Journal articles on the topic 'Obscene gestures'

Straipsnyje analizuojami agresyvų vairavimą aiškinančių veiksnių – vairuotojų agresyvumo, pykčio ir saviveiksmingumo – ypatumai. Buvo keliami šie tyrimo uždaviniai: a) įvertinti Lietuvos vairuotojų agresyvumo, vairavimo pykčio ir saviveiksmingumo rodiklius; b) nustatyti šių rodiklių tarpusavio sąsajas bei ryšius su kitais agresyvų vairavimą aiškinančiais veiksniais (lytimi, amžiumi, vairavimo ypatumais); c) nustatyti eismo įvykio tikimybę geriausiai prognozuojančius rodiklius. Naudojant Buss ir Perry agresijos klausimyną, Vairavimo pykčio skalę, Adelaidės vairavimo saviveiksmingumo skalę bei vairavimo ypatumus atskleidžiančius kintamuosius, buvo ištirti 196 vairuotojai. Gauti rezultatai rodo, kad vairuotojų pykčio ir agresyvumo ryšys yra statistiškai reikšmingai teigiamas, o vairavimo pykčio ir vairuotojų saviveiksmingumo ryšys – statistiškai reikšmingai neigiamas. Nebuvo nustatyta reikšmingų ryšių tarp vairuotojų agresyvumo ir jų vairavimo saviveiksmingumo. Vairuotojų agresyvumo įverčiai geriausiai prognozuoja patekimą į eismo įvykius.Pagrindiniai žodžiai: agresyvus vairavimas, agresyvumas, vairavimo pyktis, vairavimo saviveiksmingumas.Aggressive Driving: the Role of Aggression, Driving Anger, and Self-efficacyČėsnienė I., Kašinska A. SummaryAccording to the World Health Organization (2004), road traffic accidents are one of the ten leading causes of death. Many of these fatalities involve aggressive driving. P. Ellison-Potter et al. (2001) suggest that aggressive driving is any driving behaviour that intentionally endangers others psychologically, physically, or both. Examples of aggressive driving include behaviours such as excessive speeding, tailgating, horn honking, traffic weaving, profanity, obscene gestures, headlight flashing, etc. In order to understand this phenomenon, researchers have examined aggressive driving in terms of several levels of variables such as sociocultural, situational or personal (Valleries et al., 2005). Moreover, self-assessment of driving skills is a central dimension of driving activity. The evaluation of specific skills may be conceptualized by self-efficacy. Self-efficacy refers to individuals’ belief in their ability to accomplish specific goals (Bandura, 1995).The article reports the findings concerning the relationship between aggression, anger and self-efficacy among Lithuanian drivers. The sample consisted of 196 drivers (99 males, 97 females) aged 18 to 74 years. The Buss–Perry Aggression Questionnaire (Buss and Perry, 1992), the Driving Anger Scale (Deffenbacher et al., 1994), and the Adelaide Driving Self-efficacy Scale (George et al., 2007) were used in the study. Participants were administered also a questionnaire measuring a variety of demographical characteristics and driving-related factors.The results showed that more aggressive drivers tend to express the higher levels of driving anger than do less aggressive drivers. A negative relation between driving anger and driving self-efficacy was found. Further, the driving self-efficacy was higher in males than in females. Research findings indicate that there are gender differences in aggression, i.e. male drivers are more aggressive than female drivers. There are significant age differences in driver anger. In addition, high anger and aggression were related to unsafe driving behaviours. Seat-belt wearing tends to be less frequent among male drivers than among females. Aggression was found to be a predictor of crash-related outcomes. Finally, limitations of the study are discussed.Keywords: aggressive driving, aggression, driving anger, driving self-efficacy.

This paper argues that ‘the Anthropocene’ is a deeply depoliticizing notion. This de-politicization unfolds through the creation of a set of narratives, what we refer to as ‘AnthropoScenes’, which broadly share the effect of off-staging certain voices and forms of acting. Our notion of the Anthropo-obScene is our tactic to both attest to and undermine the depoliticizing stories of ‘the Anthropocene’. We first examine how various AnthropoScenes, while internally fractured and heterogeneous, ranging from geo-engineering and earth system science to more-than-human and object-oriented ontologies, place things and beings, human and non-human, within a particular relational straitjacket that does not allow for a remainder or constitutive outside. This risks deepening an immunological biopolitical fantasy that promises adaptive and resilient terraforming, an earth system management of sorts that permits life as we know it to continue for some, while turning into a necropolitics for others. Second, we develop a post-foundational political perspective in relation to our dramatically changing socio-ecological situation. This perspective understands the political in terms of performance and, in an Arendtian manner, re-opens the political as forms of public-acting in common that subtracts from or exceeds what is gestured to hold socio-ecological constellations together. We conclude that what is off-staged and rendered obscene in ‘the AnthropoScenes’ carries precisely the possibility of a return of the political.

In recent discussions there has been a tendency to refer to ‘gesture’ and ‘sign’ as if these are distinct categories, sometimes even as if they are in opposition to one another. Here I trace the historical origins of this distinction. I suggest that it is a product of the application to the analysis of sign languages of a formalist model of language derived from structural linguistics, on the one hand, and, on the other, of a cognitive-psychological view of ‘gesture’ that emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century. I suggest that this division between ‘gesture’ and ‘sign’ tends to exaggerate differences and obscure areas of overlap. It should be replaced by a comparative semiotics of the utterance uses of visible bodily action. This will be better able to articulate the similarities and differences between how kinesics is used, according to whether and how it is employed in relation to other communicative modalities such as speech.

This study examined speaking-rate-induced spectral and temporal variability of F2 formant trajectories for target words produced in a carrier phrase at speaking rates ranging from fast to slow. F2 onset frequency measured at the first glottal pulse following the stop consonant release in target words was used to quantify the extent to which adjacent consonantal and vocalic gestures overlapped; F2 target frequency was operationally defined as the first occurrence of a frequency minimum or maximum following F2 onset frequency. Regression analyses indicated 70% of functions relating F2 onset and vowel duration were statistically significant. The strength of the effect was variable, however, and the direction of significant functions often differed from that predicted by a simple model of overlapping, sliding gestures. Results of a partial correlation analysis examining interrelationships among F2 onset, F2 target frequency, and vowel duration across the speaking rate range indicated that covariation of F2 target with vowel duration may obscure the relationship between F2 onset and vowel duration across rate. The results further suggested that a sliding based model of acoustic variability associated with speaking rate change only partially accounts for the present data, and that such a view accounts for some speakers' data better than others.

Abstract This article assesses the ways in which religious diversity and religious pluralism are asserted and negotiated within the context of contemporary South Africa through scrutinising the Christian Friendly Products campaign which advocates against the ubiquity of the halaal food symbol and halaal food in South Africa. Halaal is an Islamic term, which refers to food products that are ritually permissible for consumption by Muslims. The campaign claims that the visible presence of halaal food in public spaces undermines the rights of Christian consumers, is an affront to the beliefs of Christians, and is a presage to the impending Islamisation of South Africa. In claiming that religion is the final frontier of the rainbow nation, this article argues that the myth of rainbowism, once wielded as a peacemaking gesture and nation building tool, has projected inaccurate representations of religious coexistence and difference in South Africa that obscure and minimise growing religious conflict and tension.

This article analyses the new Greenwood Rising museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which tells the largely forgotten story of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. Greenwood Rising is influenced by the broader global proliferation of memorial museums created to confront historical violence vis-à-vis today’s ‘politics of regret’ and works to centre slavery and racial inequality in American history as well as in contemporary society, representing a new intervention in the mnemonic struggles over slavery and its legacies in the United States. In its adherence to global memorial ethics, Greenwood Rising also places (White) visitors in the position of what Michael Rothberg has theorized as the ‘implicated subject’. However, Greenwood Rising has been highly controversial among Tulsa’s African American community, many of whom see the museum as a ‘symbolic gesture’ intended to obscure ongoing racism and replace material reparations. This controversy raises questions about the limits of memory in the face of ongoing injustice and highlights tensions between increasingly globalized ethics of remembrance and local mnemonic struggles.

Abstract Care of persons with living with dementia is complicated by using personal protective equipment (PPE). Masks and other facial coverings although protective, prohibit visualization of lip-reading and nonverbal cues and obscure identity. The purpose of this qualitative study was to determine best practices for effective communication while using PPE from the provider (n=10), resident (n=5), and family perspective (n=4). The 19 participants were recruited from four states. Qualitative content analysis identified two major themes: (1) challenges experienced during nursing home pandemic care, and (2) the communication strategies to overcome PPE challenges. Although our interviews were not focused on experiences outside of using PPE, all participants voiced trauma surrounding the lockdown for residents and separation from their families. All participants expressed pessimism surrounding the PPE, but this was also met with feelings of normalization surrounding its use. The communication strategies discussed focused on emphasizing (1) verbal and nonverbal communication skills, and (2) person-centered communication. The general communication strategies recommended were consistent with expert opinions such as using written messages and gestures, using loud speech, using clear speech, identifying self, and varying approaches based on person and context. Person-centered approaches centered on the staff and resident "knowing each other." Specifically, knowing the resident is essential to understanding their personal barriers and facilitators to successful communication and knowing each other in a personal and trusting manner helps overcome barriers caused by PPE. This study provides practical suggestions for best practices in communication and reinforces the need for person-centered communication focused on psycho-emotional care.

Small-bowel capsule endoscopy (SBCE) is used widely because of its non-invasive and patient-friendly nature. SBCE can visualize entire small-intestinal mucosa and facilitate detection of small-intestinal abnormalities. Indications for SBCE are obscure gastrointestinal bleeding, Crohn’s disease, small-intestinal polyps, tumors and celiac disease. Materials and methods: We report a study from September 2018 to February 2022, including 59 patients who underwent SBCE type PillCam SB3®. All our patients previously had a normal endoscopic assessment (oesogastro-duodenal fibroscopy and ileo-colonoscopy). CT enterography and MR enterography realized in 54.2% of cases were normal. The preparation used is PEG (2l the day before and 0.5l after ingesting the capsule) with clear broth the day before the examination and 10 days off oral iron if taken. Results: The mean age was 53.9 years, with a female predominance (sex ratio: 0.52). 16.9% of the patients had a history of heart disease, 8.4% are chronic renal failure, 5% are followed for Crohn's disease and 3.3% for celiac disease. 10.1% of patients were on anticoagulants and 5% on antiplatelet agents. The indication for SBCE was Obscure gastrointestinal bleeding (OGIB) in 86,3%, Crohn's disease (CD) in 5%, celiac disease in 3,3%, chronic diarrhea in 3,3%, and unexplained edematoascites syndrome in 1,6%. SBCE found small bowel angiodysplasia lesions in 40.6% of patients, small bowel inflammatory lesions in 15% of patients, a submucosal tumor appearance in 6.7% of patients and active small bowel bleeding in 5% patients. The examination did not objectivate small bowel lesion in 25.4% of patients. Non-small bowel lesions have been demonstrated in the form of gastric (16.9% of cases) and cecal (10.1% of cases) angiodysplasia responsible for OGIB. Conclusion: In our study, SBCE showed lesions in 74,6% of cases; dominated by angiodysplasia followed by inflammatory lesions and submucosal tumors and whose indication was essentially OGIB. Enteroscopy with biopsies or with therapeutic gesture, remains essential in the management of these patients.

Based on a fresh study of all primary sources of Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin (composition: 1918/19, orchestration: 1924) the article reconsiders the entire history of composition and repeated revisions of the work. The original choice of genre (expressive “pantomime” in contrast to “ballet”) seems to have played a significant role in this troubled history, which shows the composer’s efforts to transform sections of the original “gesture” music into a more symphonic style often making the music more succinct. Puzzlingly, the first full score of the complete work and a revised edition of the piano reduction published posthumously in 1955 by Universal Edition present an abridged form of the work, which cannot be fully authenticated and was finally restored to its more complete form in Peter Bartók’s new edition of 2000. Looking for the possible origin of the more obscure cuts, discussions with choreographer Aurelio Milloss in 1936 and Gyula Harangozó in 1939/40, both of whom later directed and danced productions of the work under the baton of János Ferencsik with great success (in Milan in 1942 and in Budapest in 1945, resp.), should probably be taken into consideration as these might have resulted in the integration of cuts into the published full score. Apart from trying to understand the different stages of the work’s long evolution, the article argues that it is essential to study the original version in the compositional sources since it reveals Bartók’s first concept of the piece composed in his period of highest expressionism.

What is the relationship between American studies and affective production? In what specific ways does our scholarship participate in the creation, circulation, and appreciation of affective practices? These questions provide a foundation for understanding the sometimes obscure connections between academic scholarship and mass culture. I argue that the history of American studies involves a specific and influential imbrication with affective production that has shaped notions of identity and affect since the nineteenth century. Usually this history is understood in terms of how the field used to advocate conservative notions of nativist national identity; this paper brings the history of this advocacy into new focus by histricizing the relationship between scholarship and affective production in the often-overlooked field of humor studies. The first section traces the invention of an academic tradition that articulated humor practice to national character, and identifies this articulation itself as the affective labor of that scholarship. The second section addresses alternative histories that might be written once we recognize this articulation of affective practice to identity as itself a form of affective labor. In three case studies, I briefly explore the relations between humor, mass culture, and politics in the works of the late nineteenth-century humorists David Ker, Marietta Holley, and Bill Nye, whose humor was produced in the same period that saw the durable articulation of humor practice to national identity emerge. These cases gesture, polemically, to the important work American studies can still do with humor, especially as we realize the key role of affective production in our disciplinary history.

Adolescents in secured residential facilities may engage in excess behavior immediately following verbal directives or corrective statements from staff. Excess behavior may include verbal aggression, indices of disrespect (e.g., eye rolling, grunting, and obscene gestures), or even physical aggression. These excess behaviors may evoke further directives or corrective statements from staff that, in turn, escalate the adolescent’s excess behavior and can produce undesirable effects for both the adolescent (e.g., loss of privileges) and staff members (e.g., increased burn out). Teaching detained adolescents to respond appropriately to staff directives and corrective statements may produce large collateral changes in the way staff interact with adolescents in detention facilities. These changes could be conceptualized as a behavioral cusp. We used behavioral skills training to teach 11 adolescent males to respond appropriately to staff directives. All 11 students showed low percentages of trials with appropriate reactions in baseline and high percentages of trials with appropriate reactions during treatment and generalization sessions. Further, two students showed maintenance of the skill 1 month and 5 months following treatment.

Several clay figurines dating to the Hellenistic period from the sanctuaries of Demeter at Priene and Samos depict the lower part of naked female bodies with arms and legs (Figures 1–2). The facial features are represented on the stomach of the figurines. One single clay figurine from Erythrai and two from the sanctuary of Demeter at Mytilene represent the facial features on the stomach without arms and legs (Figure 3). The iconography of the clay figurines recalls the obscene gesture of Iambe, who lifted up her skirt and exposed her genitals (Hom. Hymn Dem. 199–205). The obscene act of Iambe offered an explanation for ritual mockery. Depending on the festival, ritual mockery was performed by men and women, or only by women. Despite the significance of ritual mockery for the Eleusinian cult, Iambe/Baubo is only mentioned in a few inscriptions dedicated outside Attica. The present paper aims to analyse the so-called clay figurines of Baubo. Before discussing the clay figurines, I will first reconsider the written sources on Iambe and Baubo dating to the Archaic and later periods. Given the fact that several papers discuss most written sources on Baubo, ritual mockery, and lifting up the skirt, I will focus on selected written sources on Baubo and ritual mockery performed at the festivals of Demeter.

Jonathan Harvey debuted several novel techniques and elements in his String Quartet No. 2—“temperature” and gender markings, unique to this piece, and the melodic chain technique, a method which he continued to use in his subsequent quartets. Though the melodic chain technique is decipherable from score analysis, and has been explained by the composer in interviews, Harvey’s temperature and gender markings have continued to puzzle scholars, due to vague descriptions that obscure their meaning (especially in the case of the temperature markings) and to the implied stereotypes of themes that are gendered feminine and masculine (more shocking to the modern eye than it was in 1988). The question thus arises: did Harvey engage in a sexist trope with his gendered stereotyping of the themes, or was he ahead of his time by offering a nuanced and fluid approach to understanding gender, guided by his spirituality, presenting the constraints of binary stereotypes before dismantling them? Building on the scholarship of gender theory and musical gesture and embodiment, this article examines the meaning of gender in this piece.

On 8 September 2016, Tsa Tsa Ke K’e (Iron Foot Place) was officially unveiled on the floor of the new Rogers Place Arena, home to the National Hockey League’s Edmonton Oilers. The circular, 45-foot-diameter tile mosaic is the creation of renowned contemporary artist Alex Janvier (Denesųłiné/Saulteaux), whose remarkable career has involved fighting for artistic sovereignty and resisting settler colonialism. This mural has prompted multiple expressions and practices of Indigenous survivance, performances and gestures of state and corporate reconciliation, and exists at the edge of some of the lived realities of exacerbated biopolitical necropolitics in Edmonton. In this article, we explore the intersections of art and professional men’s hockey as they coexist under ongoing settler colonialism at the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century. In post–Truth and Reconciliation Commission Canada, how do investments in public art in corporate-civic professional sport partnerships further celebrate Indigenous culture and persistent presence? And concomitantly, how do such investments continue to both obscure and intensify the genocidal conditions under which the settler nation of Canada was created, and just as importantly, continues to function?

Du poète décrit par Ibn Khaldoun et mis en scène par Mouloud Mammeri à l’homme du « souffle », « respir » et assefrou, qu’il s’agisse de Jean Amrouche ou de Kateb Yacine, cet article retrouve un même allant du poème, voix que rien ne peut ni voiler ni imiter, geste qui organise le monde et lui donne place au large du sensé. Dans ce rapide parcours sur les traces d’une poétique comme élan qui installe le poème, voix et corps dans le monde, Mohammed Dib s’impose lorsque les voix de Djamila Amrane et de Jean Sénac apportent leur tribu, au milieu de toutes celles qui hantent des contes ancestraux.From the poet described by Ibn Khaldoun and dramatized by Mouloud Mammeri to the man of “breath”, “respir” and “assefrou”, whether it is discussing Jean Amrouche or Kateb Yacine, this article finds the common energy in the poems, a voice that nothing can obscure or imitate, a gesture that makes sense of the world while giving it a place outside the realm of the sensible. In this rapid journey, using this poetic discourse as momentum that places the poem, voice and body in the world, Mohammed Dib’s influence is obvious when Djamila Amrane and Jean Sénac add their voices to all those who haunt his ancestral tales.

The trial of corruption cases by teleconference is very vulnerable to manipulation of the trial or game cases that can obscure or change the actual facts, internet network connections. In addition, with atrial teleconference for judges, public prosecutors and legal advisors cannot see the direct response of the examined parties to determine the gesture in answering and giving reasons in answering questions, making it difficult to catch whether there has been a blurring of facts or not. The problems of this research are 1) How is the evidence in the trial of corruption cases by teleconference during the COVID-19 pandemic? 2) How should a case prove a corruption case teleconference during the COVID-19 pandemic? By using normative juridical research methods, it is known that 1) Supreme Court Regulation No. 4 of 2020 in principle has accommodated the process of evidentiary the trial of corruption cases and is legal according to law, but in practice not all cases of corruption can be proven by teleconference. 2) The process of evidentiary the trial of corruption cases by teleconference in the COVID-19 pandemic situation that should be carried out is optional so that in practice it does not need to be carried out by teleconference, this returns to the weight of the case being handled.

We do not bear a straightforwardly passive relationship with the ubiquitous regime of the logo-sign. As dwellers of the eternity of the consumer present, the luxury of our boredom allows us to pick and choose. The overwhelming celerity with which the everyday perpetually transforms its packaging, the excessively rapid turnover of signs has condensed our historical perspective. Tomorrow I will buy that new pair of shoes. As congenital sufferers of a logorrhea of the logo, our chatter is articulated by product placement. We become active in distinguishing ourselves with these loaded and at once empty signifiers. Whether linguistically or graphically organized the condensation of ideas, facilitated by the economy of the logo is allowed through the operation of the sign. It is beneath the dazzling lights of signification that we can find the logo, a tool bandied about by ‘ideas men.’ Signification is that logic upon which the logo depends. Though the mechanism that silently determines our findings remains obscure, as good little consumers we have nonetheless done our research. Our choice, seemingly personal, but actually orchestrated by the dissimulated forces of the social, perpetuates a cycle of exchange, the endless circulation of logo-signs. In compliance with our socio-economic status, one logo demarcated product has more symbolic purchase than another. Our habitual belief that we have a choice, and that this choice is well informed, allows the naturalisation of logo-signs in such a way that subtle, often unspoken thresholds between taste communities become reified. There persists, all the same, a traffic across such thresholds, and although it would appear that there is little room to move, our product choices are not necessarily all determined in advance. Though our habitation is one composed of multitudinous worldly signs, this does not mean that it is impossible to discover some way out, or perhaps some other mode of operation for the logo-sign. Our taste for the logo-sign is augmented by what might be considered an apprenticeship in signs, one that commences with early childhood. As the philosopher Gilles Deleuze suggests, “to learn is first of all to consider a substance, an object, a being as if it emitted signs to be deciphered, interpreted” (Deleuze, 2000: 4). As it relates to the logo this apprenticeship and the desire it produces operates almost exclusively with what Deleuze has called the worldly sign. As for the world, “there is no milieu that emits and concentrates so many signs, in such reduced space, at so great a rate” (5). And there is no world that is more banal than that of the logo. And yet, at once, it is by way of our reading of the logo that we imagine another world, better, brighter and more beautiful. This is the transcendent logic of the logo. The banalisation of this world, the one I must face everyday, is effectuated in the desire for this imaginary other place that the logo invites me to enter. If I buy that pair of shoes I will find a suitable lover (presumably also a shoe fetishist) who will steal me away from the present drudgery of my life. We use logos to cover over the damp spots on our threadbare walls, to sugar coat the unpalatable real. Could it be, nonetheless, that the insistence of the logo can teach us something about how to manage our signs, or even create new ones? By what practice can we make the logo immanent, or reverse the emptying out of the quotidian that its logic demands? How might we secure “relations with others based not in identification or recognition, but encounter and new compositions” (Deleuze, 2001: 15)? The efficacy of the logo-sign is related to our capacity for recognition and our desire to secure identity. In response to our propensity toward consumer boredom, there unfolds increasingly sophisticated morphological permutations of logos and the products, both material and immaterial, they designate. The fact that we are apt to the immediate, frequently unconscious recognition of the logo-sign allows it an elasticity of expression. All the same, there is an insistent emptiness in worldly signs, as witnessed in the logo, “one does not think and one does not act, but one makes signs,” (Deleuze, 2000: 6) the more the better. I am not laughing, I am merely making the gestures that suggest the idea of laughter. I am not a sportsperson, but I am wearing garb that would suggest a healthy and active life. We are even more sophisticated than this, for we can appreciate the multiple levels of significance that the running shoe seemingly offers its wearer. The worldly sign, and I would like to suggest that the logo-sign is an exemplary instance of this, “anticipates action as it does thought, annuls thought as it does action, and declares itself adequate: whence its stereotyped aspect and its vacuity” (6-7). It could be that Deleuze is too harsh here. The consumer can be a sophisticated actor, even if they do frequently become indiscernible from the logo of their choice. Deleuze and Guattari deplore the ‘ideas men,’ who have wrought such havoc, who have made of our desire something empty and unproductive. They accuse these “shameless and inane” advertising executives of having requisitioned the philosophical concept for their add campaigns, making of it a commercial product (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 10). Logos, the word of the god of consumerism. The ideas men know that the strength of the logo-sign resides in the fact that, “it doesn’t matter what it means, it’s still signifying” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 112). The logo-sign holds us firmly under its seductive sway. It permeates our affective landscape, impressing itself upon us so thoroughly that our very corporeal existence becomes host to a swarm of signs. We ourselves circulate as so many signs, carrying on our bodies innumerable minor signs and insignias. We inhabit a “network without beginning or end…an amorphous atmospheric continuum” (112), from which it is frequently difficult to distinguish ourselves. Instead, we become mere ciphers of our consumer behaviour, which will be noted and collated with each electro-plastic transaction. This is what Deleuze and Guattari have called the shadow world of signs, where signs refer to other signs ad infinitum, and where “the statement survives its object, the name survives its owner” (113). Here, although it offers little nourishment, “the simulation of a pack of noodles has become the true concept” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 10). The logo-sign operates by way of its relationship with an idea, or that concept stolen by ideas men. It is a vague idea, perhaps little more than a feeling that arouses an ill-defined desire that we believe will be consummated in the acquisition of some object or other. The work of the logo-sign is to designate a product-object, but this is a relation we tend to reverse, “we think that the ‘object’ itself has the secret of the sign it emits.” (Deleuze, 2000: 27) Ironically, the habitual assumption by which we think we can count on the “possession of things or on the consumption of objects,” an assumption augmented by the logo-sign, generally leaves us dissatisfied. Why, finally, despite our conquest of the object, do we so often feel that something is missing? Because the logo-sign that attaches itself to the object induces in us, the consumer, a sensibility toward the complex of logo and product. We become convinced that the object accommodates a fixed content that exists as a doppelganger for the obscure idea that has begun to plague our fantasies. It is important that the idea the logo communicates is vague and inexact, for we should not be given the opportunity to compare the registers of product and logo too closely. We achieve the object, we take it into our possession and all the gradually accumulated consumer pleasure begins to dissipate. The idea that aroused our desire has silently and surreptitiously slipped away. With what remarkable ease we become hooked. Then, the perpetuity of the consumer present demands that we promptly go in search of our next conquest, as little by little the world gets used up. Such are the highs and lows of logo induced consumer activity. That fiery and brief flush we suffer when we finally act on our desire to purchase, to own, to sport that particular product (my pair of shoes), makes the heart race. Quite literally, the blood is caused to rise. But this consumer glow tends to be followed by a vague, queasy sense of consumer guilt, which is succeeded in turn by consumer amnesia. The forgetfulness that assuages our consumer dissatisfaction keeps the logo-world turning. If we assume that we cannot escape the reign of the logo-sign and its logic, what can we instead choose to do with it? How do we return from our transcendent distractions to a field of immanence? How do we address the ever unfolding problems of this difficult world, day in, day out? This difficult world, a temporal maelstrom of immanence is only thinly disguised by our habits. Though it gives us little purchase, its unending upsurge of novelty surely offers some clues. As has been suggested above, the logo-sign depends on our well-tuned faculty for recognition. I see the same again, or the same with minor variations. Where is the novelty here? I circle around the constant of an obscure idea that draws me in and then, at the last moment, mysteriously escapes. How does the logo-sign instead become the sign of an unexpected encounter that encourages creative endeavours, especially when it always seems that the ideas men are one step ahead? Ideas men know full well the attraction of the new and are well practiced in dressing old concepts in the garb of the novel. They know how to deploy the logo, often setting it loose on the field of immanence where it will catch us unawares only to draw us away from real problems and productive engagements. Deleuze tells us that it is the plane of immanence that leads us into and not away from a life. This is the milieu in which we actualise possibilities at once as continuing to address the problems of the here and now as it slips away (Deleuze, 2001: 31). In part it is a matter of disentangling ourselves from the stultification of brand oriented identity formation, manifested in our intricate taxonomies of consumer-subjects and product-objects. Deleuze incites us to consider instead a participation in the impersonal process of singularisation. This has nothing to do with the spectacularly particular individual, her ownership of a value laden object, and her belief that such acquisitiveness will lead her to a higher actuality. The work required demands our extrication from the careful consumer training we have received, wherein we have determined that we are subjects of a certain genre of product in need of appropriate object accessories. It may simply be a matter of practicing a logo-awareness, of readjusting our consumer mores so that they align with the presentiment of other, less exploitative possibilities. We might consider all the minor relations, silent, invisible and absolutely crucial that interact to deliver the items that populate our consumer world. By these endlessly reconfigured relations, we are inextricably gathered into other lives, into the ebb and flow of uncountable singularities. Works Cited Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Capitalism and Schizophrenia: A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. What is Philosophy? Trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson, London and New York: Verso, 1994. Deleuze, Gilles. Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Deleuze, Gilles. Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life, trans. Anne Boyman, New York: Zone Books, 2001. Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Frichot, Hélène. "On the relentless logic of the logo-sign" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/10-sign.php>. APA Style Frichot, H. (2003, Jun 19). On the relentless logic of the logo-sign. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/10-sign.php>

Dégueulasse is French slang for “disgusting,” derived in 1867 from the French verb dégueuler, to vomit. Despite its vulgar status, it is frequently used by almost every French speaker, including foreigners and students. It is also a term that has often been employed to describe the 1973 cult film, La Grande bouffe [Blow Out], by Marco Ferreri, which recounts in grotesque detail the gastronomic suicide of four male protagonists. This R-rated French-Italian production was booed, and the director spat on, at the 26th Cannes Film Festival—the Jury President, Ingrid Bergman, said it was the most “sordid” film she’d ever seen, and is even reported to have vomited after watching it (Télérama). Ferreri nevertheless walked away with the Prix FIPRESCI, awarded by the Federation of International Critics, and it is apparently the largest grossing release in the history of Paris with more than 700,000 entries in Paris and almost 3 million in France overall. Scandal sells, and this was especially seemingly so 1970s, when this film was avidly consumed as part of an unholy trinity alongside Bernardo Bertolucci’s Le Dernier Tango à Paris [Last Tango in Paris] (1972) and Jean Eustache’s La Maman et la putain [The Mother and the Whore] (1973). Fast forward forty years, though, and at the very moment when La Grande bouffe was being commemorated with a special screening on the 2013 Cannes Film Festival programme, a handful of University of Melbourne French students in a subject called “Matters of Taste” were boycotting the film as an unacceptable assault to their sensibilities. Over the decade that I have been showing the film to undergraduate students, this has never happened before. In this article, I want to examine critically the questions of taste that underpin this particular predicament. Analysing firstly the intradiegetic portrayal of taste in the film, through both gustatory and aesthetic signifiers, then the choice of the film as a key element in a University subject corpus, I will finally question the (dis)taste displayed by certain students, contextualising it as part of an ongoing socio-cultural commentary on food, sex, life, and death. Framed by a brief foray into Bourdieusian theories of taste, I will attempt to draw some conclusions on the continual renegotiation of gustatory and aesthetic tastes in relation to La Grande bouffe, and thereby deepen understanding of why it has become the incarnation of dégueulasse today. Theories of Taste In the 1970s, the parameters of “good” and “bad” taste imploded in the West, following political challenges to the power of the bourgeoisie that also undermined their status as the contemporary arbiters of taste. This revolution of manners was particularly shattering in France, fuelled by the initial success of the May 68 student, worker, and women’s rights movements (Ross). The democratization of taste served to legitimize desires different from those previously dictated by bourgeois norms, enabling greater diversity in representing taste across a broad spectrum. It was reflected in the cultural products of the 1970s, including cinema, which had already broken with tradition during the New Wave in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and became a vector for political ideologies as well as radical aesthetic choices (Smith). Commonly regarded as “the decade that taste forgot,” the 1970s were also a time for re-assessing the sociology of taste, with the magisterial publication of Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979, English trans. 1984). As Bourdieu refuted Kant’s differentiation between the legitimate aesthetic, so defined by its “disinterestedness,” and the common aesthetic, derived from sensory pleasures and ordinary meanings, he also attempted to abolish the opposition between the “taste of reflection” (pure pleasure) and the “taste of sense” (facile pleasure) (Bourdieu 7). In so doing, he laid the foundations of a new paradigm for understanding the apparently incommensurable choices that are not the innate expression of our unique personalities, but rather the product of our class, education, family experiences—our habitus. Where Bourdieu’s theories align most closely with the relationship between taste and revulsion is in the realm of aesthetic disposition and its desire to differentiate: “good” taste is almost always predicated on the distaste of the tastes of others. Tastes (i.e. manifested preferences) are the practical affirmation of an inevitable difference. It is no accident that, when they have to be justified, they are asserted purely negatively, by the refusal of other tastes. In matters of taste, more than anywhere else, all determination is negation; and tastes are perhaps first and foremost distastes, disgust provoked by horror or visceral intolerance (“sick-making”) of the tastes of others. “De gustibus non est disputandum”: not because “tous les goûts sont dans la nature,” but because each taste feels itself to be natural—and so it almost is, being a habitus—which amounts to rejecting others as unnatural and therefore vicious. Aesthetic intolerance can be terribly violent. Aversion to different life-styles is perhaps one of the strongest barriers between the classes (Bourdieu). Although today’s “Gen Y” Melbourne University students are a long way from 1970s French working class/bourgeois culture clashes, these observations on taste as the corollary of distaste are still salient tools of interpretation of their attitudes towards La Grande bouffe. And, just as Bourdieu effectively deconstructed Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgement and the 18th “century of taste” notions of universality and morality in aesthetics (Dickie, Gadamer, Allison) in his groundbreaking study of distinction, his own theories have in turn been subject to revision in an age of omnivorous consumption and eclectic globalisation, with various cultural practices further destabilising the hierarchies that formerly monopolized legitimate taste (Sciences Humaines, etc). Bourdieu’s theories are still, however, useful for analysing La Grande bouffe given the contemporaneous production of these texts, as they provide a frame for understanding (dis)taste both within the filmic narrative and in the wider context of its reception. Taste and Distaste in La Grande bouffe To go to the cinema is like to eat or shit, it’s a physiological act, it’s urban guerrilla […] Enough with feelings, I want to make a physiological film (Celluloid Liberation Front). Marco Ferreri’s statements about his motivations for La Grande bouffe coincide here with Bourdieu’s explanation of taste: clearly the director wished to depart from psychological cinema favoured by contemporary critics and audiences and demonstrated his distaste for their preference. There were, however, psychological impulses underpinning his subject matter, as according to film academic Maurizio Viano, Ferrari had a self-destructive, compulsive relation to food, having been forced to spend a few weeks in a Swiss clinic specialising in eating disorders in 1972–1973 (Viano). Food issues abound in his biography. In an interview with Tullio Masoni, the director declared: “I was fat as a child”; his composer Phillipe Sarde recalls the grand Italian-style dinners that he would organise in Paris during the film; and, two of the film’s stars, Marcello Mastroianni and Ugo Tognazzi, actually credit the conception of La Grande bouffe to a Rabelaisian feast prepared by Tognazzi, during which Ferreri exclaimed “hey guys, we are killing ourselves!” (Viano 197–8). Evidently, there were psychological factors behind this film, but it was nevertheless the physiological aspects that Ferreri chose to foreground in his creation. The resulting film does indeed privilege the physiological, as the protagonists fornicate, fart, vomit, defecate, and—of course—eat, to wild excess. The opening scenes do not betray such sordid sequences; the four bourgeois men are introduced one by one so as to establish their class credentials as well as display their different tastes. We first encounter Ugo (Tognazzi), an Italian chef of humble peasant origins, as he leaves his elegant restaurant “Le Biscuit à soupe” and his bourgeois French wife, to take his knives and recipes away with him for the weekend. Then Michel (Piccoli), a TV host who has pre-taped his shows, gives his apartment keys to his 1970s-styled baba-cool daughter as he bids her farewell, and packs up his cleaning products and rubber gloves to take with him. Marcello (Mastroianni) emerges from a cockpit in his aviator sunglasses and smart pilot’s uniform, ordering his sexy airhostesses to carry his cheese and wine for him as he takes a last longing look around his plane. Finally, the judge and owner of the property where the action will unfold, Philippe (Noiret), is awoken by an elderly woman, Nicole, who feeds him tea and brioche, pestering him for details of his whereabouts for the weekend, until he demonstrates his free will and authority, joking about his serious life, and lying to her about attending a legal conference in London. Having given over power of attorney to Nicole, he hints at the finality of his departure, but is trying to wrest back his independence as his nanny exhorts him not to go off with whores. She would rather continue to “sacrifice herself for him” and “keep it in the family,” as she discreetly pleasures him in this scene. Scholars have identified each protagonist as an ideological signifier. For some, they represent power—Philippe is justice—and three products of that ideology: Michel is spectacle, Ugo is food, and Marcello is adventure (Celluloid Liberation Front). For others, these characters are the perfect incarnations of the first four Freudian stages of sexual development: Philippe is Oedipal, Michel is indifferent, Ugo is oral, and Marcello is impotent (Tury & Peter); or even the four temperaments of Hippocratic humouralism: Philippe the phlegmatic, Michel the melancholic, Ugo the sanguine, and Marcello the choleric (Calvesi, Viano). I would like to offer another dimension to these categories, positing that it is each protagonist’s taste that prescribes his participation in this gastronomic suicide as well as the means by which he eventually dies. Before I develop this hypothesis, I will first describe the main thrust of the narrative. The four men arrive at the villa at 68 rue Boileau where they intend to end their days (although this is not yet revealed). All is prepared for the most sophisticated and decadent feasting imaginable, with a delivery of the best meats and poultry unfurling like a surrealist painting. Surrounded by elegant artworks and demonstrating their cultural capital by reciting Shakespeare, Brillat-Savarin, and other classics, the men embark on a race to their death, beginning with a competition to eat the most oysters while watching a vintage pornographic slideshow. There is a strong thread of masculine athletic engagement in this film, as has been studied in detail by James R. Keller in “Four Little Caligulas: La Grande bouffe, Consumption and Male Masochism,” and this is exacerbated by the arrival of a young but matronly schoolmistress Andréa (Ferréol) with her students who want to see the garden. She accepts the men’s invitation to stay on in the house to become another object of competitive desire, and fully embraces all the sexual and gustatory indulgence around her. Marcello goes further by inviting three prostitutes to join them and Ugo prepares a banquet fit for a funeral. The excessive eating makes Michel flatulent and Marcello impotent; when Marcello kicks the toilet in frustration, it explodes in the famous fecal fountain scene that apparently so disgusted his then partner Catherine Deneuve, that she did not speak to him for a week (Ebert). The prostitutes flee the revolting madness, but Andréa stays like an Angel of Death, helping the men meet their end and, in surviving, perhaps symbolically marking an end to the masculinist bourgeoisie they represent.To return to the role of taste in defining the rise and demise of the protagonists, let me begin with Marcello, as he is the first to die. Despite his bourgeois attitudes, he is a modern man, associated with machines and mobility, such as the planes and the beautiful Bugatti, which he strokes with greater sensuality than the women he hoists onto it. His taste is for the functioning mechanical body, fast and competitive, much like himself when he is gorging on oysters. But his own body betrays him when his “masculine mechanics” stop functioning, and it is the fact that the Bugatti has broken down that actually causes his death—he is found frozen in driver’s seat after trying to escape in the Bugatti during the night. Marcello’s taste for the mechanical leads therefore to his eventual demise. Michel is the next victim of his own taste, which privileges aesthetic beauty, elegance, the arts, and fashion, and euphemises the less attractive or impolite, the scatological, boorish side of life. His feminized attire—pink polo-neck and flowing caftan—cannot distract from what is happening in his body. The bourgeois manners that bind him to beauty mean that breaking wind traumatises him. His elegant gestures at the dance barre encourage rather than disguise his flatulence; his loud piano playing cannot cover the sound of his loud farts, much to the mirth of Philippe and Andréa. In a final effort to conceal his painful bowel obstruction, he slips outside to die in obscene and noisy agony, balanced in an improbably balletic pose on the balcony balustrade. His desire for elegance and euphemism heralds his death. Neither Marcello nor Michel go willingly to their ends. Their tastes are thwarted, and their deaths are disgusting to them. Their cadavers are placed in the freezer room as silent witnesses to the orgy that accelerates towards its fatal goal. Ugo’s taste is more earthy and inherently linked to the aims of the adventure. He is the one who states explicitly: “If you don’t eat, you won’t die.” He wants to cook for others and be appreciated for his talents, as well as eat and have sex, preferably at the same time. It is a combination of these desires that kills him as he force-feeds himself the monumental creation of pâté in the shape of the Cathedral of Saint-Peter that has been rejected as too dry by Philippe, and too rich by Andréa. The pride that makes him attempt to finish eating his masterpiece while Andréa masturbates him on the dining table leads to a heart-stopping finale for Ugo. As for Philippe, his taste is transgressive. In spite of his upstanding career as a judge, he lies and flouts convention in his unorthodox relationship with nanny Nicole. Andréa represents another maternal figure to whom he is attracted and, while he wishes to marry her, thereby conforming to bourgeois norms, he also has sex with her, and her promiscuous nature is clearly signalled. Given his status as a judge, he reasons that he can not bring Marcello’s frozen body inside because concealing a cadaver is a crime, yet he promotes collective suicide on his premises. Philippe’s final transgression of the rules combines diabetic disobedience with Oedipal complex—Andréa serves him a sugary pink jelly dessert in the form of a woman’s breasts, complete with cherries, which he consumes knowingly and mournfully, causing his death. Unlike Marcello and Michel, Ugo and Philippe choose their demise by indulging their tastes for ingestion and transgression. Following Ferreri’s motivations and this analysis of the four male protagonists, taste is clearly a cornerstone of La Grande bouffe’s conception and narrative structure. It is equally evident that these tastes are contrary to bourgeois norms, provoking distaste and even revulsion in spectators. The film’s reception at the time of its release and ever since have confirmed this tendency in both critical reviews and popular feedback as André Habib’s article on Salo and La Grande bouffe (2001) meticulously demonstrates. With such a violent reaction, one might wonder why La Grande bouffe is found on so many cinema studies curricula and is considered to be a must-see film (The Guardian). Corpus and Corporeality in Food Film Studies I chose La Grande bouffe as the first film in the “Matters of Taste” subject, alongside Luis Bunuel’s Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie, Gabriel Axel’s Babette’s Feast, and Laurent Bénégui’s Au Petit Marguery, as all are considered classic films depicting French eating cultures. Certainly any French cinema student would know La Grande bouffe and most cinephiles around the world have seen it. It is essential background knowledge for students studying French eating cultures and features as a key reference in much scholarly research and popular culture on the subject. After explaining the canonical status of La Grande bouffe and thus validating its inclusion in the course, I warned students about the explicit nature of the film. We studied it for one week out of the 12 weeks of semester, focusing on questions of taste in the film and the socio-cultural representations of food. Although the almost ubiquitous response was: “C’est dégueulasse!,” there was no serious resistance until the final exam when a few students declared that they would boycott any questions on La Grande bouffe. I had not actually included any such questions in the exam. The student evaluations at the end of semester indicated that several students questioned the inclusion of this “disgusting pornography” in the corpus. There is undoubtedly less nudity, violence, gore, or sex in this film than in the Game of Thrones TV series. What, then, repulses these Gen Y students? Is it as Pasolini suggests, the neorealistic dialogue and décor that disturbs, given the ontologically challenging subject of suicide? (Viano). Or is it the fact that there is no reason given for the desire to end their lives, which privileges the physiological over the psychological? Is the scatological more confronting than the pornographic? Interestingly, “food porn” is now a widely accepted term to describe a glamourized and sometimes sexualized presentation of food, with Nigella Lawson as its star, and hundreds of blog sites reinforcing its popularity. Yet as Andrew Chan points out in his article “La Grande bouffe: Cooking Shows as Pornography,” this film is where it all began: “the genealogy reaches further back, as brilliantly visualized in Marco Ferreri’s 1973 film La Grande bouffe, in which four men eat, screw and fart themselves to death” (47). Is it the overt corporeality depicted in the film that shocks cerebral students into revulsion and rebellion? Conclusion In the guise of a conclusion, I suggest that my Gen Y students’ taste may reveal a Bourdieusian distaste for the taste of others, in a third degree reaction to the 1970s distaste for bourgeois taste. First degree: Ferreri and his entourage reject the psychological for the physiological in order to condemn bourgeois values, provoking scandal in the 1970s, but providing compelling cinema on a socio-political scale. Second degree: in spite of the outcry, high audience numbers demonstrate their taste for scandal, and La Grande bouffe becomes a must-see canonical film, encouraging my choice to include it in the “Matters of Taste” corpus. Third degree: my Gen Y students’ taste expresses a distaste for the academic norms that I have embraced in showing them the film, a distaste that may be more aesthetic than political. Oui, c’est dégueulasse, mais … Bibliography Allison, Henry E. Kant’s Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2001. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1984. Calvesi, M. “Dipingere all moviola” (Painting at the Moviola). Corriere della Sera, 10 Oct. 1976. Reprint. “Arti figurative e il cinema” (Cinema and the Visual Arts). Avanguardia di massa. Ed. M. Calvesi. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1978. 243–46. Celluloid Liberation Front. “Consumerist Ultimate Indigestion: La Grande Bouffe's Deadly Physiological Pleasures.” Bright Lights Film Journal 60 (2008). 13 Jan. 2014 ‹http://brightlightsfilm.com/60/60lagrandebouffe.php#.Utd6gs1-es5›. Chan, Andrew. “La Grande bouffe: Cooking Shows as Pornography.” Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture 3.4 (2003): 47–53. Dickie, George. The Century of Taste: The Philosophical Odyssey of Taste in the Eighteenth Century. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. Ebert, Roger, “La Grande bouffe.” 13 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/la-grande-bouffe-1973›. Ferreri, Marco. La Grande bouffe. Italy-France, 1973. Freedman, Paul H. Food: The History of Taste. U of California P, 2007. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Trans. Joel Winsheimer and Donald C. Marshall. New York: Continuum, 1999. Habib, André. “Remarques sur une ‘réception impossible’: Salo and La Grande bouffe.” Hors champ (cinéma), 4 Jan. 2001. 11 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/cinema/030101/salo-bouffe.html›. Keller, James R. “Four Little Caligulas: La Grande bouffe, Consumption and Male Masochism.” Food, Film and Culture: A Genre Study. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co, 2006: 49–59. Masoni, Tullio. Marco Ferreri. Gremese, 1998. Pasolini, P.P. “Le ambigue forme della ritualita narrativa.” Cinema Nuovo 231 (1974): 342–46. Ross, Kristin. May 68 and its Afterlives. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008. Smith, Alison. French Cinema in the 1970s: The Echoes of May. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2005. Télérama: “La Grande bouffe: l’un des derniers grands scandales du Festival de Cannes. 19 May 2013. 13 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.telerama.fr/festival-de-cannes/2013/la-grande-bouffe-l-un-des-derniers-grands-scandales-du-festival-de-cannes,97615.php›. The Guardian: 1000 films to see before you die. 2007. 17 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.theguardian.com/film/series/1000-films-to-see-before-you-die› Tury, F., and O. Peter. “Food, Life, and Death: The Film La Grande bouffe of Marco Ferreri in an Art Psychological Point of View.” European Psychiatry 22.1 (2007): S214. Viano, Maurizio. “La Grande Abbuffata/La Grande bouffe.” The Cinema of Italy. Ed. Giorgio Bertellini. London: Wallflower Press, 2004: 193–202.

Ever since I tripped over Tiddles while I was carrying a pile of discs into the studio, I’ve known it was possible to get a laugh out of gramophone records!Max Bygraves In 1978 the music critic Lester Bangs published a typically pugnacious essay with the fighting title, “The Ten Most Ridiculous Albums of the Seventies.” Before deliciously launching into his execution of Uri Geller’s self-titled album or Rick Dees’ The Original Disco Duck, Bangs asserts that because that decade was history’s silliest, it stands to reason “that ridiculous records should become the norm instead of anomalies,” that abominations should be the best of our time (Bangs, 1978). This absurd pretzel logic sounds uncannily like Jacques Derrida’s definition of the “post” condition, since for it to arrive it begins by not arriving (Derrida 1987, 29). Lester is thinking like a poststructuralist. The oddness of the most singularly odd album out in Bangs’ greatest misses of the seventies had nothing to do with how ridiculous it was, but the fact that it even existed at all. (Bangs 1978) The album was entitled The Best of Marcel Marceao. Produced by Michael Viner the album contained four tracks, with two identical on both sides: “Silence,” which is nineteen minutes long and “Applause,” one minute. To underline how extraordinary this gramophone record is, John Cage’s Lecture on Nothing (1959) is cacophonous by comparison. While Bangs agrees with popular opinion that The Best of Marcel Marceao the “ultimate concept album,” he concluded that this is “one of those rare records that never dates” (Bangs, 1978). This tacet album is a good way to start thinking about the Classical Gas project, and the ironic semiotics at work in it (Tofts & Gye 2011). It too is about records that are silent and that never date. First, the album’s cover art, featuring a theatrically posed Marceau, implies the invitation to speak in the absence of speech; or, in our terms, it is asking to be re-written. Secondly, the French mime’s surname is spelled incorrectly, with an “o” rather than “u” as the final letter. As well as the caprice of an actual album by Marcel Marceau, the implicit presence and absence of the letters o and u is appropriately in excess of expectations, weird and unexpected like an early title in the Classical Gas catalogue, Ernesto Laclau’s and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. (classical-gas.com) Like a zootrope animation, it is impossible not to see the o and u flickering at one at the same time on the cover. In this duplicity it performs the conventional and logical permutation of English grammar. Silence invites difference, variation within a finite lexical set and the opportunity to choose individual items from it. Here is album cover art that speaks of presence and absence, of that which is anticipated and unexpected: a gramophone recoding without sound. In this the Marceau cover is one of Roland Barthes’ mythologies, something larger than life, structured like a language and structured out of language (Barthes 1982). This ambiguity is the perfidious grammar that underwrites Classical Gas. Images, we learned from structuralism, are codified, or rather, are code. Visual remix is a rhetorical gesture of recoding that interferes with the semiotic DNA of an image. The juxtaposition of text and image is interchangeable and requires our imagination of what we are looking at and what it might sound like. This persistent interplay of metaphor and metonymy has enabled us to take more than forty easy listening albums and republish them as mild-mannered recordings from the maverick history of ideas, from Marxism and psychoanalysis, to reception theory, poststructuralism and the writings of critical auteurs. Foucault à gogo, for instance, takes a 1965 James Last dance album and recodes it as the second volume of The History of Sexuality. In saying this, we are mindful of the ambivalence of the very possibility of this connection, to how and when the eureka moment of remix recognition occurs, if at all. Mix and remix are, after Jean Baudrillard, both precession and procession of simulacra (Baudrillard, 1983). The nature of remix is that it is always already elusive and anachronistic. Not everyone can be guaranteed to see the shadow of one text in dialogue with another, like a hi-fi palimpsest. Or another way of saying this, such an epiphany of déjà vu, of having seen this before, may happen after the fact of encounter. This anachrony is central to remix practices, from the films of Quentin Tarrantino and the “séance fictions” of Soda_Jerk, to obscure Flintstones/Goodfellas mashups on YouTube. It is also implicit in critical understandings of an improbable familiarity with the superabundance of cultural archives, the dizzying excess of an infinite record library straight out of Jorge Luis Borges’ ever-expanding imagination. Drifting through the stacks of such a repository over an entire lifetime any title found, for librarian and reader alike, is either original and remix, sometime. Metalanguages that seek to counter this ambivalence are forms of bad faith, like film spoilers Brodie’s Notes. Accordingly, this essay sets out to explain some of the generic conventions of Classical Gas, as a remix project in which an image’s semiotic DNA is rewired and recontextualised. While a fake, it is also completely real (Faith in fakes, as it happens, may well be a forthcoming Umberto Eco title in the series). While these album covers are hyperreal, realistic in excess of being real, the project does take some inspiration from an actual, rather than imaginary archive of album covers. In 2005, Jewish artist Dani Gal happened upon a 1968 LP that documented the events surrounding the Six Day War in Israel in 1967. To his surprise, he found a considerable number of similar LPs to do with significant twentieth century historical events, speeches and political debates. In the artist’s own words, the LPs collected in his Historical Record Archive (2005-ongoing) are in fact silent, since it is only their covers that are exhibited in installations of this work, signifying a potential sound that visitors must try to audition. As Gal has observed, the interactive contract of the work is derived from the audience’s instinct to “try to imagine the sounds” even though they cannot listen to them (Gal 2011, 182). Classical Gas deliberately plays with this potential yearning that Gal astutely instils in his viewer and aspiring auditor. While they can never be listened to, they can entice, after Gilles Deleuze, a “virtual co-existence” of imaginary sound that manifests itself as a contract between viewer and LP (Deleuze 1991, 63). The writer Jeffrey Sconce condensed this embrace of the virtual as something plausibly real when he pithily observed of the Classical Gas project that it is “the thrift-bin in my fantasy world. I want to play S/Z at 78 rpm” (Sconce 2011). In terms of Sconce’s spectral media interests the LPs are haunted by the trace of potential “other” sounds that have taken possession of and appropriated the covers for another use (Sconce 2000).Mimetic While most albums are elusive and metaphoric (such as Freud’s Totem and Taboo, or Luce Irigaray’s Ethics of Sexual Difference), some titles do make a concession to a tantalizing, mimetic literalness (such as Das Institut fur Sozialforschung). They display a trace of the haunting subject in terms of a tantalizing echo of fact or suggestion of verifiable biography. The motivation here is the recognition of a potential similarity, since most Classical Gas titles work by contrast. As with Roland Barthes’ analysis of the erotics of the fashion system, so with Gilles Deleuze’s Coldness and Cruelty: it is “where the garment gapes” that the tease begins. (Barthes 1994, 9) Or, in this instance, where the cigarette smokes. (classical-gas.com) A casual Max Bygraves, paused in mid-thought, looks askance while lighting up. Despite the temptation to read even more into this, a smoking related illness did not contribute to Bygraves’ death in 2012. However, dying of Alzheimer’s disease, his dementia is suggestive of the album’s intrinsic capacity to be a palimpsest of the co-presence of different memories, of confused identities, obscure realities that are virtual and real. Beginning with the album cover itself, it has to become an LP (Deleuze 1991, 63). First, it is a cardboard, planar sleeve measuring 310mm squared, that can be imprinted with a myriad of different images. Secondly, it is conventionally identified in terms of a title, such as Organ Highlights or Classics Up to Date. Thirdly it is inscribed by genre, which may be song, drama, spoken word, or novelty albums of industrial or instrumental sounds, such as Memories of Steam and Accelerated Accordians. A case in point is John Woodhouse And His Magic Accordion from 1969. (classical-gas.com) All aspects of its generic attributes as benign and wholesome accordion tunes are warped and re-interpreted in Classical Gas. Springtime for Kittler appeared not long after the death of its eponymous philosopher in 2011. Directed by Richard D. James, also known as Aphex Twin, it is a homage album to Friedrich Kittler by the PostProducers, a fictitious remix collective inspired by Mel Brooks whose personnel include Mark Amerika and Darren Tofts. The single from this album, yet to be released, is a paean to Kittler’s last words, “Alle Apparate auschalten.” Foucault à gogo (vol. 2), the first album remixed for this series, is also typical of this archaeological approach to the found object. (classical-gas.com) The erasure and replacement of pre-existing text in a similar font re-writes an iconic image of wooing that is indicative of romantic album covers of this period. This album is reflective of the overall project in that the actual James Last album (1968) preceded the publication of the Foucault text (1976) that haunts it. This is suggestive of how coding and recoding are in the eye of the beholder and the specific time in which the remixed album is encountered. It doesn’t take James Last, Michel Foucault or Theodor Holm Nelson to tell you that there is no such thing as a collective memory with linear recall. As the record producer Milt Gabler observes in the liner notes to this album, “whatever the title with this artist, the tune remains the same, that distinct and unique Foucault à gogo.” “This artist” in this instance is Last or Foucault, as well as Last and Foucault. Similarly Milt Gabler is an actual author of liner notes (though not on the James Last album) whose words from another album, another context and another time, are appropriated and deftly re-written with Last’s Hammond à gogo volume 2 and The History of Sexuality in mind as a palimpsest (this approach to sampling liner notes and re-writing them as if they speak for the new album is a trope at work in all the titles in the series). And after all is said and done with the real or remixed title, both artists, after Umberto Eco, will have spoken once more of love (Eco 1985, 68). Ambivalence Foucault à gogo is suggestive of the semiotic rewiring that underwrites Classical Gas as a whole. What is at stake in this is something that poststructuralism learned from its predecessor. Taking the tenuous conventionality of Ferdinand de Saussure’s signifier and signified as a starting point, Lacan, Derrida and others embraced the freedom of this arbitrariness as the convention or social contract that brings together a thing and a word that denotes it. This insight of liberation, or what Hélène Cixous and others, after Jacques Lacan, called jouissance (Lacan 1992), meant that texts were bristling with ambiguity and ambivalence, free play, promiscuity and, with a nod to Mikhail Bakhtin, carnival (Bakhtin 1984). A picture of a pipe was, after Foucault after Magritte, not a pipe (Foucault 1983). This po-faced sophistry is expressed in René Magritte’s “Treachery of Images” of 1948, which screamed out that the word pipe could mean anything. Foucault’s reprise of Magritte in “This is Not a Pipe” also speaks of Classical Gas’ embrace of the elasticity of sign and signifier, his “plastic elements” an inadvertent suggestion of vinyl (Foucault 1983, 53). (classical-gas.com) This uncanny association of structuralism and remixed vinyl LPs is intimated in Ferdinand de Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale. Its original cover art is straight out of a structuralist text-book, with its paired icons and words of love, rain, honey, rose, etc. But this text as performed by Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians in New York in 1956 is no less plausible than Saussure’s lectures in Geneva in 1906. Cultural memory and cultural amnesia are one and the same thing. Out of all of the Classical Gas catalogue, this album is arguably the most suggestive of what Jeffrey Sconce would call “haunting” (Sconce, 2000), an ambivalent mixing of the “memory and desire” that T.S. Eliot wrote of in the allusive pages of The Waste Land (Eliot 1975, 27). Here we encounter the memory of a bookish study of signs from the early twentieth century and the desire for its vinyl equivalent on World Record Club in the 1960s. Memory and desire, either or, or both. This ambivalence was deftly articulated by Roland Barthes in his last book, Camera Lucida, as a kind of spectral haunting, a vision or act of double seeing in the perception of the photographic image. This flickering of perception is never static, predictable or repeatable. It is a way of seeing contingent upon who is doing the looking and when. Barthes famously conceptualised this interplay in perception of an between the conventions that culture has mandated, its studium, and the unexpected, idiosyncratic double vision that is unique to the observer, its punctum (Barthes 1982, 26-27). Accordingly, the Cours de linguistique générale is a record by Saussure as well as the posthumous publication in Paris and Lausanne of notes from his lectures in 1916. (Barthes 1982, 51) With the caption “Idiot children in an institution, New Jersey, 1924,” American photographer Lewis Hine’s anthropological study declares that this is a clinical image of pathological notions of monstrosity and aberration at the time. Barthes though, writing in a post-1968 Paris, only sees an outrageous Danton collar and a banal finger bandage (Barthes 1982, 51). With the radical, protestant cries of the fallout of the Paris riots in mind, as well as a nod to music writer Greil Marcus (1989), it is tempting to see Hine’s image as the warped cover of a Dead Kennedys album, perhaps Plastic Surgery Disasters. In terms of the Classical Gas approach to recoding, though, this would be far too predictable; for a start there is neither a pipe, a tan cardigan nor a chenille scarf to be seen. A more heart-warming, suitable title might be Ray Conniff’s 1965 Christmas Album: Here We Come A-Caroling. Irony (secretprehistory.net) Like our Secret Gestural Prehistory of Mobile Devices project (Tofts & Gye), Classical Gas approaches the idea of recoding and remixing with a relentless irony. The kind of records we collect and the covers which we use for this project are what you would expect to find in the hutch of an old gramophone player, rather than “what’s hot” in iTunes. The process of recoding the album covers seeks to realign expectations of what is being looked at, such that it becomes difficult to see it in any other way. In this an album’s recoded signification implies the recognition of the already seen, of album covers like this, that signal something other than what we are seeing; colours, fonts etc., belonging to a historical period, to its genres and its demographic. One of the more bucolic and duplicitous forms of rhetoric, irony wants it both ways, to be totally lounge and theoretically too-cool-for school, as in Rencontre Terrestre by Hélène Cixous and Frédéric-Yves Jeannet. (classical-gas.com) This image persuades through the subtle alteration of typography that it belongs to a style, a period and a vibe that would seem to be at odds with the title and content of the album, but as a totality of image and text is entirely plausible. The same is true of Roland Barthes’ S/Z. The radical semiologist invites us into his comfortable sitting room for a cup of coffee. A traditional Times font reinforces the image of Barthes as an avuncular, Sunday afternoon story-teller or crooner, more Alistair Cooke/Perry Como than French Marxist. (classical-gas.com) In some instances, like Histoire de Tel Quel, there is no text at all on the cover and the image has to do its signifying work iconographically. (classical-gas.com) Here a sixties collage of French-ness on the original Victor Sylvester album from 1963 precedes and anticipates the re-written album it has been waiting for. That said, the original title In France is rather bland compared to Histoire de Tel Quel. A chic blond, the Eiffel Tower and intellectual obscurity vamp synaesthetically, conjuring the smell of Gauloises, espresso and agitated discussions of Communism on the Boulevard St. Germain. With Marcel Marceao with an “o” in mind, this example of a cover without text ironically demonstrates how Classical Gas, like The Secret Gestural Prehistory of Mobile Devices, is ostensibly a writing project. Just as the images are taken hostage from other contexts, text from the liner notes is sampled from other records and re-written in an act of ghost-writing to complete the remixed album. Without the liner notes, Classical Gas would make a capable Photoshop project, but lacks any force as critical remix. The redesigned and re-titled covers certainly re-code the album, transform it into something else; something else that obviously or obliquely reflects the theme, ideas or content of the title, whether it’s Louis Althusser’s Philosophy as a Revolutionary Weapon or Luce Irigaray’s An Ethics of Sexual Difference. If you don’t hear the ruggedness of Leslie Fiedler’s essays in No! In Thunder then the writing hasn’t worked. The liner notes are the albums’ conscience, the rubric that speaks the tunes, the words and elusive ideas that are implied but can never be heard. The Histoire de Tel Quel notes illustrate this suggestiveness: You may well think as is. Philippe Forest doesn’t, not in this Éditions du Seuil classic. The titles included on this recording have been chosen with a dual purpose: for those who wish to think and those who wish to listen. What Forest captures in this album is distinctive, fresh and daring. For what country has said it like it is, has produced more robustesse than France? Here is some of that country’s most famous talent swinging from silk stockings, the can-can, to amour, presented with the full spectrum of stereo sound. (classical-gas.com) The writing accurately imitates the inflection and rhythm of liner notes of the period, so on the one hand it sounds plausibly like a toe-tapping dance album. On the other, and at the same time, it gestures knowingly to the written texts upon which it is based, invoking its rigours as a philosophical text. The dithering suggestiveness of both – is it music or text – is like a scrambled moving image always coming into focus, never quite resolving into one or the other. But either is plausible. The Tel Quel theorists were interested in popular culture like the can-can, they were fascinated with the topic of love and if instead of books they produced albums, their thinking would be auditioned in full stereo sound. With irony in mind, then, it’s hardly surprising to know that the implicit title of the project, that is neither seen nor heard but always imminent, is Classical Gasbags. (classical-gas.com) Liner notes elaborate and complete an implicit narrative in the title and image, making something compellingly realistic that is a composite of reality and fabulation. Consider Adrian Martin’s Surrealism (A Quite Special Frivolity): France is the undeniable capital of today’s contemporary sound. For Adrian Martin, this is home ground. His French soul glows and expands in the lovely Mediterranean warmth of this old favourite, released for the first time on Project 3 Total Sound Stereo. But don’t be deceived by the tonal and melodic caprices that carry you along in flutter-free sound. As Martin hits his groove, there will be revolution by night. Watch out for new Adrian Martin releases soon, including La nuit expérimentale and, his first title in English in many years, One more Bullet in the Head (produced by Bucky Pizzarelli). (classical-gas.com) Referring to Martin’s famous essay of the same name, these notes allusively skirt around his actual biography (he regularly spends time in France), his professional writing on surrealism (“revolution by night” was the sub-title of a catalogue for the Surrealism exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra and the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1993 to which he contributed an essay) (Martin 1993), as well as “One more bullet in the head,” the rejected title of an essay that was published in World Art magazine in New York in the mid-1990s. While the cover evokes the cool vibe of nouvelle vague Paris, it is actually from a 1968 album, Roma Oggi by the American guitarist Tony Mottola (a real person who actually sounds like a fictional character from Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time in America, a film on which Martin has written a book for the British Film Institute). Plausibility, in terms of Martin’s Surrealism album, has to be as compellingly real as the sincerity of Sandy Scott’s Here’s Sandy. And it should be no surprise to see the cover art of Scott’s album return as Georges Bataille’s Erotism. Gramophone The history of the gramophone represents the technological desire to write sound. In this the gramophone record is a ligature of sound and text, a form of phonographic writing. With this history in mind it’s hardly surprising that theorists such as Derrida and Kittler included the gramophone under the conceptual framework of a general grammatology (Derrida 1992, 253 & Kittler 1997, 28). (classical-gas.com) Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology is the avatar of Classical Gas in its re-writing of a previous writing. Re-inscribing the picaresque Pal Joey soundtrack as a foundation text of post-structuralism is appropriate in terms of the gramme or literate principle of Western metaphysics as well as the echolalia of remix. As Derrida observes in Of Grammatology, history and knowledge “have always been determined (and not only etymologically or philosophically) as detours for the purpose of the reappropriation of presence” (Derrida 1976, 10). A gas way to finish, you might say. But in retrospect the ur-text that drives the poetics of Classical Gas is not Of Grammatology but the errant Marcel Marceau album described previously. Far from being an oddity, an aberration or a “novelty” album, it is a classic gramophone recording, the quintessential writing of an absent speech, offbeat and untimely. References Bahktin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Bangs, Lester. “The Ten Most Ridiculous Albums of the Seventies”. Phonograph Record Magazine, March, 1978. Reproduced at http://rateyourmusic.com/list/dacapo/the_ten_most_ridiculous_records_of_the_seventies__by_lester_bangs. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. London: Flamingo, 1982. ---. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. London: Granada, 1982. ---. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext[e], 1983. Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone Books, 2000. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. ---. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987. ---. “Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce,” in Acts of Literature. Ed. Derek Attridge. New York: Routledge, 1992. Eco, Umberto. Reflections on The Name of the Rose. Trans. William Weaver. London: Secker & Warburg, 1985. Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land and Other Poems. London: Faber & Faber, 1975. Foucault, Michel. This Is Not a Pipe. Trans. James Harkness. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. ---. The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality Volume 2. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Random House, 1985. Gal, Dani. Interview with Jens Hoffmann, Istanbul Biennale Companion. Istanbul Foundation for Culture and the Arts, 2011. Kittler, Friedrich. “Gramophone, Film, Typewriter,” in Literature, Media, Information Systems. Ed. John Johnston. Amsterdam: Overseas Publishers Association, 1997. Lacan, Jacques. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959–1960): The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Trans. Dennis Porter. London: Routledge, 1992. Marcus, Greil. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. London: Secker & Warburg, 1989. Martin, Adrian. “The Artificial Night: Surrealism and Cinema,” in Surrealism: Revolution by Night. Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 1993. Sconce, Jeffrey. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. ---. Online communication with authors, June 2011. Tofts, Darren and Lisa Gye. The Secret Gestural Prehistory of Mobile Devices. 2010-ongoing. http://www.secretprehistory.net/. ---. Classical Gas. 2011-ongoing. http://www.classical-gas.com/.

Biracial Phenotypes as Ambivalent SignifiersRacialisation is the process of imbuing a body with meaning (Ahmed). Rockquemore et al.’s study on American Black-White middle-class college youth emphasises the importance of phenotypes in interracial children because “physical appearance is the primary cue for racial group membership… and remains the greatest factor in how mixed-race children are classified by others” (114). Wilson’s work on British mixed race 6 to 9-year-olds argues that interracial children classify other children based on how “they locate themselves in the racial structure and how they feel about the various racial groups” (64).However, interracial children often struggle with claiming a racial identity that does not correspond to their obvious physical appearance because society is more likely to classify or perceive the child based on their corporeal manifestations than their self-identified racial master status. In instances where they are unacknowledged or rejected by homoethinc groups, interracial persons may be deemed ‘illegitimate’ trespassers within social contexts. In response, interracial bodies may selectively hyper/under-visibilise one racial identity depending on personal connotations of the social group in particular settings (Choudhry 119). Choudhry’s book on the ‘chameleon identities’ of mixed race Black-Asian and White-Asian British young people sets out four ‘interpretative repertoires’ that interracials cognitively adopt: ‘Identity in Transition’ where individuals are still coming to terms with their master status; ‘One Ethnic Identity’ where individuals always privilege one race over the other regardless of context; ‘Interethnic Identity’ where individuals consciously and equally express their dual race and parentage at all times; and ‘Situational/Chameleon-like Identity’ where individuals selectively emphasise one race over the other when it benefits them (112-116). This paper follows on a similar mode of enquiry among Malay-Chinese women in Singapore, whose racial master status is situationally-based.In ethnically heterogeneous and culturally diverse Singapore, an individual’s racial phenotype is convenient shorthand that demarcates Others’ appropriate interactions with and expectations of them. Malbon describes these brief encounters in crowded urban settings as ‘mismeetings’, in which a body’s visual markers allow for a quick assessment and situation of a person’s identity and status. A visibly racialised body thus informs Others on how to negotiate cross-cultural sensitivities and understandings with them in a shared social space. For instance, this visibility may help inform the Other of an appropriate choice of mother tongue to be adopted in conversation with a stranger, or whether to extend non-halal food to a ‘Malay-looking’ – and by extension in most parts of South East Asia, Muslim – person.Unlike previous studies, this paper is not focused on interracial individuals’ felt-race, cognitive development, or the ethnic influence in their upbringing. Instead, it concentrates on their praxis of enacting corporeal markers to enable homophilous interactions with homoethnic social groups. Some Malay-Chinese in Singapore have phenotypic features that may not distinctly reflect their ethnic diversity. Hence, they are not readily acknowledged or accepted into some homoethnic contexts and are deemed ‘illegitimate’ trespassers. It is important for Others to be able to situate them since this “brings with it privileges or deprivations that affect [their] relationships with others and [their] relation to the world” (Mohanty 109). Every day interactions that affirm or negate one’s biraciality then become micropolitics of legitimating one’s in-group status; in the words of one woman’s reactions to Malay classmates excluding her from conversations about Hari Raya, “I also Melayu ok”. These women thus find themselves under- or hyper-visibilising facets of their biracial corporeality to negotiate legitimacy and sense of belonging. Through in-depth interviews with five young Malay-Chinese women who have had to renegotiate their biraciality in educational institutions each school year, this paper seeks to document the intentional under/hyper-performativity of biraciality through visible bodily signifiers. It argues that these biracial women who are perceived as illegitimate inhabitants of social settings have agentically adopted the ambivalence others display towards them as everyday micro-actions to exercise their autonomy, and strategically reposition themselves favourably.The five women were contacted through snowball sampling among personal networks in polytechnics and universities, which are education settings where students have the liberty to dress themselves, and thus, visibilise facets of their identity. These settings were also places in which the women had to continually under/hyper-visibilise and remark their race and ethnicity in rotating tutorial and lecture groups every semester, therefore (re)constructing their identities through peer interactions (Wilson in Choudhry 112).They were aged between 18 and 23 at the time of the interview. Their state-documented ‘official’ race, self-identified religion, and state-assigned mother tongue are tabulated below. Pseudonyms are employed.Semi-structured open-ended interviews were conducted to draw out personal nuances and interpretations of their bodies as read by Others. Our face-to-face interaction proved to be especially useful when informants physically referenced bodily markers or performed verbal cues to convey their under/hyper-visibility strategies.InformantNadiaAtiqahSaraClaireWahidaSexFemaleFemaleFemaleFemaleFemaleAge2322221822‘Official’ raceMalayMalayMalayMalayChineseReligionChristianMuslimChristianChristianMuslimMother tongueMandarinMalayMandarin MandarinMalayThe Body BeingAmong primary phenotypic cues, the women acknowledged popular perceptions of Chinese as fair-skinned and Malay as darker-skinned. This shorthand has been ingrained into society through rampant media images, especially in annual national-wide initiatives based in educational institutes such as Racial Harmony Day, International Friendship Day, and National Day. These settings utilise a ‘racial colour code’ to represent the CMIO – Chinese, Malay, Indian, Others; the four racial categories all Singaporeans are officially categorised into by the state – multiracialism in Singapore. Media imagery employs four children of different skin tones clad in ethnic dress, holding hands as symbolic of unity across diversity. So normative was this image even at the level of Primary School (7-12 year-olds) that Sara found her legitimacy in Chinese lessons questioned: “I used to be quite tanned in Primary School, quite Malay-looking… during Chinese lessons, the teacher always explained [difficult things] to me in English, as if I don’t understand Mandarin. But I even took higher Chinese...”The non-congruence of Sara’s apparently Malay phenotype and Mandarin mother tongue was perceived by her teacher as incompetence; Sara was an ‘illegitimate’ pupil in Mandarin class. Despite having been qualified enough to enrol in the higher Chinese stream that she says only takes in 10% of her cohort annually, Sara felt her high performance was negated because the visual marker of her Malayness took precedence during interactions with the teacher. Instead, English was adopted as a ‘neutral’ third language for conversing.In other instances, the women reported that while their skin tone generally enabled an audience to assign them a race, closer observations of their facial features such as their eyes signposted their racial hybridity. Claire states: “People always ask if I’m mixed blood because my eyelashes are very long and thick.” Sara experienced similar questioning gazes from strangers: “… maybe it’s my big eyes, and thick eyebrows… and my double eyelids are also very ‘Malay’?"Both Claire and Sara pointed out anatomic subtleties such as the folds of their eyelids, the size of their eyes, the volume of their eyebrows, and the length of their eyelashes as markers of their racial hybridity. There also emerged a consensus based on personal experience that Malays are more likely to have double eyelids, larger eyes, thicker eyebrows, and longer lashes, than to Chinese.Visual emphases on subtle characteristics thus help audiences interpret the biraciality of these women despite the apparent ‘incongruence’ of their skin tone and facial features. However, since racial identity is “influenced by historical, cultural, and contextual factors” (Rockquemore et al. 121), corporeal indications only serve as a primary racial cue. The next segment places these women in the context of secondary cues where the body is actively engaged in performing biraciality.The Body SpeakingThe women code-switched with choice of language, mother tongue, and manner of accents and vocal inflexions to contest initial readings of their racial status. Atiqah shares: “People always think I’m Chinese, until I open my mouth and speak Malay to ‘shock’ them. After that, they just ‘get’ that I am Malay.”Atiqah’s raised vocal inflexions and increasingly enthusiastic body language – she was clenching her fist as if to symbolically convey her victory at this point of the interview – seemed to imply that she relished in the ‘shock value’ of her big racial ‘reveal’. In a setting where her racial status was misidentified, she responded by asserting her racial legitimacy by displaying her competency of the Malay language.However, this has not always had a lasting impact in her interactions. She adds that within familiar social groups where she has long asserted her racial identity, she does not always feel acknowledged. Atiqah then attempts to ‘fit in’ by quietly deciphering her peers’ verbal exchanges: “… sometimes my Chinese friends forget that I’m ‘different’ because I’m so fair. They always talk in Mandarin… and I’ll try to figure out what they are saying from facial expressions and gestures.”Given her fair skin tone, Atiqah finds herself hypervisiblising her Malayness by utilizing the Malay language among Malay friends, even though they often converse in English themselves. In contrast, among Chinese friends where she feels her phenotypic Chinese features are visually dominant, she appears to under-visibilise this same Malayness by not speaking up about her language barrier. Language’s potential to demarcate social boundaries thus becomes a negotiative tool for Malay-Chinese women, while they simultaneously “shift their involvement and alliances” (Choudhry 119) to exercise choice over their identity.In another instance, Wahida is a fair skinned, tudung-clad, officially documented Chinese woman who identifies more as Malay. Her apparent ‘incongruence’ is of particular concern because Wahida had been attending a Madrasah up till the age of 18. Madrasahs are Islamic learning schools which also provide full-time education from Kindergarten to Junior College level, as an alternative to the mainstream track offered by the Ministry of Education in Singapore; a vast majority of Madrasah students self-identify as Malay Muslims. The desire for a sense of belonging encouraged Wahida to undervisibilise her Chineseness when she was younger:There was once my father came to pick me up from Madrasah… I forgot why but he scolded me so loudly in Mandarin! Everybody stared at me… I was so embarrassed! I already tried so hard to hide my Chinese-ness, he ruined it.Although Wahida never spoke Mandarin in school to underplay her Chineseness, ‘passing’ as a Malay necessitated intimate Others to sustain the racial construct. In this instance, her father had broken the ‘Malay’ persona she had deliberately crafted by conversing fluently in Malay in the Madrasah.Butler’s work on ‘gender as performed’ may be applied here in that what she describes as the “sustained set of acts” or a “stylization of the body” (xv) is also necessary to enact a sustained visual signifier of one’s racial identity. Although portrayed as a natural, innate, or unquestioned heritage in CMIO media portrays for Singapore, race is in fact an intentional construction. It is the practice of a certain regime of actions that contributes to the establishment of one’s raced personality. One is not naturally ‘Malay’ or ‘Chinese’ for these identities have to be carefully rehearsed and performed in order to translate one’s hereditary race into an outward expression of visible-race as practiced. As evidenced, this constant performance of Wahida’s racial self is fragile and dialectic, especially when other actors (such as her father) do not respond favourably to her intended presentation of self.Within a supposedly neutral third language such as English, the women also demonstrated their manipulation of accents emphasising or underplaying what they deem to be Malay or Chinese intonations and syllabic stresses. Sara explains:When I’m with my Malay friends, I speak with the mat [shortened from the local colloquial term matrep which loosely stands for the Malay version of a chav or a redneck] accent. Sometimes it’s subconscious… but sometimes it’s on purpose... they all speak like that… when I speak my ‘proper’ English, I feel out of place.Sara then demonstrates that Malay-accented English nasally accentuates the ‘N’ consonant, where words such ‘morning’ and ‘action’ have weighted pronunciations as ‘mornang’ and ‘actione’. Words that begin with a ‘C’ consonant are also developed into a voiced plosive ‘K’ sound, where words such as ‘corner’ and ‘concept’ are articulated as ‘korner’ and ‘koncept’, similar to the Malay language. Claire, who demonstrated similar Malay-accented utterances, supported this.Claire also noted that within Singlish – the colloquial spoken Singaporean English – Malay-accented English also tends towards end-sentence inflexions such as “seh”, “sia”, and “siol” in place of the more Mandarin-accented English that employs the end-sentence inflexions “ba”, and “ma”.Racialising spoken English is a symbolic interaction that interracial bodies may utilise to gain recognition and acceptance into a racial group that has not yet acknowledged their ‘legitimate’ membership. This is a manifestation of Cooley’s ‘looking glass self’ where an individual’s presentation of the body is based how they think other actors’ perceive them. In doing so, biracial bodies are able to exaggerate or obscure some corporeal traits to convey their preferred racial master status.The Body DoingPhysical gestures that constitute a ‘racial code’ are mirrored and socialised among children during their upbringing, since these designate one’s bodily boundaries and limits of exchange. Thus, while unseen by outsiders, insiders of the racial group may appropriate subtle gesticulations to demarcate and legitimate each other’s membership. Atiqah contends: “We [the Malays] always salaam each other when we first meet, it’s like a signal to show that we are ‘the same’ you know, so as long as I ‘act’ Malay, then my [colour] doesn’t really matter.”The salaam is a salutation of Islamic origin, signifying ‘peace to you’. It usually involves taking the back of the hand of a senior and bringing it to one’s forehead, heart, or lips. It is commonly practiced among Malays and Muslims. However, when a body’s phenotypic markers do not adequately signify racial identity, insiders may not extend such affective body language to them. As Nadia laments:When I first came to uni, the Malay kampong [literally translates into ‘village’, but figuratively stands for a social group in which reciprocal Malay cultural relationality is attached] couldn’t tell I was one of them… when I tried to salaam one of [the boys], he asked me why I was shaking his hand!Butler illuminated the notion of bodily signifiers (skin tone) marking access and limitations of corporeal exchange (salaam). Visual signifiers on biracial bodies must thus be significant enough to signpost one’s racial master status, in order to be positively assessed, acknowledged, and legitimated by Others.Among the women, only Wahida had committed to wearing a tudung at the time of the interview. Although a religious Islamic practice (as opposed to a culturally Malay one), such ethnic dress as ethnic signifier takes precedence over one’s ambivalent bodily markers. Wahida expressed that dressing in her jubah hyper-visualised her Malayness, especially when she was schooling in a Madrasah where fellow students dressed similarly.Omar’s concept of Masuk Melayu – literally ‘to enter Malayness’ – describes non-ethnic Malays who ‘become’ Malay through converting into Islam and practising the religion. Despite Wahida’s ambivalent fair skin tone, donning a tudung publically signifies her religious inclination and signals to Other Malays her racial master status. This thus earns her legitimacy in the social group more so than other ambivalent Malay-Chinese women without such religious symbolism.Agentic IllegitimacyIn negotiating their biraciality within the setting of educational institutions, these five Malay-Chinese women expressed the body ‘being’, ‘speaking’, and ‘doing’ strategies in which selected traits more commonly associated with Malayness or Chineseness were hyper-visibilised or under-visibilised, depending on the setting in which they find themselves (Wilson), and social group in which they want to gain membership and favour. Sara recalls having to choose an ethnic dress to wear to her Primary School’s Racial Harmony Day. Her father suggested “a mix” such as “a red baju kurung” or a “green cheong sum” (in Singapore, red is associated with the festivities of Chinese New Year and green with Hari Raya) where she could express her biraciality. Owing to this childhood memory, she says she still attempts to convey her racial hybridity by dressing strategically at festive family gatherings. Atiqah similarly peppers conversations with Chinese friends with the few Mandarin phrases she knows, partly to solicit an affective response when they tease her for “trying”, and also to subtly remind them of her desire for acknowledgement and inclusivity. Despite expressing similar frustrations over their exclusion and ‘illegitimate’ status in homoethnic settings, the women reacted agentically by continuously asserting emic readings of their corporeal ambivalence, and entering into spaces that give them the opportunity to reframe Others’ readings of their visual markers through microactions. However, enacting this agentic ethnic repertoire necessitates an intimate understanding of both Malay and Chinese social markers (Choudhry 120).None of the women suggested completely dissociating themselves from either Malayness or Chineseness, although they may selectively hyper-visibilise one over the other to legitimate their group membership. Instead, they engage in a continuously dialectic repositioning that requires reflexivity, self-awareness, and an attentiveness to how they are perceived from the etic. By inculcating Malay and Chinese social cues into their repertoire, these biracial women can strategically enact their desired racial master status fluently, treating ethnic identity as fluid and in flux (Choudhry 120). In transgressing popular perceptions of CMIO imagery, Malay-Chinese women use their bodies as a sustained site for contesting visual racial stereotypes and reframe their everyday ‘illegitimacy’ into agentic ambivalence, albeit only selectively in spaces where their racial membership would be favourable.ReferencesAhmed, Sara. “Racialized Bodies.” Real Bodies: A Sociological Introduction. Ed. Mary Evans, and Ellie Lee. New York: Palgrave, 2002. 46-63.Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1999.Choudhry, Sultana. Multifaceted Identity of Interethnic Young People: Chameleon Identities. Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2010.Cooley, Charles. Human Nature and the Social Order. New York: Scribner's, 1902. Katz, Ilan. The Construction of Racial Identity in Children of Mixed Parentage – Mixed Metaphors. London: J. Kingsley Publishers, 1996.Malbon, Ben. “The Club. Clubbing: Consumption, Identity and the Spatial Practices of Every-Night Life.” Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures, Ed. Tracey Skelton, Gill Valentine. Routledge: London, 1997. 266-288.Mohanty, Satya P. “Epilogue. Colonial Legacies, Multicultural Futures: Relativism, Objectivity, and the Challenge of Otherness.” PMLA 110.1 (1995). 14 Sep 2014 ‹http://www.jstor.org/stable/463198›.Omar, Ariffin. Bangsa Melayu: Malay Concepts of Democracy and Community, 1945-1950. Oxford: Oxford University, 1993.Rockquemore, Kerry Ann, and Tracy A. Laszloffy. Raising Biracial Children. Lanham, MD: Altamira Press, 2005.Wilson, Anne. Mixed Race Children – A Study of Identity. London: Allen & Unwin, 1987.


 
 
 One of the writers of this paper visited America at the end of the ‘90s and came across a curious translation dilemma as a foreigner. In some of the seemingly inauspicious districts of the city, there were signs saying “No Loitering” on the displays of shops or walls of residencies. These signs were causing anxiety for her, because she did not know the actual meaning of the phrase of “No Loitering”. (Her dictionary was still packed away.) Apart from being curious about the meaning of the phrase, she was rather afraid of performing “the act of loitering” since she had no idea what it meant. 
 
 When she was settled she looked up to the meaning of the term “loitering”: “waiting, hanging around, lingering, dallying, etc…” (Oxford Encyclopedia). The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English defined “to loiter” as “to stand in a public place, usually with no particular or obvious purpose.” Based on this, if a person spends time hanging around or dallying in a public place with no purpose, the act of this person is called “loitering”. In the eyes of the newcomer, we suggest that “loitering” might be equal to more or less “doing nothing”. A person who is acting in the way described is almost inactive. When we view the issue from this framework, the person does not seem to be doing anything dangerous or precarious. In essence, what right or reason does someone have to command another “do not stand here”? Actually, a person who comes across such a warning can comfortably (if ironically) say that they are doing “nothing”. 
 
 Loitering as a Sign of “Doing Nothing”
 
 From a semiological point of view, loitering can be seen as an honest act that reveals its intent of doing nothing by itself, because by definition loitering indicates to a lack of purpose and inactivity. On the other hand, loitering does not conjure up innocence associated with a natural state of inactivity. In fact, it conjures up possible danger, threat and crime. It does not signify doing nothing, but on the contrary it points to the possibility of being able to do “a very bad thing”. Closest to its definition, loitering might seem like an honest act; it can also be considered as the interval between inactivity and possible negative action. In this respect, loitering can be seen as the double-layered mythological sign of Barthes: namely, loitering at a denotative level is coded as innocent and honest – doing nothing signifies doing nothing. However, ideologically at a connotative level, loitering reveals itself as an action by which doing nothing is turned into doing something. Within this setting, if we accept that the subject does loiter with a “bad intention”, we can observe that the seemingly innocent acts of “lingering” and “dallying” can easily turn into proper camouflage instruments that conceal these “bad intentions”. Doing nothing can be considered to function as a curtain that briefly conceals the act of doing something or the possibility of doing something. 
 
 Within this scope, loitering can also be a direct representation of a slippery possibility. We recall a specific type of postcards which was once quite fashionable. The characteristic of these postcards is to allow us to see two different images on the same surface. When those postcards are viewed from a definite angle you can see a picture of, for example, New York which is taken in daylight, and when viewed from another angle, this time the night vision of the same setting can be observed. When loitering is in question, there is a similar mechanism at work. 
 
 The idea that we want to point out is that, due to the slippery nature of the category of the term loitering, neither of these pictures – each one depicting one side of the term – can be absolute. This is because of the permeable nature of these pictures. In fact, what is “real” is the very act of changing the angle while viewing the pictures: to be able to see the two pictures/definitions simultaneously. Loitering is a real conjunction point, a transformation point that we can not grasp between the two pictures/definitions: an interval point of innocent acts of dallying, lingering, and a threatening act of crime. In other words, between being a mythological and a denotative sign, loitering is the sign of possibility itself. 
 
 The dominant paradigm of modern urban life defines “non-functionality” as inauspicious, immobile and therefore risky. Loitering can also be coupled with non-functionality, and this association would have two consequences: firstly the perception of the term alters toward a negative tone; secondly it opens up an area where we can discuss the body, the city and the concept of movement respectively:
 
 The loitering human body which is alive but non-functional in the public space brings to mind a series of possibilities that originate from a potential energy which is not in use. This is usually taken to be something “bad”. Namely, a person who loiters is not expected to give money to a beggar, but is often seen as likely to seize money from another person by violence. A city is a system depending on flow. In other words, it is a system depending on the flow of vehicles, people, goods, money and waste. For such a system depending on movement there is no place for stability. Thus, individuals should either take part in this flow or they should not act as a point of resistance that would be an obstacle to the movement. The late capitalist period has a “psychic” effect on urban life and individuals. Recently, this effect has been discussed with other approaches within discussions around the concept of Risk Society. Risk Society starts where the systems of security norms do not function against the threats (Beck). It is located in a new definition of modernity in which risks that are related to economic initiatives, security of employment, health and environment have increased intensively. Abundance of possibilities and uncertainties, and polysemy in Risk Society, create an intensive agenda. Concerning the psychological implications of Risk Society on individuals and their acts, Beck argues that our horizon also darkens due to risks. Hence, risks say what should not be done, but not what should be done. Risk management demands that precaution is taken through avoidance. A person who designs the world as a risk loses their ability to act in the end. The remarkable aspect of this development is that the increase in the intention of control turns this intention into its opposite (Beck).
 
 In this context, loitering can be considered as one of the risks in everyday life due to its ambiguous definition and perception. Returning to the earlier quote from Beck, the visuality of the “No Loitering” sign which tells what should be avoided or what should not be done in a commanding tone identifies a “risk zone”. In fact, while this sign functions to warn people concerning the area that the act of loitering can take place, it also embodies, constructs and strengthens the possibility of risk.
 
 Is Loitering a Crime?
 
 The prejudice supposing that loitering is dangerous reveals itself strikingly in legal matters. The “Chicago Anti-Gang Loitering” law, which was approved in 1992, allowed police to arrest persons who “remain in any one place with no apparent purpose” (“High Court Rejects Chicago Anti-Gang Loitering Law”) in the presence of a suspected gang member and who then fail to disperse satisfactorily when warned by police. 
 
 Thus, it is possible for perceived loiterers to be arrested under the same law, although it is not proven that these people had been previously convicted of a crime, had committed a crime before their arrest, or were planning to commit an offence. “Before lower courts found the law unconstitutional in 1995, Chicago police issued 89,000 dispersal orders under the ordinance and made 42,000 arrests. The majority of people arrested were black or Latino” (“High Court Rejects Chicago Anti-Gang Loitering Law”). A group of justices considers the freedom to loiter a part of constitutional right. For example,
 
 Justice John Paul Stevens said, ‘the freedom to loiter for innocent purposes is part of the liberty’ protected by the U.S. Constitution. People in Chicago who stop to ‘engage in idle conversation or simply enjoy a cool breeze on a warm evening’ should not be subject to police commands. (“High Court Rejects Chicago Anti-Gang Loitering Law”)
 
 
 The second group claims that “Chicago Anti-Gang Loitering” law did not focus on specific criminal conduct and suggests that Chicago city lawyers redrafted this law to make it illegal to loiter, to “establish control over identifiable areas or to intimidate others from entering those areas” (“High Court Rejects Chicago Anti-Gang Loitering Law”). They argue that the lawyers are obliged to bring onto the agenda a better definition of the conduct for it to be accepted as a criminal act. A U.S. Constitutional Court abolished the “Chicago Anti-Gang Loitering” law in 1999, with ongoing discussions over the complicated nature of the issue.
 
 The legal uncertainty in the concept of loitering proves that the foreigner who had difficulties in understanding the notion was right in her concerns. All these things strikingly point to the possibility that somebody who is hanging around, chatting or lingering on a beautiful day can be arrested at any moment.
 
 The main reason the term “loiter” is obscure to the foreigner is not only because of the definitive meaning of loitering, but because the ambiguity of the term is still preserved after that. Thus, the person still has some hesitations about whether her behavior belongs to this category. The reason for her hesitation is based on the suspicion she has: she only intended to relax, dally and hang around (loiter); however, all those behaviors could be read (perceived) to suggest that she is about to engage in a criminal “bad” act. While the concept of social perception, which refers to the initial stage of evaluating the intentions of others using their body movements, hand gestures, facial expressions, and other biological motion cues (Allison, Puce and McCarthy), would explain the reason behind this reading, it is also possible to suggest that this kind of reading is conveyed by broader social norms. So, the problem which the foreigner experienced is the difficulty to create signs of doing nothing differentiating from the behaviors which are perceived as socially unacceptable. 
 
 Last Word
 
 Nothing is the definition of a void. The aim of this essay is to discuss how loitering makes this void visible and representable. As defined earlier, a sign is a surface of meaning, an interface. Doing nothing, which is an intellectual or philosophical category, is represented in different ways in different cultures by some acts which form interfaces, and sometimes it is made visible.
 
 When signs of doing nothing are being discussed, one of the most important problems is related to defining and naming the acts. As congruent with the purpose of doing nothing, loitering would be the best representation of doing nothing. However, even if loitering does not include an intention to harm, it is considered that the state of danger continues since it is rather difficult to make this visible and comprehensible through bodily signs. Loitering is a state of inactivity, incapable of creating the signs that will make its intention obvious. Yet it signifies the storm itself by being perceived as the silence before the storm. 
 
 References
 
 Allison, Truett, Aina Puce, and Gregory McCarthy. “Social Perception from Visual Cues: Roles of the STS region”. Trends in Cognitive Science 4 (2000): 267-278. Barthes, Roland. “Myth Today.” Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. London: Vintage, 1990. Beck, Ulrich. The Reinvention of Politics: Rethinking Modernity in the Global Social Order. Trans. M. Ritter. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997. “High Court Rejects Chicago Anti-Gang Loitering Law” 17 July 2006. http://www.ndsn.org/summer99/courts3.html>. Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English. Ed. J. Crowther. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Oxford Encyclopedia English-Turkish Dictionary. Ä°stanbul: Sabah, 1990.
 
 
 
 
 Citation reference for this article
 
 MLA Style
 Timur, Sebnem, and Melike Turkan Bagli. "A Bodily Sign of “Doing Nothing”: Loitering or the Silence before the Storm." M/C Journal 9.3 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0607/05-timur-bagli.php>. APA Style
 Timur, S., and M. Bagli. (Jul. 2006) "A Bodily Sign of “Doing Nothing”: Loitering or the Silence before the Storm," M/C Journal, 9(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0607/05-timur-bagli.php>. 

As a specialist in culture and communication studies, teaching in a school of business, I realised that the notion of interdisciplinarity is usually explored in the comfort of one's own discipline. Meanwhile, the practice of interdisciplinarity is something else. The very notion of disciplinarity implies a regime of discursive practices, but in the zone between disciplines, there is often no adequate language. This piece of writing is a brief analysis of an example of the language of business studies when business studies thinks about culture. It looks at how business studies approaches cultural difference in context of intercultural contact. Geert Hofstede's Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind (1991) This article is a brief and very selective critique of Geert Hofstede's notion of culture in Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind. Hofstede has been publishing his work on cross-cultural management since the 1960s. His work is routinely used in reference to cross/multi/intercultural issues in business studies (a term I use to include commerce, finance, management, and marketing). Before I begin, I must insist that Hofstede's Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind is a very useful text for business studies students, as it introduces them to useful concepts in relation to culture, like culture shock, acculturation (not enculturation -- I suppose managers are repatriated before that happens), and training for successful cross-cultural communication. It is worth including here a brief note on the subtitle of Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind. This "software of the mind" is clearly analogous to computer programming. However, Hofstede disavows the analogy, which is central to his thesis, saying that people are not programmed the way computers are. So they are, but not really. Hofstede claims that in order to learn something different, one "must unlearn ... (the) ... patterns of thinking, feeling, and potential acting which were learned throughout (one's) lifetime". And it is this thinking/feeling/acting function he calls the "software of the mind" (4). So, is the body the hardware? Thinking and feeling are abstract and could, with a flight of fancy, be seen as "software". However, acting is visible, tangible, and often visceral. I am suggesting that "acting" either represents or is just about all we have as culture. Acting (in the fullest sense, including speech, gesture, manners, textual production, etc.) is not evidence of culture, it is culture. Also, computer technology, like every other technology, is part of culture, as evident in this journal. Culture I share Clifford Geertz's concept of culture as a semiotic one, where interpretation is a search for meaning, and where meaning lies in social relations. Geertz writes that to claim that culture consists in brute patterns of behaviour in some identifiable community is to reduce it (the community and the notion of culture). Human behaviour is symbolic action. Culture is not just patterned conduct, a frame of mind which points to some sort of ontological status. Culture is public, social, relational, and contextual. To quote Geertz: "culture is not a power, something to which social events, behaviours, institutions, or processes can be causally attributed; it is a context" (14). Culture is not an ontological essence or set of behaviours. Culture is made up of webs of relationships. That Hofstede locates culture in the mind is probably the most problematic aspect of his writing. Culture is difficult for any discipline to describe because different disciplines have their own view of social reality. They operate in their own paradigms. Hofstede uses a behaviourist psychological approach to culture, which looks at what he calls national character and typical behaviours. Even though Hofstede is aware of being, as an observer of human behaviour, an integral part of his object of analysis (other cultures), he nevertheless continuously equates the observed behaviour to particular kinds of national thinking and feeling where national is often collapsed into cultural. Hofstede uses an empirical behaviourist paradigm which measures certain behaviours, as if the observer is outside the cultural significance attributed to behaviours, and attributes them to culture. Hofstede's Notion of Culture Hofstede's work is based on quantitative data gathered from questionnaires administered to IBM corporation employees in various countries. He looked at 72 national subsidiaries, 38 occupations, 20 languages, and at two points in time (1968 and 1972), and continued his commentary on that data into the 1990s. He claims that because the entire sample has a common corporate culture, the only thing that can account for systematic and consistent differences between national groups within a homogeneous multinational organisation is nationality itself. It is as if corporate culture is outside, has nothing to do with, national culture (itself a complex and dynamic concept). Hofstede's work does not account for the fact that IBM is an American multinational corporation and, as such, whatever attributes are used to measure cultural difference, those found in American corporate culture will set the benchmark for whatever other cultures are measured. This view is supported in business studies in general where American management practices are seen as universal and normal, even when they are described as 'Western'. The areas Hofstede's IBM survey looked at are: 1. Social inequality, including the relationship with authority (also described as power distance); 2. The relationship between the individual and the group (also described as individualism versus collectivism); 3. Concepts of masculinity and femininity: the social implications of having been born as a boy or a girl (also described as masculinity versus femininity); 4. Ways of dealing with uncertainty, relating to the control of aggression and the expression of emotions (also described as uncertainty avoidance). These concepts are in themselves culturally specific and have become structurally embedded in organisational theory. Hofstede writes that these four dimensions of culture are aspects of culture that can be measured relative to other cultures. What these four dimensions actually do is not to combine to give us a four-dimensional (complex?) appreciation of culture. Rather, they map onto each other and reinforce a politically conservative, Eurocentric view of culture. Hofstede does admit to having had "a 'Western' way of thinking", but he inevitably goes back to "the mind" as a place or goal. He refers to a questionnaire composted by "Eastern', in this case Chinese minds ... [which] ... are programmed according to their own particular cultural framework" (171). So there is this constant reference to culturally programmed minds that determine certain behaviours. In his justification of using typologies to categorise people and their behaviour (minds?) Hofstede also admits that most people / cultures are hybrids. And he admits that rules are made arbitrarily in order to classify people / cultures (minds?). However, he insists that the statistical clusters he ends up with are an empirical typology. Such a reduction of "culture" to this kind of radical realism is absolutely anatomical and enumerative. And, the more Hofstede is quoted as an authority on doing business across cultures, the more truth value his work accrues. The sort of language Hofstede uses to describe culture attributes intrinsic meanings and, as a result, points to difference rather than diversity. Languages of difference are based on binaristic notions of masculine/feminine, East/West, active/passive, collective/individual, and so on. In this opposition of activity and passivity, the East (feminine, collectivist) is the weaker partner of the West (masculine, individualist). There is a nexus of knowledge and power that constructs cultural difference along such binaristic lines. While a language of diversity take multiplicity as a starting point, or the norm, Hofstede's hegemonic and instrumentalist language of difference sees multiplicity as problematic. This problem is flagged at the very start of Cultures and Organizations. 12 Angry Men: Hofstede Interprets Culture and Ignores Gender In the opening page of Cultures and Organizations there is a brief passage from Reginald Rose's play 12 Angry Men (1955). (For a good review of the film see http://www.film.u- net.com/Movies/Reviews/Twelve_Angry.html. The film was recently remade.) Hofstede uses it as an example of how twelve different people with different cultural backgrounds "think, feel and act differently". The passage describes a confrontation between what Hofstede refers as "a garage owner" and "a European-born, probably Austrian, watchmaker". Such a comparison flags, right from the start, a particular way of categorising and distinguishing between two people, in terms of visible and audible signs and symbols. Both parties are described in terms of their occupation. But then the added qualification of one of the parties as being "European-born, probably Austrian" clearly indicates that the unqualified party places him in the broad category "American". In other words, the garage owner's apparently neutral ethnicity implies a normative "American", against which all markers of cultural difference are measured. Hofstede is aware of this problem. He writes that "cultural relativism does not imply normlessness for oneself, nor for one's society" (7). However, he still uses the syntax of binaristic classification which repeats and perpetuates the very problems he is apparently addressing. One of the main factors that makes 12 Angry Men such a powerful drama is that each man carries / inscribes different aspects of American culture. And American culture is idealised in the justice system, where rationality and consensus overcomes prejudice and social pressure. Each man has a unique make-up, which includes class, occupation, ethnicity, personality, intelligence, style and experience. But 12 Angry Men is also an interesting exploration of masculinity. Because Hofstede has included a category of "masculine/feminine" in his study of national culture, it is an interesting oversight that he does not comment on this powerful element of the drama. People identify along various lines, in terms of ethnicities, languages, histories, sexuality, politics and nationalism. Most people do have multiple and varied aspects to their identity. However, Hofstede sees multiple lines of identification as causing "conflicting mental programs". Hofstede claims that identification on the gender level of his hierarchy is determined "according to whether a person was born as a girl or as a boy" (10). Hofstede misses the crucial point that whilst whether one is born female or male determines one's sex, whether one is enculturated as and identifies as feminine or masculine indicates one's gender. Sex and gender are not the same thing. Sex is biological (natural) and gender is ideological (socially constructed and naturalised). This sort of blindness to the ideological component of identity is a fundamental flaw in Hofstede's thesis. Hofstede takes ideological constructions as given, as natural. For example, in endnote 1 of Chapter 4, "He, she, and (s)he", he writes "My choice of the terms (soft feminine and hard masculine) is based on what is in virtually all societies, not on what anybody thinks should be (107, his italics). He reinforces the notion of gendered essences, or essences which constitute national identity. Indeed, the world is not made up of entities or essences that are masculine or feminine, Western or Eastern, active or passive. And the question is not so much about empirical accuracy along such lines, but rather what are the effects of always reinscribing cultures as Western or Eastern, masculine or feminine, collectivist or individualist. In an era of globalism and mass, interconnected communication, identities are multiple, and terms like East and West, masculine and feminine, active and passive, should be used as undecidable codes that, at the most, flag fragments of histories and ideologies. Identity East and West are concepts that did not come out of a political or cultural vacuum. They are categories, or concepts, that originated and flourished with European expansionism from the 17th century. They underwrote imperialism and colonisation. They are not inert labels that merely point to something "out there". East and West, like masculine and feminine or any other binary pair, indicate an imaginary relationship that prioritises one of the pair over the other. People and cultures cannot be separated into static Western and Eastern essences. Culture itself is always diverse and dynamic. It is marked by migration, diaspora, and exile, not to mention historical change. There are no "original" cultures. The sort of discourse Hofstede uses to describe cultures is based on an ontological and epistemological distinction made between East and West. Culture is not something invisible or intangible. Culture is not something obscure that is in the mind (whatever or wherever that is) which manifests itself in peculiar behaviours. Culture is what and how we communicate, whether that takes the form of speech, gestures, novels, plays, architecture, style, or art. And, as such, communication includes the objects we produce and exchange and the symbols to which we give meaning. So, when Hofstede writes that the Austrian watchmaker acts the way he does because he cannot behave otherwise. After many years in his new home country, he still behaves the way he was raised. He carries within himself an indelible pattern of behaviour he is attributing a whole range of qualities which are frequently given by dominant cultures to their cultural "others" (1). Hofstede attributes politeness, tradition, and, above all, stasis, to the European-Austrian watchmaker. The phrase "after many years in his new home country" is contradictory. If so many years have passed, why is "home" still "new"? And, indeed, the watchmaker might still behave the way he was raised, but it would be safe to assume that the garage owner also behaves the way he was raised. One of the main points made in 12 Angry Men is that twelve American men are all very different to each other in terms of values and behaviour. All this is represented in the dialogue and behaviour of twelve men in a closed room. If we are concerned with different kinds of social behaviour, and we are not concerned with pathological behaviour, then how can we know what anyone carries within themselves? Why do we want to know what anyone carries within themselves? From a cultural studies perspective, the last question is political. However, from a business studies perspective, that question is naïve. The radical economic rationalist would want to know as much as possible about cultural differences so that we can better target consumer groups and be more successful in cross-cultural negotiations. In colonial days, foreigners often wielded absolute power in other societies and they could impose their rules on it [sic]. In these postcolonial days, foreigners who want to change something in another society will have to negotiate their interventions. (7) Those who wielded absolute power in the colonies were the non-indigenous colonisers. It was precisely the self-legitimating step of making a place a colony that ensured an ongoing presence of the colonising power. The impetus behind learning about the Other in the colonial times was a combination of spiritual salvation (as in the "mission civilisatrice") and economic exploitation (colonies were seen as resources for the benefit of the European and later American centres). And now, the impetus behind learning about cultural difference is that "negotiation is more likely to succeed when the parties concerned understand the reasons for the differences in viewpoints" (7). Culture as Commerce What, in fact, happens, is that business studies simultaneously wants to "do" components of cross-cultural studies, as it is clearly profitable, while shunning the theoretical discipline of cultural studies. A fundamental flaw in a business studies perspective, which is based on Hofstede's work, is a blindness to the ideological and historical component of identity. Business studies has picked up just enough orientalism, feminism, marxism, deconstruction and postcolonialism to thinly disavow any complicity with dominant (and dominating) discourses, while getting on with business-as-usual. Multiculturalism and gender are seen as modern categories to which one must pay lip service, only to be able to get on with business-as-usual. Negotiation, compromise and consensus are desired not for the sake of success in civil processes, but for the material value of global market presence, acceptance and share. However, civil process and commercial interests are not easily separable. To refer to a cultural economy is not just to use a metaphor. The materiality of business, in the various forms of commercial transactions, is itself part of one's culture. That is, culture is the production, consumption and circulation of objects (including less easily definable objects, like performance, language, style and manners). Also, culture is produced and consumed socially (in the realm of the civil) and circulates through official and unofficial social and commercial mechanisms. Culture is a material and social phenomenon. It's not something hidden from view that only reveals itself in behaviours. Hofstede rightly asserts that culture is learned and not inherited. Human nature is inherited. However, it is very difficult to determine exactly what human nature is. Most of what we consider to be human nature turns out to be, upon close inspection, ideological, naturalised. Hofstede writes that what one does with one's human nature is "modified by culture" (5). I would argue that whatever one does is cultural. And this includes taking part in commercial transactions. Even though commercial transactions (including the buying and selling of services) are material, they are also highly ritualistic and highly symbolic, involving complex forms of communication (verbal and nonverbal language). Culture as Mental Programming Hofstede's insistent ontological reference to 'the sources of one's mental programs' is problematic for many reasons. There is the constant ontological as well as epistemological distinction being made between cultures, as if there is a static core to each culture and that we can identify it, know what it is, and deal with it. It is as if culture itself is a knowable essence. Even though Hofstede pays lip service to culture as a social phenomenon, saying that "the sources of one's mental programs lie within the social environments in which one grew up and collected one's life experiences" (4), and that past theories of race have been largely responsible for massive genocides, he nevertheless implies a kind of biologism simply by turning the mind (a radical abstraction) into something as crude as computer software, where data can be stored, erased or reconfigured. In explaining how culture is socially constructed and not biologically determined, Hofstede says that one's mental programming starts with the family and goes on through the neighbourhood, school, social groups, the work place, and the community. He says that "mental programs vary as much as the social environments in which they were acquired", which is nothing whatsoever like computer software (4-5). But he carries on to claim that "a customary term for such mental software is culture" (4, my italics). Before the large-scale changes which took place in the second half of the twentieth century in disciplines like anthropology, history, linguistics, and psychology, culture was seen to be a recognisable, determined, contained, consistent way of living which had deep psychic roots. Today, any link between mental processes and culture (formerly referred to as "race") cannot be sustained. We must be cautious against presuming to understand the relationship between mental process and social life and also against concluding that the content of the mind in each racial (or, if you like, ethnic or cultural) group is of a peculiar kind, because it is this kind of reductionism that feeds stereotypes. And it is the accumulation of knowledge about cultural types that implies power over the very types that are thus created. Conclusion A genuinely interdisciplinary approach to communication, commerce and culture would make business studies more theoretical and more challenging. And it would make cultural studies take commerce more seriously, beyond a mere celebration of shopping. This article has attempted to reveal some of the cracks in how business studies accounts for cultural diversity in an age of global commercial ambitions. It has also looked at how Hofstede's writings, as exemplary of the business studies perspective, papers over those cracks with a very thin layer of pluralist cultural relativism. This article is an invitation to open up a critical dialogue which dares to go beyond disciplinary traditionalisms in order to examine how meaning, communication, culture, language and commerce are embedded in each other. References Carothers, J.C. Mind of Man in Africa. London: Tom Stacey, 1972. Degabriele, Maria. Postorientalism: Orientalism since "Orientalism". Ph.D. Thesis. Perth: Murdoch University, 1997. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Hofstede, Geert. Cultures and Organisations: Software of the Mind. Sydney: McGraw-Hill, 1991. Moore, Charles A., ed. The Japanese Mind: Essentials of Japanese Philosophy and Culture. Honolulu: East-West Centre, U of Hawaii, 1967. Patai, Raphael. The Arab Mind. New York: Scribner, 1983. Toffler, Alvin. Future Shock: A Study of Mass Bewildernment in the Face of Accelerating Change. Sydney: Bodley Head, 1970. 12 Angry Men. Dir. Sidney Lumet. Orion-Nova, USA. 1957. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Maria Degabriele. "Business as Usual: How Business Studies Thinks Culture." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.2 (2000). [your date of access] Chicago style: Maria Degabriele, "Business as Usual: How Business Studies Thinks Culture," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 2 (2000), ([your date of access]). APA style: Maria Degabriele. (2000) Business as usual: how business studies thinks culture. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(2). ([your date of access]).


 
 
 ‘Artists are replicants who have found the secret of their obsolescence.’ (Brian Massumi)
 
 
 The critical reception to British writer Iain Sinclair’s most recent novel Dining on Stones (or, the Middle Ground) frequently focused on the British writer’s predilection for intertextual quotation and allusion, and more specifically, on his proclivity for integrating material from his own backlist. A survey of Dining on Stones reveals the following textual duplication: an entire short story, “View from My Window”, which was published in 2003; excerpts from a 2002 collection of poetry and prose, White Goods; material from his 1999 collaboration with artist Rachel Lichtenstein, Rodinsky’s Room; a paragraph lifted from Dark Lanthorns: Rodinsky’s A to Z, also from 1999; and scenes from 1971’s The Kodak Mantra Diaries. Moreover, the name of the narrator, Andrew Norton, is copied from an earlier Sinclair work, Slow Chocolate Autopsy. Of the six aforementioned inter-texts, only Rodinsky’s Room has had wide commercial release. The remainder are small press publications, often limited edition, difficult to find and read, which leads to the charge that Sinclair is relying on the inaccessibility of earlier texts to obscure his acts of autoplagiarism in the mass market Dining on Stones. Whatever Sinclair’s motives, his textual methodology locates a point of departure for an interrogation of textual doubling within the context of late era capitalism. 
 
 At first approximation, Dining on Stones appears to belong to a postmodern literature which treats a text’s confluence, or dissonance of innumerable signifiers and systems of signification as axiomatic and intra-textually draws attention to this circumstance. Thematically, the heteroglot narrative of Dining on Stones frequently returns to the duplication of textual material. The book’s primary narrator is haunted by doubles, not least because Andrew Norton periodically functions as a textual doppelganger for Sinclair. Norton’s biography constitutes a cut-up of episodes copied from Sinclair’s personal history and experience as it is presented in his non-fiction and quasi-autobiographical poetry and prose like Lights Out for the Territory and London Orbital. Like his creator, Norton is ontologically troubled by a fetch, or two, who may or may not be the products of his writer’s imagination. He claims that someone is ‘stealing my material. He impersonated me with a flair I couldn’t hope to equal, this thief. Trickster.’ (218) A ‘disturbing’ encounter with ‘Grays’, an uncannily familiar short story by another writer Marina Fountain, reveals a second textual poacher copying Norton’s work. 
 
 She hadn’t written it without help, obviously. The tone was masculine, sure of itself, its pretensions; grammatically suspect, lexicologically challenged, topographically slapdash. A slash-and-burn stylist. But haunted: by missing fathers – Bram Stoker, S. Freud and Joseph Conrad. Clunky hints… about writing and stalking, literary bloodsucking, gender, disguise. … But it was the Conrad aspect that pricked me. Fountain had somehow got wind of my researched (incomplete, unpublished) essay on Conrad in Hackney. Her exaggerated prose, its shotgun sarcasm, jump-cuts, psychotic syntax, was an offensive parody of a manner of composition I’d left behind. (167)
 
 
 When ‘Grays’ is later reprinted in full in the novel (141-65), it is a renamed double of a previous Sinclair piece, ‘In Train for the Estuary’ (Sinclair, White Goods, 57-75). This doubling is replicated with another Sinclair story ‘View from My Window’ also being attributed to Fountain (313-341). Neither the style, nor the content of Sinclair’s previous works have been discarded: they have been reproduced and incorporated in Dining on Stones’ retrospective of Sinclair’s earlier work. Thus, Norton’s review of Fountain’s writing as ‘a manner of composition I’d left behind’ doubles as Sinclair’s self-conscious recognition of the text as an artefact produced from diverse inter-texts – including his own. 
 
 In contrast to Sinclair’s dialogic doubling, Fountain’s double is of a monologic disposition. It is mechanical ‘echopraxis,’ a neologism coined in Dining on Stones which is defined as the ‘mindless repetition of another person’s moves and gestures.’ (192) Its mercenary dimension, enacted without regard for the integrity of the inter-text, is underscored with the epithet ‘slash-and-burn stylist.’ The monologic double possesses the text, drains it of its vitality. It entails necrosis, mortification. Fountain’s appropriation of Norton’s story is close to Fredric Jameson’s characterisation of pastiche which, he says, shuts down communication between texts (202). For Jameson, pastiche is the exemplary postmodern literary ‘style’. It is inert, static, a textual aporia. Jameson’s verdict is harsh: pastiche is cannibalism, text devouring text with an appetite that corresponds to the cupidity of consumer culture. Textual cannibalism vanquishes dialogism. It is the negation of the textual Other because cannibalism is only possible when the Other no longer exists. 
 
 So how does Sinclair distinguish his doubling of his own text from Fountain’s monologic doubling as it is depicted in the novel’s narrative? A clue can be detected in one of the stories stolen by Fountain. ‘In Train for the Estuary’ is a re-writing of Dracula, and takes its cue from Karl Marx’s famous analogy between capitalism and vampirism: ‘capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.’ (342) Sinclair’s vampire doubles as an academic (or is it the other way round?) who obsessively and compulsively stalks her quarry/object of study, Joseph Conrad. 
 
 First, she had learnt Polish. Then she tracked down the letters and initiated the slow, painstaking, much-revised process of translation. She travelled. Validated herself. Being alone in an unknown city, visiting libraries, enduring and enjoying bureaucratic obfuscation, sitting in bars, going to the cinema, allowed her to try on a new identity. She initiated correspondence with people she never met. She lied. She stole from Conrad. (Sinclair, White Goods, 58)
 
 
 The woman’s identity is leeched from the work of Conrad. Sinclair describes unethical activity in appropriating text: lying, stealing, sucking the blood from the corpus of Conrad. A compulsive need to maintain the ‘validation’ of this poached identity emerges, manifesting itself as addiction. The addict is an extreme embodiment of the (ir)rationality of consumption: consumed by the need to consume. The woman’s lust for text is commensurate with the twin desires—blood and real estate—of her precursor, Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Sinclair’s narrative of addiction doubles as a meta-critique on the compulsive desire to reproduce text and image that characterizes postmodern textualities as well as the apparatuses that produce them. 
 
 The textual doubling in Dining on Stones, which is published by the multinational Penguin, seems to enact a reterritorialisation of a deterritorialised minor literature. However, Sinclair’s allegorical rewriting of the vampire legend and its subsequent inclusion in the mainstream novel’s narrative, reveal that capitalism’s doubles are simulacra in the Aristotelian sense because they are copies for which there is no original. The ostensible ‘original’ is the product of different material conditions and thus cannot be duplicated by the machinery of capitalism. The capitalist reproduction of text produced within an alternative cultural economy is an uncanny double (with an infinite capacity to be doubled over and over again) whose existence, like that of Sinclair’s academic in White Goods, is parasitical. The capitalist simulacrum necessitates that the original be destroyed, or at the very least, theorised out of existence so that restrictions based on its own premise of individual property rights can be circumvented. 
 
 Postmodernism’s attendant theory is an over-determined repetition of poststructuralist tenets such as the instability of texts, the polysemous signifier and the impossibility of self as empirical subject. Images and meaning are no longer anchored, and free to be reproduced. Paradoxically, this proliferation of signification has the effect of constricting the originary text, compressing it under the burden of competing meanings, so that it is almost undetectable. Writes Brian Massumi (doubling Jean Baudrillard), ‘postmodernism stutters. In the absence of any gravitational pull to ground them, images accelerate and tend to run together. They become interchangeable. Any term can be substituted for any other: utter indetermination.’ The postmodern project’s effacement of the centred subject and the self has as its consequence, according to Jameson, a ‘waning of affect’ which is superseded ‘by a peculiar kind of euphoria.’ (200) The euphoria to which Jameson refers is not that of the poststructuralist textasy. Instead, it is postmodernism’s return to the idealism of Hegelian dialects, a euphoria achieved from the fusion of contradictions. Postmodernism’s doubles are a utopian attempt to synthesize antinomy and unity in a simultaneity that assimilates the fragmentation of modernity and the modern subject, with the cohesion of the commodity and its closed system of cultural logic. As such, the postmodern double is a rejection of modernist engagements with technical reproducibility. Modernism’s literary assemblages are, in Victor Shlovsky’s words, the laying bare of the device, an exposition of the seams through techniques such as collage, bricolage and montage. These linguistic (and at times visual) conjunctures of disparate elements do not attempt to elide material and thematic disjuncture. As Walter Benjamin stresses, this type of textual methodology has the potential, through the disruption of spatial and temporal logic and the creation of anachrony, to rupture the linear representations and formations of order favoured by capitalist political economies (Benjamin, ‘On the concept of history’).
 
 Postmodernism, which doubles (following Jameson’s formulation) as the cultural logic of late capitalism, reiterates that texts can be undone, and then reassembled, rearticulated anew, rendered useful to a commodity culture over and over again. Consequently, postmodernism’s copies are analogous, at the level of cultural production, to capitalism’s ceaseless appropriation of discourse, practice, and production. This is the alchemical project of capitalism. It strives to transform everything that it has doubled into the gold of the commodity. The inherent dangers of unrestrained reproduction are for Jameson exemplified in the treatment of Van Gogh’s Pair of Shoes (1885):
 
 If this copiously reproduced image is not to sink to the level of sheer decoration, it requires us to reconstruct some initial situation out of which the finished work emerges. Unless that situation—which has vanished into the past—is somehow mentally restored, the painting will remain an inert object, a reified end-product, and be unable to be grasped as a symbolic act in its own right, as praxis and as production. (194)
 
 
 Jameson’s reading of Van Gogh’s shoes reminds us of the fate of Alberto Korda’s 1960 photograph of revolutionary Che Guevara. Appropriated by the media, inscribed on T-shirts, mugs, even door mats, Che’s portrait is an emblem of the degradation Jameson describes. Like Van Gogh’s painting, Korda’s photograph was once a ‘symbolic act in its own right, as praxis and as production,’ saturated with the potential and spirit of revolution. Over time, the iconic image has leaked meaning. The signifying chain that anchored it to its original significance is broken each time it is reproduced and decontextualised through the process of commodification, until Che’s image is unrecognisable, a mere ornament. 
 
 Refuting Benjamin’s concerns in ‘The Work of Art in its Age of Technical Reproducibility’ postmodern theory argues that technologies enabling reproducibility have led to a democratisation of text and textual production, and by extension, have liberated the multitude from a hierarchy of value that privileges the singular. Mass reproduction and the accompanying pressure for texts to be accessible results in altered attitudes regarding the preservation of intellectual property rights and ‘fair use’. In an economy of signs where use-value has become synonymous with exchange-value, then the text which has no exchange value due to it being ‘freely’ available—‘free’ in its double sense, as something exempt from restriction, or cost—can be copied without economic or ethical restraint, without permission. The quotation marks can be scrapped. According to postmodern logic, the double is a transposition with a legitimacy equalling, even rivalling the original. Clearly, Jameson’s lament that postmodernism represents ‘the end of the distinctive individual brushstroke (as symbolized by the emergent primacy of mechanical reproduction)’ cannot escape an association with elitism because technical reproducibility indubitably enables greater access. However, the utility of technologies of reproduction to the capitalist empire of structures and signs cannot be underestimated. It enables the ceaseless reproduction of ideologemes inscribed with the logic of capitalism; in other words, it enables capitalism to reproduce itself relentlessly. 
 
 Postmodern cultural production is self-aware; it acknowledges its role as commodity and reproduces the ideology of the commodity form in its material form. In this manner, it functions as an ideologeme. Sinclair’s doubles cannot be understood according to the schema of postmodernism because he subverts postmodernism’s political and aesthetic symbiosis with capitalism. Moreover, the double in Sinclair travels beyond rehearsing a self-conscious hyphology (Barthes, 39). He defies postmodernism’s occultation of the author through his reiteration of the author’s authority over their own work. In contrast to the reductive manner postmodern texts duplicate other texts, Sinclair’s texts propose a typology of the double which advocates a dialogic duplication. Sinclair’s doubling refuses postmodernism’s return to the idealism of Hegelian dialects, and its synthesis of contradictions in the service of its unified material and aesthetic program: the commodification of literature. Consequently, Dining on Stones’ textual doubling is a critique of the epistemic shift to the monologic double which Jameson claims typifies a large portion of contemporary textual duplication.
 
 References
 
 Barthes, Roland. “Theory of the Text.” Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader. Ed. Robert Young. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. Benjamin, Walter. “On the Concept of History.” Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938-1940. Trans. by Edmund Jephcott. Eds. Michael W.Jennings & Howard Eiland. Cambridge, Mass. & London, England: Belknap Press, 2003. ––– . “The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproducibility.” Selected Writings: Volume 3, 1935-1938. Trans. by Edmund Jephcott. Eds. Michael W.Jennings & Howard Eiland. Cambridge, Mass. & London, England: Belknap Press, 2003. Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” The Jameson Reader. Eds. Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Massumi, Brian. “Realer than Real: The Simulacrum According to Deleuze and Guattari.” 12 May 2005. http://www.anu.edu.au/HRC/first_and_last/works/realer.htm>. Marx, Karl. Capital, Volume 1. Trans. by Ben Fowkes. Vintage Books edition. New York: Random House, 1976. Sinclair, Iain. Dark Lanthorns: Rodinsky’s A-Z. ––– . Dining on Stones. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2004. ––– . Lights Out for the Territory. London: Granta 1997. ––– . London Orbital. London: Granta, 2002. ––– . Rodinsky’s Room. London: Granta, 1998. ––– . View from My Window. Tonbridge: Worple Press, 2003. ––– . White Goods. Uppingham: Goldmark, 2002. Sinclair, Iain, and Dave McKean. Slow Chocolate Autopsy. London: Phoenix, 1997.
 
 
 
 
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IntroductionThe 2009 American film Trash Humpers, directed by Harmony Korine, was released at a time when the hipster had become a ubiquitous concept, entering into the common vernacular of numerous cultures throughout the world, and gaining significant press, social media and academic attention (see Žižek; Arsel and Thompson; Greif et al.; Stahl; Ouellette; Reeve; Schiermer; Maly and Varis). Trash Humpers emerged soon after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis triggered Occupy movements in numerous cities, aided by social media platforms, reported on by blogs such as Gawker, and stylized by multi-national youth-subculture brands such as Vice, American Apparel, Urban Outfitters and a plethora of localised variants.Korine’s film, which is made to resemble found VHS footage of old-aged vandals, epitomises the ironic, retro stylizations and “counterculture-meets-kitsch” aesthetics so familiar to hipster culture. As a creative stereotype from 1940s and ‘50s jazz and beatnik subcultures, the hipster re-emerged in the twenty-first century as a negative embodiment of alternative culture in the age of the Internet. As well as plumbing the recent past for things not yet incorporated into contemporary marketing mechanisms, the hipster also signifies the blurring of irony and authenticity. Such “outsiderness as insiderness” postures can be regarded as a continuation of the marginality-from-the-centre logic of cool capitalism that emerged after World War Two. Particularly between 2007 and 2015, the post-postmodern concept of the hipster was a resonant cultural trope in Western and non-Western cultures alike, coinciding with the normalisation of the new digital terrain and the establishment of mobile social media as an integral aspect of many people’s daily lives. While Korine’s 79-minute feature could be thought of as following in the schlocky footsteps of the likes of Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects (2006), it is decidedly more arthouse, and more attuned to the influence of contemporary alternative media brands and independent film history alike – as if the love child of Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963) and Vice Video, the latter having been labelled as “devil-may-care hipsterism” (Carr). Upon release, Trash Humpers was described by Gene McHugh as “a mildly hip take on Jackass”; by Mike D’Angelo as “an empty hipster pose”; and by Aaron Hillis as either “the work of an insincere hipster or an eccentric provocateur”. Lacking any semblance of a conventional plot, Trash Humpers essentially revolves around four elderly-looking protagonists – three men and a woman – who document themselves with a low-quality video camera as they go about behaving badly in the suburbs of Nashville, Tennessee, where Korine still lives. They cackle eerily to themselves as they try to stave off boredom, masturbating frantically on rubbish bins, defecating and drinking alcohol in public, fellating foliage, smashing televisions, playing ten-pin bowling, lighting firecrackers and telling gay “hate” jokes to camera with no punchlines. In one purposefully undramatic scene half-way through the film, the humpers are shown in the aftermath of an attack on a man wearing a French maid’s outfit; he lies dead in a pool of blood on their kitchen floor with a hammer at his feet. The humpers are consummate “bad” performers in every sense of the term, and they are joined by a range of other, apparently lower-class, misfits with whom they stage tap dance routines and repetitively sing nursery-rhyme-styled raps such as: “make it, make it, don’t break it; make it, make it, don’t fake it; make it, make it, don’t take it”, which acts as a surrogate theme song for the film. Korine sometimes depicts his main characters on crutches or in a wheelchair, and a baby doll is never too far away from the action, as a silent and Surrealist witness to their weird, sinister and sometimes very funny exploits. The film cuts from scene to scene as if edited on a video recorder, utilising in-house VHS titling sequences, audio glitches and video static to create the sense that one is engaging voyeuristically with a found video document rather than a scripted movie. Mainstream AlternativesAs a viewer of Trash Humpers, one has to try hard to suspend disbelief if one is to see the humpers as genuine geriatric peeping Toms rather than as hipsters in old-man masks trying to be rebellious. However, as Korine’s earlier films such as Gummo (1997) attest, he clearly delights in blurring the line between failure and transcendence, or, in this case, between pretentious art-school bravado and authentic redneck ennui. As noted in a review by Jeannette Catsoulis, writing for the New York Times: “Much of this is just so much juvenile posturing, but every so often the screen freezes into something approximating beauty: a blurry, spaced-out, yellow-green landscape, as alien as an ancient photograph”. Korine has made a career out of generating this wavering uncertainty in his work, polarising audiences with a mix of critical, cinema-verité styles and cynical exploitations. His work has consistently revelled in ethical ambiguities, creating environments where teenagers take Ritalin for kicks, kill cats, wage war with their families and engage in acts of sexual deviancy – all of which are depicted with a photographer’s eye for the uncanny.The elusive and contradictory aspects of Korine’s work – at once ugly and beautiful, abstract and commercial, pessimistic and nostalgic – are evident not just in films such as Gummo, Julien Donkey Boy (1999) and Mister Lonely (2007) but also in his screenplay for Kids (1995), his performance-like appearances on The Tonight Show with David Letterman (1993-2015) and in publications such as A Crackup at the Race Riots (1998) and Pass the Bitch Chicken (2001). As well as these outputs, Korine is also a painter who is represented by Gagosian Gallery – one of the world’s leading art galleries – and he has directed numerous music videos, documentaries and commercials throughout his career. More than just update of the traditional figure of the auteur, Korine, instead, resembles a contemporary media artist whose avant-garde and grotesque treatments of Americana permeate almost everything he does. Korine wrote the screenplay for Kids when he was just 19, and subsequently built his reputation on the paradoxical mainstreaming of alternative culture in the 1990s. This is exemplified by the establishment of music and film genres such “alternative” and “independent”; the popularity of the slacker ethos attributed to Generation X; the increased visibility of alternative press zines; the birth of grunge in fashion and music; and the coining of “cool hunting” – a bottom-up market research phenomenon that aimed to discover new trends in urban subcultures for the purpose of mass marketing. Key to “alternative culture”, and its related categories such as “indie” and “arthouse”, is the idea of evoking artistic authenticity while covertly maintaining a parasitic relationship with the mainstream. As Holly Kruse notes in her account of the indie music scenes of the 1990s, which gained tremendous popularity in the wake of grunge bands such as Nirvana: without dominant, mainstream musics against which to react, independent music cannot be independent. Its existence depends upon dominant music structures and practices against which to define itself. Indie music has therefore been continually engaged in an economic and ideological struggle in which its ‘outsider’ status is re-examined, re-defined, and re-articulated to sets of musical practices. (Kruse 149)Alternative culture follows a similar, highly contentious, logic, appearing as a nebulous, authentic and artistic “other” whose exponents risk being entirely defined by the mainstream markets they profess to oppose. Kids was directed by the artist cum indie-director Larry Clark, who discovered Korine riding his skateboard with a group of friends in New York’s Washington Square in the early 1990s, before commissioning him to write a script. The then subcultural community of skating – which gained prominence in the 1990s amidst the increased visibility of “alternative sports” – provides an important backdrop to the film, which documents a group of disaffected New York teenagers at a time of the Aids crisis in America. Korine has been active in promoting the DIY ethos, creativity and anti-authoritarian branding of skate culture since this time – an industry that, in its attempts to maintain a non-mainstream profile while also being highly branded, has become emblematic of the category of “alternative culture”. Korine has undertaken commercial projects with an array skate-wear brands, but he is particularly associated with Supreme, a so-called “guerrilla fashion” label originating in 1994 that credits Clark and other 1990s indie darlings, and Korine cohorts, Chloë Sevigny and Terry Richardson, as former models and collaborators (Williams). The company is well known for its designer skateboard decks, its collaborations with prominent contemporary visual artists, its hip-hop branding and “inscrutable” web videos. It is also well known for its limited runs of new clothing lines, which help to stoke demand through one-offs – blending street-wear accessibility with the restricted-market and anti-authoritarian sensibility of avant-garde art.Of course, “alternative culture” poses a notorious conundrum for analysis, involving highly subjective demarcations of “mainstream” from “subversive” culture, not to mention “genuine subversion” from mere “corporate alternatives”. As Pierre Bourdieu has argued, the roots of alternative culture lie in the Western tradition of the avant-garde and the “aesthetic gaze” that developed in the nineteenth century (Field 36). In analysing the modernist notion of advanced cultural practice – where art is presented as an alternative to bourgeois academic taste and to the common realm of cultural commodities – Bourdieu proposed a distinction between two types of “fields”, or logics of cultural production. Alternative culture follows what Bourdieu called “the field of restricted production”, which adheres to “art for art’s sake” ideals, where audiences are targeted as if like-minded peers (Field 50). In contrast, the “field of large-scale production” reflects the commercial imperatives of mainstream culture, in which goods are produced for the general public at large. The latter field of large-scale production tends to service pre-established markets, operating in response to public demand. Furthermore, whereas success in the field of restricted production is often indirect, and latent – involving artists who create niche markets without making any concessions to those markets – success in the field of large-scale production is typically more immediate and quantifiable (Field 39). Here we can see that central to the branding of “alternative culture” is the perceived refusal to conform to popular taste and the logic of capitalism more generally is. As Supreme founder James Jebbia stated about his brand in a rare interview: “The less known the better” (Williams). On this, Bourdieu states that, in the field of restricted production, the fundamental principles of all ordinary economies are inversed to create a “loser wins” scenario (Field 39). Profit and cultural esteem become detrimental attributes in this context, potentially tainting the integrity and marginalisation on which alternative products depend. As one ironic hipster t-shirt puts it: “Nothing is any good if other people like it” (Diesel Sweeties).Trash HipstersIn abandoning linear narrative for rough assemblages of vignettes – or “moments” – recorded with an unsteady handheld camera, Trash Humpers positions itself in ironic opposition to mainstream filmmaking, refusing the narrative arcs and unwritten rules of Hollywood film, save for its opening and closing credits. Given Korine’s much publicized appreciation of cinema pioneers, we can understand Trash Humpers as paying homage to independent and DIY film history, including Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, William Eggleston’s Stranded in Canton (1973), Andy Warhol’s and Paul Morrissey’s Lonesome Cowboys (1967) and Trash (1970), and John Waters’s Pink Flamingos (1972), all of which jubilantly embraced the “bad” aesthetic of home movies. Posed as fantasized substitutions for mainstream movie-making, such works were also underwritten by the legitimacy of camp as a form of counter-culture critique, blurring parody and documentary to give voice to an array of non-mainstream and counter-cultural identities. The employment of camp in postmodern culture became known not merely as an aesthetic subversion of cultural mores but also as “a gesture of self-legitimation” (Derrida 290), its “failed seriousness” regarded as a critical response to the specific historical problem of being a “culturally over-saturated” subject (Sontag 288).The significant difference between Korine’s film and those of his 1970s-era forbears is precisely the attention he pays to the formal aspects of his medium, revelling in analogue editing glitches to the point of fetishism, in some cases lasting as long as the scenes themselves. Consciously working out-of-step with the media of his day, Trash Humpers in imbued with nostalgia from its very beginning. Whereas Smith, Eggleston, Warhol, Morrissey and Waters blurred fantasy and documentary in ways that raised the social and political identities of their subjects, Korine seems much more interested in “trash” as an aesthetic trope. In following this interest, he rightfully pays homage to the tropes of queer cinema, however, he conveniently leaves behind their underlying commentaries about (hetero-) normative culture. A sequence where the trash humpers visit a whorehouse and amuse themselves by smoking cigars and slapping the ample bottoms of prostitutes in G-strings confirms the heterosexual tenor of the film, which is reiterated throughout by numerous deadpan gay jokes and slurs.Trash Humpers can be understood precisely in terms of Korine’s desire to maintain the aesthetic imperatives of alternative culture, where formal experimentation and the subverting of mainstream genres can provide a certain amount of freedom from explicated meaning, and, in particular, from socio-political commentary. Bourdieu rightly points out how the pleasures of the aesthetic gaze often manifest themselves curiously as form of “deferred pleasure” (353) or “pleasure without enjoyment” (495), which corresponds to Immanuel Kant’s notion of the disinterested nature of aesthetic judgement. Aesthetic dispositions posed in the negative – as in the avant-garde artists who mined primitive and ugly cultural stereotypes – typically use as reference points “facile” or “vulgar” (393) working-class tropes that refer negatively to sensuous pleasure as their major criterion of judgment. For Bourdieu, the pleasures provided by the aesthetic gaze in such instances are not sensual pleasures so much as the pleasures of social distinction – signifying the author’s distance from taste as a form of gratification. Here, it is easy to see how the orgiastic central characters in Trash Humpers might be employed by Korine for a similar end-result. As noted by Jeremiah Kipp in a review of the film: “You don't ‘like’ a movie like Trash Humpers, but I’m very happy such films exist”. Propelled by aesthetic, rather than by social, questions of value, those that “get” the obscure works of alternative culture have a tendency to legitimize them on the basis of the high-degree of formal analysis skills they require. For Bourdieu, this obscures the fact that one’s aesthetic “‘eye’ is a product of history reproduced by education” – a privileged mode of looking, estranged from those unfamiliar with the internal logic of decoding presupposed by the very notion of “aesthetic enjoyment” (2).The rhetorical priority of alternative culture is, in Bourdieu’s terms, the “autonomous” perfection of the form rather than the “heteronomous” attempt to monopolise on it (Field 40). However, such distinctions are, in actuality, more nuanced than Bourdieu sometimes assumed. This is especially true in the context of global digital culture, which makes explicit how the same cultural signs can have vastly different meanings and motivations across different social contexts. This has arguably resulted in the destabilisation of prescriptive analyses of cultural taste, and has contributed to recent “post-critical” advances, in which academics such as Bruno Latour and Rita Felski advocate for cultural analyses and practices that promote relationality and attachment rather than suspicious (critical) dispositions towards marginal and popular subjects alike. Latour’s call for a move away from the “sledge hammer” of critique applies as much to cultural practice as it does to written analysis. Rather than maintaining hierarchical oppositions between authentic versus inauthentic taste, Latour understands culture – and the material world more generally – as having agency alongside, and with, that of the social world.Hipsters with No AlternativeIf, as Karl Spracklen suggests, alternativism is thought of “as a political project of resistance to capitalism, with communicative oppositionality as its defining feature” (254), it is clear that there has been a progressive waning in relevance of the category of “alternative culture” in the age of the Internet, which coincides with the triumph of so-called “neoliberal individualism” (258). To this end, Korine has lost some of his artistic credibility over the course of the 2000s. If viewed negatively, icons of 1990s alternative culture such as Korine can be seen as merely exploiting Dada-like techniques of mimetic exacerbation and symbolic détournement for the purpose of alternative, “arty” branding rather than pertaining to a counter-hegemonic cultural movement (Foster 31). It is within this context of heightened scepticism surrounding alternative culture that the hipster stereotype emerged in cultures throughout the world, as if a contested symbol of the aesthetic gaze in an era of neoliberal identity politics. Whatever the psychological motivations underpinning one’s use of the term, to call someone a hipster is typically to point out that their distinctive alternative or “arty” status appears overstated; their creative decisions considered as if a type of bathos. For detractors of alternative cultural producers such as Korine, he is trying too hard to be different, using the stylised codes of “alternative” to conceal what is essentially his cultural and political immaturity. The hipster – who is rarely ever self-identified – re-emerged in the 2000s to operate as a scapegoat for inauthentic markers of alternative culture, associated with men and women who appear to embrace Realpolitik, sincerity and authentic expressions of identity while remaining tethered to irony, autonomous aesthetics and self-design. Perhaps the real irony of the hipster is the pervasiveness of irony in contemporary culture. R. J Magill Jnr. has argued that “a certain cultural bitterness legitimated through trenchant disbelief” (xi) has come to define the dominant mode of political engagement in many societies since the early 2000s, in response to mass digital information, twenty-four-hour news cycles, and the climate of suspicion produced by information about terrorism threats. He analyses the prominence of political irony in American TV shows including The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Simpsons, South Park, The Chappelle Show and The Colbert Report but he also notes its pervasiveness as a twenty-first-century worldview – a distancing that “paradoxically and secretly preserves the ideals of sincerity, honesty and authenticity by momentarily belying its own appearance” (x). Crucially, then, the utterance “hipster” has come to signify instances when irony and aesthetic distance are perceived to have been taken too far, generating the most disdain from those for whom irony, aesthetic discernment and cultural connoisseurship still provide much-needed moments of disconnection from capitalist cultures drowning in commercial hyperbole and grave news hype. Korine himself has acknowledged that Spring Breakers (2013) – his follow-up feature film to Trash Humpers – was created in response to the notion that “alternative culture”, once a legitimate challenge to mainstream taste, had lost its oppositional power with the decentralization of digital culture. He states that he made Spring Breakers at a moment “when there’s no such thing as high or low, it’s all been exploded. There is no underground or above-ground, there’s nothing that’s alternative. We’re at a point of post-everything, so it’s all about finding the spirit inside, and the logic, and making your own connections” (Hawker). In this context, we can understand Trash Humpers as the last of the Korine films to be branded with the authenticity of alternative culture. In Spring Breakers Korine moved from the gritty low-fi sensibility of his previous films and adopted a more digital, light-filled and pastel-coloured palette. Focussing more conventionally on plot than ever before, Spring Breakers follows four college girls who hold up a restaurant in order to fund their spring break vacation. Critic Michael Chaiken noted that the film marks a shift in Korine’s career, from the alternative stylings of the pre-Internet generation to “the cultural heirs [of] the doomed protagonists of Kids: nineties babies, who grew up with the Internet, whose sensibilities have been shaped by the sweeping technological changes that have taken place in the interval between the Clinton and Obama eras” (33).By the end of the 2000s, an entire generation came of age having not experienced a time when the obscure films, music or art of the past took more effort to track down. Having been a key participant in the branding of alternative culture, Korine is in a good position to recall a different, pre-YouTube time – when cultural discernment was still caught up in the authenticity of artistic identity, and when one’s cultural tastes could still operate with a certain amount of freedom from sociological scrutiny. Such ideas seem a long way away from today’s cultural environments, which have been shaped not only by digital media’s promotion of cultural interconnection and mass information, but also by social media’s emphasis on mobilization and ethical awareness. ConclusionI should reiterate here that is not Korine’s lack of seriousness, or irony, alone that marks Trash Humpers as a response to the scepticism surrounding alternative culture symbolised by the figure of the hipster. It is, rather, that Korine’s mock-documentary about juvenile geriatrics works too hard to obscure its implicit social commentary, appearing driven to condemn contemporary capitalism’s exploitations of youthfulness only to divert such “uncool” critical commentaries through unsubtle formal distractions, visual poetics and “bad boy” avant-garde signifiers of authenticity. Before being bludgeoned to death, the unnamed man in the French maid’s outfit recites a poem on a bridge amidst a barrage of fire crackers let off by a nearby humper in a wheelchair. Although easily overlooked, it could, in fact, be a pivotal scene in the film. Spoken with mock high-art pretentions, the final lines of the poem are: So what? Why, I ask, why? Why castigate these creatures whose angelic features are bumping and grinding on trash? Are they not spawned by our greed? Are they not our true seed? Are they not what we’ve bought for our cash? We’ve created this lot, of the ooze and the rot, deliberately and unabashed. Whose orgiastic elation and one mission in creation is to savagely fornicate TRASH!Here, the character’s warning of capitalist overabundance is drowned out by the (aesthetic) shocks of the fire crackers, just as the stereotypical hipster’s ethical ideals are drowned out by their aesthetic excess. The scene also functions as a metaphor for the humpers themselves, whose elderly masks – embodiments of nostalgia – temporarily suspend their real socio-political identities for the sake of role-play. It is in this sense that Trash Humpers is too enamoured with its own artifices – including its anonymous “boys club” mentality – to suggest anything other than the aesthetic distance that has come to mark the failings of the “alternative culture” category. In such instances, alternative taste appears as a rhetorical posture, with Korine asking us to gawk knowingly at the hedonistic and destructive pleasures pursued by the humpers while factoring in, and accepting, our likely disapproval.ReferencesArsel, Zeynep, and Craig J. Thompson. “Demythologizing Consumption Practices: How Consumers Protect Their Field-Dependent Identity Investments from Devaluing Marketplace Myths.” Journal of Consumer Research 37.5 (2011): 791-806.Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984.Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production Essays on Art and Literature. Edited by Randal Johnson. London: Polity Press, 1993.Carr, David. “Its Edge Intact, Vice Is Chasing Hard News.” New York Times 24 Aug. 2014. 12 Nov. 2016 <https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/25/business/media/its-edge-intact-vice-is-chasing-hard-news-.html>.Catsoulis, Jeannette. “Geriatric Delinquents, Rampaging through Suburbia.” New York Times 6 May 2010. 1` Nov. 2016 <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/movies/07trash.html>.Chaiken, Michael. “The Dream Life.” Film Comment (Mar./Apr. 2013): 30-33.D’Angelo, Mike. “Trash Humpers.” Not Coming 18 Sep. 2009. 12 Nov. 2016 <http://www.notcoming.com/reviews/trashhumpers>.Derrida, Jacques. Positions. London: Athlone, 1981.Diesel Sweeties. 1 Nov. 2016 <https://store.dieselsweeties.com/products/nothing-is-any-good-if-other-people-like-it-shirt>.Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.Greif, Mark. What Was the Hipster? A Sociological Investigation. New York: n+1 Foundation, 2010.Hawker, Philippa. “Telling Tales Out of School.” Sydney Morning Herald 4 May 2013. 12 Nov. 2016 <http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/telling-tales-out-of-school-20130503-2ixc3.html>.Hillis, Aaron. “Harmony Korine on Trash Humpers.” IFC 6 May 2009. 12 Nov. 2016 <http://www.ifc.com/2010/05/harmony-korine-2>.Jay Magill Jr., R. Chic Ironic Bitterness. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007.Kipp, Jeremiah. “Clean Off the Dirt, Scrape Off the Blood: An Interview with Trash Humpers Director Harmony Korine.” Slant Magazine 18 Mar. 2011. 1 Nov. 2016 <http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/article/clean-off-the-dirt-scrape-off-the-blood-an-interview-with-trash-humpers-director-harmony-korine>.Latour, Bruno. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (2004): 225-248.Maly, Ico, and Varis, Piia. “The 21st-Century Hipster: On Micro-Populations in Times of Superdiversity.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 19.6 (2016): 637–653.McHugh, Gene. “Monday May 10th 2010.” Post Internet. New York: Lulu Press, 2010.Ouellette, Marc. “‘I Know It When I See It’: Style, Simulation and the ‘Short-Circuit Sign’.” Semiotic Review 3 (2013): 1–15.Reeve, Michael. “The Hipster as the Postmodern Dandy: Towards an Extensive Study.” 2013. 12 Nov. 2016. <http://www.academia.edu/3589528/The_hipster_as_the_postmodern_dandy_towards_an_extensive_study>.Schiermer, Bjørn. “Late-Modern Hipsters: New Tendencies in Popular Culture.” Acta Sociologica 57.2 (2014): 167–181.Sontag, Susan. “Notes on Camp.” Against Interpretation. New York: Octagon, 1964/1982. 275-92. Stahl, Geoff. “Mile-End Hipsters and the Unmasking of Montreal’s Proletaroid Intelligentsia; Or How a Bohemia Becomes BOHO.” Adam Art Gallery, Apr. 2010. 12 May 2015 <http://www.adamartgallery.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/adamartgallery_vuwsalecture_geoffstahl.pdf>.Williams, Alex. “Guerrilla Fashion: The Story of Supreme.” New York Times 21 Nov. 2012. 1 Nov. 2016 <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/22/fashion/guerrilla-fashion-the-story-of-supreme.html>.Žižek, Slavoj. “L’Etat d’Hipster.” Rhinocerotique. Trans. Henry Brulard. Sep. 2009. 3-10.

Introduction A snapshot, not unlike countless photographs likely to be found in any number of family albums, shows two figures sitting on a park bench: an elderly and amiable looking man grins beneath the rim of a golf cap; a young boy of twelve smiles wide for the camera — a rather banal scene, captured on film. And yet, this seemingly innocent and unexceptional photograph was the site of a remarkable and wide ranging discourse — encompassing American conservatism, celebrity politics, and the end of the Cold War — as the image circulated around the globe during the weeklong state funeral of Ronald Wilson Reagan, 40th president of the United States. Taken in 1997 by the young boy’s grandfather, Ukrainian immigrant Yakov Ravin, during a chance encounter with the former president, the snapshot is believed to be the last public photograph of Ronald Reagan. Published on the occasion of the president’s death, the photograph made “instant celebrities” of the boy, now a twenty-year-old college student, Rostik Denenburg and his grand dad. Throughout the week of Reagan’s funeral, the two joined a chorus of dignitaries, politicians, pundits, and “ordinary” Americans praising Ronald Reagan: “The Great Communicator,” the man who defeated Communism, the popular president who restored America’s confidence, strength, and prosperity. Yes, it was mourning in America again. And the whole world was watching. Not since Princess Diana’s sudden (and unexpected) death, have we witnessed an electronic hagiography of such global proportions. Unlike Diana’s funeral, however, Reagan’s farewell played out in distinctly partisan terms. As James Ridgeway (2004) noted, the Reagan state funeral was “not only face-saving for the current administration, but also perhaps a mask for the American military debacle in Iraq. Not to mention a gesture of America’s might in the ‘war on terror.’” With non-stop media coverage, the weeklong ceremonies provided a sorely needed shot in the arm to the Bush re-election campaign. Still, whilst the funeral proceedings and the attendant media coverage were undeniably excessive in their deification of the former president, the historical white wash was not nearly so vulgar as the antiseptic send off Richard Nixon received back in 1994. That is to say, the piety of the Nixon funeral was at once startling and galling to many who reviled the man (Lapham). By contrast, given Ronald Reagan’s disarming public persona, his uniquely cordial relationship with the national press corps, and most notably, his handler’s mastery of media management techniques, the Reagan idolatry was neither surprising nor unexpected. In this brief essay, I want to consider Reagan’s funeral, and his legacy, in relation to what cultural critics, referring to the production of celebrity, have described as “fame games” (Turner, Bonner & Marshall). Specifically, I draw on the concept of “flashpoints” — moments of media excess surrounding a particular personage — in consideration of the Reagan funeral. Throughout, I demonstrate how Reagan’s death and the attendant media coverage epitomize this distinctive feature of contemporary culture. Furthermore, I observe Reagan’s innovative approaches to electoral politics in the age of television. Here, I suggest that Reagan’s appropriation of the strategies and techniques associated with advertising, marketing and public relations were decisive, not merely in terms of his electoral success, but also in securing his lasting fame. I conclude with some thoughts on the implications of Reagan’s legacy on historical memory, contemporary politics, and what neoconservatives, the heirs of the Reagan Revolution, gleefully describe as the New American Century. The Magic Hour On the morning of 12 June 2004, the last day of the state funeral, world leaders eulogized Reagan, the statesmen, at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. Among the A-List political stars invited to speak were Margaret Thatcher, former president George H. W. Bush and, to borrow Arundhati Roi’s useful phrase, “Bush the Lesser.” Reagan’s one-time Cold War adversary, Mikhail Gorbachev, as well as former Democratic presidents, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were also on hand, but did not have speaking parts. Former Reagan administration officials, Supreme Court justices, and congressional representatives from both sides of the aisle rounded out a guest list that read like a who’s who of the American political class. All told, Reagan’s weeklong sendoff was a state funeral at its most elaborate. It had it all—the flag draped coffin, the grieving widow, the riderless horse, and the procession of mourners winding their way through the Rotunda of the US Capitol. In this last regard, Reagan joined an elite group of seven presidents, including four who died by assassination — Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley and John F. Kennedy — to be honored by having his remains lie in state in the Rotunda. But just as the deceased president was product of the studio system, so too, the script for the Gipper’s swan song come straight out of Hollywood. Later that day, the Reagan entourage made one last transcontinental flight back to the presidential library in Simi Valley, California for a private funeral service at sunset. In Hollywood parlance, the “magic hour” refers to the quality of light at dusk. It is an ideal, but ephemeral time favored by cinematographers, when the sunlight takes on a golden glow lending grandeur, nostalgia, and oftentimes, a sense of closure to a scene. This was Ronald Reagan’s final moment in the sun: a fitting end for an actor of the silver screen, as well as for the president who mastered televisual politics. In a culture so thoroughly saturated with the image, even the death of a minor celebrity is an occasion to replay film clips, interviews, paparazzi photos and the like. Moreover, these “flashpoints” grow in intensity and frequency as promotional culture, technological innovation, and the proliferation of new media outlets shape contemporary media culture. They are both cause and consequence of these moments of media excess. And, as Turner, Bonner and Marshall observe, “That is their point. It is their disproportionate nature that makes them so important: the scale of their visibility, their overwhelmingly excessive demonstration of the power of the relationship between mass-mediated celebrities and the consumers of popular culture” (3-4). B-Movie actor, corporate spokesman, state governor and, finally, US president, Ronald Reagan left an extraordinary photographic record. Small wonder, then, that Reagan’s death was a “flashpoint” of the highest order: an orgy of images, a media spectacle waiting to happen. After all, Reagan appeared in over 50 films during his career in Hollywood. Publicity stills and clips from Reagan’s film career, including Knute Rockne, All American, the biopic that earned Reagan his nickname “the Gipper”, King’s Row, and Bedtime for Bonzo provided a surreal, yet welcome respite from television’s obsessive (some might say morbidly so) live coverage of Reagan’s remains making their way across country. Likewise, archival footage of Reagan’s political career — most notably, images of the 1981 assassination attempt; his quip “not to make age an issue” during the 1984 presidential debate; and his 1987 speech at the Brandenburg Gate demanding that Soviet President Gorbachev, “tear down this wall” — provided the raw materials for press coverage that thoroughly dominated the global mediascape. None of which is to suggest, however, that the sheer volume of Reagan’s photographic record is sufficient to account for the endless replay and reinterpretation of Reagan’s life story. If we are to fully comprehend Reagan’s fame, we must acknowledge his seminal engagement with promotional culture, “a professional articulation between the news and entertainment media and the sources of publicity and promotion” (Turner, Bonner & Marshall 5) in advancing an extraordinary political career. Hitting His Mark In a televised address supporting Barry Goldwater’s nomination for the presidency delivered at the 1964 Republican Convention, Ronald Reagan firmly established his conservative credentials and, in so doing, launched one of the most remarkable and influential careers in American politics. Political scientist Gerard J. De Groot makes a compelling case that the strategy Reagan and his handlers developed in the 1966 California gubernatorial campaign would eventually win him the presidency. The centerpiece of this strategy was to depict the former actor as a political outsider. Crafting a persona he described as “citizen politician,” Reagan’s great appeal and enormous success lie in his uncanny ability to project an image founded on traditional American values of hard work, common sense and self-determination. Over the course of his political career, Reagan’s studied optimism and “no-nonsense” approach to public policy would resonate with an electorate weary of career politicians. Charming, persuasive, and seemingly “authentic,” Reagan ran gubernatorial and subsequent presidential campaigns that were distinctive in that they employed sophisticated public relations and marketing techniques heretofore unknown in the realm of electoral politics. The 1966 Reagan gubernatorial campaign took the then unprecedented step of employing an advertising firm, Los Angeles-based Spencer-Roberts, in shaping the candidate’s image. Leveraging their candidate’s ease before the camera, the Reagan team crafted a campaign founded upon a sophisticated grasp of the television industry, TV news routines, and the medium’s growing importance to electoral politics. For instance, in the days before the 1966 Republican primary, the Reagan team produced a five-minute film using images culled from his campaign appearances. Unlike his opponent, whose television spots were long-winded, amateurish and poorly scheduled pieces that interrupted popular programs, like Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, Reagan’s short film aired in the early evening, between program segments (De Groot). Thus, while his opponent’s television spot alienated viewers, the Reagan team demonstrated a formidable appreciation not only for televisual style, but also, crucially, a sophisticated understanding of the nuances of television scheduling, audience preferences and viewing habits. Over the course of his political career, Reagan refined his media driven, media directed campaign strategy. An analysis of his 1980 presidential campaign reveals three dimensions of Reagan’s increasingly sophisticated media management strategy (Covington et al.). First, the Reagan campaign carefully controlled their candidate’s accessibility to the press. Reagan’s penchant for potentially damaging off-the-cuff remarks and factual errors led his advisors to limit journalists’ interactions with the candidate. Second, the character of Reagan’s public appearances, including photo opportunities and especially press conferences, grew more formal. Reagan’s interactions with the press corps were highly structured affairs designed to control which reporters were permitted to ask questions and to help the candidate anticipate questions and prepare responses in advance. Finally, the Reagan campaign sought to keep the candidate “on message.” That is to say, press releases, photo opportunities and campaign appearances focused on a single, consistent message. This approach, known as the Issue of the Day (IOD) media management strategy proved indispensable to advancing the administration’s goals and achieving its objectives. Not only was the IOD strategy remarkably effective in influencing press coverage of the Reagan White House, this coverage promoted an overwhelmingly positive image of the president. As the weeklong funeral amply demonstrated, Reagan was, and remains, one of the most popular presidents in modern American history. Reagan’s popular (and populist) appeal is instructive inasmuch as it illuminates the crucial distinction between “celebrity and its premodern antecedent, fame” observed by historian Charles L. Ponce de Leone (13). Whereas fame was traditionally bestowed upon those whose heroism and extraordinary achievements distinguished them from common people, celebrity is a defining feature of modernity, inasmuch as celebrity is “a direct outgrowth of developments that most of us regard as progressive: the spread of the market economy and the rise of democratic, individualistic values” (Ponce de Leone 14). On one hand, then, Reagan’s celebrity reflects his individualism, his resolute faith in the primacy of the market, and his defense of “traditional” (i.e. democratic) American values. On the other hand, by emphasizing his heroic, almost supernatural achievements, most notably his vanquishing of the “Evil Empire,” the Reagan mythology serves to lift him “far above the common rung of humanity” raising him to “the realm of the divine” (Ponce de Leone 14). Indeed, prior to his death, the Reagan faithful successfully lobbied Congress to create secular shrines to the standard bearer of American conservatism. For instance, in 1998, President Clinton signed a bill that officially rechristened one of the US capitol’s airports to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. More recently, conservatives working under the aegis of the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project have called for the creation of even more visible totems to the Reagan Revolution, including replacing Franklin D. Roosevelt’s profile on the dime with Reagan’s image and, more dramatically, inscribing Reagan in stone, alongside Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt at Mount Rushmore (Gordon). Therefore, Reagan’s enduring fame rests not only on the considerable symbolic capital associated with his visual record, but also, increasingly, upon material manifestations of American political culture. The High Stakes of Media Politics What are we to make of Reagan’s fame and its implications for America? To begin with, we must acknowledge Reagan’s enduring influence on modern electoral politics. Clearly, Reagan’s “citizen politician” was a media construct — the masterful orchestration of ideological content across the institutional structures of news, public relations and marketing. While some may suggest that Reagan’s success was an anomaly, a historical aberration, a host of politicians, and not a few celebrities — Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Arnold Schwarzenegger among them — emulate Reagan’s style and employ the media management strategies he pioneered. Furthermore, we need to recognize that the Reagan mythology that is so thoroughly bound up in his approach to media/politics does more to obscure, rather than illuminate the historical record. For instance, in her (video taped) remarks at the funeral service, Margaret Thatcher made the extraordinary claim — a central tenet of the Reagan Revolution — that Ronnie won the cold war “without firing a shot.” Such claims went unchallenged, at least in the establishment press, despite Reagan’s well-documented penchant for waging costly and protracted proxy wars in Afghanistan, Africa, and Central America. Similarly, the Reagan hagiography failed to acknowledge the decisive role Gorbachev and his policies of “reform” and “openness” — Perestroika and Glasnost — played in the ending of the Cold War. Indeed, Reagan’s media managed populism flies in the face of what radical historian Howard Zinn might describe as a “people’s history” of the 1980s. That is to say, a broad cross-section of America — labor, racial and ethnic minorities, environmentalists and anti-nuclear activists among them — rallied in vehement opposition to Reagan’s foreign and domestic policies. And yet, throughout the weeklong funeral, the divisiveness of the Reagan era went largely unnoted. In the Reagan mythology, then, popular demonstrations against an unprecedented military build up, the administration’s failure to acknowledge, let alone intervene in the AIDS epidemic, and the growing disparity between rich and poor that marked his tenure in office were, to borrow a phrase, relegated to the dustbin of history. In light of the upcoming US presidential election, we ought to weigh how Reagan’s celebrity squares with the historical record; and, equally important, how his legacy both shapes and reflects the realities we confront today. Whether we consider economic and tax policy, social services, electoral politics, international relations or the domestic culture wars, Reagan’s policies and practices continue to determine the state of the union and inform the content and character of American political discourse. Increasingly, American electoral politics turns on the pithy soundbite, the carefully orchestrated pseudo-event, and a campaign team’s unwavering ability to stay on message. Nowhere is this more evident than in Ronald Reagan’s unmistakable influence upon the current (and illegitimate) occupant of the White House. References Covington, Cary R., Kroeger, K., Richardson, G., and J. David Woodward. “Shaping a Candidate’s Image in the Press: Ronald Reagan and the 1980 Presidential Election.” Political Research Quarterly 46.4 (1993): 783-98. De Groot, Gerard J. “‘A Goddamed Electable Person’: The 1966 California Gubernatorial Campaign of Ronald Reagan.” History 82.267 (1997): 429-48. Gordon, Colin. “Replace FDR on the Dime with Reagan?” History News Network 15 December, 2003. http://hnn.us/articles/1853.html>. Lapham, Lewis H. “Morte de Nixon – Death of Richard Nixon – Editorial.” Harper’s Magazine (July 1994). http://www.harpers.org/MorteDeNixon.html>. Ponce de Leon, Charles L. Self-Exposure: Human-Interest Journalism and the Emergence of Celebrity in America, 1890-1940. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2002. Ridgeway, James. “Bush Takes a Ride in Reagan’s Wake.” Village Voice (10 June 2004). http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0423/mondo5.php>. Turner, Graeme, Frances Bonner, and P. David Marshall. Fame Games: The Production of Celebrity in Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Zinn, Howard. The Peoples’ History of the United States: 1492-Present. New York: Harper Perennial, 1995. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Howley, Kevin. "Always Famous: Or, The Electoral Half-Life of Ronald Reagan." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/17-howley.php>. APA Style Howley, K. (Nov. 2004) "Always Famous: Or, The Electoral Half-Life of Ronald Reagan," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/17-howley.php>.

In my article, "A New Sound; a New Sensation: A Cultural and Literary Reconsideration of the Motorcar in Modernity" (Ryder), I propose that "a range of semiotic engines" may be mobilised "to argue that, in the first quarter of the twentieth century, the motorcar is received as relatum profundis of freedom". In that 2019 article I further argue that, as Roland Barthes has indirectly proposed, the automobile fits into a "highway code" and into a broader "car system" in which its attributes—including its architectural details—are received as signs of liberation (Barthes Elements, 10, 29). While extending that argument, with near exclusive focus on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) and with special reference to the hero’s Rolls Royce, I argue here that the automobile is offered as a sign of both conquest and destruction; as both dream machine and vehicle of nightmare. This is not to suggest that the motorcar was, prior to 1925, seen in absolutely idealistic terms. Nor is it to suggest that by the end of the first quarter of the twentieth century the automobile had been unequivocally condemned. As observed in my 2019 article for the Southern Semiotic Review, while The Wind in the Willows (1908) is the first novel written in English to deal with the deleterious effects of the motorcar, "it is [nonetheless] impossible to find a literary text from the early part of the twentieth century that flatly condemns the machine". So, from Gatsby’s emblematic "circus wagon" to narrator Nick Carraway’s equally symbolic "Dodge", I argue that the motorcar is represented by Fitzgerald as an emblem of both dreams and wreckage.The first motorcar noted in The Great Gatsby is the "old Dodge" belonging to Nick Carraway—the novel’s narrator and greatest dodger (Fitzgerald Great Gatsby, 17). Dreaming of success, and having declared himself restless, Nick claims to have come East to try his luck in the bond business (16). But, reflecting a propensity to dishonesty, the unreliable narrator (Abrams, 168) eventually reveals that at least one of the reasons for his migration East is to escape his emotional responsibilities to a girl "out West" (Fitzgerald Great Gatsby, 30); a girl to whom he continues to write letters signed "Love, Nick" (61). While these notions of being dodgy and dodging—and their connection to Carraway’s car—seem to have escaped the attention of commentators, several have nonetheless observed that the make suits its owner for another reason: a work-a-day mass-produced machine, the vehicle is surely a sign of the narrator’s conservatism. Tad Burness, for instance, notes that in the early twentieth century the Dodge was a make that particularly appealed to conservative and careful drivers (91). Certainly, the Dodge brothers’ advertising of the nineteen-twenties, which steadfastly emphasised staunchness and stability, reinforces this conclusion. The make, therefore, is entirely appropriate to Nick: a man who evades the vicissitudes of romance; who shuns excitement, who aligns himself with mainstream Midwestern values, who identifies more with the mechanical than with the human, and who, until the very end, fails to commit to the extraordinary. Apropos, in reviewing the manuscript of Gatsby, Keath Fraser records an exchange between Jordan Baker and Nick Carraway that was finally, and perhaps unfortunately, excised: "You appeal to me,” she said suddenly as we strolled away.“You’re sort of slow and steady ... you’ve got everything adjusted just right.” (Qtd. in Bloom, 67)To have been included at the end of the third chapter, Jordan’s assessment of Nick suggests that the narrator has over-tuned the cognitive machinery necessary to navigation through a social milieu to which he does not belong. While Fitzgerald may have felt this to be too blunt a narrative tool, the ‘slow and steady’ approach to life attributed to Nick in the finished novel clearly suggests that the narrator lives life by the manual.It may be argued, then, that while ostensibly facilitating a new start and an associated desire for upward social mobility, Nick’s old Dodge symbolises a perfunctory approach to the business of living, a shabby escape from a "tangle back home", and an escape from self (Fitzgerald Great Gatsby, 61). Certainly, it represents no "on the road" conquest. Indeed, Nick’s clinical and mechanical approach to life comes close to ruining him. Short of his identification with Gatsby at the end—and the subsequent telling of a tragic tale—Nick is an archetypal loser. While claiming to identify with the "racy, adventurous" feel of New York (59), his instinct is to fall back on "interior rules that act as brakes on [his] desires" (61). He therefore fails to connect with Jordan Baker—his racy and attractive would-be lover, herself named after the Jordan Playboy automobile: the "first car to be marketed on emotional appeal alone" (Heimann and Patton, 14). So, it turns out that Nick is one of life’s "rotten drivers" (Fitzgerald Great Gatsby, 60)—an accusation he ironically levels at Jordan Baker who eventually tackles him on this point:"You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver? Well, I met another bad driver, didn’t I? I mean it was careless of me to make such a wrong guess. I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person." (154)As Fraser has pointed out, the mechanical and shifty Nick is far from honest (Bloom, 68). Rather than achieving any sort of emotional consummation, his already muted desires idle, misfire, or stall. Declaring himself to be "one of the few honest people that [he has] ever known" (Fitzgerald Great Gatsby, 154), Nick’s self-deception is, from the outset, complete. Left without the stimulus of the hero, one wonders if perhaps Nick might become a George B. Wilson.Despite his dream of pecuniary success (something shared with Nick Carraway), garage proprietor George B. Wilson is impoverished by the automobile. A dissolute dealer in second-hand machines, this once-handsome but "spiritless man" (Fitzgerald Great Gatsby, 33) has worked for years on scant margins. James Flink notes that dealers in used automobiles had a particularly hard time in the mid to late 1920s when profits on sales were very slight (144). The fact that Wilson is a second-hand car dealer also reinforces that everything else in his life is second-hand: built on the enterprise of others, his dream is second hand; his premises are second-hand; even his wife is second-hand. And, of course, he himself is used. Fitzgerald, then, is at pains to highlight the cultural meaning of the common or inferior car. Indeed, in the dark recesses of Wilson’s garage—which itself rests precariously on the edge of a wasteland under the faded and failed eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg—sits a "dust-covered wreck of a Ford" (Fitzgerald Great Gatsby, 33). Emblematic of the garage proprietor’s broken dreams, Wilson’s psychic paralysis is variously foregrounded—principally by the broken car. Here we have nothing less than Heidegger’s das Gestell: the mechanised consciousness as discussed in his essay "The Question Concerning Technology" (in Krell, 227). Significantly, only automobiles elicit a spark of interest from Wilson—but the irony, as suggested above, is that these are signs of the technical spirit to which he has so utterly acquiesced.It is often, if not always, the case in Gatsby that automobiles signpost derailed agency and, therefore, broken dreams. After all, Gatsby’s own death and funeral are foreshadowed through the automobile. In the first chapter, for example, Nick tells his cousin Daisy that "all the cars in Chicago have the left rear wheel painted black as a mourning wreath" for her (Fitzgerald Great Gatsby, 22). More portentously, during Nick and Gatsby’s drive to Astoria, "a dead man" passes the hero’s Rolls-Royce "in a hearse heaped with blooms" (68). While Myrtle’s death and Gatsby’s murder are contemporaneously suggested, in this emblematic tableau Gatsby’s Rolls-Royce is also overtaken by a limousine—and so the final chapter’s depressing "procession of three cars" is subtly anticipated (153). A "horribly black and wet" motor hearse bears Gatsby’s corpse to the cemetery while the narrator arrives with Gatsby’s father and the minister in a limousine. Then come the servants and the postman in Gatsby’s yellow station wagon. That the yellow and black cars are so incongruously and so tragically juxtaposed is a structurally and semantically significant feature of the text. The yellow car that once bore cheerful guests to Gatsby’s parties now follows the black hearse—the novel’s ultimate and, arguably, most awful death car. Thus, Fitzgerald presents us with one last reminder that, corrupted by our materialistic drives, our dreams wither and die; that there is, in the end, no magic.As Robert Long points out, however, the manuscript of Gatsby confirms that Fitzgerald had originally intended such foreshadowing to be much more obvious. For instance, in the manuscript, when Gatsby drives Nick to New York he declares his car to be "the handsomest in New York" and that he "wouldn’t want to ride around in a big hearse like some of those fellas do" (Long, 193). Further confirmation of Fitzgerald’s determination to mute the novel’s funereal symbolism is provided in chapter two when, along with the word "sepulchrally", the phrase "reeks of death" is crossed out (Long, 194). As published, then, the automobile travels much more subtly in The Great Gatsby. While a ghostly machine turns up to the hero’s house shortly after the funeral, the end of the road for Nick is suggested when he sells his plain old Dodge to a plain old grocer (Fitzgerald Great Gatsby, 157-158).The counterpoint to Nick’s old Dodge is, of course, Gatsby’s magnificent Rolls Royce: literature’s ultimate dream car. C.S. Rolls knew very well that his automobile was the new haute couture of the privileged. In his famous article on motorcars in the 1911 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, he declares the upmarket machine to be "the private carriage of the wealthier classes to be used on all occasions" (223). To set it apart from competitors, the Rolls Royce not only offered an extraordinarily robust and responsive chassis, but boasted bodywork hand-crafted by a range of highly skilled artisans. W.A. Robotham writes that "one of the more fascinating aspects of Rolls-Royce car production in the twenties was the manufacture of the body at the many coachbuilding establishments that existed in London, the provinces, and Paris" (14). Once an order for a chassis was placed, an appointed carrossier would prescribe and detail coachwork and agonise over every internal appointment. With its "interior of glittering plate glass and rich morocco", the unnamed machine that so hopelessly besots the Toad in the third chapter of The Wind in the Willows is undoubtedly the result of such a special order—and seems likely to have goaded Fitzgerald into a fit of imitation (Grahame, 30). Apposite to a novel that contrasts dream and reality and pertinent to the near nonchalant agency of its wraithlike, almost ethereal, hero, Gatsby’s car is a cream-yellow Rolls Royce: a Silver Ghost. When C.S. Rolls conceived the model, he wrote: "the motion of the car must be absolutely silent. The car must be free from the objectionable rattling and buzzing and inconvenience of chains. ... The engine must be smokeless and odourless" (Robson, 27). Reflecting its whisper-quiet locomotion and its extensive use of silver, nickel, and aluminium plating, Rolls’s partner Claude Johnson gave the model its perfect name. Manufactured between 1906 and 1925, the Silver Ghost was the automobile of choice for F. Scott Fitzgerald himself. In 1922, the year in which Gatsby is set, Scott and his wife Zelda owned a second-hand Silver Ghost which they drove, with much joy, between Great Neck and New York. Here, then, lies one of those rare and fortuitous connections between one’s personal drives and one’s work; really, the hero of Fitzgerald’s third novel could have no other motorcar.Like the machine he drives, and in keeping with Roland Barthes’ idea that automobiles are somehow "magical" (Mythologies, 88), Gatsby would appear to have arrived from the heavens. Ghost-like, he glides in and out of the narrative and is, moreover, ineluctably associated with silver. He has pursued silver for much of his life and is, on numerous occasions, specifically identified with this powerful symbol of privilege and betrayal. While Nick finds him "regarding the silver pepper of the stars" (Fitzgerald Great Gatsby, 31), later the "pale", wraithlike hero wears a "silver shirt" (80). So much the object of Gatsby’s yearnings, along with Jordan Baker, Daisy Buchanan is likened to a "silver idol" (105), has a "voice full of money", and wears a hat of "metallic cloth" (109). A trophy held in hopeless memory, Daisy may be said to be one of an extensive collection of enchanted objects beheld and worshipped by an all-too-flawed hero—but while Fitzgerald’s numerous references to silver undoubtedly highlight a double-edged significance, it is nonetheless suggestions of glamour that first strike us. Early in the novel, then, aside from the portentous foreshadowing of disasters to come, Gatsby’s car emerges as a powerful archetype: an image coupled with enormous emotive significance (Jung, 87); a sign of uncompromised and near-miraculous opulence. Terraced with windshields and sporting a green leather interior, his magnificent cream-yellow Rolls Royce is "bright with nickel" (a very expensive plating used for Rolls Royce radiators) and is "swollen here and there in its monstrous length with triumphant hat-boxes and supper boxes and tool boxes" (Fitzgerald Great Gatsby, 64). Fitzgerald’s parataxis here seems to encourage breathless awe at the near obscene luxury of the vehicle, yet the depiction is historically accurate.In an Autocar article of 1921 there appears a closely-annotated plan of a two-seater Rolls Royce. Numerous fittings are noted: food lockers, tool cupboards, hot-and-cold water-locker, wash-basin compartment, spares cupboard, kodak photography compartment, cooking utensil compartment, suit and dressing cases, spare accumulator compartment, and recess for spare petroleum tins (Garnier and Allport, 50). Like Toad’s, Gatsby’s chimerical car is undoubtedly the creation of a carrossier. Its standard of appointment, moreover, suggests royal status. Since the Rolls-Royce is an English car, its presence in America, where it was manufactured under licence for a time, also points to a desire to recapture something left behind. This, as all readers of Fitzgerald will know, is a major thematic thread in Gatsby. To be explored in a forthcoming article, the relationship between this theme of "backing up" (that is, recapturing the past) and representations of the motorcar in the novel is profound, but for the moment I focus on the Silver Ghost as a sign of Gatsby’s outrageous aristocratic pretensions. Perhaps an expression of Fitzgerald’s own fantasy that he wasn’t the son of his parents at all, but the child of a world-ruling king, Gatsby claims to have lived "like a young rajah in all the capitals of Europe" (Fitzgerald Great Gatsby, 65). If not actually a Rolls-Royce-loving rajah, Gatsby certainly lives like a king and even signs himself "in a majestic hand" (47). Indeed, in these senses and more, the hero is "circus master" and performer par excellence.As a letter from Fitzgerald to Maxwell Perkins tells us, Petronius’s Satyrica furnished one of several alternative titles for Gatsby (Fitzgerald Letters, 169). Pointing to a delight in comedic hedonism, "Trimalchio in West Egg" was one of several titular options entertained by Fitzgerald (Gatsby is actually referred to as Trimalchio at the start of the novel’s seventh chapter) and so it is fitting that Brian Way declares Gatsby’s Rolls Royce to be "not so much a means of transport as a theatrical gesture"—one commensurate with the hero’s "non-stop theatrical performance" (Way in Bloom, 102). Similarly, in their 2019 article "Comfortably Cocooned: Onboard Media and Sydney’s Ongoing Gridlock", Richardson and Ryder argue that the automobile is far greater than the sum of its collective parts. In a similar vein, Leo Marx writes that Gatsby has about him a "gratifying sense of a dream about to be consummated" and argues that the hero’s dream car is one of many objects in the novel that speak to Gatsby’s attempt to locate, in the real world, the stuff of unutterable visions (Marx, 77). As "circus wagon" (Fitzgerald Great Gatsby, 109), the machine also makes a substantial contribution to Fitzgerald’s comedy of the excess: cars driven by clowns at circuses stereotypically seem to operate according to a set of physical laws distinct from those governing the real world. However, with its "fenders spread like wings" (67), the hero’s car seems destined to fly. But, like Daisy’s white roadster, a machine that ironically bespeaks innocence and purity while sitting portentously "under … dripping bare lilac-trees" (81), Gatsby’s machine—one of the most heavenly automobiles in literature—is also literature’s most famous death car. While, in the end, the make of the killing machine is not spelled out for us, we may nonetheless be sure that it is Gatsby’s ever-so-aptly owned Silver Ghost. After the dreadful accident in the seventh chapter, the fender of the hero’s carefully hidden open car is in need of repair. That the death car is an open one is highlighted for us before the accident, when Gatsby feels the pleated leather seats of the machine that will mow Myrtle down. The point is reinforced in chapter eight, after the accident, when Gatsby orders that his open car not be taken out. Moreover, while automobile upholstery specification varied in the nineteen-twenties, open cars generally had pleated leather seat cushions while mohair or broadcloth featured in closed tourers. This, too, narrows down the options confronting readers. Finally, the focus on the Rolls Royce’s great fenders (these are referred to at least three times before Myrtle is killed) also establishes a clear connection between the calamity and Gatsby’s "winged" Rolls. And, finally, there is the crucial matter of the ambiguous paintwork.Nick tells us that Gatsby’s Rolls-Royce is a "rich cream colour" (64) while Mavro Michaelis claims that the death car is "light green" (123). Another witness to the accident claims that the vehicle involved is "a yellow car"; "a big yellow car" (125). In fact, they are all right. Like Gatsby himself, his motorcar suggests one thing at one time and another at another. From about the mid-nineteen-tens, Rolls-Royce painted a good many Silver Ghosts a rather uncertain cream-yellow and, in fading light, the lacquer betrays a greenish hue. We remember that the party drives "towards death through the cooling twilight" (122); that Myrtle runs out "into the dusk"; and that the death car comes "out of gathering darkness" (123). While an earlier 1914 model, there is an excellent example of this ambiguous colour used on a Silver Ghost in Turin’s Museo dell’automobile. Finally, of course, the many references to ‘ghosts’ and to ‘silver’ connected with both the hero and Daisy Buchanan cannot be considered accidental. In one of modern literature’s greatest novels, then, behind the dream of the automobile falls the depressingly foul dust of betrayal and death.ReferencesAbrams, Meyer H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957/1993.Barthes, Roland. Elements of Semiology. Trans. A. Lavers. NY: Hill and Wang, 1964/1977.———. Mythologies. Trans. A. Lavers. NY: Hill & Wang, 1957/1974.Bloom, Harold, ed. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: Modern Critical Interpretations. NY: Chelsea House, 1986.Burness, Tad. Cars of the Early Twenties. NY: Galahad, 1968.Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. London: The Folio Society, 1926/1968.———. The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ed. A. Turnbull. London: The Bodley Head, 1964.Flink, James. The Car Culture. Mass.: MIT Press, 1975.Garnier, Peter, and Warren Allport. Rolls Royce: From the Archives of Autocar. London: Hamlyn, 1978.Grahame, Kenneth. The Wind in the Willows. NY: Methuen, 1908/1980.Heimann, Jim, and Phil Patton. 20th Century Classic Cars. Köln: Taschen, 2009/2015.Jung, Carl G. Man and His Symbols. NY: Dell, 1964/1984.Krell, David, ed. Heidegger: Basic Writings. London: Routledge, 2011.Long, Robert E. The Achieving of The Great Gatsby. London: Bucknell UP., 1979.Marx, Leo. "The Puzzle of Anti-Urbanism in Classic American Literature." Literature & Urban Experience: Essays on the City and Literature. Eds. M.C. Jaye and A.C. Watts. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1981.Richardson, Nicholas, and Paul Ryder. "Comfortably Cocooned: Onboard Media and Sydney’s Ongoing Gridlock." Global Media Journal (Australian Edition) 13.1 (2019). 1 Mar. 2020 <https://www.hca.westernsydney.edu.au/gmjau/?p=3302>.Robotham, W. Arthur. Silver Ghosts & Silver Dawn. London: Constable & Co., 1970.Robson, Graham. Man and the Automobile. Maidenhead: McGraw Hill, 1979.Rolls, Charles S. In Encyclopaedia Britannica. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1911.Ryder, Paul. "A New Sound; A New Sensation: A Cultural and Literary Reconsideration of the Motorcar in Modernity." Southern Semiotic Review 11 (2019). 1 Mar. 2020 <http://www.southernsemioticreview.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Ryder_Issue-11_1_-2019-SSR.pdf>.


 
 
 Samurai and Chinese martial arts themes inspire and permeate the uniquely philosophical lyrics and beats of Wu-Tang Clan, a New York-based hip-hop collective made popular in the mid-nineties with their debut album Enter the Wu-Tang: Return of the 36 Chambers. Original founder RZA (“Rizza”) scored his first full-length motion-picture soundtrack and made his feature film debut with Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (Jim Jarmusch, 2000). Through a critical exploration of the film’s musical filter, it will be argued that RZA’s aesthetic vision effectively deterritorialises the figure of the samurai, according to which the samurai “change[s] in nature and connect[s] with other multiplicities” (Deleuze and Guattari, 9). The soundtrack consequently emancipates and redistributes the idea of the samurai from within the dynamic context of a fundamentally different aesthetic intensity, which the Wu-Tang has always hoped to communicate, that is to say, an aesthetics of adaptation or of what is called in hip-hop music more generally: an aesthetics of flow. At the center of Jarmusch’s film is a fundamental opposition between the sober asceticism and deeply coded lifestyle of Ghost Dog and the supple, revolutionary, itinerant hip-hop beats that flow behind it and beneath it, and which serve at once as philosophical foil and as alternate foundation to the film’s themes and message. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai tells the story of Ghost Dog (Forest Whitaker), a deadly and flawlessly precise contract killer for a small-time contemporary New York organised crime family. He lives his life in a late 20th-century urban America according to the strict tenets of the 18th century text Hagakure, which relates the principles of the Japanese Bushido (literally, the “way of the warrior,” but more often defined and translated as the “code of the samurai”). Others have noted the way in which Ghost Dog not only fails as an adaptation of the samurai genre but thematises this very failure insofar as the film depicts a samurai’s unsuccessful struggle to adapt in a corrupt and fractured postmodern, post-industrial reality (Lanzagorta, par. 4, 9; Otomo, 35-8). If there is any hope at all for these adaptations (Ghost Dog is himself an example), it lies, according to some, in the singular, outmoded integrity of his nostalgia, which despite the abstract jouissance or satisfaction it makes available, is nevertheless blank and empty (Otomo, 36-7). Interestingly, in his groundbreaking book Spectacular Vernaculars, and with specific reference to hip-hop, Russell Potter suggests that where a Eurocentric postmodernism posits a lack of meaning and collapse of value and authority, a black postmodernism that is neither singular nor nostalgic is prepared to emerge (6-9). And as I will argue there are more concrete adaptive strategies at work in the film, strategies that point well beyond the film to popular culture more generally. These are anti-nostalgic strategies of possibility and escape that have everything to do with the way in which hip-hop as soundtrack enables Ghost Dog in his becoming-samurai, a process by which a deterritorialised subject and musical flow fuse to produce a hybrid adaptation and identity. But hip-hip not only makes possible such a becoming, it also constitutes a potentially liberating adaptation of the past and of otherness that infuses the film with a very different but still concrete jouissance. At the root of Ghost Dog is a conflict between what Deleuze and Guattari call state and nomad authority, between the code that prohibits adaptation and its willful betrayer. The state apparatus, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is the quintessential form of interiority. The state nourishes itself through the appropriation, the bringing into its interior, of all that over which it exerts its control, and especially over those nomadic elements that constantly threaten to escape (Deleuze and Guattari, 380-7). In Ghost Dog, the code or state-form functions throughout the film as an omnipresent source of centralisation, authorisation and organisation. It is attested to in the intensely stratified urban environment in which Ghost Dog lives, a complicated and forbidding network of streets, tracks, rails, alleys, cemeteries, tenement blocks, freeways, and shipping yards, all of which serve to hem Ghost Dog in. And as race is highlighted in the film, it, too, must be included among the many ways in which characters are always already contained. What encounters with racism in the film suggest is the operative presence of a plurality of racial and cultural codes; the strict segregation of races and cultures in the film and the animosity which binds them in opposition reflect a racial stratification that mirrors the stratified topography of the cityscape. Most important, perhaps, is the way in which Bushido itself functions, at least in part, as code, as well as the way in which the form of the historical samurai in legend and reality circumscribes not only Ghost Dog’s existence but the very possibility of the samurai and the samurai film as such. On the one hand, Bushido attests to the absolute of religion, or as Deleuze and Guattari describe it: “a center that repels the obscure … essentially a horizon that encompasses” and which forms a “bond”, “pact”, or “alliance” between subject/culture and the all-encompassing embrace of its deity: in this case, the state-form which sanctions samurai existence (382-3). On the other hand, but in the same vein, the advent of Bushido, and in particular the Hagakure text to which Ghost Dog turns for meaning and guidance, coincides historically with the emergence of the modern Japanese state, or put another way, with the eclipse of the very culture it sponsors. In fact, samurai history as a whole can be viewed to some extent as a process of historical containment by which the state-form gradually encompassed those nomadic warring elements at the heart of early samurai existence. This is the socio-historical context of Bushido, insofar as it represents the codification of the samurai subject and the stratification of samurai culture under the pressures of modernisation and the spread of global capitalism. It is a social and historical context marked by the power of a bourgeoning military, political and economic organisation, and by policies of restraint, centralisation and sedentariness. Moreover, the local and contemporary manifestations of this social and historical context are revealed in many of the elements that permeate not only the traditional samurai films of Kurosawa, Mizoguchi or Kobayashi, but modern adaptations of the genre as well, which tend to convey a nostalgic mourning for this loss, or more precisely, for this failure to adapt. Thus the filmic atmosphere of Ghost Dog is dominated by the negative qualities of inaction, nonviolence and sobriety, and whether these are taken to express the sterility and impotence of postmodern existence or the emptiness of a nostalgia for an unbroken and heroic past, these qualities point squarely towards the transience of culture and towards the impossibility of adaptation and survival. Ghost Dog is a reluctant assassin, and the inherently violent nature of his task is always deflected. In the same way, most of Ghost Dog’s speech in the film is delivered through his soundless readings of the Hagakure, silent and austere moments that mirror as well the creeping, sterile atmosphere in which most of the film’s action takes place. It is an atmosphere of interiority that points not only towards the stratified environment which restricts possibility and expressivity but also squarely towards the meaning of Bushido as code. But this atmosphere meets resistance. For the samurai is above all a man of war, and, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, “the man of war [that is to say, the nomad] is always committing an offence against” the State (383). In Ghost Dog, for all the ways in which Ghost Dog’s experience is stratified by the Bushido as code and by the post-industrial urban reality in which he lives and moves, the film shows equally the extent to which these strata or codes are undermined by nomadic forces that trace “lines of flight” and escape (Deleuze and Guattari, 423). Clearly it is the film’s soundtrack, and thus, too, the aesthetic intensities of the flow in hip-hop music, which both constitute and facilitate this escape: We have an APB on an MC killer Looks like the work of a master … Merciless like a terrorist Hard to capture the flow Changes like a chameleon (“Da Mystery of Chessboxin,” Enter) Herein lies the significance of (and difference between) the meaning of Bushido as code and as way, a problem of adaptation and translation which clearly reflects the central conflict of the film. A way is always a way out, the very essence of escape, and it always facilitates the breaking away from a code. Deleuze and Guattari describe the nomad as problematic, hydraulic, inseparable from flow and heterogeneity; nomad elements, as those elements which the State is incapable of drawing into its interior, are said to remain exterior and excessive to it (361-2). It is thus significant that the interiority of Ghost Dog’s readings from the Hagakure and the ferocious exteriority of the soundtrack, which along with the Japanese text helps narrate the tale, reflect the same relationship that frames the state and nomad models. The Hagakure is not only read in silence by the protagonist throughout the film, but the Hagakure also figures prominently inside the diegetic world of the film as a visual element, whereas the soundtrack, whether it is functioning diegetically or non-diegetically, is by its very nature outside the narrative space of the film, effectively escaping it. For Deleuze and Guattari, musical expression is inseparable from a process of becoming, and, in fact, it is fair to say that the jouissance of the film is supplied wholly by the soundtrack insofar as it deterritorialises the conventional language of the genre, takes it outside of itself, and then reinvests it through updated musical flows that facilitate Ghost Dog’s becoming-samurai. In this way, too, the soundtrack expresses the violence and action that the plot carefully avoids and thus intimately relates the extreme interiority of the protagonist to an outside, a nomadic exterior that forecloses any possibility of nostalgia but which suggests rather a tactics of metamorphosis and immediacy, a sublime deterritorialisation that involves music becoming-world and world becoming-music. Throughout the film, the appearance of the nomad is accompanied, even announced, by the onset of a hip-hop musical flow, always cinematically represented by Ghost Dog’s traversing the city streets or by lengthy tracking shots of a passenger pigeon in flight, both of which, to take just two examples, testify to purely nomadic concepts: not only to the sheer smoothness of open sky-space and flight with its techno-spiritual connotations, but also to invisible, inherited pathways that cross the stratified heart of the city undetected and untraceable. Embodied as it is in the Ghost Dog soundtrack, and grounded in what I have chosen to call an aesthetics of flow, hip-hop is no arbitrary force in the film; it is rather both the adaptive medium through which Ghost Dog and the samurai genre are redeemed and the very expression of this adaptation. Deleuze and Guattari write: The necessity of not having control over language, of being a foreigner in one’s own tongue, in order to draw speech to oneself and ‘bring something incomprehensible into the world.’ Such is the form of exteriority … that forms a war machine. (378) Nowhere else do Deleuze and Guattari more clearly outline the affinities that bind their notion of the nomad and the form of exteriority that is essential to it with the politics of language, cultural difference and authenticity which so color theories of race and critical analyses of hip-hop music and culture. And thus the key to hip-hop’s adaptive power lies in its spontaneity and in its bringing into the world of something incomprehensible and unanticipated. If the code in Ghost Dog is depicted as nonviolent, striated, interior, singular, austere and measured, then the flow in hip-hop and in the music of the Wu-Tang that informs Ghost Dog’s soundtrack is violent, fluid, exterior, variable, plural, playful and incalculable. The flow in hip-hop, as well as in Deleuze and Guattari’s work, is grounded in a kinetic linguistic spontaneity, variation and multiplicity. Its lyrical flow is a cascade of accelerating rhymes, the very speed and implausibility of which often creates a sort of catharsis in performers and spectators: I bomb atomically, Socrates’ philosophies and hypotheses can’t define how I be droppin’ these mockeries, lyrically perform armed robberies Flee with the lottery, possibly they spotted me Battle-scarred shogun, explosion. … (“Triumph”, Forever) Over and against the paradigm of the samurai, which as I have shown is connected with relations of content and interiority, the flow is attested to even more explicitly in the Wu-Tang’s embrace of the martial arts, kung-fu and Chinese cinematic traditions. And any understanding of the figure of the samurai in the contemporary hip-hop imagination must contend with the relationship of this figure to both the kung-fu fighting traditions and to kung-fu cinema, despite the fact that they constitute very different cultural and historical forms. I would, of course, argue that it is precisely this playful adaptation or literal deterritorialisation of otherwise geographically and culturally distinct realities that comprises the adaptive potential of hip-hop. Kung-fu, like hip-hop, is predicated on the exteriority of style. It is also a form of action based on precision and immediacy, on the fluid movements of the body itself deterritorialised as weapon, and thus it reiterates that blend of violence, speed and fluidity that grounds the hip-hop aesthetic: “I’ll defeat your rhyme in just four lines / Yeh, I’ll wax you and tax you and plus save time” (RZA and Norris, 211). Kung-fu lends itself to improvisation and to adaptability, essential qualities of combat and of lyrical flows in hip-hop music. For example, just as in kung-fu combat a fighter’s success is fundamentally determined by his ability to intuit and adapt to the style and skill and detailed movements of his adversary, the victory of a hip-hop MC engaged in, say, a freestyle battle will be determined by his capacity for improvising and adapting his own lyrical flow to counter and overcome his opponent’s. David Bordwell not only draws critical lines of difference between the Hong Kong and Hollywood action film but also hints at the striking differences between the “delirious kinetic exhilaration” of Hong Kong cinema and the “sober, attenuated, and grotesque expressivity” of the traditional Japanese samurai film (91-2). Moreover, Bordwell emphasises what the Wu-Tang Clan has always known and demonstrated: the sympathetic bond between kung-fu action or hand-to-hand martial arts combat and the flow in hip-hop music. Bordwell calls his kung-fu aesthetic “expressive amplification”, which communicates with the viewer through both a visual and physical intelligibility and which is described by Bordwell in terms of beats, exaggerations, and the “exchange and rhyming of gestures” (87). What is pointed to here are precisely those aspects of Hong Kong cinema that share essential similarities with hip-hop music as such and which permeate the Wu-Tang aesthetic and thus, too, challenge or redistribute the codified stillness and negativity that define the filmic atmosphere of Ghost Dog. Bordwell argues that Hong Kong cinema constitutes an aesthetics in action that “pushes beyond Western norms of restraint and plausibility,” and in light of my thesis, I would argue that it pushes beyond these same conventions in traditional Japanese cinema as well (86). Bruce Lee, too, in describing the difference between Chinese kung-fu and Japanese fighting forms in A Warrior’s Journey (Bruce Little, 2000) points to the latter’s regulatory principles of hesitation and segmentarity and to the former’s formlessness and shapelessness, describing kung-fu when properly practiced as “like water, it can flow or it can crash,” qualities which echo not only Bordwell’s description of the pause-burst-pause pattern of kung-fu cinema’s combat sequences but also the Wu-Tang Clan’s own self-conception as described by GZA (“Jizza”), a close relative of RZA and co-founder of the Wu-Tang Clan, when he is asked to explain the inspiration for the title of his album Liquid Swords: Actually, ‘Liquid Swords’ comes from a kung-fu flick. … But the title was just … perfect. I was like, ‘Legend of a Liquid Sword.’ Damn, this is my rhymes. This is how I’m spittin’ it. We say the tongue is symbolic of the sword anyway, you know, and when in motion it produces wind. That’s how you hear ‘wu’. … That’s the wind swinging from the sword. The ‘Tang’, that’s when it hits an object. Tang! That’s how it is with words. (RZA and Norris, 67) Thus do two competing styles animate the aesthetic dynamics of the film Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai: an aesthetic of codified arrest and restraint versus an aesthetic of nomadic resistance and escape. The former finds expression in the film in the form of the cultural and historical meanings of the samurai tradition, defined by negation and attenuated sobriety, and in the “blank parody” (Otomo, 35) of a postmodern nostalgia for an empty historical past exemplified in the appropriation of the Samurai theme and in the post-industrial prohibitions and stratifications of contemporary life and experience; the latter is attested to in the affirmative kinetic exhilaration of kung-fu style, immediacy and expressivity, and in the corresponding adaptive potential of a hip-hop musical flow, a distributive, productive, and anti-nostalgic becoming, the nomadic essence of which redeems the rhetoric of postmodern loss described by the film. References Bordwell, David. “Aesthetics in Action: Kungfu, Gunplay, and Cinematic Expressivity.” At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World. Ed. and Trans. Esther Yau. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2004. Bruce Lee: A Warrior’s Journey. Dir./Filmmaker John Little. Netflix DVD. Warner Home Video, 2000. Daidjo, Yuzan. Code of the Samurai. Trans. Thomas Cleary. Tuttle Martial Arts. Boston: Tuttle, 1999. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP,1987. Forman, Murray, and Mark Anthony Neal, eds. That’s the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 2004. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. Dir. Jim Jarmusch. Netflix DVD. Artisan, 2000. Hurst, G. Cameron III. Armed Martial Arts of Japan. New Haven: Yale UP,1998. Ikegami, Eiko. The Taming of the Samurai. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995. Jansen, Marius, ed. Warrior Rule in Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Kurosawa, Akira. Seven Samurai and Other Screenplays. Trans. Donald Richie. London: Faber and Faber, 1992. Lanzagorta, Marco. “Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai.” Senses of Cinema. Sept-Oct 2002. http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/02/22/ghost_dog.htm>. Mol, Serge. Classical Fighting Arts of Japan. Tokyo/New York: Kodansha Int., 2001. Otomo, Ryoko. “‘The Way of the Samurai’: Ghost Dog, Mishima, and Modernity’s Other.” Japanese Studies 21.1 (May 2001) 31-43. Potter, Russell. Spectacular Vernaculars. Albany: SUNY P, 1995. RZA, The, and Chris Norris. The Wu-Tang Manual. New York: Penguin, 2005. Silver, Alain. The Samurai Film. Woodstock, New York: Overlook, 1983. Smith, Christopher Holmes. “Method in the Madness: Exploring the Boundaries of Identity in Hip-Hop Performativity.” Social Identities 3.3 (Oct 1997): 345-75. Watkins, Craig S. Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1998. Wu-Tang Clan. Enter the Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers. CD. RCA/Loud Records, 1993. ———. Wu-Tang Forever. CD. RCA/Loud Records, 1997. Xing, Yan, ed. Shaolin Kungfu. Trans. Zhang Zongzhi and Zhu Chengyao. Beijing: China Pictorial, 1996. 
 
 
 
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Music from Another Time – One Perth Night in 2009The following extract is taken from fieldwork notes from research into the enduring Northern Soul dance scene in Perth, Western Australia.It’s 9.30 and I’m walking towards the Hyde Park Hotel on a warm May night. I stop to talk to Jenny, from London, who tells me about her 1970s trip to India and teenage visits to soul clubs in Soho. I enter a cavernous low-ceilinged hall, which used to be a jazz venue and will be a Dan Murphy’s bottle shop before the year ends. South West Soul organiser Tommy, wearing 34-inch baggy trousers, gives me a Northern Soul handshake, involving upturned thumbs. ‘Spread the Faith’, he says. Drinkers are lined up along the long bar to the right and I grab a glass of iced water. A few dancers are out on the wooden floor and a mirror ball rotates overhead. Pat Fisher, the main Perth scene organiser, is away working in Monaco, but the usual suspects are there: Carlisle Derek, Ivan from Cheltenham, Ron and Gracie from Derby. Danny is back from DJing in Tuscany, after a few days in Widnes with old friends. We chat briefly mouth to ear, as the swirling strings and echo-drenched vocals of the Seven Souls’ 45 record, ‘I still love you’ boom through the sound system. The drinkers at the bar hit the floor for Curtis Mayfield’s ‘Move on up’ and the crowd swells to about 80. When I move onto the floor, Barbara Acklin’s ‘Am I the Same Girl?’ plays, prompting reflection on being the same, older person dancing to a record from my teenage years. On the bridge of the piano and conga driven ‘’Cause you’re mine’, by the Vibrations, everybody claps in unison, some above their heads, some behind their backs, some with an expansive, open-armed gesture. The sound is like the crack of pistol. We are all living in the moment, lost in the music, moving forward and backward, gliding sideways, and some of us spinning, dervish-like, for a few seconds, if we can still maintain our balance.Having relocated their scene from England south to the Antipodes, most of the participants described on this night are now in their sixties. Part of the original scene myself, I was a participant observer, dancing and interviewing, and documenting and exploring scene practices over five years.The local Perth scene, which started in 1996, is still going strong, part of a wider Australian and New Zealand scene. The global scene goes back nearly 50 years to the late 1960s. Northern Soul has now also become southern. It has also become significantly present in the USA, its place of inspiration, and in such disparate places as Medellin, in Colombia, and Kobe, in Japan.The feeling of ‘living in the moment’ described is a common feature of dance-oriented subcultures. It enables escape from routines, stretches the present opportunity for leisure and postpones the return to other responsibilities. The music and familiar dance steps of a long-standing scene like Northern Soul also stimulate a nostalgic reverie, in which you can persuade yourself you are 18 again.Dance steps are forward, backward and sideways and on crowded dancefloors self-expression is necessarily attenuated. These movements are repeated and varied as each bar returns to the first beat and in subcultures like Northern Soul are sufficiently stylised as to show solidarity. This solidarity is enhanced by a unison handclap, triggered by cues in some records. Northern Soul is not line-dancing. Dancers develop their own moves.Place of Origin: Soul from the North?For those new to Northern Soul, the northern connection may seem a little puzzling. The North of England is often still imagined as a cold, rainy wasteland of desolate moors and smoky, industrial, mostly working-class cities, but such stereotyping obscures real understanding. Social histories have also tended to focus on such phenomena as the early twentieth century Salford gang members, the “Northern Scuttlers”, with “bell-bottomed trousers … and the thick iron-shod clogs” (Roberts 123).The 1977 Granada television documentary about the key Northern Soul club, Wigan Casino, This England, captured rare footage; but this was framed by hackneyed backdrops of mills and collieries. Yet, some elements of the northern stereotype are grounded in reality.Engels’s portrayal of the horrors of early nineteenth century Manchester in The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 was an influential exploration of the birth pains of this first industrial city, and many northern towns and cities have experienced similar traumas. Levels of social disadvantage in contemporary Britain, whilst palpable everywhere, are still particularly significant in the North, as researched by Buchan, Kontopantelis, Sperrin, Chandola and Doran in North-South Disparities in English Mortality 1965–2015: Longitudinal Population Study.By the end of the 1960s, the relative affluence of Harold Wilson’s England began to recede and there was increased political and counter-cultural activity. Into this social climate emerged both skinheads, as described by Fowler in Skins Rule and the Northern Soul scene.Northern Soul scene essentially developed as an extension of the 1960s ‘mod’ lifestyle, built around soul music and fashion. A mostly working-class response to urban life and routine, it also evidenced the ability of the more socially mobile young to get out and stay up late.Although more London mods moved into psychedelia and underground music, many soul fans sought out obscure, but still prototypical Motown-like records, often from the northern American cities Detroit and Chicago. In Manchester, surplus American records were transported up the Ship Canal to Trafford Park, the port zone (Ritson and Russell 1) and became cult club hits, as described in Rylatt and Scott’s Central 1179: The Story of Manchester's Twisted Wheel.In the early 1970s, the rare soul fans found a name for their scene. “The Dave Godin Column” in the fanzine Blues and Soul, published in London, referred for the first time to ‘Northern Soul’ in 1971, really defining ‘Northern’ directionally, as a relative location anywhere ‘north of Watford’, not a specific place.The scene gradually developed specific sites, clothes, dances and cultural practices, and was also popular in southern England, and actually less visible in cities such as Liverpool and Newcastle. As Nowell (199) argues, the idea that Northern Soul was regionally based is unfounded, a wider movement emerging as a result of the increased mobility made possible by railways and motorways (Ritson and Russell 14).Clubs like the Blackpool Mecca and Wigan Casino were very close to motorway slip roads and accessible to visitors from further south. The initial scene was not self-consciously northern and many early clubs, like the ‘Golden Torch’, in Tunstall were based in the Midlands, as recounted by Wall (441).The Time and Space of the DancefloorThe Northern Soul scene’s growth was initially covered in fanzines like Blues and Soul, and then by Frith and Cummings (23-32). Following Cosgrove (38-41) and Chambers (142), a number of insider accounts (Soul Survivors: The Wigan Casino Story by Winstanley and Nowell; Too Darn Soulful: The Story of Northern Soul by Nowell; The In-Crowd: The Story of the Northern & Rare Soul Scene by Ritson & Russell) were followed by academic studies (Milestone 134-149; Hollows and Milestone 83-103; Wall 431-445). The scene was first explored by an American academic in Browne’s Identity Scene and Material Culture: The Place of African American Rare Soul Music on the British Northern Soul Scene.Many clubs in earlier days were alcohol-free, though many club-goers substituted amphetamines (Wilson 1-5) as a result, but across the modern scene, drug-taking is not significant. On Northern Soul nights, dancing is the main activity and drinking is incidental. However, dance has received less subtle attention than it deserves as a key nexus between the culture of the scene and black America.Pruter (187) referred to the earlier, pre-disco “myopia” of many music writers on the subject of dance, though its connection to leisure, pleasure, the body and “serious self-realization” (Chambers 7) has been noted. Clearly Northern Soul dancers find “evasive” pleasure (Fiske 127) and “jouissance” (Barthes v) in the merging of self into record.Wall (440) has been more nuanced in his perceptions of the particular “physical geography” of the Northern Soul dance floor, seeing it as both responsive to the music, and a vehicle for navigating social and individual space. Dancers respond to each other, give others room to move and are also connected to those who stand and watch. Although friends often dance close, they are careful not to exclude others and dancing between couples is rare. At the end of popular records, there is often applause. Some dance all night, with a few breaks; others ‘pace’ themselves (Mercieca et al. 78).The gymnastics of Northern Soul have attracted attention, but the forward dives, back drops and spins are now less common. Two less noticed markers of the Northern Soul dancing style, the glide and the soul clap, were highlighted by Wall (432). Cosgrove (38) also noted the sideways glide characteristic of long-time insiders and particularly well deployed by female dancers.Significantly, friction-reducing talcum powder is almost sacramentally sprinkled on the floor, assisting dancers to glide more effectively. This fluid feature of the dancing makes the scene more attractive to those whose forms of expression are less overtly masculine.Sprung wooden floors are preferred and drink on the floor is frowned upon, as spillage compromises gliding. The soul clap is a communal clap, usually executed at key points in a record. Sometimes very loud, this perfectly timed unison clap is a remarkable, though mostly unselfconscious, display of group co-ordination, solidarity and resonance.Billy from Manchester, one of the Perth regulars, and notable for his downward clapping motion, explained simply that the claps go “where the breaks are” (Mercieca et al. 71). The Northern Soul clap demonstrates key attributes of what Wunderlich (384) described as “place-temporality in urban space”, emerging from the flow of music and movement in a heightened form of synchronisation and marked by the “vivid sense of time” (385) produced by emotional and social involvement.Crucially, as Morris noted, A Sense of Space is needed to have a sense of time and dancers may spin and return via the beat of the music to the same spot. For Northern Soul dancers, the movements forwards, backwards, sideways through objective, “geometric space” are paralleled by a traversing of existential, “conceived space”. The steps in microcosm symbolise the relentless wider movements we make through life. For Lefebvre, in The Production of Space, these “trialectics” create “lived space”.A Sense of Place and Evolving IdentitySpaces are plastic environments, charged with emerging meanings. For Augé, they can also remain spaces or be manipulated into “Non-Places”. When the sense of space is heightened there is the potential for lived spaces to become places. The space/place distinction is a matter of contention, but, broadly, space is universal and non-relational, and place is particular and relational.For Augé, a space can be social, but if it lacks implicit, shared cultural understandings and requires explicit signs and rules, as with an airport or supermarket, it is a non-place. It is not relational. It lacks history. Time cannot be stretched or temporarily suspended. As non-places proliferate, urban people spend more time alone in crowds, ”always, and never, at home” (109), though this anonymity can still provide the possibility of changing identity and widening experience.Northern Soul as a culture in the abstract, is a space, but one with distinct practices which tend towards the creation of places and identities. Perth’s Hyde Park Hotel is a place with a function space at the back. This empty hall, on the night described in the opening, temporarily became a Northern Soul Club. The dance floor was empty as the night began, but gradually became not just a space, but a place. To step onto a mostly empty dance floor early in the night, is to cross liminal space, and to take a risk that you will be conspicuous or lonely for a while, or both.This negotiation of space is what Northern Soul, like many other club cultures has always offered, the promise and risk of excitement outside the home. Even when the floor is busy, it is still possible to feel alone in a crowd, but at some stage in the night, there is also the possibility, via some moment of resonance, that a feeling of connection with others will develop. This is a familiar teenage theme, a need to escape bonds and make new ones, to be both mobile and stable. Northern Soul is one of the many third spaces/places (Soja 137) which can create opportunities to navigate time, space and place, and to find a new sense of direction and identity. Nicky from Cornwall, who arrived in Perth in the early 1970s, felt like “a fish out of water”, until involvement in the Northern Soul scene helped him to achieve a successful migration (Mercieca et al. 34-38). Figure 1: A Perth Northern Soul night in 2007. Note the talcum powder on the DJ table, for sprinkling on the dancefloor. The record playing is ‘Helpless’, by Kim Weston.McRobbie has argued in Dance and Social Fantasy that Northern Soul provides places for women to define and express themselves, and it has appealed to more to female and LGBTQIA participants than the more masculine dominated rock, funk and hip-hop scenes. The shared appreciation of records and the possibilities for expression and sociality in dance unite participants and blur gender lines.While the more athletic dancers have tended to be male, dancing is essentially non-contact, as in many other post-1960s ‘discotheque’ styles, yet there is little overt sexual display or flirtation involved. Male and female styles, based on foot rather than arm movements, are similar, almost ungendered, and the Soul scene has differed from more mainstream nightlife cultures focussed on finding partners, as noted in Soul Survivors: The Wigan Casino Story by Winstanley and Nowell. Whilst males, who are also involved in record buying, predominated in the early scene, women now often dominate the dance floor (Wall 441).The Perth scene is little different, yet the changed gender balance has not produced more partner-seeking for either the older participants, who are mostly in long-term relationships and the newer, younger members, who enjoy the relative gender-blindness, and focus on communality and cultural affinity. Figure 2: A younger scene member, ‘Nash’, DJing in Perth in 2016. He has since headed north to Denmark and is now part of the Nordic Northern Soul scene.In Perth, for Stan from Derby, Northern Soul linked the experiences of “poor white working class kids” with young black Americans (Mercieca et al. 97). Hollows and Milestone (87-94) mapped a cultural geographic relationship between Northern Soul and the Northern cities of the USA where the music originated. However, Wall (442) suggested that Northern Soul is drawn from the more bi-racial soul of the mid-1960s than the funky, Afro-centric 1970s and essentially deploys the content of the music to create an alternative British identity, rather than to align more closely with the American movement for self-determination. Essentially, Northern Soul shows how “the meanings of one culture can be transformed in the cultural practices of another time and place” (Wall 444).Many contemporary Australian youth cultures are more socially and ethnically mixed than the Northern Soul scene. However, over the years, the greater participation of women, and of younger and newer members, has made its practices less exclusive, and the notion of an “in-crowd” more relaxed (Wall 439). The ‘Northern’ connection is less meaningful, as members have a more adaptable sense of cultural identity, linked to a global scene made possible by the internet and migration. In Australia, attachment seems stronger to locality rather than nation or region, to place of birth in Britain and place of residence in Perth, two places which represent ‘home’. Northern Soul appears to work well for all members because it provides both continuity and change. As Mercieca et al. suggested of the scene (71) “there is potential for new meanings to continue to emerge”.ConclusionThe elements of expression and directional manoeuvres of Northern Soul dancing, symbolise the individual and social negotiation of direction, place, space, identity and time. The sense of time and space travelled can create a feeling of being pushed forward without control. It can also produce an emotional pull backwards, like an elastic band being stretched. For those growing older and moving far from places of birth, these dynamics can be particularly challenging. Membership of global subcultures can clearly help to create successful migrations, providing third spaces/places (Soja 137) between home and host culture identities, as evidenced by the ‘Southern’ Northern Soul scene in Australia. For these once teenagers, now grandparents in Australia, connections to time and space have been both transformed and transcended. They remain grounded in their youth, but have reduced the gravitational force of home connections, projecting themselves forward into the future by balancing aspects of both stability and mobility. Physical places and places and their connections with culture have been replaced by multiple and overlapping mappings, but it is important not to romanticise notions of agency, hybridity, third spaces and “deterritorialization” (Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia). In a globalised world, most people are still located geographically and labelled ideologically. The Northern Soul repurposing of the culture indicates a transilience (Richmond 328) “differentially available to those in different locations in the field of power” (Gupta and Ferguson 20). However, the way in which Northern Soul has moved south over the decade via migration, has arguably now provided a stronger possible sense of resonance with the lives of black Americans whose lives in places like Chicago and Detroit in the 1960s, and their wonderful music, are grounded in the experience of family migrations in the opposite direction from the South to the North (Mercieca et al. 11). In such a celebration of “memory, loss, and nostalgia” (Gupta and Ferguson 13), it may still be possible to move beyond the exclusion that characterises defensive identities.ReferencesAugé, Marc. Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity. Trans. John Howe. London: Verso, 2008.Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975Browne, Kimasi L. "Identity Scene and Material Culture: The Place of African American Rare Soul Music on the British Northern Soul Scene." Proceedings of Manchester Music & Place Conference. Manchester: Manchester Metropolitan University. Vol. 8. 2006.Buchan, Iain E., Evangelos Kontopantelis, Matthew Sperrin, Tarani Chandola, and Tim Doran. "North-South Disparities in English Mortality 1965–2015: Longitudinal Population Study." Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 71 (2017): 928-936.Chambers, Iain. Urban Rhythms: Pop Music and Popular Culture. London: Macmillan, 1985.Cosgrove, Stuart. "Long after Tonight Is All Over." Collusion 2 (1982): 38-41.Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977.Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844. Trans. Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky. London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1892.Fiske, John. Understanding Popular Culture. London: Unwin Hyman, 1989.Fowler, Pete. "Skins Rule." The Beat Goes On: The Rock File Reader. Ed. Charlie Gillett. London: Pluto Press, 1972. 10-26.Frith, Simon, and Tony Cummings. “Playing Records.” Rock File 3. Eds. Charlie Gillett and Simon Frith. St Albans: Panther, 1975. 21–48.Godin, Dave. “The Dave Godin Column”. Blues and Soul 67 (1971).Gupta, Akhil, and James Ferguson. "Beyond 'Culture': Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference." Cultural Anthropology 7.1 (1992): 6-23.Hollows, Joanne, and Katie Milestone. "Welcome to Dreamsville: A History and Geography of Northern Soul." The Place of Music. Eds. Andrew Leyshon, David Matless, and George Revill. New York: The Guilford Press, 1998. 83-103.Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.McRobbie, Angela. "Dance and Social Fantasy." Gender and Generation. Eds. Angela McRobbie and Mica Nava. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1984. 130-161.Mercieca, Paul, Anne Chapman, and Marnie O'Neill. To the Ends of the Earth: Northern Soul and Southern Nights in Western Australia. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2013.Milestone, Katie. "Love Factory: The Sites, Practices and Media Relationships of Northern Soul." The Clubcultures Reader. Eds. Steve Redhead, Derek Wynne, and Justin O’Connor. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997. 134-149.Morris, David. The Sense of Space. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2004.Nowell, David. Too Darn Soulful: The Story of Northern Soul. London: Robson, 1999.Pruter, Robert. Chicago Soul. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992.Richmond, Anthony H. "Sociology of Migration in Industrial and Post-Industrial Societies." Migration (1969): 238-281.Ritson, Mike, and Stuart Russell. The In Crowd: The Story of the Northern & Rare Soul Scene. London: Robson, 1999.Roberts, Robert. The Classic Slum. London: Penguin, 1971.Rylatt, Keith, and Phil Scott. 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Introduction In this paper, I examine the practices of representing Deaf ‘voices’’ to hearing audiences in two recent US television crime dramas. More literally I look at how American Sign Language is framed and made visible on the screen through various production decisions. Drawing examples from an episode of CSI: New York that aired in December 2006 and an episode of Law and Order: Criminal Intent that aired in April 2007, I examine how the practices of filming Deaf people and the use of American Sign Language intersect with the production of a Deaf ‘voice’ on the screen. The problem of representing a Deaf ‘voice’ on the screen is akin to the problem of representing other minority languages. Film and television producers in the United States have to make choices about whether the majority audience of English speakers will have access to the minority language or not. In the face of this dilemma media producers have taken several approaches: subtitling foreign speech, translating foreign speech through other characters, or leaving the language inaccessible except to those who use it. The additional difficulty with representing national sign languages is that both the language and the recording medium are visual. Sometimes, filmmakers make the choice of leaving some portions of the signed dialogue inaccessible to a non-signing hearing audience. On the one hand this choice could indicate a devaluing of the signed communication, as its specific content is considered irrelevant to the plot. On the other hand it could indicate that Deaf people have a right to be visible on television using their own language without accommodating hearing people. A number of choices made in the filming and editing can subtly undermine positive representations of Deaf ‘voices’ particularly to a Deaf audience. These choices often construct an image of sign languages as objectified, exoticised, disjointed, incomplete, or a code for spoken language. Simple choices such as using simultaneous speaking and signing by Deaf characters, cropping the scene, translating or not translating the dialogue have powerful implications for the ways that Deaf ‘voices’ are becoming more visible in the 21st century. Typical filming and editing conventions effectively silence the Deaf ‘voice.’ Over 20 years ago, in the comprehensive book, Hollywood Speaks: Deafness and the Film Entertainment Industry (1988), Schuchman’s complaint that the filming and editing techniques of the day often did not attend to preserving the visibility and comprehensibility of sign language eon the screen, still applies today. As editing techniques have evolved over the years, fr om reliance on wide and medium shots to frequent intercutting of close-ups, the tendency to cut sign language off the screen, and out of the comprehensible view of the audience, may have even increased. Recent Portrayals of Deaf People on Television During one television season in the United States between August 2006 and April 2007, 30 episodes of six different serial television programs portrayed signing Deaf characters. Three of these programs had on-going Deaf characters that appeared in a number of episodes throughout the season, while three other programs portrayed Deaf people in a one-off episode with a Deaf theme. Initial air date for the season Program and Season # of Episodes 1 14 Aug. 2006 Weeds, Season 2 5 2 20 Sep. 2006 Jericho, Season 1 13 3 28 Jan. 2007 The L Word, Season 4 9 Table 1. Dramas with Ongoing Deaf Characters during the 2006-2007 USA Television Season Initial air date Program, Season, Episode Episode Title 1 13 Dec. 2006 CSI: New York, Season 3, Episode 12 “Silent Night” 2 3 Apr. 2007 Law and Order: Criminal Intent, Season 6, Episode 18 "Silencer" 3 12 Apr. 2007 Scrubs, Season 6, Episode 16 “My Words of Wisdom” Table 2. One-off Episodes with Signing Deaf Characters during the 2006-2007 USA Television Seasons Ironically, although the shows with ongoing characters sometimes allow the Deafness of the character to be incidental to the character, it is only the one-off crime dramas that show Deaf people relating with one another as members of a vibrant community and culture based in sign language. Often, in the ongoing series, the characters remain isolated from the Deaf community and their interactions with other Deaf people are sparse or non-existent. For example, out of the 27 episodes with an ongoing Deaf character only two episodes of The L-Word have more than one Deaf character portrayed. In both Weeds and The L-Word the Deaf character is the love interest of one of the hearing characters, while in Jericho, the Deaf character is the sister of one of the main hearing characters. In these episodes though some of realities about Deaf people’s lives are touched on as they relate to the hearing characters, the reality of signing Deaf people’s social lives in the Deaf community is left absent and they are depicted primarily interacting with hearing people. The two episodes, from CSI: New York, and Law and Order: Criminal Intent, focus on the controversial theme of cochlear implants in the Deaf community. Though it is true that generally the signing Deaf community in the U.S.A. sees cochlear implants as a threat to their community, there is no record of this controversy ever motivating violent criminal acts or murder as portrayed in these episodes. In the episode of CSI: New York entitled “Silent Night” a conflict between a young Deaf man and Deaf woman who were formerly romantically involved is portrayed. The murdered young woman who comes from a Deaf family does not want her Deaf baby to have a cochlear implant while the killer ex-boyfriend who has a cochlear implant believes that it is the best option for his child. The woman’s Deaf parents are involved in the investigation. The episode of Law and Order: Criminal Intent, entitled “Silencer,” is also ultimately about a conflict between a Deaf man and a Deaf woman over cochlear implants. In the end, it is revealed that the Deaf woman is exploring the possibility of a cochlear implant. Her boyfriend projecting the past hurt of his hearing sister leaving him behind to go off and live her own life, doesn’t want his girlfriend to leave him once she gains more hearing. So he shoots the cochlear implant surgeon in the hand to prevent him from being able to perform the surgery. Then he accidentally kills him by crushing his voice box to prevent him from screaming. Analyzing Two Crime Dramas In both television dramas, the filmmakers use both sound and video editing techniques to mark the experiential difference between hearing and Deaf characters. In comparing the two dramas two techniques are evident : muting/distorting sounds and extreme close-ups on lips talking or hands signing. Though these techniques may heighten awareness of deaf experience to a non-signing audience they also point to a disabling stereotyping of the experience of being Deaf as lacking — framing their experience as hearing loss rather than Deaf gain (Bauman & Murray; Shakespeare 199). By objectifying sign language through extreme close ups American Sign Language is portrayed as something strange and unusual that separates Deaf signers from hearing speakers. The auditory silences can either jolt the hearing non-signer into awareness of the sensory aspect of sound that is missing or it can jolt them into awareness of the visual world that they often don’t really see. In the opening few scenes of the episodes both CSI: New York and Law and Order: Criminal Intent use sound editing alternately muting or distorting sounds as they cut between a ‘deaf’ auditory perspective and a ‘hearing’ perspective on the action as it unfolds. Even though the sound editing does play a part in the portrayal of Deaf people’s experience as lacking sound, the more important aspects of film production to attend to are the visual aspects where Deaf people are seen authentically signing in their own language. Scene Analysis Methodology In taking a closer look at a scene from each episode we can see exactly how the filming and editing techniques work to create an image of sign language. I have chosen comparable scenes where a Deaf individual is interviewed or interrogated by the police using a sign language interpreter. In each scene it can be assumed that all the communication is happening in both English and ASL through an interpreter, so at all times some signing should be occurring. In transcribing the scenes, I noted each point when the editor spliced different camera shots adjacent to each other. Because of the different visual aesthetics in each program where one relied heavily on continuous panning shots, I also noted where the camera shifted focus from one character to another marking the duration of screen time for each character. This allowed for a better comparison between the two programs. In my transcripts, I included both glosses of the ASL signs visible on the screen as well as the flow of the spoken English on the audio track. This enabled me to count how many separate shifts in character screen time segments contained signing and how much of these contained completely visible signing in medium shots. CSI:NY Witness Interview Scene In the first signing scene, Gina (played by Marlee Matlin) is brought in for an interview with Detective Taylor and a uniformed officer interpreter. The scene opens with a medium shot on Detective Taylor as he asks her, “What do you think woke you up?” The shot cuts to an extreme close up of her face and hands and pans to only the hands as she signs FOOTSTEPS. Then the scene shifts to an over the shoulder medium shot of the interpreter where we can still see her signing VIBRATIONS and it cuts to a close up of her face as she signs ALISON NOISE. Though these signs are cropped, they are still decipherable as they happen near the face. Throughout this sequence the interpreter voices “Footsteps, I felt vibrations. I thought maybe it was Alison.” Next we have a close-up on Detective Taylor’s face as he asks her why her family moved and whether she had family in the area. During his question the camera shifts to a close up reaction of Gina listening and then back to a close up on Taylor’s face, and then to a medium shot of the interpreter translating the last part of the question. Next, while Gina responds the camera quickly cuts from a medium shot to a close-up side view of the hands to a close-up bird’s eye view of the hands to a close up of Gina’s face with most of the signs outside of the frame. See the transcript below: [medium shot] NOT PLAN HAVE MORE CHILDREN,[close-up side view of hands] PREGNANT,[close-up from bird’s eye view] DECIDE RAISE ELIZABETH[close-up Gina’s face signs out of frame] SAFE While this sequence plays out the interpreter voices, “My husband and I weren’t planning on having any more children. When I got pregnant my husband and I decided to raise Elizabeth outside of the city where it’s safe.” The kind of quick cuts between close-ups, medium shots and reaction shots of other characters sets the visual aesthetic for this episode of CSI: NY. In this particular clip, the camera shifts shot angles no less than 50 times in the space of one minute and 34 seconds. Yet there are only 12 conversational turns back and forth between the two characters. This makes for a number of intercut reaction shots, interpreter shots as well as close-ups and other angles on the same character. If only counting shifts in screen time on a particular character, there are still 37 shifts in focus between different characters during the scene. Out of the 22 shots that contain some element of signing — we only see a medium shot with all of the signing space visible 4 times for approximately 2 seconds each. Even though signing is occurring during every communication via the interpreter or Gina, less than half of the shots contain signs and 18 of these are close ups from various angles. The close ups in this clip varied from close-ups on the face, which cut out part of the signs, to close ups on the hands caught in different perspectives from a front, side, top or even table top reflected upside-down view. Some of the other shots were over the back shoulder of Gina catching a rear view of the signs as the camera is aimed in a medium shot of the detective and interpreter. The overall result from a signing perspective is a disjointed jumble of signs leaving the impression of chaos and heightened emotion. In some ways this can be seen as an exoticisation of the signs making them look surreal, drawing attention to the body parts displaying the signs and objectifying them. Such objectification may seem harmless to a non-signing hearing audience or media producer as a mere materializing of the felt amazement at signed communication moving at such a pace. But if we were to propose a hypothetical parallel situation where a Korean character is speaking in her native tongue and we are shown extreme close ups and quick cuts jumping from an image of the lips moving to the tongue tapping the teeth to a side close up of the mouth to an overhead image from the top of the head – this type of portrayal would immediately be felt to be a de-humanization of Korean people and likely labeled racist. In the case of sign language, is it merely thought of as visual artistry? Law & Order: Suspect Interrogation Scene Law & Order: Criminal Intent has a different film aesthetic. The scene selected is an interview with a potential suspect in the murder of a cochlear implant surgeon. The Deaf man, Larry is an activist and playwright. He is sitting at a table with his lawyer across from the male detective, Goren, and the interpreter with the female detective, Eames, standing to the side. Unlike the CSI: NY scene there are no quick cuts between shots. Instead the camera takes longer shots panning around the table. Even when there are cuts to slightly different angles, the camera continues to pan in the same direction as the previous shot giving the illusion that almost the entire scene is one shot. In this 45-second scene, there are only five cuts to different camera angles. However, the act of panning the camera around the room even in a continuous shot serves to break up the scene further as the camera pulls focus zooming in on different characters while it pans. For the purposes of this analysis, in addition to dividing the scene at shifts in camera angles performed through editing, I also divide the scenes at shifts in camera angles focusing on different characters. As the camera moves to focus on a different interlocutor (serving the same purpose as a shift done through editing), this brings the total shifts in camera angles to ten. At several points throughout this Law & Order: CI episode, the cinematographer uses the technique of zooming into an extreme close-up on the hands and then pulling out to see the signer. But in this particular scene all of the visible signed sequences are filmed in medium shots. While this is positive because we can actually see the whole message including hand and face, the act of panning behind the backs of seated characters while Larry is signing blocks some of his message just as much as shifting the edit to a reaction shot would do. Of the ten shots, only one shot does not contain any signing: when Detective Eames reacts to Larry’s demands and incredulously says, “A Deaf cop?” While all of the other shots contain some signing, there are only two signed interchanges that are not interrupted by some sort of body block. Ironically, both of these shots are when the hearing detective is speaking. The first is the opening shot. The camera, in a wide shot on 5 characters, opens on their reflections in the mirrored window located in the interview room. As the camera pulls back into the room, it spins around and pans across Detective Eames’ face to settle on Detective Goran. While Goran begins talking the shot widens out to include the interpreter sitting next to him and catch the signed translation. Goran says, “Larry? There’s a lot of people pointing their finger at you.” With a bit of lag time the interpreter signs: A-LOT PEOPLE THINK YOU GUILTY. Overall Comparison of the Two Scenes For both scenes there were only four segments with unobstructed medium shots of signers in the act of signing. In the case of Law & Order: CI this might be considered a good showing as there were only nine segments in the entire scene and 8 contained signing. Thus potentially yielding 50% visibility of the signs during the entire stream of the conversation (however not all signs were actually fully visible). In the case of CSI: NY, with its higher ratio of segments split by different camera shots, 22 segments contained signing, yielding a ratio of 18% visibility of signs. Though this analysis is limited to only one scene for comparison it does reveal that both episodes prioritize the spoken language stream of information over the sign language stream of information. CSI: New York Law & Order: CI Time duration of the clip 1 min 34 sec 45 sec # shifts in character conversational turns 12 times 10 times # edited camera shots to different angle 50 5 #shifts in screen time of the characters (edited or panned) 37 9 Total # screen time segments with signing 22 8 # medium shot segments with signing fully visible 4 4 # segments containing close ups of signs, cropped off signs or blocked 18 4 Table 3. Count comparison between the two scenes Filmmakers come from a hearing framework of film production where language equals sound on an audio track. Within that framework sound editing is separate from video editing and can provide continuity between disjointed visual shots. But this kind of reliance on sound to provide the linguistic continuity fails when confronted with representing American Sign Language on the screen. The sound stream of translated English words may provide continuity for the hearing audience, but if left to rely on what is available in the visual modality Deaf viewers may have to rely on closed captioning to understand the dialog even when it is portrayed in their own language. Disjointed scenes showing quick cuts between different angles on a signed dialog and flashing between reacting interlocutors leaves the signing audience with a view on a silenced protagonist. Recommendations How can media producers give voice to sign language on the screen? First there needs to be an awareness and concern amongst these same media producers that there is actually value in taking the care required to make sign language visible and accessible to the signing Deaf audience and perhaps raise more awareness among the non-signing hearing audience. It may be entirely possible to maintain a similar visual aesthetic to the programs and still make sign language visible. Hearing producers could learn from Deaf cinema and the techniques being developed there by emerging Deaf film producers (Christie, Durr, and Wilkins). In both examples used above careful planning and choreography of the filming and editing of the scenes would make this possible. With the quick cutting style of frequent close up shots found in CSI: NY, it would be necessary to reduce the number of close ups or make sure they were wide enough to include enough of the signs to maintain intelligibility as with signs that are made near the face. In addition, medium shots of the interpreter or the interpreter and the hearing speaker would have to become the norm in order to make the interpreted spoken language accessible as well. Over the shoulder shots of signers are possible as well, as long as the back of the signer does not obscure understanding of the signs. In order to avoid objectification of sign language, extreme close-ups of the hands should be avoided as it de-humanizes sign languages and reduces language to animalistic hand gestures. In addition, with adopting the visual aesthetic of panning continuous shots such as those found in Law and Order: CI, care would need to be taken not to obstruct the signs while circling behind other participants. Other possibilities remain such as adapting the visual aesthetic of 24 (another United States crime drama) where multiple shots taking place simultaneously are projected onto the screen. In this manner reaction shots and full shots of the signing can both be visible simultaneously. Aside from careful choreography, as suggested in previous work by scholars of Deaf cinema, (Schuchman, Hollywood; Jane Norman qtd. in Hartzell), hearing media producers would need to rely on excellent ASL/Deaf culture informants during all stages of the production; typically, cinematographers, directors and editors likely will not know how to make sure that signs are not obscured. Simultaneous signing and talking by Deaf and hearing characters should be avoided as this method of communication only confirms in the minds of hearing signers that sign language is merely a code for spoken language and not a language in and of itself. Instead, hearing media producers can more creatively rely on interpreters in mixed settings or subtitling when conversations occur between Deaf characters. Subtitling is already a marker for foreign language and may alert non-signing hearing audiences to the fact that sign language is a full language not merely a code for English. Using these kinds of techniques as a matter of policy when filming signing Deaf people will enable the signing voice some of the visibility that the Deaf community desires. Acknowledgements This article is based on work originally presented at the conference “Deaf Studies Today!”, April 2008, at Utah Valley State University in Orem, Utah, USA. I am grateful for feedback that I received from participants at this presentation. An earlier version of this article is published as part of the conference proceedings Deaf Studies Today! Mosaic edited by Brian K. Eldredge, Flavia Fleischer, and Douglas Stringham. References Bauman, H-Dirksen, and Joseph Murray. "Reframing from Hearing Loss to Deaf Gain." Deaf Studies Digital Journal (Fall 2009). < http://dsdj.gallaudet.edu/ >. Chaiken, Ilene (writer). The L Word. Television series. Season 4. 2007. Chbosky, S., J. Schaer, and J.E. Steinbert (creators) Jericho. Television series. Season 1 & 2. 2006-2007. Christie, Karen, Patti Durr, and Dorothy M. Wilkins. “CLOSE-UP: Contemporary Deaf Filmmakers.” Deaf Studies Today 2 (2006): 91-104. Hartzell, Adam. “The Deaf Film Festival.” The Film Journal (May 2003) < http://www.thefilmjournal.com/issue5/deaf.html >. Kohan, J. (creator), M. Burley (producer). Weeds. Television series. Lawrence, B. (creator), V. Nelli Jr. (director). “My Words of Wisdom.” Scrubs. Television series episode. Season 6, Episode 16. 12 Apr. 2007. Lenkov, P. M., and S. Humphrey (writers), A.E. Zulker (story), and R. Bailey (director). “Silent Night.” CSI: New York. Television series episode. Season 3, episode 12. CBS, 13 Dec. 2006. O'Shea, M. (writer), D. White (director), M.R. Thewlis (producer). "Silencer." Law and Order Criminal Intent. Television series episode. Season 6, Episode 18. New York: Universal, 3 April 2007. Schuchman, John. S. Hollywood Speaks: Deafness and the Entertainment Industry. Urbana & Chicago, Ill.: University of Illinois Press. 1988. ———. “The Silent Film Era: Silent Films, NAD Films, and the Deaf Community's Response.” Sign Language Studies 4.3 (2004): 231-238.

One cannot use the Internet for long without encountering its many dead ends. Despite the adage that everything posted online stays there forever, users quickly discover how fleeting Web content can be. Whether it be the result of missing files, platform moderation, or simply bad code, the Internet constantly displaces its archival contents. Eventual decay is the fate of all digital media, as Wendy Hui Kyong Chun observed in a 2008 article. “Digital media is not always there”, she writes. “We suffer daily frustrations with digital sources that just disappear” (160). When the media content we seek is something trivial like a digitised vacation photo, our inability to retrieve it may merely disappoint us. But what happens when we lose access to Web content about significant cultural events, like viral misinformation about a school shooting? This question takes on great urgency as conspiracy content spreads online at baffling scale and unprecedented speed. Although conspiracy theories have long been a fixture of American culture, the contemporary Internet enables all manner of “information disorder” (Wardle and Derakhshan) to warp media coverage, sway public opinion, and even disrupt the function of government—as seen in the harrowing “Stop the Steal” attack on the U.S. Capitol on 6 January 2021, when rioters attempted to prevent Congress from verifying the results of the 2020 Presidential Election. Scholars across disciplines have sought to understand how conspiracy theories function within our current information ecosystem (Marwick and Lewis; Muirhead and Rosenblum; Phillips and Milner). Much contemporary research focusses on circulation, tracking how conspiracy theories and other types of misinformation travel from fringe Websites to mainstream news outlets such as the New York Times. While undoubtedly valuable, this emphasis on circulation provides an incomplete picture of online conspiracy theories’ lifecycle. How should scholars account for the afterlife of conspiracy content, such as links to conspiracy videos that get taken down for violating YouTube’s Community Guidelines? This and related questions about the dead ends of online conspiracy theorising are underexplored in the existing scholarly literature. This essay contends that the Internet’s tendency to decay ought to factor into our models of digital conspiracy theories. I focus on the phenomenon of malfunctional hyperlinks, one of the most common types of disrepair to which the Internet is prone. The product of so-called “link rot”, broken links would appear to signal an archival failure for online conspiracy theories. Yet recent work from rhetorical theorist Jenny Rice suggests that these broken hyperlinks instead function as a rhetorically potent archive in their own right. To understand this uncanny persuasive work, I draw from rhetorical theory to analyse broken links to conspiracy content on Reddit, the popular social news platform, surrounding the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, the worst high school shooting in American history. I show that broken links on the subreddit r/conspiracy, by virtue of their dysfunction, persuade conspiracy theorists that they possess “stigmatized knowledge” (Barkun 26) about the shooting that is being suppressed. Ultimately, I argue that link rot functions as a powerful source of evidence within digital conspiracy theories, imbuing broken links with enduring rhetorical force to validate marginalised belief systems. Link Rot—Archival Failure or Archival Possibility? As is suggested by the prefix ‘inter-’, connectivity has always been one of the Internet’s core functionalities. Indeed, the ability to hyperlink two different texts—and now images, videos, and other media—is so fundamental to navigating the Web that we often take these links for granted until they malfunction. In popular parlance, we then say we have clicked on a “broken” or “dead” link, and without proper care to prevent its occurrence, all URLs are susceptible to dying eventually (much like us mortals). This slow process of decay is known as “link rot”. The precise extent of link rot on the Internet is unknown—and likely unknowable, in practice if not principle—but multiple studies have been conducted to assess the degree of link rot in specific archives. One study from 2015 found that nearly 50% of the URLs cited in 406 library and information science journal articles published between 2008-2012 were no longer accessible (Kumar et al. 59). In the context of governmental Webpages, a 2010 study determined that while only 8% of the URLs sampled in 2008 had link rot, that number more than tripled to 28% of URLs with link rot when sampled only two years later (Rhodes 589-90). More recently, scholars from Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society uncovered an alarming amount of link rot in the online archive of the New York Times, perhaps the most prominent newspaper in the United States: “25% of all links were completely inaccessible, with linkrot becoming more common over time – 6% of links from 2018 had rotted, as compared to 43% of links from 2008 and 72% of links from 1998” (Zittrain et al. 4). Taken together, these data indicate that link rot worsens over time, creating a serious obstacle for the study of Web-based phenomena. Link rot is particularly worrisome for researchers who study online misinformation (including digital conspiracy theories), because the associated links are often more vulnerable to removal due to content moderation or threats of legal action. How should scholars understand the function of link rot within digital conspiracy theories? If our academic focus is on how conspiracy theories circulate, these broken links might seem at best a roadblock to scholarly inquiry or at worst as totally insignificant or irrelevant. After all, users cannot access the material in question; they reach a dead end. Yet recent work by rhetoric scholar Jenny Rice suggests these dead ends might have enduring persuasive power. In her book Awful Archives: Conspiracy Rhetoric and Acts of Evidence, Rice argues that evidence is an “act rather than a thing” and that as a result, we ought to recalibrate what we consider an archive (12, original emphasis). For Rice, archives are more than simple aggregates of documents; instead, they are “ordinary and extraordinary experiences in public life that leave lasting, palpable residues, which then become our sources—our resources—for public discourse” (16-17). These “lasting, palpable residues” are deeply embodied, Rice maintains, for the evidence we gather is “always real in its reference, which is to a felt experience of proximities” (118). For conspiracy theorists in particular, an archive might evoke a profound sense of what Rice memorably describes as “Something intense, something real. Something off. Something fucked up. Something anomalous” (12, original emphasis). This is no less true when an archive fails to function as designed. Hence, for the remainder of this essay, I pivot to analysing how link rot functions within digital conspiracy theories about the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida. As we will see, the shooting galvanised meaningful gun control activism via the March for Our Lives movement, but the event also quickly became fodder for proliferating conspiracy content. From Crisis to Crisis Actors: The Parkland Shooting and Its Aftermath On the afternoon of 14 February 2018, Nikolas Cruz entered his former high school, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, and murdered 17 people, including 14 students (Albright). While a horrific event, the Parkland shooting unfortunately marked merely the latest in a long line of similar tragedies in the United States, which has been punctuated by school shootings for decades. But the Parkland shooting stands out among the gruesome lineage of similar tragedies due to the profound resolve of its student-survivors, who agitated for gun policy reform through the March for Our Lives movement. In the weeks following the shooting, a group of Parkland students partnered with Everytown for Gun Safety, a non-profit organisation advocating for gun control, to coordinate a youth-led demonstration against gun violence. Held in the U.S. capitol of Washington, D.C. on 24 March 2018, the March for Our Lives protest was the largest demonstration against gun violence in American history (March for Our Lives). The protest drew around 200,000 participants to Washington; hundreds of thousands of protestors attended an estimated 800 smaller rallies held across the United States (CBS News). Furthermore, likeminded protestors across Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia held allied events to show support for these American students’ cause (Russo). The broader March for Our Lives organisation developed out of the political demonstrations on 24 March 2018; four years later, March for Our Lives continues to be a major force in debates about gun violence in the United States. Although the Parkland shooting inspired meaningful gun control activism, it also quickly provoked a deluge of online conspiracy theories about the tragedy and the people involved, including the student-activists who survived the shooting and spearheaded March for Our Lives. This conspiracy content arrived at breakneck pace: according to an analysis by the Washington Post, the first conspiracy posts appeared on the platform 8chan a mere 47 minutes after the first news reports aired about the shooting (Timberg and Harwell). Later that day, Parkland conspiracy theories migrated from fringe haunts like 8chan to InfoWars, a mainstay of the conspiracy media circuit, where host/founder Alex Jones insinuated that the shooting could be a “false flag” event orchestrated by the Democratic Party (Media Matters Staff). Over the ensuing hours, days, weeks, and months, Parkland conspiracies continued to circulate, receiving mainstream news coverage when conversative activists and politicians publicly espoused conspiracy claims about the shooting (Arkin and Popken). Ultimately, the conspiracist backlash was so persistent and virulent throughout 2018 that PolitiFact, a fact-checking site run by the Poynter Institute, declared the Parkland conspiracy theories their 2018 “Lie of the Year” (Drobnic Holan and Sherman). As with many conspiracy theories, the Parkland conspiracies remixed novel information with longstanding conspiracist tropes. Predominantly, these theories alleged that the Parkland student-activists who founded March for Our Lives were being controlled by outside forces to do their bidding. Although conspiracy theorists diverged in who they named as the shadowy puppet master pulling the strings—was it the Democratic Party? George Soros? Someone else?—all agreed that a secretive agenda was afoot. The most extreme version of this theory held that David Hogg, X González, and other prominent March for Our Lives activists were “crisis actors”. This account envisions Hogg et al. as paid performers playing the part of angry and traumatised students for media coverage about a school shooting that either did not occur as reported or did not occur at all (Yglesias). While unnerving and callous, these crisis actor allegations are not new ideas; rather, they draw from a long history of loosely antisemitic “New World Order” conspiracy theories that see an ulterior motive behind significant historical events (Barkun 39-65). Parkland conspiracy theorists circulated a wide variety of media artifacts—anti-March for Our Lives memes, obscure blog posts, and manipulated video footage of the Parkland students, among other content—to propagate their crisis actor claims. But whether due to platform moderation, threat of legal action, or simply public pressure, much of this conspiracy material is now inaccessible, leaving behind only broken links to conspiracy content that once was. By closely examining these broken links through a rhetorical lens, we can trace the “lasting, palpable residues” (Rice 16) link rot leaves in its wake. “All part of the purge”: Parkland Link Rot on r/conspiracy In this final section, I use the tools of rhetorical analysis to demonstrate how link rot can function as a form of evidence for conspiracy theorists. Rhetorical analysis, when applied to digital infrastructure, requires that we expand our notion of rhetoric beyond intentional human persuasion. As James J. Brown, Jr. argues, digital infrastructure is rhetorical because it determines “what’s possible in a given space”, which may or may not involve human beings (99). Human intentionality still matters in many contexts, of course, but seeing digital infrastructure as a “possibility space” opens up productive new avenues for rhetorical inquiry (Brown, Jr. 72-99). This rhetorical perspective aligns with the method of “affordance analysis” derived from Science and Technology Studies and related fields, which investigates how technologies facilitate certain outcomes for users (Curinga). Much like an affordance analysis, my goal is to illustrate how broken links produce certain rhetorical effects, not to make broader empirical claims about the extent of link rot within Parkland conspiracy theories. The r/conspiracy page on Reddit, the popular social news platform, serves as an ideal site for conducting a rhetorical analysis of broken links. The r/conspiracy subreddit is a preeminent hub for digital conspiracy content, with nearly 1.7 million members as of March 2022 and thousands of active users viewing the site at any given time (r/conspiracy). Beyond its popularity, Reddit’s platform design makes link rot a common feature on r/conspiracy. As a forum-based social media platform, Reddit consists entirely of subreddits dedicated to various topics. In each subreddit, users generate and contribute to threads with relevant content, which often entails posting links to materials hosted elsewhere on the Internet. Importantly, Reddit allows each subreddit to set its own specific community rules for content moderation (so long as these rules themselves abide by Reddit’s general Content Policy), and unlike other profile-based social media platforms, Reddit allows anonymity through the use of pseudonyms. For all of these reasons, one finds a high frequency of link rot on r/conspiracy, as posts linking to external conspiracy media stay up even when the linked content itself disappears from the Web. Consider the following screenshot of an r/conspiracy Parkland post from 23 February 2018, a mere nine days after the Parkland shooting, which demonstrates what conspiracist link rot looks like on Reddit (fig. 1). Titling their thread “A compilation of anomalies from the Parkland shooting that the media won't address. The media wants to control the narrative. Feel free to use this if you find it helpful”, this unknown Redditor frames their post as an intervention against media suppression of suspicious details (“A compilation of anomalies”). Yet the archive this poster hoped to share with likeminded users has all but disintegrated—the poster’s account has been deleted (whether by will or force), and the promised “compilation of anomalies” no longer exists. Instead, the link under the headline sends users to a blank screen with the generic message “If you are looking for an image, it was probably deleted” (fig. 2). Fittingly, the links that the sole commenter assembled to support the original poster are also rife with link rot. Of the five links in the comment, only the first one works as intended; the other four videos have been removed from Google and YouTube, with corresponding error messages informing users that the linked content is inaccessible. Fig. 1: Parkland Link Rot on r/conspiracy. (As a precaution, I have blacked out the commenter’s username.) Fig. 2: Error message received when clicking on the primary link in Figure 1. Returning to Jenny Rice’s theory of “evidentiary acts” (173), how might the broken links in Figure 1 be persuasive despite their inability to transport users to the archive in question? For conspiracy theorists who believe they possess “stigmatized knowledge” (Barkun 26) about the Parkland shooting, link rot paradoxically serves as powerful validation of their beliefs. The unknown user who posted this thread alleges a media blackout of sorts, one in which “the media wants to control the narrative”. This claim, if true, would be difficult to verify. Interested users would have to scour media coverage of Parkland to assess whether the media have ignored the “compilation of anomalies” the poster insists they have uncovered and then evaluate the significance of those oddities. But link rot here produces a powerful evidentiary shortcut: the alleged “compilation of anomalies” cannot be accessed, seemingly confirming the poster’s claims to have secretive information about the Parkland shooting that the media wish to suppress. Indeed, what better proof of media censorship than seeing links to professed evidence deteriorate before your very eyes? In a strange way, then, it is through objective archival failure that broken links function as potent subjective evidence for Parkland conspiracy theories. Comments about Parkland link rot elsewhere on r/conspiracy further showcase how broken links can validate conspiracy theorists’ marginalised belief systems. For example, in a thread titled “Searching for video of Parkland shooting on bitchute”, a Redditor observes, “Once someone gives the link watch it go poof”, implying that links to conspiracy content disappear due to censorship by an unnamed force (“Searching for video”). That nearly everything else on this particular thread suffers from link rot—the original poster, the content of their post, and most of the other comments have since been deleted—seems only to confirm the commentor’s ominous prediction. In another thread about a since-deleted YouTube video supposedly “exposing” Parkland students as crisis actors, a user notes, “You can tell there’s an agenda with how quickly this video was removed by YouTube” (“Video Exposing”). Finally, in a thread dedicated to an alleged “Social Media Purge”, Redditors share strategies for combating link rot, such as downloading conspiracy materials and backing them up on external hard drives. The original poster warns their fellow users that even r/conspiracy is not safe from censorship, for removal of content about Parkland and other conspiracies is “all part of the purge” (“the coming Social Media Purge”). In sum, these comments suggest that link rot on r/conspiracy persuades users that their ideas and their communities are under threat, further entrenching their conspiratorial worldviews. I have argued in this article that link rot has a counterintuitive rhetorical effect: in generating untold numbers of broken links, link rot supplies conspiracy theorists with persuasive evidence for the validity of their beliefs. These and other dead ends on the Internet are significant yet understudied components of digital conspiracy theories that merit greater scholarly attention. Needless to say, I can only gesture here to the sheer scale of dead ends within online conspiracy communities on Reddit and elsewhere. Future research ought to trace other permutations of these dead ends, unearthing how they persuade users from beyond the Internet’s grave. References “A compilation of anomalies from the Parkland shooting that the media won't address. The media wants to control the narrative. Feel free to use this if you find it helpful.” Reddit. <https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/7ztc9l/a_compilation_of_anomalies_from_the_parkland/>. Albright, Aaron. “The 17 Lives Lost at Douglas High.” Miami Herald 21 Feb. 2018.<https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/broward/article201139254.html>. Arkin, Daniel, and Ben Popken. “How the Internet’s Conspiracy Theorists Turned Parkland Students into ‘Crisis Actors’.” NBC News 21 Feb. 2018. <https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/how-internet-s-conspiracy-theorists-turned-parkland-students-crisis-actors-n849921>. Barkun, Michael. A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. Brown, Jr., James J. Ethical Programs: Hospitality and the Rhetorics of Software. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015. CBS News. “How Many People Attended March for Our Lives? Crowd in D.C. Estimated at 200,000.” CBS News 25 Mar. 2018. <https://www.cbsnews.com/news/march-for-our-lives-crowd-size-estimated-200000-people-attended-d-c-march/>. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. “The Enduring Ephemeral, or the Future Is a Memory.” Critical Inquiry 35.1 (2008): 148-71. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/595632>. Curinga, Matthew X. “Critical Analysis of Interactive Media with Software Affordances.” First Monday 19.9 (2014). <https://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4757/4116>. Drobnic Holan, Angie, and Amy Sherman. “PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year: Online Smear Machine Tries to Take Down Parkland Students.” PolitiFact 11 Dec. 2018. <http://www.politifact.com/article/2018/dec/11/politifacts-lie-year-parkland-student-conspiracies/>. Kumar, D. Vinay, et al. “URLs Link Rot: Implications for Electronic Publishing.” World Digital Libraries 8.1 (2015): 59-66. March for Our Lives. “Mission and Story.” <https://marchforourlives.com/mission-story/>. Marwick, Alice, and Becca Lewis. Media Manipulation and Misinformation Online. Data & Society Research Institute, 2017. <https://datasociety.net/library/media-manipulation-and-disinfo-online/>. Media Matters Staff. “Alex Jones on Florida High School Shooting: It May Be a False Flag, and Democrats Are Suspects.” Media Matters for America 14 Feb. 2018. <https://www.mediamatters.org/alex-jones/alex-jones-florida-high-school-shooting-it-may-be-false-flag-and-democrats-are-suspects>. Muirhead, Russell, and Nancy L. Rosenblum. A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. “I Posted A 4Chan Link a few days ago, that got deleted here, that mentions the coming Social Media Purge by a YouTube insider. Now we are seeing it happen.” Reddit. <https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/7zqria/i_posted_a_4chan_link_a_few_days_ago_that_got/>. Phillips, Whitney, and Ryan M. Milner. You Are Here: A Field Guide for Navigating Polarized Speech, Conspiracy Theories, and Our Polluted Media Landscape. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2021. r/conspiracy. Reddit. <https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/>. Rhodes, Sarah. “Breaking Down Link Rot: The Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive's Examination of URL Stability.” Law Library Journal 102. 4 (2010): 581-97. Rice, Jenny. Awful Archives: Conspiracy Theory, Rhetoric, and Acts of Evidence. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2020. Russo, Carla Herreria. “The Rest of the World Showed Up to March for Our Lives.” Huffington Post 25 Mar. 2018. <https://www.huffpost.com/entry/world-protests-march-for-our-lives_n_5ab717f2e4b008c9e5f7eeca>. “Searching for video of Parkland shooting on bitchute.” Reddit. <https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/ddl1s8/searching_for_video_of_parkland_shooting_on/>. Timberg, Craig, and Drew Harwell. “We Studied Thousands of Anonymous Posts about the Parkland Attack – and Found a Conspiracy in the Making.” Washington Post 27 Feb. 2018. <https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/we-studied-thousands-of-anonymous-posts-about-the-parkland-attack---and-found-a-conspiracy-in-the-making/2018/02/27/04a856be-1b20-11e8-b2d9-08e748f892c0_story.html>. “Video exposing David Hogg and Emma Gonzalez as crisis actors and other strange anomalies involving the parkland shooting.” Reddit. <https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/ae3xxp/video_exposing_david_hogg_and_emma_gonzalez_as/>. Wardle, Claire, and Hossein Derakhshan. Information Disorder: Toward and Interdisciplinary Framework for Research and Policymaking. Council of Europe, 2017. <https://rm.coe.int/information-disorder-toward-an-interdisciplinary-framework-for-researc/168076277c>. Yglesias, Matthew. “The Parkland Conspiracy Theories, Explained.” Vox 22 Feb. 2018. <https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/22/17036018/parkland-conspiracy-theories>. Zittrain, Jonathan, et al. “The Paper of Record Meets an Ephemeral Web: An Examination of Linkrot and Content Drift within The New York Times.” Social Science Research Network 27 Apr. 2021. <https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3833133>.


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