of commerce. But this is not to argue that consumers necessarily accept this role, nor to imply any (over)- determining role for hypertextual environments. Foucault himself recognises the immanent potential for resistance within any disciplining practice. It is however, to point to the ordered disordering that constitutes the new media environment, particularly in its commercial forms. Like Featherstone on consumer culture we can read interactive media as a site for the ‘controlled de-control’ of emotion. We can see it as a site where disorder is not necessarily the weapon of the revolutionary or the radical, but is also, and simultaneously, in the service of the order it ostensibly challenges. References Austin, J.L. How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955. 2nd edition. Eds. J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisa. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. Chomsky, Noam. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1965. Dancer, Helen. “Riding the Storm”. The Bulletin 1 Feb 2000: 64-5. Featherstone, Mike. Consumer Culture and Postmodernism. London: Sage, 1991. Flamberg, Danny. “Understanding the Empowered E-Consumer”. iMarketing News 1.9 (19 Nov 1999): 32. Foucault, Michel. The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998. Trans. Robert Hurley. Originally published 1976. Gates, Bill, with Nathan Myhrvold and Peter Rinearson. The Road Ahead. Revised edition. London: Penguin Books, 1996. Originally published 1995. Haas, Stephanie W., and Erika S. Grams. “Page and Link Classifications: Connecting Diverse Resources”. Proceedings of the Third ACM Conference on Digital Libraries, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, 1998: 99-107. 2 Oct 2002 http://portal.acm.org>. Haas, Stephanie W., and Erika S. Grams. “Readers, Authors and Page Structure: A Discussion of Four Questions Arising from a Content Analysis of Web Pages.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science 51.2 (2000): 181-92. Horton, Matthew. “The Internet and the Empowered Consumer: From the Scarcity of the Commodity to the Multiplicity of Subjectivities.” Media International Australia 91 (May 1999): 111-23. Jackson, Michele H. “Assessing the Structure of Communication on the World Wide Web”. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 3.1 (Jun 1997). 8 Aug 2002 http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/> Levine, Rick, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls and David Weinberger. The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual. South Yarra: Hardie Grant Books, 2000. Lynch, Adrian. “Revolution Gives Power to Consumers.” The Australian 30 May 2000: IT section 17. Miles, Adrian. “Cinematic Paradigms for Hypertext.” Presented at Digital Arts & Culture conference, Bergen, Norway, 26-28 Nov 1998. 3 Oct 2002 http://cmc.uib.no/dac98/> Miles, Adrian. “Hypertext Structure as the Event of Connection.” Journal of Digital Information 2.3 (2002). Originally presented at ACM Hyperlink 2001 conference in Aarhus, Denmark. 5 Sep 2002 http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk>. Poster, Mark. The Second Media Age. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995. Sullivan, Andrew. “Dotcommo e-Volution”. The Australian 19 Jun 2000: 40. Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics: Essays on Dromology. New York: Semiotext(e), 1986. Trans. Mark Polizzotti. Originally published 1977. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Jarrett, Kylie. "Ordering Disorder: ninemsn, Hypertext and Databases." M/C Journal 7.6 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0501/07-jarrett.php>. APA Style Jarrett, K. (Jan. 2005) "Ordering Disorder: ninemsn, Hypertext and Databases," M/C Journal, 7(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0501/07-jarrett.php>.

Content warning: although it was kept to a minimum, this text displays instances of (anti-Semitic) hate speech. During the 2016 U.S. election and its aftermath, multiple journalistic accounts reported on “alt-right trolls” emanating from anonymous online spaces like the imageboard 4chan (e.g. Abramson; Ellis). Having gained infamy for its nihilist trolling subcultures (Phillips, This Is Why) and the loose hacktivist movement Anonymous (Coleman), 4chan now drew headlines because of the alt-right’s “genuinely new” concoction of white supremacy, ironic Internet humour, and a lack of clear leadership (Hawley 50). The alt-right “anons”, as imageboard users call themselves, were said to primarily manifest on the “Politically Incorrect” subforum of 4chan: /pol/. Gradually, a sentiment arose in the titles of several news articles that the pro-Trump “alt-right trolls” had successfully won the metapolitical battle intertwined with the elections (Phillips, Oxygen 5). For instance, articles titled that “trolls” were “The Only True Winners of this Election” (Dewey) or even “Plotting a GOP Takeover” (Stuart).The headlines were as enticing as questionable. As trolling-expert Whitney Phillips headlined herself, the alt-right did not attain political gravity solely through its own efforts but rather was “Conjured Out of Pearl Clutching and Media Attention” (“The Alt-Right”), with news outlets being provoked to criticise, debunk, or sensationalise its trolling activities (Faris et al. 131; Phillips, “Oxygen” 5-6). Even with the right intentions, attempts at denouncement through using vague, structuralist notions–from “alt-right” and “trolls” to “the basket of deplorables” (Robertson) – arguably only strengthened the coherence of those it was meant to disavow (Phillips, Oxygen; Phillips et al.; Marantz). Phillips et al. therefore lamented such generalisations, arguing attributing Trump’s win to vague notions of “4chan”, “alt-right”, or “trolls” actually bestowed an “atemporal, almost godlike power” to what was actually an “ever-reactive anonymous online collective”. Therefore, they called to refrain from making claims about opaque spaces like 4chan without first “plotting the landscape” and “safeguarding the actual record”. Indeed, “when it comes to 4chan and Anonymous”, Phillips et al. warned, “nobody steps in the same river twice”.This text answers the call to map anonymous online groups by engaging with the complexity of testing the muddy waters of the ever-changing and dissimulative 4chan-current. It first argues how anti-structuralist research outlooks can answer to many of the pitfalls arising from this complex task. Afterwards, it traces the word trump as it was used on 4chan/pol/ to problematise some of the above-mentioned media narratives. How did anons consider Trump, and how did the /pol/-current change during the build-up of the 2016 U.S. elections and afterwards?On Researching Masked and Dissimulative ExtremistsWhile potentially playing into the self-imagination of malicious actors (Phillips et al.), the frequent appearance of overblown narratives on 4chan is unsurprising considering the peculiar affordances of imageboards. Imageboards are anonymous – no user account is required to post – and ephemeral – posts are deleted after a certain amount of activity, sometimes after days, sometimes after minutes (Bernstein et al.; Hagen). These affordances complicate studying collectives on imageboards, with the primary reasons being that 1) they prevent insights into user demographics, 2) they afford particularly dissimulative, playful discourse that can rarely be taken at face value (Auerbach; de Zeeuw and Tuters), and 3) the sheer volume of auto-deleted activity means one has to stay up-to-date with a rapid waterfall of subcultural ephemera. Additionally, the person stepping into the muddy waters of the chan-river also changes their gaze over time. For instance, Phillips bravely narrates how she once saw parts of the 4chan-stream as “fun” to only later realise the blatantly racist elements present from the start (“It Wasn’t Just”).To help render legible the changing currents of imageboard activity without relying on vague understandings of the “alt-right”, “trolls”, or “Anonymous”, anti-structuralist research outlooks form a possible answer. Around 1900, sociologists like Gabriel Tarde already argued to refrain from departing from structuralist notions of society and instead let social compositions arise through iterative tracing of minute imitations (11). As described in Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social, actor-network theory (ANT) revitalises the Tardean outlook by similarly criticising the notion of the “social” and “society” as distinct, sui-generis entities. Instead, ANT advocates tracing “flat” networks of agency made up of both human and non-human actors (165-72). By tracing actors and describing the emerging network of heterogeneous mediators and intermediaries (105), one can slowly but surely get a sense of collective life. ANT thus takes a page from ethnomethodology, which advocates a similar mapping of how participants of a group produce themselves as such (Garfinkel).For multiple reasons, anti-structuralist approaches like ANT can be useful in tracing elusive anonymous online groups and their changing compositions. First, instead of grasping collectives on imageboards from the outset through structuralist notions, as networked individuals, or as “amorphous and formless entities” (see e.g. Coleman 113-5), it only derives its composition after following where its actors lead. This can result in an empirical and literally objective mapping of their collectivity while refraining from mystifications and non-existent connections–so often present in popular narratives about “trolls” and the “alt-right”. At the same time, it allows prominent self-imaginations and mythologizations – or, in ANT-parlance, “localisations of the global” (Latour 173-190) – rise to the surface whenever they form important actors, which, as we will see, tends to happen on 4chan.Second, ANT offers a useful lens with which to consider how non-human actors can uphold a sense of collectivity within anonymous imageboards. This can include digital objects as part of the infrastructure–e.g. the automatically assigned post numbers having mythical value on 4chan (Beran, It Came From 69)–but also cultural objects like words or memes. Considering 4chan’s anonymity, this focus on objects instead of individuals is partly a necessity: one cannot know the exact amount and flow of users. Still, as this text seeks to show, non-human actors like words or memes can form suitable actors to map the changing collectivity of anonymous imageboard users in the absence of demographic insights.There are a few pitfalls worth noting when conducting ANT-informed research into extremist spaces like 4chan/pol/. The aforementioned ironic and dissimulative rhetoric of anonymous forum culture (de Zeeuw and Tuters) means tracing is complicated by implicit (yet omnipresent) intertextual references undecipherable to the untrained eye. Even worse, when misread or exaggerated, such tracing efforts can play into trolling tactics. This can in turn risk what Phillips calls “giving oxygen” to bigoted narratives by amplifying their presence (“Oxygen”). Since ANT does not prescribe what sort of description is needed (Latour 149), this exposure can be limited and/or critically engaged with by the researcher. Still, it is inevitable that research on extremist collectives adds at least some garbage to already polluted information ecologies (Phillips and Milner 2020), even when “just” letting the actors speak (Venturini). Indeed, this text will unfortunately also show hate speech terms below.These complications of irony and amplification can be somewhat mitigated by mixing ethnographic involvement with computational methods. Together, they can render implicit references explicit while also mapping broad patterns in imitation and preventing singular (misleading) actors from over-dominating the description. When done well, such descriptions do not only have to amplify but can also marginalise and trivialise. An accurate mapping can thereby counter sensationalist media narratives, as long as that is where the actors lead. It because of this potentiality that anti-structuralist tracing of extremist, dissimulative online groups should not be discarded outright.Stopping Momentarily to Test the WatersTo put the above into practice, what follows is a brief case study on the term trump on 4chan/pol/. Instead of following users, here the actor trump is taken an entry point for tracing various assemblages: not only referring to Donald J. Trump as an individual and his actions, but also to how /pol/-anons imagine themselves in relation to Trump. In this way, the actor trump is a fluid one: each of its iterations contains different boundaries and variants of its environment (de Laet and Mol 252). By following these environments, can we make sense of how the delirious 2016 U.S. election cycle played out on /pol/, a space described as the “skeleton key to the rise of Trump” (Beran, 4chan)?To trace trump, I use the 4plebs.com archive, containing almost all posts made on /pol/ between late-2013 and early 2018 (the time of research). I subsequently use two text mining methods to trace various connections between trump and other actors and use this to highlight specific posts. As Latour et al. note, computational methods allow “navigations” (593) of different data points to ensure diverse empirical perspectives, preventing both structuralist “zoomed-out” views and local contexts from over-dominating. Instead of moving between micro and macro views, such a navigation should therefore be understood as a “circulation” around the data, deploying various perspectives that each assemble the actors in a different way. In following this, the case study aims to demonstrate how, instead of a lengthy ethnographic account, a brief navigation using both quali- and quantitative perspectives can quickly demystify some aspects of seemingly nebulous online groups.Tracing trump: From Meme-Wizard to Anti-Semitic TargetTo get a sense of the centrality of Trump on /pol/, I start with post frequencies of trump assembled in two ways. The first (Figure 1) shows how, soon after the announcement of Trump’s presidential bid on 16 June 2015, around 100,000 comments mention the word (2% of the total amount of posts). The frequencies spike to a staggering 8% of all comments during the build-up to Trump’s win of the Republican nomination in early 2016 and presidential election in November 2016. Figure 1: The absolute and relative amount of posts on 4chan/pol/ containing the word trump (prefixes and suffixes allowed).To follow the traces between trump and the more general discourse surrounding it, I compiled a more general “trump-dense threads” dataset. These are threads containing thirty or more posts, with at least 15% of posts mentioning trump. As Figure 2 shows, at the two peaks, 8% of any thread on /pol/ was trump-dense, accounting for approximately 15,000 monthly threads. While Trump’s presence is unsurprising, these two views show just how incredibly central the former businessman was to /pol/ at the time of the 2016 U.S. election. Figure 2: The absolute and relative amount of threads on 4chan/pol/ that are “trump-dense”, meaning they have thirty comments or more, out of which at least 15% contain the word trump (prefixes and suffixes allowed).Instead of picking a certain moment from these aggregate overviews and moving to the “micro” (Latour et al.), I “circulate” further with Figure 3, showing another perspective on the trump­-dense thread dataset. It shows a scatter plot of trump-dense threads grouped per week and plotted according to how similar their vocabulary is. First, all the words per week are weighted with tf-idf, a common information retrieval algorithm that scores units on the basis if they appear a lot in one of the datasets but not in others (Spärck-Jones). The document sets are then plotted according to the similarity of their weighted vocabulary (cosine similarity). The five highest-scoring terms for the five clusters (identified with K-means) are listed in the bottom-right corner. For legibility, the scatterplot is compressed by the MDS algorithm. To get a better sense of specific vocabulary per week, terms that appeared in all weeks are filtered out (like trump or hillary). Read counterclockwise, the nodes roughly increase in time, thus showing a clear temporal change of discourse, with the first clusters being more similar in vocabulary than the last, and the weeks before and after the primary election (orange cluster) showing a clear gap. Figure 3: A scatterplot showing cosine distances between tf-idf weighted vocabularies of trump-dense threads per week. Compressed with MDS and coloured by five K-means clusters on the underlying tf-idf matrix (excluding terms that appeared in all weeks). Legend shows the top five tf-idf terms within these clusters. ★ denotes the median week in the cluster.With this map, we can trace other words appearing around trump as significant actors in the weekly documents. For instance, Trump-supportive words like stump (referring to “Can’t Stump the Trump”) and maga (“Make America Great Again”) are highly ranked in the first two clusters. In later weeks, less clearly pro-Trump terms appear: drumpf reminds of the unattractive root of the Trump family name, while impeached and mueller show the Russia probe in 2017 and 2018 were significant in the trump-dense threads of that time. This change might thus hint at growing scepticism towards Trump after his win, but it is not shown how these terms are used. Fortunately, the scatterplot offers a rudder with which to navigate to further perspectives.In keeping with Latour’s advice to keep “aggregate structures” and “local contexts” flat (165-72), I contrast the above scatterplot with a perspective on the data that keeps sentence structures intact instead of showing abstracted keyword sets. Figure 4 uses all posts mentioning trump in the median weeks of the first and last clusters in the scatterplot (indicated with ★) and visualises word trees (Wattenberg and Viégas) of most frequent words following “trump is a”. As such, they render explicit ontological associations about Trump; what is Trump, according to /pol/-anons? The first word tree shows posts from 2-8 November 2015, when fifteen Republican competitors were still in the race. As we have seen in Figure 1, Trump was in this month still “only” mentioned in around 50,000 posts (2% of the total). This word tree suggests his eventual nomination was at this point seen as an unlikely and even undesirable scenario, showing derogatory associations like retard and failure, as well as more conspiratorial words like shill, fraud, hillary plant, and hillary clinton puppet. Notably, the most prominent association, meme, and others like joke and fucking comic relief, imply Trump was not taken too seriously (see also Figure 5). Figure 4: Word trees of words following “trump is a” in the median weeks of the first and last clusters of the scatterplot. Made with Jason Davies’s Word Tree application. Figure 5: Anons who did not take Trump seriously. Screencapture taken from archive.4plebs.org (see post 1 and post 2 in context).The first word tree contrast dramatically with the one from the last median week from 18 to 24 December 2017. Here, most associations are anti-Semitic or otherwise related to Judaism, with trump most prominently related to the hate speech term kike. This prompts several questions: did /pol/ become increasingly anti-Semitic? Did already active users radicalise, or were more anti-Semites drawn to /pol/? Or was this nefarious current always there, with Trump merely drawing anti-Semitic attention after he won the election? Although the navigation did not depart from a particular critical framework, by “just following the actors” (Venturini), it already stumbled upon important questions related to popular narratives on 4chan and the alt-right. While it is tempting to stop here and explain the change as “radicalisation”, the navigation should continue to add more empirical perspectives. When doing so, the more plausible explanation is that the unlikely success of Trump briefly attracted (relatively) more diverse and playful visitors to /pol/, obscuring the presence and steady growth of overt extremists in the process.To unpack this, I first focus on the claim that a (relatively) diverse set of users flocked to /pol/ because of the Trump campaign. /pol/’s overall posting activity rose sharply during the 2016 election, which can point to already active users becoming more active, but is likely mostly caused by new users flocking to /pol/. Indeed, this can be traced in actor language. For instance, many anons professed to be “reporting in” from other 4chan boards during crucial moments in the campaing. One of the longest threads in the trump-dense threads dataset (4,504 posts) simply announces “Cruz drops out”. In the comments below, multiple anons state they arrived from other boards to join the Trump-infused activity. For instance, Figure 6 shows an anon replying “/v/ REPORTING IN”, to which sixty other users reacted by similarly affirming themselves as representatives from other boards (e.g. “/mu/ here. Ready to MAGA”). While but another particular view, this implies Trump’s surprising nomination stimulated a crowd-like gathering of different anons jumping into the vortex of trump-related activity on /pol/. Figure 6: Replies by outside-anons “reporting in” the sticky thread announcing Ted Cruz's drop out, 4 May 2016. Screenshots taken from 4plebs.org (see post 1 and post 2 in context).Other actor-language further expresses Trump’s campaign “drew in” new and unadjusted (or: less extreme) users. Notably, many anons claimed the 2016 election led to an “invasion of Reddit users”. Figure 7 shows one such expression: an annotated timeline of /pol/’s posting activity graph (made by 4plebs), posted to /pol/ on 26 February 2016 and subsequently reposted 34 times. It interprets 2016 as a period where “Trump shit goes into overdrive, meme shit floods /pol/, /pol/ is now reddit”. Whether these claims hold any truth is difficult to establish, but the image forms an interesting case of how the entirety “/pol/” is imagined and locally articulated. Such simplistic narratives relate to what Latour calls “panoramas”: totalising notions of some imagined “whole” (188-90) that, while not to be “confused with the collective”, form crucial data since they express how actors understand their own composition (190). Especially in the volatile conditions of anonymous and ephemeral imageboards, repeated panoramic narratives can help in constructing a sense of cohesion–and thereby also form interesting actors to trace. Indeed, following the panoramic statement “/pol/ is now reddit”, other gatekeeping-efforts are not hard to find. For instance, phrases urging other anons to go “back to reddit” (occurring in 19,069 posts in the total dataset) or “back to The_Donald” (a popular pro-Trump subreddit, 1,940 posts) are also particularly popular in the dataset. Figure 7: An image circulated on /pol/ lamenting that "/pol/ is now reddit" by annotating 4plebs’s posting metrics. Screenshot taken from archive.4plebs.org (see posts).Did trump-related activity on /pol/ indeed become more “meme-y” or “Reddit-like” during the election cycle, as the above panorama articulates? The activity in the trump-dense threads seems to suggest so. Figure 8 again uses the tf-idf terms from these threads, but here with the columns denoting the weeks and the rows the top scoring tf-idf terms of their respective week. To highlight relevant actors, all terms are greyed out (see the unedited sheet here), except for several keywords that indicate particularly playful or memetic vernacular: the aforementioned stump, emperor, referring to Trump’s nickname as “God Emperor”; energy, referring to “high energy”, a common catchphrase amongst Trump supporters; magic, referring to “meme magic”, the faux-ironic belief that posting memes affects real-life events; and pepe, the infamous cartoon frog. In both the tf-idf ranking and the absolute frequencies, these keywords flourish in 2016, but disappear soon after the presidential election passes. The later weeks in 2017 and 2018 rarely contain similarly playful and memetic terms, and if they do, suggest mocking discourse regarding Trump (e.g. drumpf). This perspective thus pictures the environment around trump in the run-up to the election as a particularly memetic yet short-lived carnival. At least from this perspective, “meme shit” thus indeed seemed to have “flooded /pol/”, but only for a short while. Figure 8: tf-idf matrix of trump-dense threads, columns denoting weeks and rows denoting the top hundred most relevant terms per week. Download the full tf-idf matrix with all terms here.Despite this carnivalesque activity, further perspectives suggest it did not go at the expense of extremist activity on /pol/. Figure 9 shows the absolute and relative counts of the word "jew" and its derogatory synonym "kike". Each of these increases from 2015 onwards. As such, it seems to align with claims that Trump’s success and /pol/ becoming increasingly extremist were causally related (Thompson). However, apart from possibly confusing correlation with causation, the relative presence remains fairly stable, even slightly decreasing during the frenzy of the Trump campaign. Since we also saw Trump himself become a target for anti-Semitic activity, these trendlines rather imply /pol/’s extremist current grew proportionally to the overall increase in activity, and increased alongside but not but necessarily as a partisan contingent as a result of Trump’s campaign. Figure 9: The absolute and relative frequency of the terms "jew" and "kike" on 4chan/pol/.ConclusionCombined, the above navigation implies two main changes in 4chan/pol/’s trump-related current. First, the climaxes of the 2016 Republican primaries and presidential elections seem to have invoked crowd-like influxes of (relatively) heterogeneous users joining the Trump-delirium, marked by particularly memetic activity. Second, /pol/ additionally seemed to have formed a welcoming hotbed for anti-Semites and other extremists, as the absolute amount of (anti-Semitic) hate speech increased. However, while already-present and new users might have been energised by Trump, they were not necessarily loyal to him, as professed by the fact that Trump himself eventually became a target. Together with the fact that anti-Semitic hate speech stayed relatively consistent, instead of being “countercultural” (Nagle) or exclusively pro-Trump, /pol/ thus seems to have been composed of quite a stable anti-Semitic and Trump-critical contingent, increasing proportionally to /pol/’s general growth.Methodologically, this text sought to demonstrate how a brief navigation of trump on 4chan/pol/ can provide provisional yet valuable insights regarding continuously changing current of online anonymous collectives. As the cliché goes, however, this brief exploration has left more many questions, or rather, it did not “deploy the content with all its connections” (Latour 147). For instance, I have not touched on how many of the trump-dense threads are distinctly separated and pro-Trump “general threads” (Jokubauskaitė and Peeters). Considering the vastness of such tasks, the necessity remains to find appropriate ways to “accurately map” the wild currents of the dissimulative Web–despite how muddy they might get.NoteThis text is a compressed and edited version of a longer MA thesis available here.ReferencesAbramson, Seth. “Listen Up, Progressives: Here’s How to Deal with a 4Chan (“Alt-Right”) Troll.” Medium, 2 May 2017. <https://medium.com/@Seth_Abramson/listen-up-progressives-heres-how-to-deal-with-a-4chan-alt-right-troll-48594f59a303>.Auerbach, David. “Anonymity as Culture: Treatise.” Triple Canopy, n.d. 22 June 2020 <https://www.canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/anonymity_as_culture__treatise>.Beran, Dale. “4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump”. Medium, 14 Feb. 2017. <https://medium.com/@DaleBeran/4chan-the-skeleton-key-to-the-rise-of-trump-624e7cb798cb>.Beran, Dale. It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office. New York: All Points Books, 2019.Bernstein, Michael S, Andrés Monroy-Hernández, Drew Harry, Paul André, Katrina Panovich, and Greg Vargas. “4chan and /b/: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community.” Proceedings of the Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, 2011.Coleman, Gabriella. Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous. London: Verso Books, 2014.De Laet, Marianne, and Annemarie Mol. “The Zimbabwe Bush Pump: Mechanics of a Fluid Technology.” Social Studies of Science 30.2 (2000): 225–263. 1 May 2020 <https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/030631200030002002>. 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New York: Columbia UP, 2017.Jokubauskaitė, Emilija, and Stijn Peeters. “Generally Curious: Thematically Distinct Datasets of General Threads on 4chan/Pol/”. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media 14.1 (2020): 863-7. <https://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/7351>.Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. New York: Oxford UP, 2005.Latour, Bruno, Pablo Jensen, Tommaso Venturini, Sébastian Grauwin, and Dominique Boullier. “‘The Whole Is Always Smaller than Its Parts’. A Digital Test of Gabriel Tarde’s Monads.” British Journal of Sociology 63.4 (2012): 590-615.Marantz, Andrew. Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation. New York: Penguin Random House, 2019.Nagle, Angela. Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the White House. Winchester: Zero Books, 2017.Phillips, Whitney. 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Introduction Many destinations promote culinary encounters. Foods and beverages, and especially how these will taste in situ, are being marketed as niche travel motivators and used in destination brand building across the globe. While initial usage of the term culinary tourism focused on experiencing exotic cultures of foreign destinations by sampling unfamiliar food and drinks, the term has expanded to embrace a range of leisure travel experiences where the aim is to locate and taste local specialities as part of a pleasurable, and hopefully notable, culinary encounter (Wolf). Long’s foundational work was central in developing the idea of culinary tourism as an active endeavor, suggesting that via consumption, individuals construct unique experiences. Ignatov and Smith’s literature review-inspired definition confirms the nature of activity as participatory, and adds consuming food production skills—from observing agriculture and local processors to visiting food markets and attending cooking schools—to culinary purchases. Despite importing almost all of its foodstuffs and beverages, including some of its water, Singapore is an acknowledged global leader in culinary tourism. Horng and Tsai note that culinary tourism conceptually implies that a transferal of “local or special knowledge and information that represent local culture and identities” (41) occurs via these experiences. This article adds the act of reading to these participatory activities and suggests that, because food writing forms an important component of Singapore’s suite of culinary tourism offerings, taste contributes to the cultural experience offered to both visitors and locals. While Singapore foodways have attracted significant scholarship (see, for instance, work by Bishop; Duruz; Huat & Rajah; Tarulevicz, Eating), Singapore food writing, like many artefacts of popular culture, has attracted less notice. Yet, this writing is an increasingly visible component of cultural production of, and about, Singapore, and performs a range of functions for locals, tourists and visitors before they arrive. Although many languages are spoken in Singapore, English is the national language (Alsagoff) and this study focuses on food writing in English. Background Tourism comprises a major part of Singapore’s economy, with recent figures detailing that food and beverage sales contribute over 10 per cent of this revenue, with spend on culinary tours and cookery classes, home wares such as tea-sets and cookbooks, food magazines and food memoirs additional to this (Singapore Government). This may be related to the fact that Singapore not only promotes food as a tourist attraction, but also actively promotes itself as an exceptional culinary destination. The Singapore Tourism Board (STB) includes food in its general information brochures and websites, and its print, television and cinema commercials (Huat and Rajah). It also mounts information-rich campaigns both abroad and inside Singapore. The 2007 ‘Singapore Seasons’ campaign, for instance, promoted Singaporean cuisine alongside films, design, books and other cultural products in London, New York and Beijing. Touring cities identified as key tourist markets in 2011, the ‘Singapore Takeout’ pop-up restaurant brought the taste of Singaporean foods into closer focus. Singaporean chefs worked with high profile locals in its kitchen in a custom-fabricated shipping container to create and demonstrate Singaporean dishes, attracting public and media interest. In country, the STB similarly actively promotes the tastes of Singaporean foods, hosting the annual World Gourmet Summit (Chaney and Ryan) and Pacific Food Expo, both attracting international culinary professionals to work alongside local leaders. The Singapore Food Festival each July is marketed to both locals and visitors. In these ways, the STB, as well as providing events for visitors, is actively urging Singaporeans to proud of their food culture and heritage, so that each Singaporean becomes a proactive ambassador of their cuisine. Singapore Food Writing Popular print guidebooks and online guides to Singapore pay significantly more attention to Singaporean food than they do for many other destinations. Sections on food in such publications discuss at relative length the taste of Singaporean food (always delicious) as well as how varied, authentic, hygienic and suited-to-all-budgets it is. These texts also recommend hawker stalls and food courts alongside cafés and restaurants (Henderson et al.), and a range of other culinary experiences such as city and farm food tours and cookery classes. This writing describes not only what can be seen or learned during these experiences, but also what foods can be sampled, and how these might taste. This focus on taste is reflected in the printed materials that greet the in-bound tourist at the airport. On a visit in October 2013, arrival banners featuring mouth-watering images of local specialities such as chicken rice and chilli crab marked the route from arrival to immigration and baggage collection. Even advertising for a bank was illustrated with photographs of luscious-looking fruits. The free maps and guidebooks available featured food-focused tours and restaurant locations, and there were also substantial free booklets dedicated solely to discussing local delicacies and their flavours, plus recommended locations to sample them. A website and free mobile app were available that contain practical information about dishes, ingredients, cookery methods, and places to eat, as well as historical and cultural information. These resources are also freely distributed to many hotels and popular tourist destinations. Alongside organising food walks, bus tours and cookery classes, the STB also recommends the work of a number of Singaporean food writers—principally prominent Singapore food bloggers, reviewers and a number of memoirists—as authentic guides to what are described as unique Singaporean flavours. The strategies at the heart of this promotion are linking advertising to useful information. At a number of food centres, for instance, STB information panels provide details about both specific dishes and Singapore’s food culture more generally (Henderson et al.). This focus is apparent at many tourist destinations, many of which are also popular local attractions. In historic Fort Canning Park, for instance, there is a recreation of Raffles’ experimental garden, established in 1822, where he grew the nutmeg, clove and other plants that were intended to form the foundation for spice plantations but were largely unsuccessful (Reisz). Today, information panels not only indicate the food plants’ names and how to grow them, but also their culinary and medicinal uses, recipes featuring them and the related food memories of famous Singaporeans. The Singapore Botanic Gardens similarly houses the Ginger Garden displaying several hundred species of ginger and information, and an Eco(-nomic/logical) Garden featuring many food plants and their stories. In Chinatown, panels mounted outside prominent heritage brands (often still quite small shops) add content to the shopping experience. A number of museums profile Singapore’s food culture in more depth. The National Museum of Singapore has a permanent Living History gallery that focuses on Singapore’s street food from the 1950s to 1970s. This display includes food-related artefacts, interactive aromatic displays of spices, films of dishes being made and eaten, and oral histories about food vendors, all supported by text panels and booklets. Here food is used to convey messages about the value of Singapore’s ethnic diversity and cross-cultural exchanges. Versions of some of these dishes can then be sampled in the museum café (Time Out Singapore). The Peranakan Museum—which profiles the unique hybrid culture of the descendants of the Chinese and South Indian traders who married local Malay women—shares this focus, with reconstructed kitchens and dining rooms, exhibits of cooking and eating utensils and displays on food’s ceremonial role in weddings and funerals all supported with significant textual information. The Chinatown Heritage Centre not only recreates food preparation areas as a vivid indicator of poor Chinese immigrants’ living conditions, but also houses The National Restaurant of Singapore, which translates this research directly into meals that recreate the heritage kopi tiam (traditional coffee shop) cuisine of Singapore in the 1930s, purposefully bringing taste into the service of education, as its descriptive menu states, “educationally delighting the palate” (Chinatown Heritage Centre). These museums recognise that shopping is a core tourist activity in Singapore (Chang; Yeung et al.). Their gift- and bookshops cater to the culinary tourist by featuring quality culinary products for sale (including, for instance, teapots and cups, teas, spices and traditional sweets, and other foods) many of which are accompanied by informative tags or brochures. At the centre of these curated, purchasable collections are a range written materials: culinary magazines, cookbooks, food histories and memoirs, as well as postcards and stationery printed with recipes. Food Magazines Locally produced food magazines cater to a range of readerships and serve to extend the culinary experience both in, and outside, Singapore. These include high-end gourmet, luxury lifestyle publications like venerable monthly Wine & Dine: The Art of Good Living, which, in in print for almost thirty years, targets an affluent readership (Wine & Dine). The magazine runs features on local dining, gourmet products and trends, as well as international epicurean locations and products. Beautifully illustrated recipes also feature, as the magazine declares, “we’ve recognised that sharing more recipes should be in the DNA of Wine & Dine’s editorial” (Wine & Dine). Appetite magazine, launched in 2006, targets the “new and emerging generation of gourmets—foodies with a discerning and cosmopolitan outlook, broad horizons and a insatiable appetite” (Edipresse Asia) and is reminiscent in much of its styling of New Zealand’s award-winning Cuisine magazine. Its focus is to present a fresh approach to both cooking at home and dining out, as readers are invited to “Whip up the perfect soufflé or feast with us at the finest restaurants in Singapore and around the region” (Edipresse Asia). Chefs from leading local restaurants are interviewed, and the voices of “fellow foodies and industry watchers” offer an “insider track” on food-related news: “what’s good and what’s new” (Edipresse Asia). In between these publications sits Epicure: Life’s Refinements, which features local dishes, chefs, and restaurants as well as an overseas travel section and a food memories column by a featured author. Locally available ingredients are also highlighted, such as abalone (Cheng) and an interesting range of mushrooms (Epicure). While there is a focus on an epicurean experience, this is presented slightly more casually than in Wine & Dine. Food & Travel focuses more on home cookery, but each issue also includes reviews of Singapore restaurants. The bimonthly bilingual (Chinese and English) Gourmet Living features recipes alongside a notable focus on food culture—with food history columns, restaurant reviews and profiles of celebrated chefs. An extensive range of imported international food magazines are also available, with those from nearby Malaysia and Indonesia regularly including articles on Singapore. Cookbooks These magazines all include reviews of cookery books including Singaporean examples – and some feature other food writing such as food histories, memoirs and blogs. These reviews draw attention to how many Singaporean cookbooks include a focus on food history alongside recipes. Cookery teacher Yee Soo Leong’s 1976 Singaporean Cooking was an early example of cookbook as heritage preservation. This 1976 book takes an unusual view of ‘Singaporean’ flavours. Beginning with sweet foods—Nonya/Singaporean and western cakes, biscuits, pies, pastries, bread, desserts and icings—it also focuses on both Singaporean and Western dishes. This text is also unusual as there are only 6 lines of direct authorial address in the author’s acknowledgements section. Expatriate food writer Wendy Hutton’s Singapore Food, first published in 1979, reprinted many times after and revised in 2007, has long been recognised as one of the most authoritative titles on Singapore’s food heritage. Providing an socio-historical map of Singapore’s culinary traditions, some one third of the first edition was devoted to information about Singaporean multi-cultural food history, including detailed profiles of a number of home cooks alongside its recipes. Published in 1980, Kenneth Mitchell’s A Taste of Singapore is clearly aimed at a foreign readership, noting the variety of foods available due to the racial origins of its inhabitants. The more modest, but equally educational in intent, Hawkers Flavour: A Guide to Hawkers Gourmet in Malaysia and Singapore (in its fourth printing in 1998) contains a detailed introductory essay outlining local food culture, favourite foods and drinks and times these might be served, festivals and festive foods, Indian, Indian Muslim, Chinese, Nyonya (Chinese-Malay), Malay and Halal foods and customs, followed with a selection of recipes from each. More contemporary examples of such information-rich cookbooks, such as those published in the frequently reprinted Periplus Mini Cookbook series, are sold at tourist attractions. Each of these modestly priced, 64-page, mouthwateringly illustrated booklets offer framing information, such as about a specific food culture as in the Nonya kitchen in Nonya Favourites (Boi), and explanatory glossaries of ingredients, as in Homestyle Malay Cooking (Jelani). Most recipes include a boxed paragraph detailing cookery or ingredient information that adds cultural nuance, as well as trying to describe tastes that the (obviously foreign) intended reader may not have encountered. Malaysian-born Violet Oon, who has been called the Julia Child of Singapore (Bergman), writes for both local and visiting readers. The FOOD Paper, published monthly for a decade from January 1987 was, she has stated, then “Singapore’s only monthly publication dedicated to the CSF—Certified Singapore Foodie” (Oon, Violet Oon Cooks 7). Under its auspices, Oon promoted her version of Singaporean cuisine to both locals and visitors, as well as running cookery classes and culinary events, hosting her own television cooking series on the Singapore Broadcasting Corporation, and touring internationally for the STB as a ‘Singapore Food Ambassador’ (Ahmad; Kraal). Taking this representation of flavor further, Oon has also produced a branded range of curry powders, spices, and biscuits, and set up a number of food outlets. Her first cookbook, World Peranakan Cookbook, was published in 1978. Her Singapore: 101 Meals of 1986 was commissioned by the STB, then known as the Singapore Tourist Promotion Board. Violet Oon Cooks, a compilation of recipes from The FOOD Paper, published in 1992, attracted a range of major international as well as Singaporean food sponsors, and her Timeless Recipes, published in 1997, similarly aimed to show how manufactured products could be incorporated into classic Singaporean dishes cooked at home. In 1998, Oon produced A Singapore Family Cookbook featuring 100 dishes. Many were from Nonya cuisine and her following books continued to focus on preserving heritage Singaporean recipes, as do a number of other nationally-cuisine focused collections such as Joyceline Tully and Christopher Tan’s Heritage Feasts: A Collection of Singapore Family Recipes. Sylvia Tan’s Singapore Heritage Food: Yesterday’s Recipes for Today’s Cooks, published in 2004, provides “a tentative account of Singapore’s food history” (5). It does this by mapping the various taste profiles of six thematically-arranged chronologically-overlapping sections, from the heritage of British colonialism, to the uptake of American and Russia foods in the Snackbar era of the 1960s and the use of convenience flavoring ingredients such as curry pastes, sauces, dried and frozen supermarket products from the 1970s. Other Volumes Other food-themed volumes focus on specific historical periods. Cecilia Leong-Salobir’s Food Culture in Colonial Asia: A Taste of Empire discusses the “unique hybrid” (1) cuisine of British expatriates in Singapore from 1858 to 1963. In 2009, the National Museum of Singapore produced the moving Wong Hong Suen’s Wartime Kitchen: Food and Eating in Singapore 1942–1950. This details the resilience and adaptability of both diners and cooks during the Japanese Occupation and in post-war Singapore, when shortages stimulated creativity. There is a centenary history of the Cold Storage company which shipped frozen foods all over south east Asia (Boon) and location-based studies such as Annette Tan’s Savour Chinatown: Stories Memories & Recipes. Tan interviewed hawkers, chefs and restaurant owners, working from this information to write both the book’s recipes and reflect on Chinatown’s culinary history. Food culture also features in (although it is not the main focus) more general book-length studies such as educational texts such as Chew Yen Fook’s The Magic of Singapore and Melanie Guile’s Culture in Singapore (2000). Works that navigate both spaces (of Singaporean culture more generally and its foodways) such Lily Kong’s Singapore Hawker Centres: People, Places, Food, provide an consistent narrative of food in Singapore, stressing its multicultural flavours that can be enjoyed from eateries ranging from hawker stalls to high-end restaurants that, interestingly, that agrees with that promulgated in the food writing discussed above. Food Memoirs and Blogs Many of these narratives include personal material, drawing on the author’s own food experiences and taste memories. This approach is fully developed in the food memoir, a growing sub-genre of Singapore food writing. While memoirs by expatriate Singaporeans such as Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan’s A Tiger in the Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family, produced by major publisher Hyperion in New York, has attracted considerable international attention, it presents a story of Singapore cuisine that agrees with such locally produced texts as television chef and food writer Terry Tan’s Stir-fried and Not Shaken: A Nostalgic Trip Down Singapore’s Memory Lane and the food memoir of the Singaporean chef credited with introducing fine Malay dining to Singapore, Aziza Ali’s Sambal Days, Kampong Cuisine, published in Singapore in 2013 with the support of the National Heritage Board. All these memoirs are currently available in Singapore in both bookshops and a number of museums and other attractions. While underscoring the historical and cultural value of these foods, all describe the unique flavours of Singaporean cuisine and its deliciousness. A number of prominent Singapore food bloggers are featured in general guidebooks and promoted by the STB as useful resources to dining out in Singapore. One of the most prominent of these is Leslie Tay, a medical doctor and “passionate foodie” (Knipp) whose awardwinning ieatŸishootŸipost is currently attracting some 90,000 unique visitors every month and has had over 20,000 million hits since its launch in 2006. An online diary of Tay’s visits to hundreds of Singaporean hawker stalls, it includes descriptions and photographs of meals consumed, creating accumulative oral culinary histories of these dishes and those who prepared them. These narratives have been reorganised and reshaped in Tay’s first book The End of Char Kway Teow and Other Hawker Mysteries, where each chapter tells the story of one particular dish, including recommended hawker stalls where it can be enjoyed. Ladyironchef.com is a popular food and travel site that began as a blog in 2007. An edited collection of reviews of eateries and travel information, many by the editor himself, the site features lists of, for example, the best cafes (LadyIronChef “Best Cafes”), eateries at the airport (LadyIronChef “Guide to Dining”), and hawker stalls (Lim). While attesting to the cultural value of these foods, many articles also discuss flavour, as in Lim’s musings on: ‘how good can chicken on rice taste? … The glistening grains of rice perfumed by fresh chicken stock and a whiff of ginger is so good you can even eat it on its own’. Conclusion Recent Singapore food publishing reflects this focus on taste. Tay’s publisher, Epigram, growing Singaporean food list includes the recently released Heritage Cookbooks Series. This highlights specialist Singaporean recipes and cookery techniques, with the stated aim of preserving tastes and foodways that continue to influence Singaporean food culture today. Volumes published to date on Peranakan, South Indian, Cantonese, Eurasian, and Teochew (from the Chaoshan region in the east of China’s Guangdong province) cuisines offer both cultural and practical guides to the quintessential dishes and flavours of each cuisine, featuring simple family dishes alongside more elaborate special occasion meals. In common with the food writing discussed above, the books in this series, although dealing with very different styles of cookery, contribute to an overall impression of the taste of Singapore food that is highly consistent and extremely persuasive. This food writing narrates that Singapore has a delicious as well as distinctive and interesting food culture that plays a significant role in Singaporean life both currently and historically. It also posits that this food culture is, at the same time, easily accessible and also worthy of detailed consideration and discussion. 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Acknowledgements Research to complete this article was supported by Central Queensland University, Australia, under its Outside Studies Program (OSPRO) and Learning and Teaching Education Research Centre (LTERC). An earlier version of part of this article was presented at the 2nd Australasian Regional Food Networks and Cultures Conference, in the Barossa Valley in South Australia, Australia, 11–14 November 2012. The delegates of that conference and expert reviewers of this article offered some excellent suggestions regarding strengthening this article and their advice was much appreciated. All errors are, of course, my own.

Introduction Figure 1 The counter-Terrorism advertising campaign of London’s Metropolitan Police commodifies some everyday items such as mobile phones, computers, passports and credit cards as having the potential to sustain terrorist activities. The process of ascribing cultural values and symbolic meanings to some everyday technical gadgets objectifies and situates Terrorism into the everyday life. The police, in urging people to look out for ‘the unusual’ in their normal day-to-day lives, juxtapose the everyday with the unusual, where day-to-day consumption, routines and flows of human activity can seemingly house insidious and atavistic elements. This again is reiterated in the Met police press release: Terrorists live within our communities making their plans whilst doing everything they can to blend in, and trying not to raise suspicions about their activities. (MPA Website) The commodification of Terrorism through uncommon and everyday objects situates Terrorism as a phenomenon which occupies a liminal space within the everyday. It resides, breathes and co-exists within the taken-for-granted routines and objects of ‘the everyday’ where it has the potential to explode and disrupt without warning. Since 9/11 and the 7/7 bombings Terrorism has been narrated through the disruption of mobility, whether in mid-air or in the deep recesses of the Underground. The resonant thread of disruption to human mobility evokes a powerful meta-narrative where acts of Terrorism can halt human agency amidst the backdrop of the metropolis, which is often a metaphor for speed and accelerated activities. If globalisation and the interconnected nature of the world are understood through discourses of risk, Terrorism bears the same footprint in urban spaces of modernity, narrating the vulnerability of the human condition in an inter-linked world where ideological struggles and resistance are manifested through inexplicable violence and destruction of lives, where the everyday is suspended to embrace the unexpected. As a consequence ambient fear “saturates the social spaces of everyday life” (Hubbard 2). The commodification of Terrorism through everyday items of consumption inevitably creates an intertextuality with real and media events, which constantly corrode the security of the metropolis. Paddy Scannell alludes to a doubling of place in our mediated world where “public events now occur simultaneously in two different places; the place of the event itself and that in which it is watched and heard. The media then vacillates between the two sites and creates experiences of simultaneity, liveness and immediacy” (qtd. in Moores 22). The doubling of place through media constructs a pervasive environment of risk and fear. Mark Danner (qtd. in Bauman 106) points out that the most powerful weapon of the 9/11 terrorists was that innocuous and “most American of technological creations: the television set” which provided a global platform to constantly replay and remember the dreadful scenes of the day, enabling the terrorist to appear invincible and to narrate fear as ubiquitous and omnipresent. Philip Abrams argues that ‘big events’ (such as 9/11 and 7/7) do make a difference in the social world for such events function as a transformative device between the past and future, forcing society to alter or transform its perspectives. David Altheide points out that since September 11 and the ensuing war on terror, a new discourse of Terrorism has emerged as a way of expressing how the world has changed and defining a state of constant alert through a media logic and format that shapes the nature of discourse itself. Consequently, the intensity and centralisation of surveillance in Western countries increased dramatically, placing the emphasis on expanding the forms of the already existing range of surveillance processes and practices that circumscribe and help shape our social existence (Lyon, Terrorism 2). Normalisation of Surveillance The role of technologies, particularly information and communication technologies (ICTs), and other infrastructures to unevenly distribute access to the goods and services necessary for modern life, while facilitating data collection on and control of the public, are significant characteristics of modernity (Reiman; Graham and Marvin; Monahan). The embedding of technological surveillance into spaces and infrastructures not only augment social control but also redefine data as a form of capital which can be shared between public and private sectors (Gandy, Data Mining; O’Harrow; Monahan). The scale, complexity and limitations of omnipresent and omnipotent surveillance, nevertheless, offer room for both subversion as well as new forms of domination and oppression (Marx). In surveillance studies, Foucault’s analysis is often heavily employed to explain lines of continuity and change between earlier forms of surveillance and data assemblage and contemporary forms in the shape of closed-circuit television (CCTV) and other surveillance modes (Dee). It establishes the need to discern patterns of power and normalisation and the subliminal or obvious cultural codes and categories that emerge through these arrangements (Fopp; Lyon, Electronic; Norris and Armstrong). In their study of CCTV surveillance, Norris and Armstrong (cf. in Dee) point out that when added to the daily minutiae of surveillance, CCTV cameras in public spaces, along with other camera surveillance in work places, capture human beings on a database constantly. The normalisation of surveillance, particularly with reference to CCTV, the popularisation of surveillance through television formats such as ‘Big Brother’ (Dee), and the expansion of online platforms to publish private images, has created a contradictory, complex and contested nature of spatial and power relationships in society. The UK, for example, has the most developed system of both urban and public space cameras in the world and this growth of camera surveillance and, as Lyon (Surveillance) points out, this has been achieved with very little, if any, public debate as to their benefits or otherwise. There may now be as many as 4.2 million CCTV cameras in Britain (cf. Lyon, Surveillance). That is one for every fourteen people and a person can be captured on over 300 cameras every day. An estimated £500m of public money has been invested in CCTV infrastructure over the last decade but, according to a Home Office study, CCTV schemes that have been assessed had little overall effect on crime levels (Wood and Ball). In spatial terms, these statistics reiterate Foucault’s emphasis on the power economy of the unseen gaze. Michel Foucault in analysing the links between power, information and surveillance inspired by Bentham’s idea of the Panopticon, indicated that it is possible to sanction or reward an individual through the act of surveillance without their knowledge (155). It is this unseen and unknown gaze of surveillance that is fundamental to the exercise of power. The design and arrangement of buildings can be engineered so that the “surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action” (Foucault 201). Lyon (Terrorism), in tracing the trajectory of surveillance studies, points out that much of surveillance literature has focused on understanding it as a centralised bureaucratic relationship between the powerful and the governed. Invisible forms of surveillance have also been viewed as a class weapon in some societies. With the advancements in and proliferation of surveillance technologies as well as convergence with other technologies, Lyon argues that it is no longer feasible to view surveillance as a linear or centralised process. In our contemporary globalised world, there is a need to reconcile the dialectical strands that mediate surveillance as a process. In acknowledging this, Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have constructed surveillance as a rhizome that defies linearity to appropriate a more convoluted and malleable form where the coding of bodies and data can be enmeshed to produce intricate power relationships and hierarchies within societies. Latour draws on the notion of assemblage by propounding that data is amalgamated from scattered centres of calculation where these can range from state and commercial institutions to scientific laboratories which scrutinise data to conceive governance and control strategies. Both the Latourian and Deleuzian ideas of surveillance highlight the disparate arrays of people, technologies and organisations that become connected to make “surveillance assemblages” in contrast to the static, unidirectional Panopticon metaphor (Ball, “Organization” 93). In a similar vein, Gandy (Panoptic) infers that it is misleading to assume that surveillance in practice is as complete and totalising as the Panoptic ideal type would have us believe. Co-optation of Millions The Metropolitan Police’s counter-Terrorism strategy seeks to co-opt millions where the corporeal body can complement the landscape of technological surveillance that already co-exists within modernity. In its press release, the role of civilian bodies in ensuring security of the city is stressed; Keeping Londoners safe from Terrorism is not a job solely for governments, security services or police. If we are to make London the safest major city in the world, we must mobilise against Terrorism not only the resources of the state, but also the active support of the millions of people who live and work in the capita. (MPA Website). Surveillance is increasingly simulated through the millions of corporeal entities where seeing in advance is the goal even before technology records and codes these images (William). Bodies understand and code risk and images through the cultural narratives which circulate in society. Compared to CCTV technology images, which require cultural and political interpretations and interventions, bodies as surveillance organisms implicitly code other bodies and activities. The travel bag in the Metropolitan Police poster reinforces the images of the 7/7 bombers and the renewed attempts to bomb the London Underground on the 21st of July. It reiterates the CCTV footage revealing images of the bombers wearing rucksacks. The image of the rucksack both embodies the everyday as well as the potential for evil in everyday objects. It also inevitably reproduces the cultural biases and prejudices where the rucksack is subliminally associated with a specific type of body. The rucksack in these terms is a laden image which symbolically captures the context and culture of risk discourses in society. The co-optation of the population as a surveillance entity also recasts new forms of social responsibility within the democratic polity, where privacy is increasingly mediated by the greater need to monitor, trace and record the activities of one another. Nikolas Rose, in discussing the increasing ‘responsibilisation’ of individuals in modern societies, describes the process in which the individual accepts responsibility for personal actions across a wide range of fields of social and economic activity as in the choice of diet, savings and pension arrangements, health care decisions and choices, home security measures and personal investment choices (qtd. in Dee). While surveillance in individualistic terms is often viewed as a threat to privacy, Rose argues that the state of ‘advanced liberalism’ within modernity and post-modernity requires considerable degrees of self-governance, regulation and surveillance whereby the individual is constructed both as a ‘new citizen’ and a key site of self management. By co-opting and recasting the role of the citizen in the age of Terrorism, the citizen to a degree accepts responsibility for both surveillance and security. In our sociological imagination the body is constructed both as lived as well as a social object. Erving Goffman uses the word ‘umwelt’ to stress that human embodiment is central to the constitution of the social world. Goffman defines ‘umwelt’ as “the region around an individual from which signs of alarm can come” and employs it to capture how people as social actors perceive and manage their settings when interacting in public places (252). Goffman’s ‘umwelt’ can be traced to Immanuel Kant’s idea that it is the a priori categories of space and time that make it possible for a subject to perceive a world (Umiker-Sebeok; qtd. in Ball, “Organization”). Anthony Giddens adapted the term Umwelt to refer to “a phenomenal world with which the individual is routinely ‘in touch’ in respect of potential dangers and alarms which then formed a core of (accomplished) normalcy with which individuals and groups surround themselves” (244). Benjamin Smith, in considering the body as an integral component of the link between our consciousness and our material world, observes that the body is continuously inscribed by culture. These inscriptions, he argues, encompass a wide range of cultural practices and will imply knowledge of a variety of social constructs. The inscribing of the body will produce cultural meanings as well as create forms of subjectivity while locating and situating the body within a cultural matrix (Smith). Drawing on Derrida’s work, Pugliese employs the term ‘Somatechnics’ to conceptualise the body as a culturally intelligible construct and to address the techniques in and through which the body is formed and transformed (qtd. in Osuri). These techniques can encompass signification systems such as race and gender and equally technologies which mediate our sense of reality. These technologies of thinking, seeing, hearing, signifying, visualising and positioning produce the very conditions for the cultural intelligibility of the body (Osuri). The body is then continuously inscribed and interpreted through mediated signifying systems. Similarly, Hayles, while not intending to impose a Cartesian dichotomy between the physical body and its cognitive presence, contends that the use and interactions with technology incorporate the body as a material entity but it also equally inscribes it by marking, recording and tracing its actions in various terrains. According to Gayatri Spivak (qtd. in Ball, “Organization”) new habits and experiences are embedded into the corporeal entity which then mediates its reactions and responses to the social world. This means one’s body is not completely one’s own and the presence of ideological forces or influences then inscribe the body with meanings, codes and cultural values. In our modern condition, the body and data are intimately and intricately bound. Outside the home, it is difficult for the body to avoid entering into relationships that produce electronic personal data (Stalder). According to Felix Stalder our physical bodies are shadowed by a ‘data body’ which follows the physical body of the consuming citizen and sometimes precedes it by constructing the individual through data (12). Before we arrive somewhere, we have already been measured and classified. Thus, upon arrival, the citizen will be treated according to the criteria ‘connected with the profile that represents us’ (Gandy, Panoptic; William). Following September 11, Lyon (Terrorism) reveals that surveillance data from a myriad of sources, such as supermarkets, motels, traffic control points, credit card transactions records and so on, was used to trace the activities of terrorists in the days and hours before their attacks, confirming that the body leaves data traces and trails. Surveillance works by abstracting bodies from places and splitting them into flows to be reassembled as virtual data-doubles, and in the process can replicate hierarchies and centralise power (Lyon, Terrorism). Mike Dee points out that the nature of surveillance taking place in modern societies is complex and far-reaching and in many ways insidious as surveillance needs to be situated within the broadest context of everyday human acts whether it is shopping with loyalty cards or paying utility bills. Physical vulnerability of the body becomes more complex in the time-space distanciated surveillance systems to which the body has become increasingly exposed. As such, each transaction – whether it be a phone call, credit card transaction, or Internet search – leaves a ‘data trail’ linkable to an individual person or place. Haggerty and Ericson, drawing from Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the assemblage, describe the convergence and spread of data-gathering systems between different social domains and multiple levels (qtd. in Hier). They argue that the target of the generic ‘surveillance assemblage’ is the human body, which is broken into a series of data flows on which surveillance process is based. The thrust of the focus is the data individuals can yield and the categories to which they can contribute. These are then reapplied to the body. In this sense, surveillance is rhizomatic for it is diverse and connected to an underlying, invisible infrastructure which concerns interconnected technologies in multiple contexts (Ball, “Elements”). The co-opted body in the schema of counter-Terrorism enters a power arrangement where it constitutes both the unseen gaze as well as the data that will be implicated and captured in this arrangement. It is capable of producing surveillance data for those in power while creating new data through its transactions and movements in its everyday life. The body is unequivocally constructed through this data and is also entrapped by it in terms of representation and categorisation. The corporeal body is therefore part of the machinery of surveillance while being vulnerable to its discriminatory powers of categorisation and victimisation. As Hannah Arendt (qtd. in Bauman 91) had warned, “we terrestrial creatures bidding for cosmic significance will shortly be unable to comprehend and articulate the things we are capable of doing” Arendt’s caution conveys the complexity, vulnerability as well as the complicity of the human condition in the surveillance society. Equally it exemplifies how the corporeal body can be co-opted as a surveillance entity sustaining a new ‘banality’ (Arendt) in the machinery of surveillance. Social Consequences of Surveillance Lyon (Terrorism) observed that the events of 9/11 and 7/7 in the UK have inevitably become a prism through which aspects of social structure and processes may be viewed. This prism helps to illuminate the already existing vast range of surveillance practices and processes that touch everyday life in so-called information societies. As Lyon (Terrorism) points out surveillance is always ambiguous and can encompass genuine benefits and plausible rationales as well as palpable disadvantages. There are elements of representation to consider in terms of how surveillance technologies can re-present data that are collected at source or gathered from another technological medium, and these representations bring different meanings and enable different interpretations of life and surveillance (Ball, “Elements”). As such surveillance needs to be viewed in a number of ways: practice, knowledge and protection from threat. As data can be manipulated and interpreted according to cultural values and norms it reflects the inevitability of power relations to forge its identity in a surveillance society. In this sense, Ball (“Elements”) concludes surveillance practices capture and create different versions of life as lived by surveilled subjects. She refers to actors within the surveilled domain as ‘intermediaries’, where meaning is inscribed, where technologies re-present information, where power/resistance operates, and where networks are bound together to sometimes distort as well as reiterate patterns of hegemony (“Elements” 93). While surveillance is often connected with technology, it does not however determine nor decide how we code or employ our data. New technologies rarely enter passive environments of total inequality for they become enmeshed in complex pre-existing power and value systems (Marx). With surveillance there is an emphasis on the classificatory powers in our contemporary world “as persons and groups are often risk-profiled in the commercial sphere which rates their social contributions and sorts them into systems” (Lyon, Terrorism 2). Lyon (Terrorism) contends that the surveillance society is one that is organised and structured using surveillance-based techniques recorded by technologies, on behalf of the organisations and governments that structure our society. This information is then sorted, sifted and categorised and used as a basis for decisions which affect our life chances (Wood and Ball). The emergence of pervasive, automated and discriminatory mechanisms for risk profiling and social categorising constitute a significant mechanism for reproducing and reinforcing social, economic and cultural divisions in information societies. Such automated categorisation, Lyon (Terrorism) warns, has consequences for everyone especially in face of the new anti-terror measures enacted after September 11. In tandem with this, Bauman points out that a few suicidal murderers on the loose will be quite enough to recycle thousands of innocents into the “usual suspects”. In no time, a few iniquitous individual choices will be reprocessed into the attributes of a “category”; a category easily recognisable by, for instance, a suspiciously dark skin or a suspiciously bulky rucksack* *the kind of object which CCTV cameras are designed to note and passers-by are told to be vigilant about. And passers-by are keen to oblige. Since the terrorist atrocities on the London Underground, the volume of incidents classified as “racist attacks” rose sharply around the country. (122; emphasis added) Bauman, drawing on Lyon, asserts that the understandable desire for security combined with the pressure to adopt different kind of systems “will create a culture of control that will colonise more areas of life with or without the consent of the citizen” (123). This means that the inhabitants of the urban space whether a citizen, worker or consumer who has no terrorist ambitions whatsoever will discover that their opportunities are more circumscribed by the subject positions or categories which are imposed on them. Bauman cautions that for some these categories may be extremely prejudicial, restricting them from consumer choices because of credit ratings, or more insidiously, relegating them to second-class status because of their colour or ethnic background (124). Joseph Pugliese, in linking visual regimes of racial profiling and the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in the aftermath of 7/7 bombings in London, suggests that the discursive relations of power and visuality are inextricably bound. Pugliese argues that racial profiling creates a regime of visuality which fundamentally inscribes our physiology of perceptions with stereotypical images. He applies this analogy to Menzes running down the platform in which the retina transforms him into the “hallucinogenic figure of an Asian Terrorist” (Pugliese 8). With globalisation and the proliferation of ICTs, borders and boundaries are no longer sacrosanct and as such risks are managed by enacting ‘smart borders’ through new technologies, with huge databases behind the scenes processing information about individuals and their journeys through the profiling of body parts with, for example, iris scans (Wood and Ball 31). Such body profiling technologies are used to create watch lists of dangerous passengers or identity groups who might be of greater ‘risk’. The body in a surveillance society can be dissected into parts and profiled and coded through technology. These disparate codings of body parts can be assembled (or selectively omitted) to construct and represent whole bodies in our information society to ascertain risk. The selection and circulation of knowledge will also determine who gets slotted into the various categories that a surveillance society creates. Conclusion When the corporeal body is subsumed into a web of surveillance it often raises questions about the deterministic nature of technology. The question is a long-standing one in our modern consciousness. We are apprehensive about according technology too much power and yet it is implicated in the contemporary power relationships where it is suspended amidst human motive, agency and anxiety. 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Ball, eds. “A Report on the Surveillance Society.” Surveillance Studies Network, UK, Sep. 2006. 14 April 2007 http://www.ico.gov.uk/upload/documents/library/data_protection/ practical_application/surveillance_society_full_report_2006.pdf>. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Ibrahim, Yasmin. "Commodifying Terrorism: Body, Surveillance and the Everyday." M/C Journal 10.3 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/05-ibrahim.php>. APA Style Ibrahim, Y. (Jun. 2007) "Commodifying Terrorism: Body, Surveillance and the Everyday," M/C Journal, 10(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/05-ibrahim.php>.

A political minimalism? That would obviously go against the grain of our current political ideology → in fact, we are in an era of political maximalisation (Roland Barthes 200, arrow in original).Barthes’ comment is found in the ‘Annex’ to his 1978 lecture course The Neutral. Despite the three decade difference I don’t things have changed that much, certainly not insofar as academic debate about the cultural and social is concerned. At conferences I regularly hear the demand that the speaker or speakers account for the ‘political intent’, ‘worth’ or ‘utility’ of their work, or observe how speakers attempt to pre-empt and disarm such calls through judicious phrasing and citing. Following his diagnosis Barthes (201-206) proceeds to write under the title ‘To Give Leave’. Here he notes the incessant demand placed upon us, as citizens, as consumers, as representative cultural subjects and as biopolitical entities and, in this context, as academics to have and to communicate our allegiances, views and opinions. Echoing the acts, (or rather the ‘non-acts’), of Melville’s Bartleby, Barthes describes the scandalous nature of suspending the obligation of holding views; the apparent immorality of suspending the obligation of being interested, engaged, opinionated, committed – even if one only ever suspends provisionally, momentarily even. For the length of a five thousand word essay perhaps. In this short, unfortunately telegraphic and quite speculative essay I want pause to consider a few gestures or figures of ‘suspension’, ‘decline’ and ‘remaining aside’. What follows is in three parts. First a comment on the nature of the ‘demand to communicate’ identified by Barthes and its links to longer running moral and practical imperatives within Western understandings of the subject, the social and the political. Second, the most substantial section but still an all too brief account of the apparent ‘passivity’ of the narrator of Imre Kertész’s novel Fatelessness and the ways in which the novel may be read as a reflection on the nature of agency and determination. Third, a very brief conclusion, the question directly; what politics or what apprehension of politics, could a reflection on stillness and its ‘political minimalism’ offer? 1.For Barthes, (in 1978), one of the factors defining the contemporary intellectual scene was the way in which “politics invades all phenomena, economic, cultural, ethical” coupled with the “radicalization” of “political behaviors” (200), perhaps most notably in the arrogance of political discourse as it assumes the place of a master discourse. Writing in 1991 Bill Readings identified a similar phenomenon. For Readings the category of the political and politically inspired critique were operating by encircling their objects within a presupposed “universal language of political significance into which one might translate everything according to its effectivity”, an approach which has the effect of always making “the political […] the bottom line, the last instance where meaning can be definitively asserted” (quoted in Clark 3) or, we may add, realized. There is, of course, much that could be said here, not least concerning the significant differences in context, (between, for example, the various forms of revolutionary Marxism, Communism and Maoism which seem to preoccupy Barthes and the emancipatory identity and cultural politics which swept through literature departments in the US and beyond in the last two decades of the twentieth century). However it is also possible to suggest that a general grammar and, moreover, a general acceptance of a telos of the political persists.Barthes' (204-206) account of ‘political maximalisation’ is accompanied by a diagnosis of its productivist virility, (be it, in 1978, on the part of the increasingly reduced revolutionary left or the burgeoning neo-liberal right). The antithesis, or, rather, the outside of such an arrangement or frame would not be another political program but rather a certain stammering, a lassitude or dilatoriness. A flaccidness even; “a devirilized image” wherein from the point of view of the (political) actor or critic, “you are demoted to the contemptible mass of the undecided of those who don’t know who to vote for: old, lost ladies whom they brutalize: vote however you want, but vote” (Barthes 204). Hence Barthes is not suggesting a counter-move, a radical refusal, a ‘No’ shouted back to the information saturated market society. What is truly scandalous he suggests, is not opposition or refusal but the ‘non-reply’. What is truly scandalous, roughish even, is the decline or deferral and so the provisional suspension of the choice (and the blackmail) of the ‘yes’ or ‘no’, the ‘this’ or the ‘that’, the ‘with us’ or ‘against us’.In Literature and Evil Georges Bataille concludes his essay on Kafka with a comment on such a decline. According to Bataille, the reason why Kafka remains an ambivalent writer for critics, (and especially for those who would seek to enrol his work to political ends), lays precisely in his constant withdrawal; “There was nothing he [Kafka] could have asserted, or in the name of which he could have spoken. What he was, which was nothing, only existed to the extent in which effective activity condemned him” (167). ‘Effective activity’ refers, contextually, to a certain form of Communism but more broadly to the rationalization or systematization intrinsic to any political program, political programs (or ideologies) as such, be they communist, liberal or libertarian. At least insofar as, as implied above, the political is taken to coincide with a certain metaphysics and morality of action and the consequent linking of freedom to work, (a factor common to communist, fascist and liberal political programs), and so to the labour of the progressive self-realization and achievement of the self, the autos or ipse (see Derrida 6-18). Be it via, for example, Marx’s account of human’s intrinsic ‘capacity for work’ (Arbeitskraft), Heidegger’s account of necessary existential (and ultimately communal) struggle (Kampf), or Weber’s diagnoses of the (Protestant/bourgeois) liberal project to realize human potentiality (see also Agamben Man without Content; François 1-64). Hence what is ‘evil’ in Kafka is not any particular deed but the deferral of deeds; his ambivalence or immorality in the eyes of certain critics being due to the question his writing poses to “the ultimate authority of action” (Bataille 153) and so to the space beyond action onto which it opens. What could this space of ‘worklessness’ or ‘unwork’ look like? This non-virile, anti-heroic space? This would not be a space of ‘inaction’, (a term still too dependent, albeit negatively, on action), but of ‘non-action’; of ‘non-productive’ or non-disclosive action. That is to say, and as a first attempt at definition, ‘action’ or ‘praxis’, if we can still call it that, which does not generate or bring to light any specific positive content. As a way to highlight the difficulties and pitfalls, (at least with certain traditions), which stand in the way of thinking such a space, we may highlight Giorgio Agamben’s comments on the widespread coincidence of a metaphysics of action with the determination of both the subject, its teleology and its orientation in the world:According to current opinion, all of man’s [sic] doing – that of the artist and the craftsman as well as that of the workman and the politician – is praxis – manifestation of a will that produces a concrete effect. When we say that man has a productive status on earth, we mean, that the status of his dwelling on the earth is a practical one […] This productive doing now everywhere determines the status of man on earth – man understood as the living being (animal) that works (laborans), and, in work, produces himself (Man without Content 68; 70-71 original emphasis).Beyond or before practical being then, that is to say before and beyond the determination of the subject as essentially or intrinsically active and engaged, another space, another dwelling. Maybe nocturnal, certainly one with a different light to that of the day; one not gathered in and by the telos of the ipse or the turning of the autos, an interruption of labour, an unravelling. Remaining still, unravelling together (see Harrison In the absence).2.Kertész’s novel Sorstalanság was first published in his native Hungary in 1975. It has been translated into English twice, in 1992 as Fateless and in 2004 as Fatelessness. Fatelessness opens in Budapest on the day before György Köves’ – the novel’s fourteen year old narrator – father has to report for ‘labour service’. It goes on to recount Köves’ own detention and deportation and the year spent in the camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buchenwald and Zeitz. During this period Köves’ health declines, gradually at first and then rapidly to a moment of near death. He survives and the novel closes with his return to his home town. Köves is, as Kertész has put it in various interviews and as is made clear in the novel, a ‘non-Jewish Jew’; a non-practicing and non-believing Hungarian Jew from a largely assimilated family who neither reads nor speaks Hebrew or Yiddish. While Kertész has insisted that the novel is precisely that, a novel, a work of literature and not an autobiography, we should note that Kertész was himself imprisoned in Buchenwald and Zeitz when fourteen.Not without reservations but for the sake of brevity I shall focus on only one theme in the novel; determination and agency, or what Kertész calls ‘determinacy’. Writing in his journal Galley Boat-Log (Gályanapló) in May 1965 Kertész suggests ‘Novel of Fatelessness’ as a possible title for his work and then reflects on what he means by ‘fate’, the entry is worth quoting at length.The external determinacy, the stigma which constrains our life in a situation, an absurdity, in the given totalitarianism, thwarts us; thus, when we live out the determinacy which is doled out to us as a reality, instead of the necessity which stems from our own (relative) freedom – that is what I call fatelessness.What is essential is that our determinacy should always be in conflict with our natural views and inclinations; that is how fatelessness manifests itself in a chemically pure state. The two possible modes of protection: we transform into our determinacy (Kafka’s centipede), voluntarily so to say, and I that way attempt to assimilate our determinacy to our fate; or else we rebel against it, and so fall victim to our determinacy. Neither of these is a true solution, for in both cases we are obliged to perceive our determinacy […] as reality, whilst the determining force, that absurd power, in a way triumphs over us: it gives us a name and turns us into an object, even though we were born for other things.The dilemma of my ‘Muslim’ [Köves]: How can he construct a fate out of his own determinacy? (Galley Boat-Log 98 original emphasis).The dilemma of determinacy then; how can Köves, who is both determined by and superfluous to the Nazi regime, to wider Hungarian society, to his neighbours and to his family, gain some kind of control over his existence? Throughout Fatelessness people prove repeatedly unable to control their destinies, be it Köves himself, his father, his stepmother, his uncles, his friends from the oil refinery, or even Bandi Citrom, Köves’ mentor in the camps. The case of the ‘Expert’ provides a telescoped example. First appearing when Köves and his friends are arrested the ‘Expert’ is an imposing figure, well dressed, fluent in German and the director of a factory involved in the war effort (Fatelessness 50). Later at the brickworks, where the Jews who have been rounded up are being held prior to deportation, he appears more dishevelled and slightly less confident. Still, he takes the ‘audacious’ step of addressing a German officer directly (and receives some placatory ‘advice’ as his reward) (68-69). By the time the group arrives at the camp Köves has difficulty recognising him and without a word of protest, the ‘Expert’ does not pass the initial selection (88).Köves displays no such initiative with regard to his situation. He is reactive or passive, never active. For Köves events unfold as a series of situations and circumstances which are, he tells himself, essentially reasonable and to which he has to adapt and conform so that he may get on. Nothing more than “given situations with the new givens inherent in them” (259), as he explains near the end of the novel. As Köves' identity papers testify, his life and its continuation are the effect of arbitrary sets of circumstances which he is compelled to live through; “I am not alive on my own account but benefiting the war effort in the manufacturing industry” (29). In his Nobel lecture Kertész described Köves' situation:the hero of my novel does not live his own time in the concentration camps, for neither his time nor his language, not even his own person, is really his. He doesn’t remember; he exists. So he has to languish, poor boy, in the dreary trap of linearity, and cannot shake off the painful details. Instead of a spectacular series of great and tragic moments, he has to live through everything, which is oppressive and offers little variety, like life itself (Heureka! no pagination).Without any wilful or effective action on the part of the narrator and with only ‘the dreary trap of linearity’ where one would expect drama, plot, rationalization or stylization, Fatelessness can read as an arbitrarily punctuated series of waitings. Köves waiting for his father to leave, waiting in the customs shed, waiting at the brick works, waiting in train carriages, waiting on the ramp, waiting at roll call, waiting in the infirmary. Here is the first period of waiting described in the book, it is the day before his father’s departure and he is waiting for his father and stepmother as they go through the accounts at the family shop:I tried to be patient for a bit. Striving to think of Father, and more specifically the fact that he would be going tomorrow and, quite probably, I would not see him for a long time after that; but after a while I grew weary with that notion and then seeing as there was nothing else I could do for my father, I began to be bored. Even having to sit around became a drag, so simply for the sake of a change I stood up to take a drink of water from the tap. They said nothing. Later on, I also made my way to the back, between the planks, in order to pee. On returning I washed my hands at the rusty, tiled sink, then unpacked my morning snack from my school satchel, ate that, and finally took another drink from the tap. They still said nothing. I sat back in my place. After that, I got terribly bored for another absolute age (Fatelessness 9). It is interesting to consider exactly how this passage presages those that will come. Certainly this scene is an effect of the political context, his father and stepmother have to go through the books because of the summons to labour service and because of the racial laws on who may own and profit from a business. However, the specifically familial setting should not be overlooked, particularly when read alongside Kertész’s other novels where, as Madeleine Gustafsson writes, Communist dictatorship is “portrayed almost as an uninterrupted continuation of life in the camp – which in turn [...] is depicted as a continuation of the patriarchal dictatorship of a joyless childhood” (no pagination, see, for example, Kertész Kaddish). Time to turn back to our question; does Fatelessness provide an answer to the ‘dilemma of determinacy’? We should think carefully before answering. As Julia Karolle suggests, the composition of the novel and our search for a logic within itreveal the abuses that reason must endure in order to create any story or history about the Holocaust […]. Ultimately Kertész challenges the reader not to make up for the lack of logic in Fatelessness, but rather to consider the nature of its absence (92 original emphasis).Still, with this point in mind, (and despite what has been said above), the novel does contain a scene in which Köves appears to affirm his existence.In many respects the scene is the culmination of the novel. The camps have been liberated and Köves has returned to Budapest. Finding his father and step-mother’s apartment occupied by strangers he calls on his Aunt and Uncle Fleischmann and Uncle Steiner. The discussion which follows would repay a slower reading, however again for the sake of brevity I shall focus on only a few short excerpts. Köves suggests that everyone took their ‘steps’ towards the events which have unfolded and that prediction and retrospection are false perspectives which give the illusion of order and inevitability whereas, in reality, “everything becomes clear only gradually, sequentially over time, step-by-step” (Fatelessness 249): “They [his Uncles] too had taken their own steps. They too […] had said farewell to my father as if we had already buried him, and even later has squabbled about whether I should take the train or the suburban bus to Auschwitz” (260). Fleischmann and Steiner react angrily, claiming that such an understanding makes the ‘victims’ the ‘guilty ones’. Köves responds by saying that they do not understand him and asks they see that:It was impossible, they must try to understand, impossible to take everything away from me, impossible for me to be neither winner nor loser, for me not to be right and not to be mistaken that I was neither the cause nor effect of anything; they should try to see, I almost pleaded, that I could not swallow that idiotic bitterness, that I should merely be innocent (260-261).Karolle (93-94) suggests that Köves' discussion with his uncles marks the moment where he accepts and affirms his existence and, from this point on begins to take control of and responsibility. Hence for Karolle the end of the novel depicts an ‘authentic’ moment of self-affirmation as Köves steps forward and refuses to participate in “the factual historical narrative of Auschwitz, to forget what he knows, and to be unequivocally categorized as a victim of history” (95). In distinction to Karolle, Adrienne Kertzer argues that Köves' moment of self-affirmation is, in fact, one of self-deception. Rather than acknowledging that it was “inexplicable luck” and a “series of random acts” (Kertzer 122) which saved his life or that his near death was due to an accident of birth, Köves asserts his personal freedom. Hence – and following István Deák – Kertzer suggests that we should read Fatelessness as a satire, ‘a modern Candide’. A satire on the hope of finding meaning, be it personal or metaphysical, in such experiences and events, the closing scenes of the novel being an ironic reflection on the “desperate desire to see […] life as meaningful” (Kertzer 122). So, while Köves convinces himself of his logic his uncles say to each other “‘Leave him be! Can’t you see he only wants to talk? Let him talk! Leave him be!’ And talk I did, albeit possibly to no avail and even a little incoherently” (Fatelessness 259). Which are we to choose then? The affirmation of agency (with Karolle) or the diagnosis of determination (with Kertzer)? Karolle and Kertzer give insightful analyses, (and ones which are certainly not limited to the passages quoted above), however it seems to me that they move too quickly to resolve the ‘dilemma’ presented by Köves, if not of Fatelessness as a whole. Still, we have a little time before having to name and decide Köves’ fate. Kertész’s use of the word ‘hero’ to describe Köves above – ‘the hero of my novel…’ – is, perhaps, more than a little ironic. As Kertész asks (in 1966), how can there be a hero, how can one be heroic, when one is one’s ‘determinacies’? What sense does it make to speak of heroic actions if “man [sic] is no more than his situation”? (Galley Boat-Log 99). Köves’ time, his language, his identity, none are his. There is no place, no hidden reservoir of freedom, from which way he set in motion any efficacious action. All resources have already been corrupted. From Kertész’s journal (in 1975): “The masters of thought and ideologies have ruined my thought processes” (Galley Boat-Log 104). As Lawrence Langer has argued, the grammar of heroics, along with the linked terms ‘virtue’, ‘dignity’, ‘resistance’ ‘survival’ and ‘liberation’, (and the wider narrative and moral economies which these terms indicate and activate), do not survive the events being described. Here the ‘dilemma of determinacy’ becomes the dilemma of how to think and value the human outside or after such a grammar. How to think and value the human beyond a grammar of action and so beyond, as Lars Iyer puts it, “the equation of work and freedom that characterizes the great discourses of political modernity” (155). If this is possible. If such a grammar and equation isn’t too all pervasive, if something of the human still remains outside their economy. It may well be that our ability to read Fatelessness depends in large part on what we are prepared to forsake (see Langar 195). How to think the subject and a politics in contretemps, beyond or after the choice between determination or autonomy, passive or active, inaction or action, immoral or virtuous – if only for a moment? Kertész wonders, (in 1966), ”perhaps there is something to be savaged all the same, a tiny foolishness, something ultimately comic and frail that may be a sign of the will to live and still awakens sympathy” (Galley Boat-Log 99). Something, perhaps, which remains to be salvaged from the grammar of humanism, something that would not be reducible to context, to ‘determinacies’, and that, at the same time, does not add up to a (resurrected) agent. ‘A tiny foolishness, something ultimately comic and frail’. The press release announcing that Kertész had been awarded the Nobel prize for literature states that “For Kertész the spiritual dimension of man lies in his inability to adapt to life” (The Swedish Academy no pagination). Despite the difficulties presented by the somewhat over-determined term ‘spiritual’, this line strikes me as remarkably perspicuous. Like Melville’s Bartleby and Bataille’s Kafka before him, Kertész’s Köves’ existence, insofar as he exists, is made up by his non-action. That is to say, his existence is defined not by his actions or his inaction, (both of which are purely reactive and functional), but rather by his irreducibility to either. As commentators and critics have remarked, (and as the quotes given from the text above hopefully illustrate), Köves has an oddly formal and neutral ‘voice’. Köves’ blank, frequently equivocal tone may be read as a sign of his immaturity, his lack of understanding and his naivety. However I would suggest that before such factors, what characterizes Köves’ mode of address is its reticence to assert or disclose. Köves speaks, he speaks endlessly, but he says nothing or almost nothing - ‘to no avail and even a little incoherently’. Hence where Karolle seeks to recover an ‘intoned self-consciousness’ and Kertzer the repressed determining context, we may find Köves' address. Where Karolle’s and Kertzer’s approaches seek in some way to repair Köves words, to supplement them with either an agency to-come or an awareness of a context and, in doing so, pull his words fully into the light, Köves, it seems to me, remains elusive. His existence, insofar as we may speak of it, lies in his ‘inability to adapt to life’. His reserves are not composed of hidden or recoverable sources of agency but in his equivocality, in the way he takes leave of and remains aside from the very terms of the dilemma. It is as if with no resources of his own, he has an echo existence. As if still remaining itself where a tiny foolishness, something ultimately comic and frail.3.Is this it? Is this what we are to be left with in a ‘political minimalism’? It would seem more resignation or failure, turning away or quietism, the conceit of a beautiful soul, than any type of recognisable politics. On one level this is correct, however any such suspension or withdrawal, this moment of stillness where we are, is only ever a moment. However it is a moment which indicates a certain irreducibility and as such is, I believe, of great significance. Great significance, (or better ‘signifyingness’), even though – and precisely because – it is in itself without value. Being outside efficacy, labour or production, being outside economisation as such, it resides only in its inability to be integrated. What purpose does it serve? None. Or, perhaps, none other than demonstrating the irreducibility of a life, of a singular existence, to any discourse, narrative, identity or ideology, insofar as such structures, in their attempt to comprehend (or apprehend) the existent and put it to use always and violently fall short. As Theodor Adorno wrote;It is this passing-on and being unable to linger, this tacit assent to the primacy of the general over the particular, which constitutes not only the deception of idealism in hypostasizing concepts, but also its inhumanity, that has no sooner grasped the particular than it reduces it to a thought-station, and finally comes all too quickly to terms with suffering and death (74 emphasis added).This moment of stillness then, of declining and remaining aside, represents, for me, the anarchical and all but silent condition of possibility for all political strategy as such (see Harrison, Corporeal Remains). A condition of possibility which all political strategy carries within itself, more or less well, more or less consciously, as a memory of the finite and corporeal nature of existence. A memory which may always and eventually come to protest against the strategy itself. Strategy itself as strategy; as command, as a calculated and calculating order. And so, and we should be clear about this, such a remaining still is a demonstration.A demonstration not unlike, for example, that of the general anonymous population in José Saramago’s remarkable novel Seeing, who ‘act’ more forcefully through non-action than any through any ends-directed action. A demonstration of the kind which Agamben writes about after those in Tiananmen Square in 1989:The novelty of the coming politics is that it will no longer be the struggle for control of the state, but a struggle between the State and the non-State (humanity) […] [who] cannot form a societas because they do not poses any identity to vindicate or bond of belonging for which to seek recognition (Coming Community 85-67; original emphasis).A demonstration like that which sounds through Köves when his health fails in the camps and he finds himself being wheeled on a handcart taken for dead;a snatch of speech that I was barely able to make out came to my attention, and in that hoarse whispering I recognized even less readily the voice that has once – I could not help recollecting – been so strident: ‘I p … pro … test,’ it muttered” (Fatelessness 187 ellipses in original).The inmate pushing the cart stops and pulls him up by the shoulders, asking with astonishment “Was? Du willst noch leben? [What? You still want to live?] […] and right then I found it odd, since it could not have been warranted and, on the whole, was fairly irrational (187).AcknowledgmentsMy sincere thanks to the editors of this special issue, David Bissell and Gillian Fuller, for their interest, encouragement and patience. Thanks also to Sadie, especially for her comments on the final section. ReferencesAdorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. London: Verso, 1974.Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990.———. The Man without Content. Stanford: Stanford U P, 1999.Barthes, Roland. The Neutral. New York: Columbia U P, 2005.Bataille, Georges. Literature and Evil. London: Marion Boyars, 1985.Clarke, Timothy. The Poetics of Singularity: The Counter-Culturalist Turn in Heidegger, Derrida, Blanchot and the Late Gadamer. Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P, 2005.Deák, István. "Stranger in Hell." New York Review of Books 23 Sep. 2003: 65-68.Derrida, Jacques. Rogues. 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The use of the family home as a setting for television sitcoms (situation comedies) has long been recognised for its ability to provide audiences with an identifiable site of ontological security (much discussed by Giddens, Scannell, Saunders and others). From the beginnings of American sitcoms with such programs as Leave it to Beaver, and through the trail of The Brady Bunch, The Cosby Show, Roseanne, The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, and on to Home Improvement, That 70s Show and How I Met Your Mother, the US has led the way with screenwriters and producers capitalising on the value of using the suburban family dwelling as a fixed setting. The most obvious advantage is the use of an easily constructed and inexpensive set, most often on a TV studio soundstage requiring only a few rooms (living room, kitchen and bedroom are usually enough to set the scene), and a studio audience. In Singapore, sitcoms have had similar successes; portraying the lives of ‘ordinary people’ in their home settings. Some programs have achieved phenomenal success, including an unprecedented ten year run for Phua Chu Kang Pte Ltd from 1996-2007, closely followed by Under One Roof (1994-2000 and an encore season in 2002), and Living with Lydia (2001-2005). This article furthers Blunt and Dowling’s exploration of the “critical geography” of home, by providing a focused analysis of home-based sitcoms in the nation-state of Singapore. The use of the home tells us a lot. Roseanne’s cluttered family home represents a lived reality for working-class families throughout the Western world. In Friends, the seemingly wealthy ‘young’ people live in a fashionable apartment building, while Seinfeld’s apartment block is much less salubrious, indicating (in line with the character) the struggle of the humble comedian. Each of these examples tells us something about not just the characters, but quite often about class, race, and contemporary societies. In the Singaporean programs, the home in Under One Roof (hereafter UOR) represents the major form of housing in Singapore, and the program as a whole demonstrates the workability of Singaporean multiculturalism in a large apartment block. Phua Chu Kang Pte Ltd (PCK) demonstrates the entrepreneurial abilities of even under-educated Singaporeans, with its lead character, a building contractor, living in a large freestanding dwelling – generally reserved for the well-heeled of Singaporean society. And in Living with Lydia (LWL) (a program which demonstrates Singapore’s capacity for global integration), Hong Kong émigré Lydia is forced to share a house (less ostentatious than PCK’s) with the family of the hapless Billy B. Ong. There is perhaps no more telling cultural event than the sitcom. In the 1970s, The Brady Bunch told us more about American values and habits than any number of news reports or cop shows. A nation’s identity is uncovered; it bares its soul to us through the daily tribulations of its TV households. In Singapore, home-based sitcoms have been one of the major success stories in local television production with each of these three programs collecting multiple prizes at the region-wide Asian Television Awards. These sitcoms have been able to reflect the ideals and values of the Singaporean nation to audiences both at ‘home’ and abroad. This article explores the worlds of UOR, PCK, and LWL, and the ways in which each of the fictional homes represents key features of the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural Singapore. Through ownership and regulation, Singaporean TV programs operate as a firm link between the state and its citizens. These sitcoms follow regular patterns where the ‘man of the house’ is more buffoon than breadwinner – in a country defined by its neo-Confucian morality, sitcoms allow a temporary subversion of patriarchal structures. In this article I argue that the central theme in Singaporean sitcoms is that while home is a personal space, it is also a valuable site for national identities to be played out. These identities are visible in the physical indicators of the exterior and interior living spaces, and the social indicators representing a benign patriarchy and a dominant English language. Structure One of the key features of sitcoms is the structure: cold open – titles – establishing shot – opening scene. Generally the cold opening (aka “the teaser”) takes place inside the home to quickly (re)establish audience familiarity with the location and the characters. The title sequence then features, in the case of LWL and PCK, the characters outside the house (in LWL this is in cartoon format), and in UOR (see Figure 1) it is the communal space of the barbeque area fronting the multi-story HDB (Housing Development Board) apartment blocks. Figure 1: Under One Roof The establishing shot at the end of each title sequence, and when returning from ad breaks, is an external view of the characters’ respective dwellings. In Seinfeld this establishing shot is the New York apartment block, in Roseanne it is the suburban house, and the Singaporean sitcoms follow the same format (see Figure 2). Figure 2: Phua Chu Kang External Visions of the Home This emphasis on exterior buildings reminds the viewer that Singaporean housing is, in many ways, unique. As a city-state (and a young one at that) its spatial constraints are particularly limiting: there simply isn’t room for suburban housing on quarter acre blocks. It rapidly transformed from an “empty rock” to a scattered Malay settlement of bay and riverside kampongs (villages) recognisable by its stilt houses. Then in the shadow of colonialism and the rise of modernity, the kampongs were replaced in many cases by European-inspired terrace houses. Finally, in the post-colonial era high-rise housing began to swell through the territory, creating what came to be known as the “HDB new town”, with some 90% of the population now said to reside in HDB units, and many others living in private high-rises (Chang 102, 104). Exterior shots used in UOR (see Figure 3) consistently emphasise the distinctive HDB blocks. As with the kampong housing, high-rise apartments continue notions of communal living in that “Living below, above and side by side other people requires tolerance of neighbours and a respect towards the environment of the housing estate for the good of all” (104). The provision of readily accessible public housing was part of the “covenant between the newly enfranchised electorate and the elected government” (Chua 47). Figure 3: Establishing shot from UOR In UOR, we see the constant interruption of the lives of the Tan family by their multi-ethnic neighbours. This occurs to such an extent as to be a part of the normal daily flow of life in Singaporean society. Chang argues that despite the normally interventionist activities of the state, it is the “self-enforcing norms” of behaviour that have worked in maintaining a “peaceable society in high-rise housing” (104). This communitarian attitude even extends to the large gated residence of PCK, home to an almost endless stream of relatives and friends. The gate itself seems to perform no restrictive function. But such a “peaceable society” can also be said to be a result of state planning which extends to the “racial majoritarianism” imposed on HDB units in the form of quotas determining “the actual number of households of each of the three major races [Chinese, Malay and Indian] … to be accommodated in a block of flats” (Chua 55). Issues of race are important in Singapore where “the inscription of media imagery bears the cultural discourse and materiality of the social milieu” (Wong 120) perhaps nowhere more graphically illustrated than in the segregation of TV channels along linguistic / cultural lines. These 3 programs all featured on MediaCorp TV’s predominantly English-language Channel 5 and are, in the words of Roland Barthes, “anchored” by dint of their use of English. Home Will Eat Itself The consumption of home-based sitcoms by audiences in their own living-rooms creates a somewhat self-parodying environment. As John Ellis once noted, it is difficult to escape from the notion that “TV is a profoundly domestic phenomenon” (113) in that it constantly attempts to “include the audiences own conception of themselves into the texture of its programmes” (115). In each of the three Singaporean programs living-rooms are designed to seat characters in front of a centrally located TV set – at most all the audience sees is the back of the TV, and generally only when the TV is incorporated into a storyline, as in the case of PCK in Figure 4 (note the TV set in the foreground). Figure 4: PCK Even in this episode of PCK when the lead characters stumble across a pornographic video starring one of the other lead characters, the viewer only hears the program. Perhaps the most realistic (and acerbic) view of how TV reorganises our lives – both spatially in the physical layout of our homes, and temporally in the way we construct our viewing habits (eating dinner or doing the housework while watching the screen) – is the British “black comedy”, The Royle Family. David Morley (443) notes that “TV and other media have adapted themselves to the circumstances of domestic consumption while the domestic arena itself has been simultaneously redefined to accommodate their requirements”. Morley refers to The Royle Family’s narrative that rests on the idea that “for many people, family life and watching TV have become indistinguishable to the extent that, in this fictional household, it is almost entirely conducted from the sitting positions of the viewers clustered around the set” (436). While TV is a central fixture in most sitcoms, its use is mostly as a peripheral thematic device with characters having their viewing interrupted by the arrival of another character, or by a major (within the realms of the plot) event. There is little to suggest that “television schedules have instigated a significant restructuring of family routines” as shown in Livingstone’s audience-based study of UK viewers (104). In the world of the sitcom, the temporalities of characters’ lives do not need to accurately reflect that of “real life” – or if they do, things quickly descend to the bleakness exemplified by the sedentary Royles. As Scannell notes, “broadcast output, like daily life, is largely uneventful, and both are punctuated (predictably and unpredictably) by eventful occasions” (4). To show sitcom characters in this static, passive environment would be anathema to the “real” viewer, who would quickly lose interest. This is not to suggest that sitcoms are totally benign though as with all genres they are “the outcome of social practices, received procedures that become objectified in the narratives of television, then modified in the interpretive act of viewing” (Taylor 14). In other words, they feature a contextualisation that is readily identifiable to members of an established society. However, within episodes themselves, it as though time stands still – character development is almost non-existent, or extremely slow at best and we see each episode has “flattened past and future into an eternal present in which parents love and respect one another, and their children forever” (Taylor 16). It takes some six seasons before the character of PCK becomes a father, although in previous seasons he acts as a mentor to his nephew, Aloysius. Contained in each episode, in true sitcom style, are particular “narrative lines” in which “one-liners and little comic situations [are] strung on a minimal plot line” containing a minor problem “the solution to which will take 22 minutes and pull us gently through the sequence of events toward a conclusion” (Budd et al. 111). It is important to note that the sitcom genre does not work in every culture, as each locale renders the sitcom with “different cultural meanings” (Nielsen 95). Writing of the failure of the Danish series Three Whores and a Pickpocket (with a premise like that, how could it fail?), Nielsen (112) attributes its failure to the mixing of “kitchen sink realism” with “moments of absurdity” and “psychological drama with expressionistic camera work”, moving it well beyond the strict mode of address required by the genre. In Australia, soap operas Home and Away and Neighbours have been infinitely more popular than our attempts at sitcoms – which had a brief heyday in the 1980s with Hey Dad..!, Kingswood Country and Mother and Son – although Kath and Kim (not studio-based) could almost be counted. Lichter et al. (11) state that “television entertainment can be ‘political’ even when it does not deal with the stuff of daily headlines or partisan controversy. Its latent politics lie in the unavoidable portrayal of individuals, groups, and institutions as a backdrop to any story that occupies the foreground”. They state that US television of the 1960s was dominated by the “idiot sitcom” and that “To appreciate these comedies you had to believe that social conventions were so ironclad they could not tolerate variations. The scripts assumed that any minute violation of social conventions would lead to a crisis that could be played for comic results” (15). Series like Happy Days “harked back to earlier days when problems were trivial and personal, isolated from the concerns of a larger world” (17). By the late 1980s, Roseanne and Married…With Children had “spawned an antifamily-sitcom format that used sarcasm, cynicism, and real life problems to create a type of in-your-face comedy heretofore unseen on prime time” (20). This is markedly different from the type of values presented in Singaporean sitcoms – where filial piety and an unrelenting faith in the family unit is sacrosanct. In this way, Singaporean sitcoms mirror the ideals of earlier US sitcoms which idealise the “egalitarian family in which parental wisdom lies in appeals to reason and fairness rather than demands for obedience” (Lichter et al. 406). Dahlgren notes that we are the products of “an ongoing process of the shaping and reshaping of identity, in response to the pluralised sets of social forces, cultural currents and personal contexts encountered by individuals” where we end up with “composite identities” (318). Such composite identities make the presentation (or re-presentation) of race problematic for producers of mainstream television. Wong argues that “Within the context of PAP hegemony, media presentation of racial differences are manufactured by invoking and resorting to traditional values, customs and practices serving as symbols and content” (118). All of this is bound within a classificatory system in which each citizen’s identity card is inscribed as Chinese, Malay, Indian or Other (often referred to as CMIO), and a broader social discourse in which “the Chinese are linked to familial values of filial piety and the practice of extended family, the Malays to Islam and rural agricultural activities, and the Indians to the caste system” (Wong 118). However, these sitcoms avoid directly addressing the issue of race, preferring to accentuate cultural differences instead. In UOR the tables are turned when a none-too-subtle dig at the crude nature of mainland Chinese (with gags about the state of public toilets), is soon turned into a more reverential view of Chinese culture and business acumen. Internal Visions of the Home This reverence for Chinese culture is also enacted visually. The loungeroom settings of these three sitcoms all provide examples of the fashioning of the nation through a “ubiquitous semi-visibility” (Noble 59). Not only are the central characters in each of these sitcoms constructed as ethnically Chinese, but the furnishings provide a visible nod to Chinese design in the lacquered screens, chairs and settees of LWL (see Figure 5.1), in the highly visible pair of black inlaid mother-of-pearl wall hangings of UOR (see Figure 5.2) and in the Chinese statuettes and wall-hangings found in the PCK home. Each of these items appears in the central view of the shows most used setting, the lounge/family room. There is often symmetry involved as well; the balanced pearl hangings of UOR are mirrored in a set of silk prints in LWL and the pair of ceramic Chinese lions in PCK. Figure 5.1: LWL Figure 5.2: UOR Thus, all three sitcoms feature design elements that reflect visible links to Chinese culture and sentiments, firmly locating the sitcoms “in Asia”, and providing a sense of the nation. The sets form an important role in constructing a realist environment, one in which “identification with realist narration involves a temporary merger of at least some of the viewer’s identity with the position offered by the text” (Budd et al. 110). These constant silent reminders of the Chinese-based hegemon – the cultural “majoritarianism” – anchors the sitcoms to a determined concept of the nation-state, and reinforces the “imaginative geographies of home” (Blunt and Dowling 247). The Foolish “Father” Figure in a Patriarchal Society But notions of a dominant Chinese culture are dealt with in a variety of ways in these sitcoms – not the least in a playful attitude toward patriarchal figures. In UOR, the Tan family “patriarch” is played by Moses Lim, in PCK, Gurmit Singh plays Phua and in LWL Samuel Chong plays Billy B. Ong (or, as Lydia mistakenly refers to him Billy Bong). Erica Sharrer makes the claim that class is a factor in presenting the father figure as buffoon, and that US sitcoms feature working class families in which “the father is made to look inept, silly, or incompetent have become more frequent” partly in response to changing societal structures where “women are shouldering increasing amounts of financial responsibility in the home” (27). Certainly in the three series looked at here, PCK (the tradesman) is presented as the most derided character in his role as head of the household. Moses Lim’s avuncular Tan Ah Teck is presented mostly as lovably foolish, even when reciting his long-winded moral tales at the conclusion of each episode, and Billy B. Ong, as a middle-class businessman, is presented more as a victim of circumstance than as a fool. Sharrer ponders whether “sharing the burden of bread-winning may be associated with fathers perceiving they are losing advantages to which they were traditionally entitled” (35). But is this really a case of males losing the upper hand? Hanke argues that men are commonly portrayed as the target of humour in sitcoms, but only when they “are represented as absurdly incongruous” to the point that “this discursive strategy recuperates patriarchal notions” (90). The other side of the coin is that while the “dominant discursive code of patriarchy might be undone” (but isn’t), “the sitcom’s strategy for containing women as ‘wives’ and ‘mothers’ is always contradictory and open to alternative readings” (Hanke 77). In Singapore’s case though, we often return to images of the women in the kitchen, folding the washing or agonising over the work/family dilemma, part of what Blunt and Dowling refer to as the “reproduction of patriarchal and heterosexist relations” often found in representations of “the ideal’ suburban home” (29). Eradicating Singlish One final aspect of these sitcoms is the use of language. PM Lee Hsien Loong once said that he had no interest in “micromanaging” the lives of Singaporeans (2004). Yet his two predecessors (PM Goh and PM Lee Senior) both reflected desires to do so by openly criticising the influence of Phua Chu Kang’s liberal use of colloquial phrases and phrasing. While the use of Singlish (or Singapore Colloquial English / SCE) in these sitcoms is partly a reflection of everyday life in Singapore, by taking steps to eradicate it through the Speak Good English movement, the government offers an intrusion into the private home-space of Singaporeans (Ho 17). Authorities fear that increased use of Singlish will damage the nation’s ability to communicate on a global basis, withdrawing to a locally circumscribed “pidgin English” (Rubdy 345). Indeed, the use of Singlish in UOR is deliberately underplayed in order to capitalise on overseas sales of the show (which aired, for example, on Australia’s SBS television) (Srilal). While many others have debated the Singlish issue, my concern is with its use in the home environment as representative of Singaporean lifestyles. As novelist Hwee Hwee Tan (2000) notes: Singlish is crude precisely because it’s rooted in Singapore’s unglamorous past. This is a nation built from the sweat of uncultured immigrants who arrived 100 years ago to bust their asses in the boisterous port. Our language grew out of the hardships of these ancestors. Singlish thus offers users the opportunity to “show solidarity, comradeship and intimacy (despite differences in background)” and against the state’s determined efforts to adopt the language of its colonizer (Ho 19-20). For this reason, PCK’s use of Singlish iterates a “common man” theme in much the same way as Paul Hogan’s “Ocker” image of previous decades was seen as a unifying feature of mainstream Australian values. That the fictional PCK character was eventually “forced” to take “English” lessons (a storyline rapidly written into the program after the direct criticisms from the various Prime Ministers), is a sign that the state has other ideas about the development of Singaporean society, and what is broadcast en masse into Singaporean homes. Conclusion So what do these home-based sitcoms tell us about Singaporean nationalism? Firstly, within the realms of a multiethnic society, mainstream representations reflect the hegemony present in the social and economic structures of Singapore. Chinese culture is dominant (albeit in an English-speaking environment) and Indian, Malay and Other cultures are secondary. Secondly, the home is a place of ontological security, and partial adornment with cultural ornaments signifying Chinese culture are ever-present as a reminder of the Asianness of the sitcom home, ostensibly reflecting the everyday home of the audience. The concept of home extends beyond the plywood-prop walls of the soundstage though. As Noble points out, “homes articulate domestic spaces to national experience” (54) through the banal nationalism exhibited in “the furniture of everyday life” (55). In a Singaporean context, Velayutham (extending the work of Morley) explores the comforting notion of Singapore as “home” to its citizens and concludes that the “experience of home and belonging amongst Singaporeans is largely framed in the materiality and social modernity of everyday life” (4). Through the use of sitcoms, the state is complicit in creating and recreating the family home as a site for national identities, adhering to dominant modes of culture and language. References Blunt, Alison, and Robyn Dowling. Home. London: Routledge, 2006. Budd, Mike, Steve Craig, and Clay Steinman. Consuming Environments: Television and Commercial Culture. New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1999. Chang, Sishir. “A High-Rise Vernacular in Singapore’s Housing Development Board Housing.” Berkeley Planning Journal 14 (2000): 97-116. Chua, Beng Huat. “Public Housing Residents as Clients of the State.” Housing Studies 15.1 (2000). Dahlgren, Peter. “Media, Citizenship and Civic Culture”. Mass Media and Society. 3rd ed. Eds. James Curran and Michael Gurevitch. London: Arnold, 2000. 310-328. Ellis, John. Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982. Hanke, Robert. “The ‘Mock-Macho’ Situation Comedy: Hegemonic Masculinity and its Reiteration.” Western Journal of Communication 62.1 (1998). Ho, Debbie G.E. “‘I’m Not West. I’m Not East. So How Leh?’” English Today 87 22.3 (2006). Lee, Hsien Loong. “Our Future of Opportunity and Promise.” National Day Rally 2004 Speech. 29 Apr. 2007 http://www.gov.sg/nd/ND04.htm>. Lichter, S. Robert, Linda S. Lichter, and Stanley Rothman. Prime Time: How TV Portrays American Culture. Washington D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 1994. Livingstone, Sonia. Young People and New Media: Childhood and the Changing Media Environment. London: Sage, 2002 Morley, David. “What’s ‘Home’ Got to Do with It? Contradictory Dynamics in the Domestication of Technology and the Dislocation of Domesticity.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 6 (2003). Noble, Greg. “Comfortable and Relaxed: Furnishing the Home and Nation.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 16.1 (2002). Rubdy, Rani. “Creative Destruction: Singapore’s Speak Good English Movement.” World Englishes 20.3 (2001). Scannell, Paddy. “For a Phenomenology of Radio and Television.” Journal of Communication 45.3 (1995). Scharrer, Erica. “From Wise to Foolish: The Portrayal of the Sitcom Father, 1950s-1990s.” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 45.1 (2001). Srilal, Mohan. “Quick Quick: ‘Singlish’ Is Out in Re-education Campaign.” Asia Times Online (28 Aug. 1999). Tan, Hwee Hwee. “A War of Words over ‘Singlish’: Singapore’s Government Wants Its Citizens to Speak Good English, But They Would Rather Be ‘Talking Cock’.” Time International 160.3 (29 July 2002). Taylor, Ella. “From the Nelsons to the Huxtables: Genre and Family Imagery in American Network Television.” Qualitative Sociology 12.1 (1989). Velayutham, Selvaraj. “Affect, Materiality, and the Gift of Social Life in Singapore.” SOJOURN 19.1 (2004). Wong, Kokkeong. Media and Culture in Singapore: A Theory of Controlled Commodification. New Jersey: Hampton Press, 2001. Images Under One Roof: The Special Appearances. Singapore: Television Corporation of Singapore. VCD. 2000. Living with Lydia (Season 1, Volume 1). Singapore: MediaCorp Studios, Blue Max Enterprise. VCD. 2001. Phua Chu Kang Pte Ltd (Season 5, Episode 10). Kuala Lumpur: MediaCorp Studios, Speedy Video Distributors. VCD. 2003. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Pugsley, Peter. "At Home in Singaporean Sitcoms: Under One Roof, Living with Lydia and Phua Chu Kang." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/09-pugsley.php>. APA Style Pugsley, P. (Aug. 2007) "At Home in Singaporean Sitcoms: Under One Roof, Living with Lydia and Phua Chu Kang," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/09-pugsley.php>.

IntroductionI stumble to my feet breathing heavily and, over the roar of a tank, a nearby soldier yells right into my face: “We’re surrounded! We have to hold this line!” I follow him, moving past burning debris and wounded men being helped walk back in the opposite direction. Shells explode around me, a whistle sounds, and then the Hun attack; shadowy figures that I fire upon as they approach through the battlefield fog and smoke. I shoot some. I take cover behind walls as others fire back. I reload the weapon. I am hit by incoming fire, and a red damage indicator appears onscreen, so I move to a better cover position. As I am hit again and again, the image becomes blurry and appears as if in slow-motion, the sound also becoming muffled. As an enemy wielding a flame-thrower appears and blasts me with thick fire, my avatar gasps and collapses. The screen fades to black.So far, so very normal in the World War One themed first-person shooter Battlefield 1 (Electronic Arts 2016). But then the game does something unanticipated. I expect to reappear—or respawn—in the same scenario to play better, to stay in the fight longer. Instead, the camera view switches to an external position, craning upwards cinematically from my character’s dying body. Text superimposed over the view indicates the minimalist epitaph: “Harvey Nottoway 1889-1918.” The camera view then races backwards, high over the battlefield and finally settles into position behind a mounted machine-gun further back from the frontline as the enemy advances closer. Immediately I commence shooting, mowing down German troops as they enter our trenches. Soon I am hit and knocked away from the machine-gun. Picking up a shotgun I start shooting the enemy at close-quarters, until I am once again overrun and my character collapses. Now the onscreen text states I was playing as “Dean Stevenson 1899-1918.”I have attempted this prologue to the Battlefield 1 campaign a number of times. No matter how skilfully I play, or how effectively I simply run away and hide from the combat, this pattern continues: the structure of the game forces the player’s avatar to be repeatedly killed in order for the narrative to progress. Over a series of player deaths, respawning as an entirely new character each time, the combat grows in ferocity and the music also becomes increasingly frenetic. The fighting turns to hand-to-hand combat, or shovel-to-head combat to be more precise, and eventually an artillery barrage wipes everybody out (Figure 1). At this point, the prologue is complete and the gamer may continue in a variety of single-player episodes in different theatres of WW1, each of which is structured according to the normal rules of combat games: when your avatar is killed, you respawn at the most recent checkpoint for a follow-up attempt.What are we to make of this alternative narrative structure deployed by the opening episode of Battlefield 1? In contrast to the normal video-game affordances of re-playability until completion, this narrative necessitation of death is in some ways motivated by the onscreen text that introduces the prologue: “What follows is frontline combat. You are not expected to survive.” Certainly it is true that the rest of the game (either single-player or in its online multiplayer deathmatch mode) follows the predictable pattern of dying, replaying, completing. And also we would not expect Battlefield 1 to be motivated primarily by a kind of historical fidelity given that an earlier instalment in the series, Battlefield 1942 (2002) was described by one reviewer as:a comic book version of WWII. The fact that any player can casually hop into a tank, drive around, hop out and pick off an enemy soldier with a sniper rifle, hop into a plane, parachute out, and then call in artillery fire (within the span of a few minutes) should tell you a lot about the game. (Osborne)However what is happening in this will-to-die structure of the game’s prologue represents an alternative and affectively unsettling game experience both in its ludological structure as well as its affective impact. Defamiliarization and Humanization Drawing upon a phenomenology of game-play, whereby the scholar examines the game “as played” (see Atkins and Kryzwinska; Keogh; Wilson) to consider how the text reveals itself to the player, I argue that the introductory single-player episode of Battlefield 1 functions to create a defamiliarizing effect on the player. Defamiliarization, the Russian Formalist term for the effect created by art when some unusual aspect of a text challenges accepted perceptions and/or representations (Schklovski; Thompson), is a remarkably common effect created by the techniques used in combat cinema and video-games. This is unsurprising. After all, warfare is one of the very examples Schklovski uses as something that audiences have developed habituated responses to and which artworks must defamiliarize. The effect may be created by many techniques in a text, and in certain cases a work may defamiliarize even its own form. For instance, recent work on the violence in Saving Private Ryan shows that during the lengthy Omaha Beach sequence, the most vivid instances of violence—including the famous shot of a soldier picking up his dismembered arm—occur well after the audience has potentially become inured to the onslaught of the earlier frequent, but less graphic, carnage (Bender Film Style and WW2). To make these moments stand out with equivalent horrific impact against the background of the Normandy beach bloodbath Spielberg also treats them with a stuttered frame effect and accompanying audio distortion, motivated (to use a related Formalist term) by the character’s apparent concussion and temporary disorientation. Effectively a sequence of point of view shots then, this moment in Private Ryan has become a model for many other war texts, and indeed the player’s death in the opening sequence of Battlefield 1 is portrayed using a very similar (though not identical) audio-visual treatment (Figure 2).Although the Formalists never played videogames, recent scholarship has approached the medium from a similar perspective. For example, Brendan Keogh has focused on the challenges to traditional videogame pleasure generated by the 2012 dystopian shooter Spec Ops: The Line. Keogh notes that the game developers intended to create displeasure and “[forcing] the player to consider what is obscured in the pixilation of war” by, for instance, having them kill fellow American troops in order for the game narrative to continue (Keogh 9). In addition, the game openly taunts the player’s expectations of entertainment based, uncritical run-and-gun gameplay with onscreen text during level loading periods such as “Do you feel like a hero yet?” (8).These kinds of challenges to the expectations of entertainment in combat shooters are found also in one sequence from the 2009 game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 in which the player—as an undercover operative—is forced to participate in a terrorist attack in which civilians are killed (Figure 3). While playing that level, titled “No Russian,” Timothy Welsh argues: “The player may shoot the unarmed civilians or not; the level still creeps slowly forward regardless” (Welsh 409). In Welsh’s analysis, this level emerges as an unusual attempt by a popular video game to “humanize” the non-playing characters that are ordinarily gunned down without any critical and self-reflective thought by the player in most shooter games. The player is forced into a scenario in which they must make a highly difficult ethical choice, but the game will show civilians being killed either way.In contrast to the usual criticisms of violent video games—eg., that they may be held responsible for school shootings, increased adolescent aggression and so on —the “No Russian” sequence drew dramatic complaints of being a “terrorist simulator” (Welsh 389). But for Welsh this ethical choice facing the player, to shoot or not to shoot civilians, raises the game to a textual experience offering self-inspection. As in the fictional theme park of Westworld (HBO 2016), it does not really matter to the digital victim if a player kills them, but it should—and does—matter to the player. There are no external consequences to killing a computer game character composed only of pixels, or killing/raping a robot in the Westworld theme park, however there are internal consequences: it makes you a killer, or a rapist (see Harris and Bloom).Thus, from the perspective of defamiliarization, the game can be regarded as creating the effect that Matthew Payne has labelled “critical displeasure.” Writing about the way this is created by Spec Ops, Payne argues that:the result is a game that wields its affective distance as a critique of the necessary illusion that all military shooters trade in, but one that so few acknowledge. In particular, the game’s brutal mise-en-scène, its intertextual references to other war media, and its real and imagined opportunities for player choice, create a discordant feeling that lays bare the ease with which most video war games indulge in their power fantasies. (Payne 270)There is then, a minor tradition of alternative military-themed video game works that attempt to invite or enable the player to conduct a kind of ethical self-examination around their engagement with interactive representations of war via particular incursions of realism. The critical displeasure invoked by texts such as Spec Ops and the “No Russian” level of Call of Duty is particularly interesting in light of another military game that was ultimately cancelled by the publisher after it received public criticism. Titled Six Days in Fallujah, the game was developed with the participation of Marines who had fought in that real life battle and aimed to depict the events as they unfolded in 2004 during the campaign in Iraq. As Justin Rashid argues:the controversy that arose around Six Days in Fallujah was, of course, a result of the view that commercial video games can only ever be pure entertainment; games do not have the authority or credibility to be part of a serious debate. (Rashid 17)On this basis, perhaps a criterial attribute of an acceptable alternative military game is that there is enough familiarity to evoke some critical distance, but not too much familiarity that the player must think about legitimately real-life consequences and impact. After all, Call of Duty was a successful release, even amid the controversy of “No Russian.” This makes sense as the level does not really challenge the overall enjoyment of the game. The novelty of the level, on the one hand, is that it is merely one part of the general narrative and cannot be regarded as representative of the whole game experience. On the other hand, because none of the events and scenarios have a clear indexical relationship to real-world terrorist attacks (at least prior to the Brussels attack in 2016) it is easy to play the ethical choice of shooting or not shooting civilians as a mental exercise rather than a reflection on something that really happened. This is the same lesson learned by the developers of the 2010 game Medal of Honor who ultimately changed the name of the enemy soldiers from “The Taliban” to “OPFOR” (standing in for a generic “Opposing Forces”) after facing pressure from the US and UK Military who claimed that the multiplayer capacities of the game enabled players to play as the Taliban (see Rashid). Conclusion: Affective Friction in Battlefield 1In important ways then, these game experiences are precursors to Battlefield 1’s single player prologue. However, the latter does not attempt a wholesale deconstruction of the genre—as does Spec Ops—or represent an attempt to humanise (or perhaps re-humanise) the non-playable victim characters as Welsh suggests “No Russian” attempts to do. Battlefield 1’s opening structure of death-and-respawn-as-different-character can be read as humanizing the player’s avatar. But most importantly, I take Battlefield’s initially unusual gameplay as an aesthetic attempt to set a particular tone to the game. Motivated by the general cultural attitude of deferential respect for the Great War, Battlefield 1 takes an almost austere stance toward the violence depicted, paradoxically even as this impact is muted in the later gameplay structured according to normal multiplayer deathmatch rules of run-and-gun killing. The futility implied by the player’s constant dying is clearly motivated by an attempt at realism as one of the cultural memories of World War One is the sheer likelihood of being killed, whether as a frontline soldier or a citizen of a country engaged in combat (see Kramer). For Battlefield 1, the repeated dying is really part of the text’s aesthetic engagement. For this reason I prefer the term affective friction rather than critical displeasure. The austere tone of the game is indicated early, just prior to the prologue gameplay with onscreen text that reads:Battlefield 1 is based on events that unfolded over 100 years agoMore than 60 million soldiers fought in “The War to End All Wars”It ended nothing.Yet it changed the world forever. At a simple level, the player’s experience of being killed in order for the next part of the narrative to progress evokes this sense of futility. There have been real responses indicating this, for instance one reviewer argues that the structure is “a powerful treatment” (Howley). But there is potential for increased engagement with the game itself as the structure breaks the replay-cycle of usual games. For instance, another reviewer responds to the overall single-player campaign by suggesting “It is not something you can sit down and play through and not experience on a higher level than just clicking a mouse and tapping a keyboard” (Simpson). This affective friction amplifies, and draws attention to, the other advances in violent stylistics presented in the game. For instance, although the standard onscreen visual distortions are used to show character damage and the direction from which the attack came, the game does use slow-motion to draw out the character’s death. In addition, the game features incidental battlefield details of shell-shock, such as soldiers simply holding the head in their hands, frozen as the battle rages around them (Figure 4). The presence of flame-thrower troops, and subsequently the depictions of characters running as they burn to death are also significant developments in violent aesthetics from earlier games. These elements of violence are constitutive of the affective friction. We may marvel at the technical achievement of such real-time rendering of dynamic fire and the artistic care given to animate deaths and shell-shock depictions. But simultaneously, these “violent delights”—to borrow from Westworld’s citation of Shakespeare—are innovations upon the depictions of earlier games, even contemporary, combat games. Indeed, one critic has almost ashamedly noted: “For a game about one of the most horrific wars in human history, it sure is pretty” (Kain).These violent depictions show a continuation in the tradition of increased detail which has been linked to a model of “reported realism” as a means of understanding audience’s claims of realism in combat films and modern videogames as a result primarily of their hypersaturated audio-visual texture (Bender "Blood Splats"). Here, saturation refers not to the specific technical quality of colour saturation but to the densely layered audio-visual structure often found in contemporary films and videogames. For example, thick mixing of soundtracks, details of gore, and nuanced movements (particularly of dying characters) all contribute to a hypersaturated aesthetic which tends to prompt audiences to make claims of realism for a combat text regardless of whether or not these viewers/players have any real world referent for comparison. Of course, there are likely to be players who will simply blast through any shooter game, giving no regard to the critical displeasure offered by Spec Ops narrative choices or the ethical dilemma of “No Russian.” There are also likely to be players who bypass the single-player campaign altogether and only bother with the multiplayer deathmatch experience, which functions in the same way as it does in other shooter games, including the previous Battlefield games. But perhaps the value of this game’s attempt at alternative storytelling, with its emphasis on tone and affect, is that even the “kill-em-all” player may experience a momentary impact from the violence depicted. This is particularly important given that, to borrow from Stephanie Fisher’s argument in regard to WW2 games, many young people encounter the history of warfare through such popular videogames (Fisher). In the centenary period of World War One, especially in Australia amid the present Anzac commemorative moment, the opportunity for young audiences to engage with the significance of the events. As a side-note, the later part of the single-player campaign even has a Gallipoli sequence, though the narrative of this component is designed as an action-hero adventure. Indeed, this is one example of how the alternative dying-to-continue structure of the prologue creates an affective friction against the normal gameplay and narratives that feature in the rest of the text. The ambivalent ways in which this unsettling opening scenario impacts on the remainder of the game-play, including for instance its depiction of PTSD, is illustrated by some industry reviewers. As one reviewer argues, the game does generate the feeling that “war isn’t fun — except when it is” (Plante). From this view, the cognitive challenge created by the will to die in the prologue creates an affective friction with the normalised entertainment inherent in the game’s multiplayer run-and-gun components that dominate the rest of Battlefield 1’s experience. Therefore, although Battlefield 1 ultimately proves to be an entertainment-oriented combat shooter, it is significant that the developers of this major commercial production decided to include an experimental structure to the prologue as a way of generating tone and affect in a fresh way. ReferencesAtkins, Barry, and Tanya Kryzwinska. "Introduction: Videogame, Player, Text." Videogame, Player, Text. Eds. Atkins, Barry and Tanya Kryzwinska. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007.Bender, Stuart Marshall. "Blood Splats and Bodily Collapse: Reported Realism and the Perception of Violence in Combat Films and Videogames." Projections 8.2 (2014): 1-25.Bender, Stuart Marshall. Film Style and the World War II Combat Film. 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