Academic literature on the topic 'Play, toy, transformations of games, games from the childhood'

Introduction. In the modern world, due to the intensive development of high technology, there are many changes that penetrate into the childhood and the world of children’s play. An increasing number of children’s games appear to have a computer format. Playing them, the child begins to alienate from reality, to lose skills in cognitive and creative activities, relying on the help of high technology. One of the reasons of (negative) personality transformations is blocking of functioning of imagination in computer games. The purpose of the article is to study the imaginative nature of children’s play and its potentials, having a cognitive and creative orientation. Materials and Methods. This problem is considered on the basis of phenomenological analysis and direct observation of children’s games. The results of the study showed that the child through immersion in the world of direct play, receives impulses to the knowledge of the world, creativity and moral manifestations. The source of the above is the imagination, which performs the role of instinct, cultural consciousness and reason in human existence. Through imagining, the child imagines, creates and interprets what is being played, expanding the horizons of his being. Discussion and Conclusion. The study of imagination allowed for a demarcation line between direct and computer children’s games. Their key difference lies in the functioning of the imagination, which manifests itself freely in direct games, and in computer – is blocked by high technology and software algorithms. The current situation actualizes the idea of returning to the children’s game, based on direct interaction and communication.

The acquisition of maritime skills in the Viking AgeThe acquisition of maritime skills in the Viking Age can be examined through application of the social constructivist theory with respect to communities of practice. A community of practice is maintained via skill transfer. The process begins already in childhood and leads to the gradual inclusion of these marginal participants as fully valid members. By way of their role play and rule games, based in part on observations of adult practice, children acquire basic skills and develop a knowledge of the community’s sensus communis.The aim of this article is not to describe the players in the community of practice, i.e. the children and adults of the Viking Age, but to examine the relationship between them in a practice structure. The child and the adult are perceived as mutual preconditions. They are, seen in relation to a common practice, parts of the same community. It is the learning process, from marginal participant via legitimate peripheral participant to fully valid member, which defines and maintains this community of practice.Model ships which can be dated to the Viking Age have been found in several locations across Northern Europe (fig. 1). These are employed in this article to examine the skill-transfer processes inherent in Viking Age communities of practice. Some of the model ships can be interpreted as children’s toys and are very detailed in their execution, with holes for a mast, a side rudder and oars (fig. 2). Other miniature artefacts, such as anchors and weather vanes, can similarly be argued to have comprised part of the fittings of these toy ships.In order to gain a more detailed insight into the process of skill acquisition in maritime communities of practice, a selection of sailors’ memories from their childhood in the Danish maritime town of Marstal in the late 19th and early 20th century are drawn upon (fig. 3). This is exclusively to demonstrate how children learn through play.The model ships and their equipment, if these are interpreted as children’s toys, give access to an aspect of Viking Age society which is very difficult to study in other ways. The toy ships are a material expression of the play which – then as now – has equipped children for their passage into the community of practice. It is this play which, in spite of its superficially banal character, is fundamental to the maintenance and development of a community of practice.Morten RavnAfdeling for Forhistorisk ArkæologiSaxo-InstituttetKøbenhavns Universitet

Resumo:As tecnologias digitais e suas possibilidades de acesso estão presentes cada vez mais cedo na vida do sujeito, desde seus primeiros dias de vida, interferindo no desenvolvimento do ser humano desde a infância. Nesta perspectiva, o estudo em questão apresenta uma breve reflexão sobre o brincar na cultura digital no contexto infantil frente as tecnologias digitais. Objetivando discutir a relevância do brincar na infância e a relação das tecnologias digitais em meio ao ensino e a aprendizagem. Para o alcance do objetivo traçado, pretende-se apresentar um panorama conceitual sobre o brincar e possíveis adversidades na cultura digital, com metodologia, desenvolvido a partir da pesquisa bibliográfica e documental, na perspectiva de Marques; Peccin (2005), Souza; Silva; Carvalho (2010) e Lakatos; Marconi (2010). Neste sentido, o texto discorre sobre concepções e análises acerca do brincar, enfatizando a mobilização dos saberes, a construção de aprendizagens e a socialização para a cultura digital, de modo a contribuir com a formação integral da criança como um todo. Verifica-se que o brincar no século XXI passa por inúmeras mudanças, atingindo espaços, tempos e rotinas, diversificando ambientes para o movimento do brincar e das brincadeiras, ou seja, o brincar sofre influências pelas tecnologias, e, desse modo, torna-se relevante discutir e refletir se tais transformações decorrentes da evolução tecnológica são oportunas para o contexto da infância. Palavras-Chave: Tecnologias Digitais; Infância; Brincar. Abstract:Digital technologies and their access possibilities are increasingly present in the subject's life, from the first days of life, interfering in the development of human beings from childhood. In this perspective, the study in question presents a brief reflection on playing in digital culture in the children's context against digital technologies. Aiming to discuss the relevance of playing in childhood and the relationship of digital technologies in teaching and learning. To achieve the objective outlined, it is intended to present a conceptual overview of playing and possible adversities in digital culture, with methodology, developed from bibliographic and documental research, from the perspective of Marques; Peccin (2005), Souza; Silva; Carvalho (2010) and Lakatos; Marconi (2010). In this sense, the text discusses conceptions and analyzes about playing, emphasizing the mobilization of knowledge, the construction of learning and socialization for digital culture, to contribute to the integral formation of the child as a whole. It appears that playing in the 21st century undergoes countless changes, reaching spaces, times and routines, diversifying environments for the movement of play and games, that is, playing is influenced by technologies, and, thus, it becomes It is relevant to discuss and reflect on whether such transformations resulting from technological evolution are opportune for the childhood context. Keywords: Digital Technologies; Childhood; Play.

Playing in childhood we are presented with foundational puzzles. Many of these arise directly from our negotiations with the laws of physics; others arise from the deliberate activities of our elders, teachers and siblings. As we sit on our grandmother’s knee we are presented with a range of playful and deceptive games. Something as simple as a loop of wool can initiate this play: now it is a straight thread; now it is a loop. Something as simple as the opening hand is the potential source of a problem that may stay with us for a lifetime: now it is a hand with open palm; now it is a fist that hides. Something as simple as a dropped toy ball can initiate the motive to engage with the world as a problem: now it is here, at hand; now it is gone, down there and rolling away. While each of these events is real, the space and time of such play can be described as an illusion. The figure of this illusion is itself a loop within which a special kind of logic pertains. This logic is illustrated in D. W. Winnicott’s concept of illusory experience and in John Dewey’s concept of perplexity as the source of human thinking. As illusions, loops are puzzling; as real objects and events, loops pre-figure and offer to mediate the development of our understanding of our being in the world. Donald Woods Winnicott (1896-1971) a British child psychoanalyst, spent much of his time exploring the relationships that children form with objects. His work offers accounts of an extraordinary array of everyday engagements that children have with simple things such as their own toes and bits of string. A key aspect of Winnicott’s theories of the formative years is the sustaining of a loop, or in Winnicott’s terms, "an intermediate state" between the child and reality. I am here staking a claim for an intermediate state between a baby’s inability and his growing ability to recognize and accept reality. I am therefore studying the substance of illusion, that which is allowed to the infant, and which in adult life is inherent in art and religion, and yet becomes the hallmark of madness when an adult puts too powerful a claim on the credulity of others, forcing them to acknowledge a sharing of illusion that is not their own. We can share a respect for illusory experience, and if we wish we may collect together and form a group on the basis of the similarity of our illusory experiences. This is a natural root of grouping among human beings. (Winnicott 3) Social groups establish preferred forms to account for dynamic systems in everyday life. The hand, for example, might be generally agreed to be an open hand, at rest, which means that fingers are curved towards the palm and the palm is down. The number of variations in the way in which a hand might be found, and described, is so large as to be able to symbolise an entire language. From the outside, to a non-signer, it is an illusion that hand-signing is language, just as it is an illusion that spoken and written languages are languages to those who do not share the particular language illusion. Within the range of possible hand gestures, a loop or tension-of-illusion is established: those in the loop can comprehend the signing as language; those outside the loop can only pretend that the illusion works. Recalling that the word "illusion" takes its origin in the Latin for play ("ludere") it comes as no surprise that initiation games frequently use spurious loop activities to trap the outsider in ways that will embarrass the new-comer. The sense of mockery in the word "illusion" is made evident as the new-comer has no way of determining the validity of the pretend inside information. Suggestions that they drink some foul concoction can only be answered by drinking the concoction: there is no way from the outside of the illusion group to resolve the challenge. To enter the inside of the loop, the new-comer has to cross some kind of line in a way that leaves a mark: the affect of embarrassment is often enough. Our ability to suspend disbelief and sustain the illusion as loop is a fundamental requirement of our social being and of our cognitive development. "Once upon a time" is a call to step inside the loop of fiction where things may emerge that cannot otherwise emerge. While this loop may be seen as nothing more than an inner fantasy world, it is impossible to sustain this concept unless we deny the common reality of such a world. The world of the loop is not some kind of denial of an outer reality, nor is it an assertion of an inner freedom that can remain separate to an external reality. We may claim to make words mean whatever we wish them to mean in an inner and private dimension, but in making such a claim we must use a common meaning of "meaning" and we must use the syntax and grammar of a language. Much as we might wish for such an interiority, Winnicott requires us to recognise the further need for an "intermediate area of experience". This intermediate area is the public space of shared illusion: It is an area that is not challenged, because no claim is made on its behalf except that it shall exist as a resting-place for the individual engaged in the perpetual human task of keeping inner and outer reality separate yet interrelated. (Winnicott 2) In this intermediate area, it is possible to sustain illusions only in relation to a presumed other reality. That is, the logics of illusion are logics that apply, if differently, in the outer and inner realms of experience. The reality of a loop may seem soft. Loops are readily formed without substantial alteration of the loop forming material. Loops are also frightening in their potential operation as capturing devices. The forces they can activate are deadly. As dynamic objects, loops offer their own interpretation of Winnicott’s concept of illusion. At some point the game or play of illusions terminates in a disclosure of closure that instructs the play. The closed hand that hides the marble opens to reveal the marble. One moment in the play of logics is elected or given a priority. The relative stability of this pattern is made obvious in certain forms of illusion that take illusions as their "fixed" shape. Knitting, for example, consists of loops interlocked with loops. As anyone who has pulled knitting apart knows, interlocking is fundamentally an illusion in its making and a disillusion in its pulling apart. Knitting can then be seen, in this sense to be "fake". Fakes "Fake" does not mean "false" except that we have come to see the dressing up of things as being insubstantial and therefore not warranting attention. Worse, we see "fake" as being morally repugnant in that a fake thing takes the place of a real thing. But "fake" also means "a coil of rope". In this case, the fake is substantial while ever it exists. Thus, a fake is a kind of benevolent illusion. The shape that the coil of rope makes is no less real, in time, than the ship-deck on which it is formed. When it is uncoiled, the rope takes on its "true" or active shape. Should the uncoiled rope form a loop, this loop is potentially malevolent. It may take the leg of a sailor. In childhood, this game is played out using simple loops and slip knots that hold but let go when pulled. The dynamic forms are sometimes the illusion; sometimes it is the static form that is the illusion. That is, the pragmatic interpretation allows for the display of the fake as a cognitive toy. Any state of the dynamic form may take priority at any one time for the purposes of the use of the system. When we sit down, our height differences are reduced: this fake is a crucial part of our social world. Loops Winnicott lets us see the life-long significance of the looping and faking that we daily use to sustain our dynamic worlds . In our loop worlds we establish a space "between thumb and the teddy bear, between the oral erotism and the true object-relationship" (Winnicott 2). Within the loop, the status of objects and systems is open to transformation, just as, over time, in the material world, objects and systems are transformed. The valency of any object or system, viewed from within the loop, is fundamentally indeterminate and hence open. It is within this loop-logic that we can understand the ironic singing of songs whose content is radically alternative to the situation of the singing: children can be heard singing songs filled with sexual connotations without there being any awareness of the inappropriate content; many people can hear and sing along with Bette Midler’s rendition of "God is watching us" without the irony striking home that God is doing this from a distance of total indifference. The tongue in Bette’s cheek could not get any bigger, but from within the loop, the song can have any value the singer selects. While we may sustain fantasy worlds as intermediate worlds, Winnicott makes obvious that "the mother’s main task (next to providing opportunity for illusion) is disillusionment" (Winnicott 12). At some point the disjunction between illusion and reality becomes perplexing. The ball that the child drops does evade the child’s grasp. It is not simply a matter of sustaining the mood. Either the ball can be recovered or else it cannot. Perplexity and the Dialectic of Loss John Dewey (1859-1952) is a major figure in American pragmatist schools of philosophy and in educational philosophy, especially problem-based theories of learning. His work bridges the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and covers all the major social and cultural issues of his day. As a thorough thinker, Dewey offers to provide explanations for most aspects of what is practically required of us in our living socially responsible lives. Even our "negative" affects, such as perplexity, are presented by Dewey as indicators of our practical connection with reality. For Dewey, perplexity is a key feature of the state of mind that initiates the growth of the individual through engagement with the problematics of the world in which they live. Dewey points out that "thinking begins as soon as the baby who has lost the ball that he is playing with begins to foresee the possibility of something not yet existing—its recovery" (How We Think 89). Losing the ball creates a difficulty, seeing that the ball might be recovered, the child is then able to move to resolve the difficulty, through action, in the real world. In this simple form we can determine the process of thesis (loss), anti-thesis (promise of recovery or remedy), synthesis (resolution of the problem with an enhanced understanding of the process). The theological allusions should not be discounted in this model. Nor should we forget Winnicott’s caution here "that the task of reality-acceptance is never completed". The ball game is still a game that retains the general forgiveness of the loop in that the real loss is mitigated by the surrounding and support "illusion" that the parent will recover the ball for the child. It may be socially frowned on, but adults still drop things just to instigate the "illusion" that others will recover their loss (for an extended account of Dewey’s notion of perplexity, see Russell). Still, the loss of the ball is a problem that holds very real interest for the baby and therefore the problem is perplexing. According to Dewey: "Interest marks the annihilation of the distance between the person and the materials and results of his action; it is the sign of their organic union" (Middle Works 160). Being "entirely taken up with" (p. 160) the loss of the ball, the baby experiences the situation in what McLuhan describes as "depth". In the depth approach attention is able to shift from content to attention itself: "Consciousness itself is an inclusive process not at all dependent on content. Consciousness does not postulate consciousness in particular" (McLuhan 247). Conclusion The capacity of consciousness to take an interest, in Dewey’s terms, is the same capacity that consciousness displays in the sustaining of the loop of illusion. For Dewey, "interest marks the annihilation of the distance between the person and the materials and results of his action". This annihilation, in Winnicott’s gentler terms, is more of respite in the long journey. For Winnicott "no human being is free from the strain of relating inner and outer reality". The intermediary illusions remain illusions even if they are instructive. For Dewey, the focus on perplexity allows that the strain is integrated in an affect-complex that both sustains the illusion ("I can get the ball back") in the manner of a hypothesis ("I had the ball, I lost the ball—losing the ball was a process, regaining the ball could also be a process—I can have the ball again"). Granted, Dewey, as a pragmatist, starts with a real world process. Nonetheless, his approach points to the deeper connections between consciousness itself and the operations of the psychological development of the individual. From the perspective of perplexity, the puzzles of childhood are also the puzzles of the adult. As adults we continue to play with loops of all kinds. We maintain intermediary spaces and we conspire in the social illusions of language References Dewey, John. How We Think: A Restatement of the Relation of Reflective Thinking to the Educative Process. Boston: D.C. Heath, 1933. Dewey, John. The Middle Works, 1899-1924. Ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Vol. 7. Carbondale and Edwardsville: South Illinios U P, 1979. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: Signet, 1964. Russell, Keith. "The Problem of the Problem and Perplexity." Themes and Variations in PBL. Proc. of the 5th International Biennial PBL Conference, 7-10 Jul. 1999, U of Quebec. U of Newcastle: PROBLARC, 1999. 180-95. Winnicott, D. W. Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock, 1971. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Russell, Keith. "Loops and Fakes and Illusions" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.4 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/fakes.php>. Chicago Style Russell, Keith, "Loops and Fakes and Illusions" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 4 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/fakes.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Russell, Keith. (2002) Loops and Fakes and Illusions. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(4). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/fakes.php> ([your date of access]).

In a recent gaming anthology, Henry Jenkins cannot help contrasting his son's cramped, urban, media-saturated existence with his own idyllic, semi-rural childhood. After describing his own Huck Finn meanderings over "the spaces of my boyhood" including the imaginary kingdoms of Jungleoca and Freedonia, Jenkins relates his version of his son's experiences: My son, Henry, now 16 has never had a backyard He has grown up in various apartment complexes, surrounded by asphalt parking lots with, perhaps, a small grass buffer from the street… Once or twice, when I became exasperated by my son's constant presence around the house I would … tell him he should go out and play. He would look at me with confusion and ask, where? … Who wouldn't want to trade in the confinement of your room for the immersion promised by today's video games? … Perhaps my son finds in his video games what I found in the woods behind the school, on my bike whizzing down the hills of suburban backstreets, or settled into my treehouse with a good adventure novel intensity of experience, escape from adult regulation; in short, "complete freedom of movement". (Jenkins 1998, 263-265) Games here are connected with a shrinking availability of domestic and public space, and a highly mediated experience of the world. Despite his best intentions, creeping into Jenkins's piece is a sense that games act as a poor substitute for the natural spaces of a "healthy" childhood. Although "Video games did not make backyard play spaces disappear", they "offer children some way to respond to domestic confinement" (Jenkins 1998, 266). They emerge, then, as a palliation for the claustrophobic circumstances of contemporary urban life, though they offer only unreal spaces, replete with "lakes of fire … cities in the clouds … [and] dazzling neon-lit Asian marketplaces" (Jenkins 1998, 263), where the work of the childish imagination is already done. Despite Jenkins's assertion that games do offer "complete freedom of movement", it is hard to shake the feeling that he considers his own childhood far richer in exploratory and imaginative opportunities: Let me be clear I am not arguing that video games are as good for kids as the physical spaces of backyard play culture. As a father, I wish that my son would come home covered in mud or with scraped knees rather than carpet burns ... The psychological and social functions of playing outside are as significant as the impact of "sunshine and good exercise" upon our physical well-being. (Jenkins 1998, 266) Throughout the piece, games are framed by a romantic, anti-urban discourse: the expanding city is imagined as engulfing space and perhaps destroying childhood itself, such that "'sacred' places are now occupied by concrete, bricks or asphalt" (Jenkins 1998, 263). Games are complicit in this alienation of space and experience. If this is not quite Paul Virilio's recent dour contention that modern mass media forms work mainly to immobilise the body of the consumer--Virilio, luckily, has managed to escape the body-snatchers--games here are produced as a feeble response to an already-effected urban imprisonment of the young. Strikingly, Jenkins seems concerned about his son's "unhealthy" confinement to private, domestic space, and his inability to imaginatively possess a slice of the world outside. Jenkins's description of his son's confinement to the world of "carpet burns" rather than the great outdoors of "scraped knees" and "mud" implicitly leaves the distinction between domestic and public, internal and external, and even the imagined passivity of the domestic sphere as against the activity of the public intact. For those of us who see games as productive activities, which generate particular, unique kinds of pleasure in their own right, rather than as anaemic replacements for lost spaces, this seems to reduce a central cultural form. For those of us who have at least some sympathy with writers on the urban environment like Raban (1974) and Young (1990), who see the city's theatrical and erotic possibilities, Jenkins's fears might seem to erase the pleasures and opportunities that city life provides. Rather than seeing gamers and children (the two groups only partially overlap) as unwitting agents in their own confinement, we can arrive at a slightly more complex view of the relationship between games and urban space. By looking at the video games arcade as it is situated in urban retail space, we can see how gameplay simultaneously acts to regulate urban space, mediates a unique kind of urban performance, and allows sophisticated representations, manipulations and appropriations of differently conceived urban spaces. Despite being a long-standing feature of the urban and retail environment, and despite also being a key site for the "exhibition" of a by-now central media form, the video game arcade has a surprisingly small literature devoted to it. Its prehistory in pinball arcades and pachinko parlours has been noted (by, for example, Steven Poole 2000) but seldom deeply explored, and its relations with a wider urban space have been given no real attention at all. The arcade's complexity, both in terms of its positioning and functions, may contribute to this. The arcade is a space of conflicting, contradictory uses and tendencies, though this is precisely what makes it as important a space as the cinema or penny theatre before it. Let me explain why I think so. The arcade is always simultaneously a part of and apart from the retail centres to which it tends to attach itself.1 If it is part of a suburban shopping mall, it is often located on the ground floor near the entrance, or is semi-detached as cinema complexes often are, so that the player has to leave the mall's main building to get there, or never enter. If it is part of a city or high street shopping area, it is often in a side street or a street parallel to the main retail thoroughfare, or requires the player to mount a set of stairs into an off-street arcade. At other times the arcade is located in a space more strongly marked as liminal in relation to the city -- the seaside resort, sideshow alley or within the fences of a theme park. Despite this, the videogame arcade's interior is usually wholly or mostly visible from the street, arcade or thoroughfare that it faces, whether this visibility is effected by means of glass walls, a front window or a fully retractable sliding door. This slight distance from the mainstream of retail activity and the visibility of the arcade's interior are in part related to the economics of the arcade industry. Arcade machines involve relatively low margins -- witness the industry's recent feting and embrace of redemption (i.e. low-level gambling) games that offer slightly higher turnovers -- and are hungry for space. At the same time, arcades are dependent on street traffic, relentless technological novelty and their de facto use as gathering space to keep the coins rolling in. A balance must be found between affordability, access and visibility, hence their positioning at a slight remove from areas of high retail traffic. The story becomes more complicated, though, when we remember that arcades are heavily marked as deviant, disreputable spaces, whether in the media, government reports or in sociological and psychological literature. As a visible, public, urban space where young people are seen to mix with one another and unfamiliar and novel technologies, the arcade is bound to give rise to adult anxieties. As John Springhall (1998) puts it: More recent youth leisure… occupies visible public space, is seen as hedonistic and presents problems within the dominant discourse of 'enlightenment' … [T]he most popular forms of entertainment among the young at any given historical moment tend also to provide the focus of the most intense social concern. A new medium with mass appeal, and with a technology best understood by the young… almost invariably attracts a desire for adult or government control (160-161, emphasis mine) Where discourses of deviant youth have also been employed in extending the surveillance and policing of retail space, it is unsurprising that spaces seen as points for the concentration of such deviance will be forced away from the main retail thoroughfares, in the process effecting a particular kind of confinement, and opportunity for surveillance. Michel Foucault writes, in Discipline and Punish, about the classical age's refinements of methods for distributing and articulating bodies, and the replacement of spectacular punishment with the crafting of "docile bodies". Though historical circumstances have changed, we can see arcades as disciplinary spaces that reflect aspects of those that Foucault describes. The efficiency of arcade games in distributing bodies in rows, and side by side demonstrates that" even if the compartments it assigns become purely ideal, the disciplinary space is always, basically, cellular" (Foucault 1977, 143). The efficiency of games from Pong (Atari:1972) to Percussion Freaks (Konami: 1999) in articulating bodies in play, in demanding specific and often spectacular bodily movements and competencies means that "over the whole surface of contact between the body and the object it handles, power is introduced, fastening them to one another. It constitutes a body weapon, body-tool, body-machine complex" (Foucault 1977,153). What is extraordinary is the extent to which the articulation of bodies proceeds only through a direct engagement with the game. Pong's instructions famously read only "avoid missing ball for high score"--a whole economy of movement, arising from this effort, is condensed into six words. The distribution and articulation of bodies also entails a confinement in the space of the arcade, away from the main areas of retail trade, and renders occupants easily observable from the exterior. We can see that games keep kids off the streets. On the other hand, the same games mediate spectacular forms of urban performance and allow particular kinds of reoccupation of urban space. Games descended or spun off from Dance Dance Revolution (Konami: 1998) require players to dance, in time with thumping (if occasionally cheesy) techno, and in accordance with on-screen instructions, in more and more complex sequences on lit footpads. These games occupy a lot of space, and the newest instalment (DDR has just issued its "7th Mix") is often installed at the front of street level arcades. When played with flair, games such as these are apt to attract a crowd of onlookers to gather, not only inside, but also on the footpath outside. Indeed games such as these have given rise to websites like http://www.dancegames.com/au which tells fans not only when and where new games are arriving, but whether or not the positioning of arcades and games within them will enable a player to attract attention to their performance. This mediation of cyborg performance and display -- where success both achieves and exceeds perfect integration with a machine in urban space -- is particularly important to Asian-Australian youth subcultures, which are often marginalised in other forums for youthful display, like competitive sport. International dance gamer websites like Jason Ho's http://www.ddrstyle.com , which is emblazoned with the slogan "Asian Pride", explicitly make the connection between Asian youth subcultures and these new kinds of public performance. Games like those in the Time Crisis series, which may seem less innocuous, might be seen as effecting important inversions in the representation of urban space. Initially Time Crisis, which puts a gun in the player's hand and requires them to shoot at human figures on screen, might even be seen to live up to the dire claims made by figures like Dave Grossman that such games effectively train perpetrators of public violence (Grossman 1995). What we need to keep in mind, though, is that first, as "cops", players are asked to restore order to a representation of urban space, and second, that that they are reacting to images of criminality. When criminality and youth are so often closely linked in public discourse (not to mention criminality and Asian ethnicity) these games stage a reversal whereby the young player is responsible for performing a reordering of the unruly city. In a context where the ideology of privacy has progressively marked public space as risky and threatening,2 games like Time Crisis allow, within urban space, a performance aimed at the resolution of risk and danger in a representation of the urban which nevertheless involves and incorporates the material spaces that it is embedded in.This is a different kind of performance to DDR, involving different kinds of image and bodily attitude, that nevertheless articulates itself on the space of the arcade, a space which suddenly looks more complex and productive. The manifest complexity of the arcade as a site in relation to the urban environment -- both regulating space and allowing spectacular and sophisticated types of public performance -- means that we need to discard simplistic stories about games providing surrogate spaces. We reify game imagery wherever we see it as a space apart from the material spaces and bodies with which gaming is always involved. We also need to adopt a more complex attitude to urban space and its possibilities than any narrative of loss can encompass. The abandonment of such narratives will contribute to a position where we can recognise the difference between the older and younger Henrys' activities, and still see them as having a similar complexity and richness. With work and luck, we might also arrive at a material organisation of society where such differing spaces of play -- seen now by some as mutually exclusive -- are more easily available as choices for everyone. NOTES 1 Given the almost total absence of any spatial study of arcades, my observations here are based on my own experience of arcades in the urban environment. Many of my comments are derived from Brisbane, regional Queensland and urban-Australian arcades this is where I live but I have observed the same tendencies in many other urban environments. Even where the range of services and technologies in the arcades are different in Madrid and Lisbon they serve espresso and alcohol (!), in Saigon they often consist of a bank of TVs equipped with pirated PlayStation games which are hired by the hour their location (slightly to one side of major retail areas) and their openness to the street are maintained. 2 See Spigel, Lynn (2001) for an account of the effects and transformations of the ideology of privacy in relation to media forms. See Furedi, Frank (1997) and Douglas, Mary (1992) for accounts of the contemporary discourse of risk and its effects. References Douglas, M. (1992) Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory. London ; New York : Routledge. Foucault, M. (1979) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin,. Furedi, F.(1997) Culture of Fear: Risk-taking and the Morality of Low Expectation. London ; Washington : Cassell. Grossman, D. (1995) On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. Boston: Little, Brown. Jenkins, H. (1998) Complete freedom of movement: video games as gendered play spaces. In Jenkins, Henry and Justine Cassell (eds) From Barbie to Mortal Kombat : Gender and Computer Games. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Poole, S. (2000) Trigger Happy: The Inner Life of Videogames. London: Fourth Estate. Raban, J. (1974) Soft City. London: Hamilton. Spigel, L. (2001) Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and the Postwar Suburbs. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Springhall, J. (1998) Youth, Popular Culture and Moral Panics : Penny Gaffs to Gangsta-rap, 1830-1996. New York: St. Martin's Press. Young, I.M. (1990) Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Websites http://www.yesterdayland.com/popopedia/s... (Time Crisis synopsis and shots) http://www.dancegames.com/au (Site for a network of fans revealing something about the culture around dancing games) http://www.ddrstyle.com (website of Jason Ho, who connects his dance game performances with pride in his Asian identity). http://www.pong-story.com (The story of Pong, the very first arcade game) Games Dance Dance Revolution, Konami: 1998. Percussion Freaks, Konami: 1999. Pong, Atari: 1972. Time Crisis, Namco: 1996. Links http://www.dancegames.com/au http://www.yesterdayland.com/popopedia/shows/arcade/ag1154.php http://www.pong-story.com http://www.ddrstyle.com Citation reference for this article MLA Style Wilson, Jason A.. "Performance, anxiety" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.2 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/performance.php>. Chicago Style Wilson, Jason A., "Performance, anxiety" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 2 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/performance.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Wilson, Jason A.. (2002) Performance, anxiety. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(2). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/performance.php> ([your date of access]).

Introduction Children are not only born digital, they are fashioned toward a lifestyle that needs them to be digital all the time (Palfrey and Gasser). They click, tap, save, circulate, download, and upload the texts of their lives, their friends’ lives, and the anonymous lives of the people that surround them. They are socialised as Internet consumers ready to participate in digital services targeted to them as they age such as Snapchat, Instagram, and YouTube. But they are also fashioned as producers, whereby their lives are sold as content on these same markets. As commodities, the minutiae of their lives become the fodder for online circulation. Paradoxically, we also celebrate these digital behaviours as a means to express identity. Personal profile-building for adults is considered agency-building (Beer and Burrows), and as a consequence, we praise children for mimicking these acts of adult lifestyle. This article reflects on the Kids, Creative Storyworlds, and Wearables project, which involved an ethnographic study with five young children (ages 4-7), who were asked to share their autobiographical stories, creative self-narrations, and predictions about their future mediated lives (Atkins et al.). For this case study, we focus on commercialised forms of children’s automedia, and we compare discussions we had with 6-year old Cayden, a child we met in the study who expresses the desire to make himself famous online, with videos of Jacob, a child vlogger on YouTube’s Kinder Playtime, who clearly influences children like Cayden. We argue that child social influencers need consideration both as autobiographical agents and as child subjects requiring a sheltered approach to their online lives.Automedia Automedia is an emergent genre of autobiography (Smith and Watson Reading 190; “Virtually Me” 78). Broadcasting one’s life online takes many forms (Kennedy “Vulnerability”). Ümit Kennedy argues “Vlogging on YouTube is a contemporary form of autobiography in which individuals engage in a process of documenting their life on a daily or weekly basis and, in doing so, construct[ing] their identity online” (“Exploring”). Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson write that “visual and digital modes are projecting and circulating not just new subjects but new notions of subjectivity through the effects of automediality” with the result that “the archive of the self in time, in space and in relation expands and is fundamentally reorganized” (Reading 190). Emma Maguire addresses what online texts “tell us about cultural understandings of selfhood and what it means to communicate ‘real’ life through media” naming one tool, “automedia”. Further, Julie Rak calls on scholars “to rethink ‘life’ and ‘writing’ as automedia” to further “characterize the enactment of a personal life story in a new media environment.” We define automedia as a genre that involves the practices of creating, performing, sharing, circulating, and (at times) preserving one’s digital life narrative meant for multiple publics. Automedia revises identity formation, embodiment, or corporealities in acts of self-creation (Brophy and Hladki 4). Automedia also emphasizes circulation. As shared digital life texts now circulate through the behaviours of other human subjects, and automatically via algorithms in data assemblages, we contend that automediality currently involves a measure of relinquishing control over perpetually evolving mediatised environments. One cannot control how a shared life narrative will meet a public in the future, which is a revised way of thinking about autobiography. For the sake of this paper, we argue that children’s automedia ought to be considered a creative, autobiographical act, in order to afford child authors who create them the consideration they deserve as agents, now and in the future. Automedial practices often begin when children receive access to a device. The need for a distraction activity is often the reason parents hand a young child a smartphone, iPad, or even a wearable camera (Nansen). Mirroring the lives of parents, children aspire to share representations of their own personal lives in pursuit of social capital. They are often encouraged to use technologies and apps as adults do–to track aspects of self, broadcast life stories and eventually “live share” them—effectively creating, performing, sharing, and at times, seeking to preserve a public life narrative. With this practice, society inculcates children into spheres of device ubiquity, “socializing them to a future digital lifestyle that will involve always carrying a computer in some form” (Atkins et al. 49). Consequently, their representations become inculcated in larger media assemblages. Writing about toddlers, Nansen describes how the “archiving, circulation and reception of these images speaks to larger assemblages of media in which software protocols and algorithms are increasingly embedded in and help to configure everyday life (e.g. Chun; Gillespie), including young children’s media lives (Ito)” (Nansen). Children, like adult citizens, are increasingly faced with choices “not structured by their own preferences but by the economic imperatives of the private corporations that have recently come to dominate the internet” (Andrejevic). Recent studies have shown that for children and youth in the digital age, Internet fame, often characterized by brand endorsements, is a major aspiration (Uhls and Greenfield, 2). However, despite the ambition to participate as celebrity digital selves, children are also mired in the calls to shield them from exposure to screens through institutions that label these activities detrimental. In many countries, digital “protections” are outlined by privacy commissioners and federal or provincial/state statutes, (e.g. Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada). Consequently, children are often caught in a paradox that defines them either as literate digital agents able to compose or participate with their online selves, or as subjectified wards caught up in commercial practices that exploit their lives for commercial gain.Kids, Creative Storyworlds and Wearables ProjectBoth academic and popular cultural critics continually discuss the future but rarely directly engage the people who will be empowered (or subjugated) by it as young adults in twenty years. To address children’s lack of agency in these discussions, we launched the Kids, Creative Storyworlds and Wearables project to bring children into a dialogue about their own digital futures. Much has been written on childhood agency and participation in culture and mediated culture from the discipline of sociology (James and James; Jenks; Jenkins). In previous work, we addressed the perspective of child autobiographical feature filmmakers to explore issues of creative agency and consent when adult gatekeepers facilitate children in film production (Pedersen and Aspevig “My Eyes”; Pedersen and Aspevig “Swept”). Drawing on that previous work, this project concentrates on children’s automediated lives and the many unique concerns that materialize with digital identity-building. Children are categorised as a vulnerable demographic group necessitating special policy and legislation, but the lives they project as children will eventually become subsumed in their own adult lives, which will almost certainly be treated and mediated in a much different manner in the future. We focused on this landscape, and sought to query the children on their futures, also considering the issues that arise when adult gatekeepers get involved with child social media influencers. In the Storyworlds ethnographic study, children were given a wearable toy, a Vtech smartwatch called Kidizoom, to use over a month’s timeframe to serve as a focal point for ethnographic conversations. The Kidizoom watch enables children to take photos and videos, which are uploaded to a web interface. Before we gave them the tech, we asked them questions about their lives, including What are machines going to be like in the future? Can you imagine yourself wearing a certain kind of computer? Can you tell/draw a story about that? If you could wear a computer that gave you a super power, what would it be? Can you use your imagination to think of a person in a story who would use technology? In answering, many of them drew autobiographical drawings of technical inventions, and cast themselves in the images. We were particularly struck by the comments made by one participant, Cayden (pseudonym), a 6-year-old boy, and the stories he told us about himself and his aspirations. He expressed the desire to host a YouTube channel about his life, his activities, and the wearable technologies his family already owned (e.g. a GroPro camera) and the one we gave him, the Kidizoom smartwatch. He talked about how he would be proud to publically broadcast his own videos on YouTube, and about the role he had been allowed to play in the making of videos about his life (that were not broadcast). To contextualize Cayden’s commentary and his automedial aspirations, we extended our study to explore child social media influencers who broadcast components of their personal lives for the deliberate purpose of popularity and the financial gain of their parents.We selected the videos of Jacob, a child vlogger because we judged them to be representative of the kinds that Cayden watched. Jacob reviews toys through “unboxing videos,” a genre in which a child tells an online audience her or his personal experiences using new toys in regular, short videos on a social media site. Jacob appears on a YouTube channel called Kinder Playtime, which appears to be a parent-run channel that states that, “We enjoy doing these things while playing with our kids: Jacob, Emily, and Chloe” (see Figure 1). In one particular video, Jacob reviews the Kidizoom watch, serving as a child influencer for the product. By understanding Jacob’s performance as agent-driven automedia, as well as being a commercialised, mediatised form of advertising, we get a clearer picture of how the children in the study are coming to terms with their own digital selfhood and the realisation that circulated, life-exposing videos are the expectation in this context.Children are implicated in a range of ways through “family” influencer and toy unboxing videos, which are emergent entertainment industries (Abidin 1; Nansen and Nicoll; Craig and Cunningham 77). In particular, unboxing videos do impact child viewers, especially when children host them. Jackie Marsh emphasizes the digital literacy practices at play here that co-construct viewers as “cyberflâneur[s]” and she states that “this mode of cultural transmission is a growing feature of online practices for this age group” (369). Her stress, however, is on how the child viewer enjoys “the vicarious pleasure he or she may get from viewing the playing of another child with the toy” (376). Marsh writes that her study subject, a child called “Gareth”, “was not interested in being made visible to EvanHD [a child celebrity social media influencer] or other online peers, but was content to consume” the unboxing videos. The concept of the cyberflâneur, then, is fitting as a mediatising co-constituting process of identity-building within discourses of consumerism. However, in our study, the children, and especially Cayden, also expressed the desire to create, host, and circulate their own videos that broadcast their lives, also demonstrating awareness that videos are valorised in their social circles. Child viewers watch famous children perform consumer-identities to create an aura of influence, but viewers simultaneously aspire to become influencers using automedial performances, in essence, becoming products, themselves. Jacob, Automedial Subjects and Social Media InfluencersJacob is a vlogger on YouTube whose videos can garner millions of views, suggesting that he is also an influencer. In one video, he appears to be around the age of six as he proudly sits with folded hands, bright eyes, and a beaming, but partly toothless smile (see Figure 2). He says, “Welcome to Kinder Playtime! Today we have the Kidi Zoom Smartwatch DX. It’s from VTech” (Kinder Playtime). We see the Kidi Zoom unboxed and then depicted in stylized animations amid snippets of Jacob’s smiling face. The voice and hands of a faceless parent guide Jacob as he uses his new wearable toy. We listen to both parent and child describe numerous features for recording and enhancing the wearer’s daily habits (e.g. calculator, calendar, fitness games), and his dad tells him it has a pedometer “which tracks your steps” (Kinder Playtime). But the watch is also used by Jacob to mediate himself and his world. We see that Jacob takes pictures of himself on the tiny watch screen as he acts silly for the camera. He also uses the watch to take personal videos of his mother and sister in his home. The video ends with his father mentioning bedtime, which prompts a “thank you” to VTech for giving him the watch, and a cheerful “Bye!” from Jacob (Kinder Playtime). Figure 1: Screenshot of Kinder Playtime YouTube channel, About page Figure 2: Screenshot of “Jacob,” a child vlogger at Kinder Playtime We chose Jacob for three reasons. First, he is the same age as the children in the Storyworlds study. Second, he reviews the smart watch artifact that we gave to the study children, so there was a common use of automedia technology. Third, Jacob’s parents were involved with his broadcasts, and we wanted to work within the boundaries of parent-sanctioned practices. However, we also felt that his playful approach was a good example of how social media influence overlaps with automediality. Jacob is a labourer trading his public self-representations in exchange for free products and revenue earned through the monetisation of his content on YouTube. It appears that much of what Jacob says is scripted, particularly the promotional statements, like, “Today we have the Kidizoom Smartwatch DX. It’s from VTech. It’s the smartest watch for kids” (Kinder Playtime). Importantly, as an automedial subject Jacob reveals aspects of his self and his identity, in the manner of many child vloggers on public social media sites. His product reviews are contextualised within a commoditised space that provides him a means for the public performance of his self, which, via YouTube, has the potential to reach an enormous audience. YouTube claims to have “over a billion users—almost one-third of all people on the Internet—and every day people watch hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube and generate billions of views” (YouTube). Significantly, he is not only filmed by others, Jacob is also a creative practitioner, as Cayden aspired to become. Jacob uses high-tech toys, in this case, a new wearable technology for self-compositions (the smart watch), to record himself, friends, family or simply the goings-on around him. Strapped to his wrist, the watch toy lets him play at being watched, at being quantified and at recording the life stories of others, or constructing automediated creations for himself, which he may upload to numerous social media sites. This is the start of his online automediated life, which will be increasingly under his ownership as he ages. To greater or lesser degrees, he will later be able to curate, add to, and remediate his body of automedia, including his digital past. Kennedy points out that “people are using YouTube as a transformative tool, and mirror, to document, construct, and present their identity online” (“Exploring”). Her focus is on adult vloggers who consent to their activities. Jacob’s automedia is constructed collaboratively with his parents, and it is unclear how much awareness he has of himself as an automedia creator. However, if we don’t afford Jacob the same consideration as we afford adult autobiographers, that the depiction of his life is his own, we will reduce his identity performance to pure artifice or advertisement. The questions Jacob’s videos raise around agency, consent, and creativity are important here. Sidonie Smith asks “Can there be a free, agentic space; and if so, where in the world can it be found?” (Manifesto 188). How much agency does Jacob have? Is there a liberating aspect in the act of putting personal technology into the hands of a child who can record his life, himself? And finally, how would an adult Jacob feel about his childhood self advertising these products online? Is this really automediality if Jacob does not fully understand what it means to publicly tell a mediated life story?These queries lead to concerns over child social media influence with regard to legal protection, marketing ethics, and user consent. The rise of “fan marketing” presents a nexus of stealth marketing to children by other children. Stealth marketing involves participants, in this case, fans, who do not know they are involved in an advertising scheme. For instance, the popular Minecon Minecraft conference event sessions have pushed their audience to develop the skills to become advocates and advertisers of their products, for example by showing audiences how to build a YouTube channel and sharing tips for growing a community. Targeting children in marketing ploys seems insidious. Marketing analyst Sandy Fleisher describes the value of outsourcing marketing to fan labourers:while Grand Theft Auto spent $120 million on marketing its latest release, Minecraft fans are being taught how to create and market promotional content themselves. One [example] is Minecraft YouTuber, SkydoesMinecraft. His nearly 7 million strong YouTube army, almost as big as Justin Bieber’s, means his daily videos enjoy a lot of views; 1,419,734,267 to be precise. While concerns about meaningful consent that practices like this raise have led some government bodies, and consumer and child protection groups to advocate restrictions for children, other critics have questioned the limits placed on children’s free expression by such restrictions. Tech commentator Larry Magid has written that, “In the interest of protecting children, we sometimes deny them the right to access material and express themselves.” Meghan M. Sweeney notes that “the surge in collaborative web models and the emphasis on interactivity—frequently termed Web 2.0—has meant that children are not merely targets of global media organizations” but have “multiple opportunities to be active, critical, and resistant producers”...and ”may be active agents in the production and dissemination of information” (68). Nevertheless, writes Sweeney, “corporate entities can have restrictive effects on consumers” (68), by for example, limiting imaginative play to the choices offered on a Disney website, or limiting imaginative topics to commercial products (toys, video games etc), as in YouTube review videos. Automedia is an important site from which to consider young children’s online practices in public spheres. Jacob’s performance is indeed meant to influence the choice to buy a toy, but it is also meant to influence others in knowing Jacob as an identity. He means to share and circulate his self. Julie Rak recalls Paul John Eakin’s claims about life-writing that the “process does not even occur at the level of writing, but at the level of living, so that identity formation is the result of narrative-building.” We view Jacob’s performance along these lines. Kinder Playtime offers him a constrained, parent-sanctioned (albeit commercialised) space for role-playing, a practice bound up with identity-formation in the life of most children. To think through the legality of recognising Jacob’s automedial content as his life, Rak is also useful: “In Eakin’s work in particular, we can see evidence of John Locke’s contention that identity is the expression of consciousness which is continuous over time, but that identity is also a product, one’s own property which is a legal entity”. We have argued that children are often caught in the paradox that defines them either as literate digital creators composing and circulating their online selves or as subjectified personas caught up in commercial advertising practices that use their lives for commercial gain. However, through close observation of individual children, one who we met and questioned in our study, Cayden, the other who we met through his mediated, commercialized, and circulated online persona, Jacob, we argue that child social influencers need consideration as autobiographical agents expressing themselves through automediality. As children create, edit, and grow digital traces of their lives and selves, how these texts are framed becomes increasingly important, in part because their future adult selves have such a stake in the matter: they are being formed through automedia. Moreover, these children’s coming of age may bring legal questions about the ownership of their automedial products such as YouTube videos, an enduring legacy they are leaving behind for their adult selves. Crucially, if we reduce identity performances such as unboxing, toy review videos, and other forms of children’s fan marketing to pure advertisement, we cannot afford Jacob and other child influencers the agency that their self representation is legally and artistically their own.ReferencesAbidin, Crystal. “#familygoals: Family Influencers, Calibrated Amateurism, and Justifying Young Digital Labor.” Social Media + Society 3.2 (2017): 1-15.Andrejevic, Mark. “Privacy, Exploitation, and the Digital Enclosure.” Amsterdam Law Forum 1.4 (2009). <http://amsterdamlawforum.org/article/view/94/168>.Atkins, Bridgette, Isabel Pedersen, Shirley Van Nuland, and Samantha Reid. “A Glimpse into the Kids, Creative Storyworlds and Wearables Project: A Work-in-Progress.” ICET 60th World Assembly: Teachers for a Better World: Creating Conditions for Quality Education – Pedagogy, Policy and Professionalism. 2017. 49-60.Beer, David, and Roger Burrows. “Popular Culture, Digital Archives and the New Social Life of Data.” Theory, Culture & Society 30.4 (2013): 47–71.Brophy, Sarah, and Janice Hladki. 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IntroductionClowns can be seen as enacting catastrophe with a small “c.” They are experts in “failing better” who perhaps live on the cusp of turning catastrophe into a metaphorical whirlwind while ameliorating the devastation that lies therein. They also have the propensity to succumb to the devastation, masking their own sense of the void with the gestures of play. In this paper, knowledge about clowns emerges from my experience, working with circus clowns in Circus Knie (Switzerland) and Circo Tihany (South America), observing performances and films about clowns, and reading, primarily in European fiction, of clowns in multiple guises. The exposure to a diverse range of texts, visual media and performance, has led me to the possibility that clowning is not only a conceptual discipline but also a state of being that is yet to be fully recognised.Diminutive CatastropheI have an idea (probably a long held obsession) of the clown as a diminutive figure of catastrophe, of catastrophe with a very small “c.” In the context of this incisive academic dialogue on relationships between catastrophe and creativity where writers are challenged with the horrendous tragedies that nature and humans unleash on the planet, this inept character appears to be utterly insignificant and, moreover, unworthy of any claim to creativity. A clown does not solve problems in the grand scheme of society: if anything he/she simply highlights problems, arguably in a fatalistic manner where innovation may be an alien concept. Invariably, as Eric Weitz observes, when clowns depart from their moment on the stage, laughter evaporates and the world settles back into the relentless shades of oppression and injustice. In response to the natural forces of destruction—earthquakes, tsunamis, cyclones, and volcanic eruptions—as much as to the forces of rage in war and ethnic cleansing that humans inflict on one another, a clown makes but a tiny gesture. Curiously, though, those fingers brushing dust off a threadbare jacket may speak volumes.Paradox is the crux of this exploration. Clowns, the best of them, project the fragility of human value on a screen beyond measure and across many layers and scales of metaphorical understanding (Big Apple Circus; Stradda). Why do odd tramps and ordinary inept people seem to pivot against the immense flows of loss and outrage which tend to pervade our understanding of the global condition today? Can Samuel Beckett’s call to arms of "failing better” in the vein of Charles Chaplin, Oleg Popov, or James Thiérrée offer a creative avenue to pursue (Bala; Coover; Salisbury)? Do they reflect other ways of knowing in the face of big “C” Catastrophes? Creation and CatastropheTo wrestle with these questions, I wish to begin by proposing a big picture view of earth-life wherein, across inconceivable aeons, huge physical catastrophes have wrought unimaginable damage on the ecological “completeness” of the time. I am not a palaeontologist or an evolutionary scientist but I suspect that, if human life is taken out of the equation, the planet since time immemorial has been battered by “disaster” which changed but ultimately did not destroy the earth. Evolution is replete with narratives of species wiped out by ice-ages, volcanoes, earthquakes, and meteors and yet the organism of this planet has survived and even regenerated. In metaphorical territory, the Sanskrit philosophers have a wise take on this process. Indian concepts are always multiple, crowded with possibilities, but I find there is something intriguing in the premise (even if it is impossible to tie down) of Shiva’s dance:Shiva Nataraja destroys creation by his Tandava Dance, or the Dance of Eternity. As he dances, everything disintegrates, apparently into nothingness. Then, out of the thin vapours, matter and life are recreated again. Shiva also dances in the hearts of his devotees as the Great Soul. As he dances, one’s egotism is consumed and one is rendered pure in soul and without any spiritual blemish. (Ghosh 109–10)For a dancer, the central location of dance in life’s creation forces is a powerful idea but I am also interested in how this metaphysical perspective aligns with current scientific views. How could these ancient thinkers predict evolutionary processes? Somehow, in the mix of experiential observation and speculation, they foresaw the complexity of time and, moreover, appreciated the necessary interdependence of creation and destruction (creativity and catastrophe). In comparison to western thought which privileges progression—and here evolution is a prime example—Hindu conceptualisation appears to prefer fatalism or a cyclical system of understanding that negates the potential of change to make things better. However, delving more closely into scientific narratives on evolution, the progression of life forms to the human species has involved the decimation of an uncountable number of other living possibilities. Contrariwise, Shiva’s Dance of Eternity is premised on endless diachronic change crossed vertically by reincarnation, through which progression and regression are equally expressed. I offer this simplistic view of both accounts of creation merely to point out that the interdependency of destruction and creation is deeply embodied in human knowledge.To introduce the clown figure into this idea, I have to turn to the minutiae of destruction and creation; to examples in the everyday nature of regeneration through catastrophe. I have memories of touring in the Northern Territory of Australia amidst strident green shoots bursting out of a fire-tortured landscape or, earlier in Paris, of the snow-crusted earth being torn asunder by spring’s awakening. We all have countless memories of such small-scale transformations of pain and destruction into startling glimpses of beauty. It is at this scale of creative wrestling that I see the clown playing his/her role.In the tension between fatalism and, from a human point of view, projections of the right to progression, a clown occupying the stage vacated by Shiva might stamp out a slight rhythm of his/her own with little or no meaning in the action. The brush on the sleeve might be hard to detect in an evolutionary or Hindu time scale but zoom down to the here and now of performance exchange and the scene may be quite different?Turning the Lens onto the Small-ScaleSmall-scale, clowns tend to be tiny bundles or, sometimes, gangly unbundles of ineptitude, careering through the simplest tasks with preposterous incompetence or, alternatively, imbibing complexity with the virtuosic delicacy—take Charles Chaplin’s shoe-lace spaghetti twirling and nibbling on nail-bones as an example. Clowns disrupt normalcy in small eddies of activity which often wreak paths of destruction within the tightly ordered rage of social formations. The momentum is chaotic and, not dissimilar to storms, clownish enactment bears down not so much to threaten human life but to disrupt what we humans desire and formulate as the natural order of decorum and success. Instead of the terror driven to consciousness by cyclones and hurricanes, the clown’s chaos is superficially benign. When Chaplin’s generous but unrealistic gesture to save the tightrope-act is thwarted by an escaped monkey, or when Thiérrée conducts a spirited debate with the wall of his abode in the midst of an identity crisis (Raoul), life is not threatened. Such incongruous and chaotic trajectories generate laughter and, sometimes, sadness. Moreover, as Weitz observes, “the clown-like imagination, unfettered by earthly logic, urges us to entertain unlikely avenues of thought and action” (87). While it may seem insensitive, I suggest that similar responses of laughter, sadness and unlikely avenues of thought and action emerge in the aftermath of cataclysmic events.Fear, unquestionably, saturates big states of catastrophe. Slide down the scale and intriguing parallels between fear and laughter emerge, one being a clown’s encapsulation of vulnerability and his/her stoic determination to continue, to persevere no matter what. There are many ways to express this continuity: Beckett’s characters are forever waiting, fearful that nothing will arrive, yet occupy themselves with variations of cruelty and amusement through the interminable passage of time. A reverse action occurs in Grock’s insistence that he can play his tiny violin, in spite of his ever-collapsing chair. It never occurs to him to find another chair or play standing up: that, in an incongruous way, would admit defeat because this chair and his playing constitute Grock’s compulsion to succeed. Fear of failure generates multiple innovations in his relationship with the chair and in his playing skills. Storm-like, the pursuit of a singular idea in both instances triggers chaotic consequences. Physical destruction may be slight in such ephemeral storms but the act, the being in the world, does leave its mark on those who witness its passage.I would like to offer a mark left in me by a slight gesture on the part of a clown. I choose this one among many because the singular idea played out in Circus Knie (Switzerland) back in the early 1970s does not conform to the usual parameters. This Knie season featured Dimitri, an Italian-Swiss clown, as the principal attraction. Following clown conventions, Dimitri appeared across the production as active glue between the various circus acts, his persona operating as an odd-jobs man to fix and clean. For instance, he intervened in the elephant act as a cleaner, scrubbing and polishing the elephant’s skin with little effect and tuned, with much difficulty, a tiny fiddle for the grand orchestration to come. But Dimitri was also given moments of his own and this is the one that has lodged in my memory.Dimitri enters the brightly lit and empty circus ring with a broom in hand. The audience at this point have accepted the signal that Dimitri’s interludes prepare the ring for the next attraction—to sweep, as it were, the sawdust back to neutrality. He surveys the circle for a moment and then takes a position on the periphery to begin what appears to be a regular clean-up. The initial brushes over the sawdust, however, produce an unexpected result—the light rather than the sawdust responds to his broom stokes. Bafflement swiftly passes as an idea takes hold: the diminutive figure trots off to the other side of the ring and, after a deep breath and a quick glance to see if anyone is looking (we all are), nudges the next edge of light. Triumphantly, the pattern is pursued with increasing nimbleness, until the figure with the broom stands before a pin-spot of light at the ring’s centre. He hesitates, checks again about unwanted surveillance, and then, in a single strike (poof), sweeps light and the world into darkness.This particular clown gesture contradicts usual commentaries of ineptitude and failure associated with clown figures but the incongruity of sweeping light and the narrative of the little man who scores a win lie thoroughly in the characteristic grounds of clownish behaviour. Moreover, the enactment of this simple idea illustrates for me today, as much as it did on its initial viewing, how powerful a slight clown gesture can be. This catastrophe with a very small “c:” the little man with nothing but a broom and an idea destroyed, like the great god Shiva, the world of light.Jesse McKnight’s discussion of the peculiar attraction of two little men of the 20th century, James Joyce’s Bloom and Charles Chaplin, could also apply to Dimitri:They are at sixes and sevens here on earth but in tune with the stars, buffoons of time, and heroes of eternity. In the petty cogs of the causal, they appear foolish; in the grand swirl of the universe, they are wise, outmaneuvering their assailants and winning the race or the girl against all odds or merely retaining their skins and their dignity by nightfall. (496) Clowning as a State of Mind/ConsciousnessAnother perspective on a clown’s relationship to ideas of catastrophe which I would like to examine is embedded in the discussion above but, at the same time, deviates by way of a harsh tangent from the beatitude and almost sacred qualities attributed by McKnight’s and my own visions of the rhythmic gestures of these diminutive figures. Beckett’s advice in Worstward Ho (1983) is a fruitful starting place wherein the directive is “to keep on trying even if the hope of success is dashed again and again by failure: ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better’” (Le Feuvre 13). True to the masterful wordsmith, these apparently simple words are not transparent; rather, they deflect a range of contradictory interpretations. Yes, failure can facilitate open, flexible and alternative thought which guards against fanatical and ultra-orthodox certitude: “Failure […] is free to honour other ways of knowing, other construals of power” (Werry & O’Gorman 107). On the other hand, failure can mask a horrifying realisation of the utter meaninglessness of human existence. It is as if catastrophe is etched lightly in external clown behaviour and scarred pitilessly deep in the psyches that drive the comic behaviour. Pupils of the pre-eminent clown teacher Jacques Lecoq suggest that theatrical clowning pivots on “finding that basic state of vulnerability and allowing the audience to exist in that state with you” (Butler 64). Butler argues that this “state of clowning” is “a state of anti-intellectualism, a kind of pure emotion” (ibid). From my perspective, there is also an emotional stratum in which the state or condition involves an adult anxiety desiring to protect the child’s view of the world with a fierceness equal to that of a mother hen protecting her brood. A clown knows the catastrophe of him/herself but refuses to let that knowledge (of failure) become an end. An obstinate resilience, even a frank acknowledgement of hopelessness, makes a clown not so much pure emotion or childlike but a kind of knowledgeable avenger of states of loss. Here I need to admit that I attribute the clowning state or consciousness to an intricate lineage inclusive of the named clowns, Grock, Chaplin, Popov, Dimitri, and Thiérrée, which extends to a whole host of others who never entered a circus or performance ring: Mikhail Dostoyevsky’s Mushkin (the holy Russian fool), Henry Miller’s Auguste, Salman Rushdie’s Saleem, Jacques Tati, Joan Miro, Marc Chagall, Jean Cocteau, Eric Satie’s sonic whimsy, and Pina Bausch’s choreography. In the following observation, the overlay of catastrophe and play is a crucial indication of this intricate lineage:Heiner Müller compared Pina Bausch's universe to the world of fairy tales. “History invades it like trouble, like summer flies [...] The territory is an unknown planet, an emerging island product of an ignored (forgotten or future) catastrophe [...] The whole is nothing but children's play”. (Biro 68)Bausch clearly recognises and is interested in the catastrophic moments or psychological wiring of life and her works are not exempt from comic (clownish) modulations in the play of violence and despair that often takes centre stage. In fact, Bausch probably plays on ambivalence between despair and play more explicitly than most artists. From one angle, this ambivalence is generational, as her adult performers bear the weight of oppression within the structures (and remembering of) childhood games. An artistic masterstroke in this regard is the tripling reproduction over many years of her work exploring gender negotiations at a social dance gathering: Kontakhof. Initially, the work was performed by Bausch’s regular company of mature, if diverse, dancers (Bausch 1977), then by an elderly ensemble, some of whom had appeared in the original production (Kontakhof), and, finally, by a group of adolescents in 2010. The latter version became the subject of a documentary film, Dancing Dreams (2010), which revealed the fidelity of the re-enactment, subtly transformed by the brashness and uncertainty of the teenage protagonists playing predetermined roles and moves. Viewing the three productions side-by-side reveals socialised relations of power and desire, resonant of Michel Foucault’s seminal observations (1997), and the catastrophe of gender relations subtly caught in generational change. The debility of each age group becomes apparent. None are able to engage in communication and free-play (dream) without negotiating an unyielding sexual terrain and, more often than not, the misinterpretation of one human to another within social conventions. Bausch’s affinity to the juxtaposition of childhood aspiration and adult despair places her in clown territory.Becoming “Inhuman” or SacrificialA variation on this condition of a relentless pursuit of failure is raised by Joshua Delpech-Ramey in an argument for the “inhuman” rights of clowns. His premise matches a “grotesque attachment to the world of things” to a clown’s existence that is “victimized by an excessive drive to exist in spite of all limitation. The clown is, in some sense, condemned to immortality” (133). In Delpech-Ramey’s terms:Chaplin is human not because his are the anxieties and frustrations of a man unable to realize his destiny, but because Chaplin—nearly starving, nearly homeless, a ghost in the machine—cannot not resist “the temptation to exist,” the giddiness of making something out of nothing, pancakes out of sawdust. In some sense the clown can survive every accident because s/he is an undead immortal, demiurge of a world without history. (ibid.)The play on a clown’s “undead” propensity, on his/her capacity to survive at all costs, provides a counterpoint to a tragic lens which has not been able, in human rights terms, to transcend "man’s inhumanity to man.” It might also be argued that this capacity to survive resists nature’s blindness to the plight of humankind (and visa versa). While I admire the skilful argument to place clowns as centrepieces in the formulation of alternative and possibly more potent human rights legislations, I’m not absolutely convinced that the clown condition, as I see it, provides a less mysterious and tragic state from which justice can be administered. Lear and his fool almost become interchangeable at the end of Shakespeare’s tragedy: both grapple with but cannot resolve the problem of justice.There is a little book written by Henry Miller, The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder (1948), which bears upon this aspect of a clown’s condition. In a postscript, Miller, more notorious for his sexually explicit fiction, states his belief in the unique status of clowns:Joy is like a river: it flows ceaselessly. It seems to me this is the message which the clown is trying to convey to us, that we should participate through ceaseless flow and movement, that we should not stop to reflect, compare, analyse, possess, but flow on and through, endlessly, like music. This is the gift of surrender, and the clown makes it symbolically. It is for us to make it real. (47)Miller’s fictional Auguste’s “special privilege [was] to re-enact the errors, the foibles, the stupidities, all the misunderstandings which plague human kind. To be ineptitude itself” (29). With overtones of a Christian resurrection, Auguste surrenders himself and, thereby, flows on through death, his eyes “wide open, gazing with a candour unbelievable at the thin sliver of a moon which had just become visible in the heavens” (40). It may be difficult to reconcile ineptitude with a Christ figure but those clowns who have made some sort of mark on human imagination tend to wander across territories designated as sacred and profane with a certain insouciance and privilege. They are individuals who become question marks: puzzles not meant to be solved. Maybe similar glimpses of the ineffable occur in tiny, miniscule shifts of consciousness, like the mark given to me by Dimitri and Chaplin and...—the unending list of clowns and clown conditions that have gifted their diminutive catastrophes to the problem of creativity, of rebirth after and in the face of destruction.With McKnight, I dedicate the last word to Chaplin, who speaks with final authority on the subject: “Be brave enough to face the veil and lift it, and see and know the void it hides, and stand before that void and know that within yourself is your world” (505).Thus poised, the diminutive clown figure may not carry the ferment of Shiva’s message of destruction and rebirth, he/she may not bear the strength to creatively reconstruct or re-birth normality after catastrophic devastation. But a clown, and all the humanity given to the collisions of laughter and tears, may provide an inept response to the powerlessness which, as humans, we face in catastrophe and death. Does this mean that creativity is inimical with catastrophe or that existing with catastrophe implies creativity? As noted at the beginning, these ruminations concern small “c” catastrophes. They are known otherwise as clowns.ReferencesBala, Michael. “The Clown.” Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche 4.1 (2010): 50–71.Bausch, Pina. Kontakthof. Wuppertal Dance Theatre, 1977.Big Apple Circus. Circopedia. 27 Feb. 2013 ‹http://www.circopedia.org/index.php/Main_Page›.Biro, Yvette. “Heartbreaking Fragments, Magnificent Whole: Pina Bausch’s New Minimyths.” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 20.2 (1998): 68–72.Butler, Lauren. “Everything Seemed New: Clown as Embodied Critical Pedagogy.” Theatre Topics 22.1 (2012): 63–72.Coover, Robert. “Tears of a Clown.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 42.1 (2000): 81–83.Dancing Dreams. Dirs. Anne Linsel and Rainer Hoffmann. First Run Features, 2010.Delpech-Ramey, Joshua. “Sublime Comedy: On the Inhuman Rights of Clowns.” SubStance 39.2 (2010): 131–41.Foucault, Michel. “The Ethics of the Concern for Self as Practice of Freedom.” Michel Foucault: Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: The New Press, 1997. 281–302. Ghosh, Oroon. The Dance of Shiva and Other Tales from India. New York: New American Library, 1965.Kontakthof with Ladies and Gentlemen over ’65. Dir. Pina Bausch. Paris: L’Arche Editeur, 2007.Le Feuvre, Lisa. “Introduction.” Failure: Documents of Contemporary Art. Ed. Lisa Le Feuvre. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2010. 12–21.McKnight, Jesse H. “Chaplin and Joyce: A Mutual Understanding of Gesture.” James Joyce Quarterly 45.3–4 (2008): 493–506.Miller, Henry. The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder. New York: New Directions Books, 1974.Raoul. Dir. James Thiérrée. Regal Theatre, Perth, 2012.Salisbury, Laura. “Beside Oneself Beckett, Comic Tremor and Solicitude.” Parallax 11.4 (2005): 81–92.Stradda. Stradda: Le Magazine de la Creation hors les Murs. 27 Feb. 2013 ‹http://www.horslesmurs.fr/-Decouvrez-le-magazine-.html›.Weitz, Eric. “Failure as Success: On Clowns and Laughing Bodies.” Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts 17.1 (2012): 79–87.Werry, Margaret, and Róisín O'Gorman. “The Anatomy of Failure: An Inventory.” Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts 17.1 (2012): 105–10.


 
 
 A rhetoric of freedom characterises much of the literature dealing with online communities: freedom from fixed identity and appearance, from the confines of geographic space, and from control. The prevailing view, a combination of futurism and utopianism, is that the lack of order in cyberspace enables the creation of social spaces that will enhance personal freedom and advance the common good. Sherry Turkle argues that computer-mediated communication allows us to create a new form of community, in which identity is multiple and fluid (15-17). Marcos Novak celebrates the possibilities of a dematerialized, ethereal virtual architecture in which the relationships between abstract elements are in a constant state of flux (250). John Perry Barlow employs the frontier metaphor to frame cyberspace as an unmapped, ungoverned territory in which a romantic and a peculiarly American form of individualism can be enjoyed by rough and ready pioneers (“Crime” 460). In his 1993 account as an active participant in The WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link), one of the earliest efforts to construct a social space online, Howard Rheingold celebrates the freedom to create a “new kind of culture” and an “authentic community” in the “electronic frontier.” He worries, however, that the freedom enjoyed by early homesteaders may be short lived, because “big power and big money” might soon find ways to control the Internet, just as they have come to dominate and direct other communications media. “The Net,” he states, “is still out of control in fundamental ways, but it might not stay that way for long” (Virtual Community 2-5). The uses of order and disorder Some theorists have identified disorder as a necessary condition for the development of healthy communities. In The Uses of Disorder (1970), Richard Sennett argues that “the freedom to accept and to live with disorder” is integral to our search for community (xviii). In his 1989 study of social space, Ray Oldenburg maintains that public hangouts, which constitute the heart of vibrant communities, support sociability best when activities are unplanned, unorganized, and unrestricted (33). He claims that without the constraints of preplanned control we will be more in control of ourselves and more aware of one another (198). More recently, Charles Landry suggests that “structured instability” and “controlled disruption,” resulting from competition, conflict, crisis, and debate, make cities less comfortable but more exciting. Further, he argues that “endemic structural disorder” requiring ongoing adjustments can generate healthy creative activity and stimulate continual innovation (156-58). Kevin Robins, too, believes that any viable social system must be prepared to accept a level of uncertainty, disorder, and fear. He observes, however, that techno-communities are “driven by the compulsion to neutralize,” and they therefore exclude these possibilities in favour of order and security (90-91). Indeed, order and security are the dominant characteristics that less idealistic observers have identified with cyberspace. Alexander Galloway explains how, despite its potential as a liberating development, the Internet is based on technologies of control. This control is exercised at the code level through technical protocols, such as TCP/IP, DNS, and HTM, that determine disconnections as well as connections (Galloway). Lawrence Lessig suggests that in our examination of the ownership, regulation, and governance of the virtual commons, we must take into account three distinct layers. As well as the “logical” or “code” layer that Galloway foregrounds, we should also consider the “physical” layer, consisting of the computers and wires that carry Internet communications, and the “content” layer, which includes everything that we see and hear over the network. In principle, each of these layers could be free and unorganized, or privately owned and controlled (Lessig 23). Dan Schiller documents the increasing privatization of the Net and argues that corporate cyberspace extends the reach of the market, enabling it to penetrate into areas that have previously been considered to be part of the public domain. For Schiller, the Internet now serves as the main production and control mechanism of a global market system (xiv). Checking into Habbo Hotel Habbo Hotel is an example of a highly ordered and controlled online social space that uses community and game metaphors to suggest something much more open and playful. Designed to attract the teenage market, this graphically intensive cartoon-like hotel is like an interactive Legoland, in which participants assemble a toy-like “Habbo” character and chat, play games, and construct personal environments. The first Habbo Hotel opened its doors in the United Kingdom in 2000, and, by September 2004, localized sites were based in a dozen countries, including Canada, the Unites States, Finland, Japan, Switzerland and Spain, with further expansion planned. At that time, there were more than seventeen million registered Habbo characters worldwide with 2.3 million unique visitors each month (“Strong Growth”). The hotel contains thousands of private rooms and twenty-two public spaces, including a welcome lounge, three lobbies, cinema, game hall, café, pub, and an extensive hallway. Anyone can go to the Room-O-Matic and instantly create a free guest room. However, there are a limited number of layouts to choose from and the furnishings, which must be purchased, have be chosen from a catalog of fixed offerings. All rooms are located on one of five floors, which categorize them according to use (parties, games, models, mazes, and trading). Paradoxically, the so-called public spaces are more restricted and less public than the private guest quarters. The limited capacity of the rooms means that all of the public spaces are full most of the time. Priority is given to paying Habbo Club members and others are denied entry or are unceremoniously ejected from a room when it becomes full. Most visitors never make it into the front lobby. This rigid and restricted construction is far from Novak’s vision of a “liquid architecture” without barriers, that morphs in response to the constantly changing desires of individual inhabitants (Novak 250). Before entering the virtual hotel, individuals must first create a Lego-like avatar. Users choose a unique name for their Habbo (no foul language is allowed) and construct their online persona from a limited selection and colour of body parts. One of two different wardrobes is available, depending on whether “Boy” or “Girl” is chosen. The gender of every Habbo is easily recognizable and the restricted wardrobe results in remarkably similar looking young characters. The lack of differentiation encourages participants to treat other Habbos as generic “Boys” or “Girls” and it encourages limited and predictable conversations that fit the stereotype of male-female interactions in most chat sites. Contrary to Turkle’s contention that computer mediated communication technologies expose the fallacy of a single, fixed, identity, and free participants to experiment with alternative selves (15-17), Habbo characters are permitted just one unchangeable name, and are capable of only limited visual transformations. A fixed link between each Habbo character and its registered user (information that is not available to other participants) allows the hotel management to track members through the site and monitor their behavior. Habbo movements are limited to walking, waving, dancing and drinking virtual alcohol-free beverages. Movement between spaces is accomplished by entering a teleport booth, or by selecting a location by name from the hotel Navigator. Habbos cannot jump, fly or walk through objects or other Habbos. They have no special powers and only a limited ability to interact with objects in their environment. They cannot be hurt or otherwise affected by anything in their surroundings, including other Habbos. The emphasis is on safety and avoidance of conflict. Text chat in Habbo Hotel is limited to one sixty-one-character line, which appears above the Habbo, floats upward, and quickly disappears off the top of the screen. Text must be typed in real time while reading on-going conversations and it is not possible to archive a chat sessions or view past exchanges. There is no way of posting a message on a public board. Using the Habbo Console, shorter messages can also be exchanged between Habbos who may be occupying different rooms. The only other narratives available on the site are in the form of official news and promotions. Before checking into the hotel, Habbos can stop to read Habbo Today, which promotes current offers and activities, and HabboHood Happenings, which offers safety tips, information about membership benefits, jobs (paid in furniture), contest winners, and polls. According to Rheingold, a virtual community can form online when enough people participate in meaningful public discussions over an extended period of time and develop “webs of personal relationships” (Virtual Community 5). By restricting communication to short, fleeting messages between individual Habbos, the hotel frustrates efforts by members to engage in significant dialogue and create a viable social group. Although “community” is an important part of the Habbo Hotel brand, it is unlikely to be a substantial part of the actual experience. The virtual hotel is promoted as a safe, non-threatening environment suitable for the teenagers is designed to attract. Parents’ concerns about the dangers of an unregulated chat space provide the hotel management with a justification for creating a highly controlled social space. The hotel is patrolled twenty-four hours a day by professional moderators backed-up by a team of 180 volunteer “Hobbas,” or guides, who can issue warnings to misbehaving Habbos, or temporarily ban them from the site. All text keyed in by Habbos passes through an automated “Bobba Filter” that removes swearing, racist words, explicit sexual comments and “anything that goes against the “Habbo Way” (“Bad Language”). Stick to the rules and you’ll have fun, Habbos are told, “break them and you’ll get yourself banned” (“Habbo Way”). In Big Brother fashion, messages are displayed throughought the hotel advising members to “Stay safe, read the Habbohood Watch,” “Never give out your details!” and “Obey the Habbo way and you’ll be OK.” This miniature surveillance society contradicts Barlow’s observation that cyberspace serves as “a perfect breeding ground for both outlaws and new ideas about liberty” (“Crime” 460). In his manifesto declaring the independence of cyberspace from government control, he maintains that the state has no authority in the electronic “global social space,” where, he asserts, “[w]e are forming our own Social Contract” based on the Golden Rule (“Declaration”). However, Habbo Hotel shows how the rule of the marketplace, which values profits more than social practices, can limit the freedoms of online civil society just as effectively as the most draconian government regulation. Place your order Far from permitting the “controlled disruption” advocated by Landry, the hotel management ensures that nothing is allowed to disrupt their control over the participants. Without conflict and debate, there are few triggers for creative activity in the site, which is designed to encourage consumption, not community. Timo Soininen, the managing director of the company that designed the hotel, states that, because teenagers like to showcase their own personal style, “self-expression is the key to our whole concept.” However, since it isn’t possible to create a Habbo from scratch, or to import clothing or other objects from outside the site, the only way for members to effectively express themselves is by decorating and furnishing their room with items purchased from the Habbo Catalogue. “You see, this,” admits Soininen, “is where our revenue model kicks in” (Shalit). Real-world products and services are also marketed through ads and promotions that are integrated into chat, news, and games. The result, according to Habbo Ltd, is “the ideal vehicle for third party brands to reach this highly desired 12-18 year-old market in a cost-effective and creative manner” (“Habbo Company Profile”). Habbo Hotel is a good example of what Herbert Schiller describes as the corporate capture of sites of public expression. He notes that, when put at the service of growing corporate power, new technologies “provide the instrumentation for organizing and channeling expression” (5-6). In an afterword to a revised edition of The Virtual Community, published in 2000, Rheingold reports on the sale of the WELL to a privately owned corporation, and its decline as a lively social space when order was imposed from the top down. Although he believes that there is a place for commercial virtual communities on the Net, he acknowledges that as economic forces become more entrenched, “more controls will be instituted because there is more at stake.” While remaining hopeful that activists can leverage the power of many-to-many communications for the public good, he wonders what will happen when “the decentralized network infrastructure and freewheeling network economy collides with the continuing growth of mammoth, global, communication empires” (Virtual Community Rev. 375-7). Although the company that built Habbo Hotel is far from achieving global empire status, their project illustrates how the dominant ethos of privatization and the increasing emphasis on consumption results in gated virtual communities that are highly ordered, restricted, and controlled. The popularity of the hotel reflects the desire of millions of Habbos to express their identities and ideas in a playful environment that they are free to create and manipulate. However, they soon find that the rules are stacked against them. Restricted design options, severe communication limitations, and fixed architectural constraints mean that the only freedom left is the freedom to choose from a narrow range of provided options. In private cyberspaces like Habbo Hotel, the logic of the market rules out unrestrained many-to-many communications in favour of controlled commercial relationships. The liberating potential of the Internet that was recognized by Rheingold and others has been diminished as the forces of globalized commerce impose their order on the electronic frontier. References “Bad Language.” Habbo Hotel. 2004. Sulake UK Ltd. 15 Apr. 2004 http://www.habbohotel.co.uk/habbo/en/help/safety/badlanguage/>. Barlow, John Perry. “Crime and Puzzlement.” High Noon on the Electronic Frontier: Conceptual Issues in Cyberspace. Ed. Peter Ludlow. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1996. 459-86. ———. “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” 8 Feb. 1996. 3 July 2004 http://www.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html>. Galloway, Alexander R. Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 2004. “Habbo Company Profile.” Habbo Hotel. 2002. Habbo Ltd. 20 Jan. 2003 http://www.habbogroup.com>. “The Habbo Way.” Habbo Hotel. 2004. Sulake UK Ltd. 15 Apr. 2004 http://www.habbohotel.co.uk/habbo/en/help/safety/habboway/>. Landry, Charles. The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators. London: Earthscan, 2000. Lessig, Lawrence. The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World. New York: Random, 2001. Novak, Marcos. “Liquid Architecture in Cyberspace.” Cyberspace: First Steps. Ed. Michael Benedikt. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1991. 225-54. Oldenburg, Ray. The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts and How They Get You through the Day. New York: Paragon, 1989. Rheingold, Howard. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. New York: Harper, 1993. ———. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Rev. ed. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 2000. Robins, Kevin. “Cyberspace and the World We Live In.” The Cybercultures Reader. Eds. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy. London: Routledge, 2000. 77-95. Schiller, Dan. Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1999. Schiller, Herbert I. Culture Inc.: The Corporate Takeover of Public Expression. New York: Oxford UP, 1991. Sennett, Richard. The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity & City Life. New York: Vintage, 1970. Shalit, Ruth. “Welcome to the Habbo Hotel.” mpulse Magazine. Mar. 2002. Hewlett-Packard. 1 Apr. 2004 http://www.cooltown.com/cooltown/mpulse/0302-habbo.asp>. “Strong Growth in Sulake’s Revenues and Profit – Habbo Hotel Online Game Will Launch in the US in September.” 3 Sept. 2004. Sulake. Sulake Corp. 9 Jan. 2005 http://www.sulake.com/>. Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon, 1997. 
 
 
 
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2021 is the fiftieth anniversary year for Japanese live-action superhero franchise Kamen Rider. For half a century, heroes bearing the name Kamen Rider have battled rubber suited monsters and defended the smiles of children. Unlike many superheroes, however, the Kamen Riders are grotesque heroes, usually drawing their powers from the same source as the villains they battle. Grotesque human-machine-animal hybrids, they differ from their opponents only in the kindness of their hearts and the strength of their spirits. Although the Kamen Rider franchise includes a variety of texts including manga, novels, movies, and stage musicals, the central text is the Sunday morning children’s television program. This article focusses exclusively on the television series. Each season of the television program is comprised of around fifty twenty-five-minute episodes, and each season features an entirely new cast, title, and premise. Kamen Rider was originally created at a time of economic downturn and social unrest, and the unease of the zeitgeist is reflected in the figure of the no longer human hero. A little over thirty years later Japan was again facing a variety of crises and intense debate over what, if any, role it should play in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The 2002 television season, Kamen Rider Ryūki, tackles difficult questions about what justice, heroism, and monstrosity mean, through the medium of a children’s martial arts and live action special effects hero television program. This article explores the blurred boundaries between monster and hero in Kamen Rider, in the context of social attitudes toward children. The First Kamen Rider The inaugural Kamen Rider (protagonist of the 1971 television season), Hongo Takeshi, is a university student who gains superpowers after being abducted and experimented on by Shocker, a terrorist organisation founded by Nazis. Their medical experiments are part of a plan to produce an army capable of world domination. Takeshi’s body was modified with grasshopper DNA and cybernetic enhancements, but he was able to escape before the mind control portion of the operation. Although he appears human, Takeshi transforms via a special belt into Kamen (masked) Rider in order to fight. His face is obscured by an insectoid helmet with red compound eyes and antennae. The transformation scene is a highlight of every episode, and the transformation belt is the most important of the (many) tie-in toys. The primary audience of Kamen Rider is children between two and seven, and as a media-mix (Steinberg) franchise the sale of toys and branded products to the primary audience is vital. Anne Allison (105) identifies the transformation and blending or crossing of bodily borders it entails as the “money shot” children anticipate and enjoy. There is also a substantial tertiary audience, however, which includes older children and adults. During the early 1970s, when the first few seasons of Kamen Rider were broadcast, ‘employment trains’ were transporting Japanese teenagers (immediately following their graduation from middle school) from rural areas to the large cities, where they worked in factories and construction far from their families (Alt 54). Kamen Rider’s creator, Ishinomori Shōtarō, had debuted as a manga artist while still in school himself, and his works were particularly popular among this disenfranchised demographic. The figure of a young man taken and changed against his will and left to forge his own path in the aftermath may have been particularly resonant with these teenagers. Kamen Rider’s creator, Ishinomori Shōtarō, was a member of the yakeato (burnt ruins) generation, who were children during the Second World War and experienced the fire- and nuclear bombings of Japan and grew up amidst the burned-out ruins. Roman Rosenbaum (Redacting 97-98) argues that this generation (or perhaps more accurately, micro-generation), “later subconsciously released the bent-up trauma of their early childhood experiences throughout their adult lives in their body of work”. Ishinomori was not alone in this experience, of course; other members of the early Kamen Rider creative team were also motivated by childhood trauma. Hirayama Tōru, who helped Ishinomori bring the Rider concept to television as a producer, was sixteen when his hometown of Nagoya was firebombed. He and other schoolboys were dispatched to dispose of the bodies of civilians who had died while trying to escape the flames only to die in the river (Oda and Muraeda 41-2). Members of the yakeato generation were prominent in anti-war activism during the 1970s, opposing Japan’s entanglement in the Vietnam War (Rosenbaum Generation 284). Violence and the meaning of justice were urgent issues for this generation. This first season of Kamen Rider, along with many of the subsequent seasons, is classifiable as a horror text, with numerous Gothic elements (Staite). Many of the monsters Takeshi battles are “designed to elicit a specific reaction: that of abject horror” (Kim 28). While some of the prosthetic suits are quite silly-looking by contemporary standards, many remain compellingly disturbing in their fusion of animal-human-machine. Although he proceeds up the chain of command to eventually battle the leaders of Shocker, Takeshi is always aware when battling other victims of Shocker experimentation that the only difference between himself and them is that he was able to escape before losing his will. He, like them, is no longer entirely human, and has become as grotesque as the unfortunate monsters he must defeat. As Miura Shion (180) puts it (translation mine), “Kamen Rider was originally an entity created by evil. The reality is that the enemy in front of you and you are actually the same. The fate of Kamen Rider is to fight while struggling with this”. Noting that Kamen Rider was created during a time of social, economic, and political upheaval in Japan, Hirofumi Katsuno (37-38) links the rise of the ambiguous hero to the decline of the ‘grand narrative’ of modernity and the belief in the kind of absolute justice represented by more traditional superheroes. Kamen Rider instead inhabits “an ambiguous space between human and nonhuman, good and evil” (Katsuno 44). In the early years of the franchise the ambiguity remained largely centred on the figure of the hero. Members of the opposing Shocker organisation – who were responsible for the rise of the first two Kamen Riders – are unambiguously evil and unsympathetic. For ordinary people who have been subjected to mind control and experimentation there is compassion, but in terms of the central conflict there is no question that destroying Shocker is correct and moral. The villains battled by Kamen Riders remained predominantly fascists and cultists bent on world domination until the late 1980s, with the primary antagonist of 1987 season Kamen Rider Black the protagonist’s beloved brother. The following season, Kamen Rider Black RX, had environmental themes. The villains trying to take over the world in this season are doing so because their own planet has become too polluted to sustain life. They argue, somewhat persuasively, that since humans are on the path to global environmental destruction they are justified in taking over the planet before it is ruined. This gradual shift toward more sympathetic monsters became explicit in 2002 with Kamen Rider Ryūki’s ambivalent response to the Bush administration’s so-called War on Terror. Justice Is a Thing with Teeth and Claws Kamen Rider Ryūki (hereafter Ryūki) was in the planning stages when the 9/11 terrorist attacks occurred, destroying the twin towers. TV Asahi, the station that airs Kamen Rider, immediately sent a directive to producer Shirakura Shinichiro stating that “now more than ever we must teach children about justice” (Salas). Seemingly uncomfortable with the implications of this idea of “justice” in light of the Bush administration's subsequent actions, Shirakura says: in that mood I wondered if I could repeat the sort of hero story we had made so far, where the ‘good person’ beats the ‘bad person’ that appears one after another and finally hits the headquarters of evil. It is very dangerous to plant the mentality of the Cold War era in children at this time. ‘Ryuuki’ was created in the hope that children will have an eye for what justice means. (Cited in Uno 261-2, translation mine) Since its creation in the 1970s, Kamen Rider had been forging a new path for Japanese heroes in opposition to what Jonathan Abel identifies as an external attitude to justice in the hero programs of the 1950s and 1960s. In these programs, he argues, justice was represented as something imposed into Japan from outside (by alien superheroes, for example, or the Allied Occupation forces). American superheroes and their various approaches to questions of justice and vigilantism were also well known in Japan, as Timothy Peters has highlighted. In its depiction of a hero so closely resembling the monsters he battles, Kamen Rider rejected notions of an absolute distinction between the categories of hero and monster. As Katsuno (46) argues, “in this postmodern, liquid society, superheroes lack a unified, self-evident justice, but must navigate multiple conceptions of justice … . As embodiments of relativized justice, these grotesque heroes were the seeds for what have become enduring trends in Japanese popular culture”. 2002 season Ryūki takes the idea of relativised justice to its extreme, questioning the very existence of a ‘justice’ that exists independently from the people it impacts. It is impossible to summarise the plot of Ryūki both briefly and accurately; this attempt prioritises the former over the latter. Ryūki features thirteen Kamen Riders in a battle royale, competing for the granting of a single wish. The Riders gain their powers through forming a contract with a mirror monster, who they must feed by defeating other Riders or less powerful mirror monsters (who are themselves feeding on helpless humans). If a Rider is defeated and can no longer feed his contract monster, the creature will consume them. Mirror monsters are so called because they come from mirror world, a parallel dimension connected to ours by reflective surfaces including mirrors and, significantly, gleaming skyscrapers. The battle is controlled by antagonist Kanzaki Shiro, who is trying to save the life of his younger sister Yui. Protagonist Kido Shinji tries to stop the Riders from fighting one another, which delays Shiro’s plans and leads to Yui’s death. Shiro repeatedly loops time to restart the battle and save Yui, but Shinji disrupts each new timeline. There are multiple alternate endings to the story, including both televisual and print versions. Because the endings each involve uncovering the reason Shiro has created the battle as part of their resolution of the story, there are also multiple explanations for why and how the battle began. In some versions the origin of the mirror monsters lies in Shiro and Yui’s childhood experience of abuse at the hands of their parents, while in another Shinji inadvertently sets events in motion after breaking a childhood promise to Yui. Which origin, ending, or time-loop is ‘true’ is never resolved. Viewers were invited to vote on the ending of the television special by telephone; alternate endings had been prepared with the winning option inserted at the end of the broadcast (Uno 271). This moral ambiguity and confusion over what is ‘true’ is an intentional critique of simplistic ideas about justice. In Ryūki each of the Riders participates in the battle because they believe that their wish is important enough to justify the means employed to obtain it. The program problematises the idea that there is an objective division between good and evil by focusing on the subjective righteousness of the individual characters’ motivations, including the irony of Shinji’s battles for the sake of stopping the war. Although these feel like quite adult themes, Shirakura couches them firmly within his interpretation of teaching children about justice, explaining that children sometimes envision themselves as the heroes and think they might also be justice. There is also the idea that people often don’t accept themselves as being wrong, because in one’s mind ‘I am myself, so I’m not wrong’ is the prevailing thought process. These thoughts lead to selfish patterns because kids might not see themselves as themselves but as the heroes. (Salas) Uno Tsunehiro (263-4) argues that there is in fact no villain and no justice in Ryūki, simply competing desires. Ryūki does not make judgements about which desires are more or less worthy, he writes, but displays all of the Riders’ motivations equally, just like Google search results of products displayed on Amazon. Just like Capitalism, Uno (263-4) suggests, Ryūki treats every story (justice / evil) equally as a desire (as a product). The mirror monsters are quite frightening; using a combination of Godzilla-style rubber suits and CGI they are all based on animals including spiders, crabs, and cobras, combined with cyborg elements such as guns embedded in various body parts. However, their behaviour is straightforwardly animalistic. They are hungry; they kill to feed. The truly monstrous characters in Ryūki are clearly the Kamen Riders themselves, who use the mirror monsters to lend power to human motivations that are far more complex and twisted. Although many of the Riders have sympathetic motivations such as saving the life of a loved one, Kamen Rider Ōja simply enjoys violence. Uno points out that this character is essentially the same as The Joker in 2008’s The Dark Knight; like The Joker, Ōja tells a variety of stories explaining the origins of his psychopathy in past traumas only to mock the credulity of those so eager to believe these explanations (Uno 274). Crucially, Ōja is still a Kamen Rider, and appears alongside more sympathetic Kamen Riders in ensemble-cast films and games. The line between hero and monster has become blurred beyond comprehension. Monsters for Children, Children as Monsters Shirakura’s comment about the danger of children uncritically viewing their own actions as being just draws attention to an important shift taking place at the turn of the millennium. Monsters were no longer something to protect children from, but increasingly children themselves were becoming viewed as potentially monstrous. Five years before Ryūki’s release Japan had been rocked by the discovery that the murderer of two elementary school children was a fourteen-year-old child dubbed ‘Youth A’, who had described his behaviour as a game, taunting the police and media before his capture (Arai 370-1). Although violent crimes perpetrated by children are always shocking, what stands out from this particular incident is the response from other school children. Youth A had sent a manifesto to a local newspaper lambasting the education system that had created him. In a survey conducted by the Ministry of Education more than fifty percent of the students surveyed sympathised and identified with at Youth A (cited in Arai 371). Lindsay Nelson (4) notes the prevalence of child-monsters in Japanese horror films in the late 1990s and early 2000s, writing that “the many monstrous children of contemporary Japanese cinema stand at a crossroads of Japan’s past, present, and future, crying out for compassion even as they drag those around them into death” (Nelson 13). There is of course a world of difference between depictions of monstrous children in adult media, and depictions of monsters in children’s media. I do not mean to conflate or confuse the two. Both kinds of monsters are, however, influenced and in turn influence wider social discourses and anxieties. Kamen Rider is also a text characterised by dual address, a narrative mode which addresses both adults and children simultaneously (in contradistinction to double address, in which the adults talk over the heads of children in an exclusionary way (Wall). Although Kamen Rider Ryūki featured adult actors (teenagers began to appear in leading roles with increasing frequency from the mid-2000s), it foreshadows the shifting of social attitudes toward children through intertextual references to the film Battle Royale (2000), also distributed by Kamen Rider’s producer Toei. Battle Royale centres on a school class who have (without their prior knowledge) been selected by lottery to participate in a ‘survival game’ on an isolated island. They must kill one another until only one survives; they have all been fitted with explosive collars, and any child refusing to participate will have their collar remotely detonated, killing them. Director Fukasaku Kinji comments that he felt a connection to the thematic linking of violence and children in Battle Royale because of his own experiences as a member of the yakeato generation. He had worked in a munitions factory during the war that was frequently targeted by bombs, and he describes hiding under and later having to dispose of the bodies of his friends (Rose). The story is a biting commentary of the relationship between economic collapse, school-based violence, and failures of governance. In Andrea Arai’s (368) analysis, “the tropes of battle, survival, and the figure of the schoolchild, reflect and refract social anxieties about the Japanese future in an era of globalisation and neoliberal reform, and the enduring historical conundrums of Japan’s twentieth-century past”. The battle between Kamen Riders in Ryūki is also a battle royale; although the core audience of very young children would probably not have made the intertextual link to the film (or the 1999 novel the film was based on), the association would have been strengthened for older viewers by the use of "those who don't fight won't survive!" as a catchphrase for Kamen Rider Ryūki. Conclusion In the early 1970s, Kamen Rider stood out as a text rejecting externally imposed, objective ideas of justice enforced by unassailable virtue, in favour of a grotesque hero struggling to find a path to justice through a metaphorical forest of misadventure and victimisation. The first Kamen Rider was a grotesque, damaged hero who fought monsters to whom he was more alike than different. In the early 2000s this blurring of the heroic and monstrous was taken even further, questioning the very concepts of justice and monstrosity. Much as the original season of Kamen Rider responded to economic and social upheavals with its reassessment of the role and figure of the hero, Kamen Rider Ryūki draws attention to fears of and for its child audience in response to both domestic economic disaster and global events. In Kamen Rider Ryūki the trope of an unwitting victim being turned into a Kamen Rider through biomechanical enhancements is discarded entirely; anyone can become a Kamen Rider simply by entering into a contract with a mirror monster. No longer grotesque because of powers beyond their control, the new generation of Kamen Riders choose grotesquery and risk their lives to obtain their desire. Anyone can become a hero, Ryūki tells its viewers, and anyone can become a monster. And, perhaps, anyone can be both at the same time. References Abel, Jonathan E. "Masked Justice: Allegories of the Superhero in Cold War Japan." Japan Forum 26.2 (2014): 187–208. Allison, Anne. Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination. Berkeley: U of California P, 2006. Alt, Matthew. Pure Invention: How Japan Conquered the World in Eight Fantasies. Brown Book Group, 2020. Arai, Andrea. "Killing Kids: Recession and Survival in Twenty-First-Century Japan." Postcolonial Studies 6.3 (2003): 367–79. Battle Royale. Dir. Kinji Fukasaku. Toei, 2000. Katsuno, Hirofumi. "The Grotesque Hero: Depictions of Justice in Tokusatsu Superhero Television Programs." Introducing Japanese Popular Culture. Eds. Alisa Freedman and Toby Slade. Routledge, 2018. 37–47. Kim, Se Young. "Kamen Rider vs. Spider-Man and Batman." Giant Creatures in Our World: Essays on Kaiju and American Popular Culture. Eds. Camille Mustachio and Jason Barr. McFarland, 2017. Nelson, Lindsay. "Ghosts of the Past, Ghosts of the Future: Monsters, Children, and Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema." Cinemascope 13 (2009). Oda, Katsumi, and Kenichi Muraeda. The Men Who Made Kamen Rider: 1971-2011. Kodansha, 2011. Peters, Timothy. "'Holy Trans-Jurisdictional Representations of Justice, Batman!' Globalisation, Persona and Mask in Kuwata's Batmanga and Morrison's Batman, Incorporated." Law and Justice in Japanese Popular Culture: From Crime Fighting Robots to Duelling Pocket Monsters. Eds. Ashley Pearson, Thomas Giddens, and Kieran Tranter. Taylor & Francis, 2018. Kamen Rider. Toei, 1971. Kamen Rider Black RX. Toei, 1988. Kamen Rider Ryūki. Toei, 2002. Rose, Steve. “The Kid Killers.” The Guardian 2001. Rosenbaum, Roman. “The ‘Generation of the Burnt-out Ruins’.” Japanese Studies 27.3 (2007): 281–293. ———. “Redacting Japanese History: Ishinomori Shōtarō’s Graphic Narratives.” Rewriting History in Manga: Stories for the Nation. Eds. Nissim Otmazgin and Rebecca Suter. Palgrave Macmillan US, 2016. Salas, Jorge. "Kamen Rider’s Reaction to 9/11." Tokusatsu Network 2018. 1 Oct. 2021 <https://tokusatsunetwork.com/2018/08/kamen-riders-reaction-to-9-11/>. Shion, Miura. Momoiro Towairaito. Paperback Bunko: Shinchosha, 2010. Staite, Sophia. "Playing the Bloody Rose: Deconstructing Childhood with Kamen Rider Kiva." Aeternum: The Journal of Contemporary Gothic Studies 6.1 (2019): 34–48 Steinberg, Marc. Anime's Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan. U of Minnesota P, 2012. The Dark Knight. Dir. Christopher Nolan. Warner Bros, 2008. Uno, Tsunehiro. The Era of Little People. Gentosha, 2015. Wall, Barbara. The Narrator's Voice: The Dilemma of Children's Fiction. Macmillan, 1991.

The femme fatale of film noir has come to be regarded as an expression or symptom of male paranoia about the shifting dynamics of gendered power relations in patriarchal Western culture. This theoretical perspective is influenced by Freudian psychoanalytic theory, which, according to philosopher Paul Ricoeur, is grounded in the “School of Suspicion” because it sees consciousness as false, an illusion shrouding darker, disturbing truths (Ricoeur 33). However, while the femme fatale has become firmly established as a subject of suspicion, her male incarnation, the homme fatal, has generally been overlooked and any research that has been done on the figure to date has attempted to align him with the same latent anxieties as those underpinning the femme fatale. I will explore the validity of this assumption by examining the neo-noir films Mr Brooks (Bruce A. Evans, 2007) and The Killer Inside Me (Michael Winterbottom, 2010). Earl Brooks (Kevin Costner), the eponymous character in Mr Brooks, is a husband, father, extremely wealthy and successful businessman, philanthropist, and Portland Chamber of Commerce man of the year. But this homme fatal character is also a “deadly man” who has a powerful addiction to serial murder. On the one hand Earl enjoys killing immensely, but the rational, logical part of his mind tells him that he should stop before he gets caught. This creates an internal battle which is played out on screen, with these two sides of Earl’s psyche portrayed by two different people: realistic Earl and reckless, indulgent Marshall (William Hurt). In The Killer Inside Me, Deputy Sheriff and homme fatal Lou Ford (Casey Affleck) narrates the tale of how he came to be a brutal and sadistic serial killer, offering a variety of psychoanalytically grounded reasons and excuses for his despicable behaviour that ultimately leave the audience no more enlightened about his state of mind at the end of the film than at the beginning. I will argue that these figures are problematic within the context of Ricoeur’s theory of suspicion and that the self-reflexive insight and knowledge of Freudian theory depicted by these hommes fatals suggests that the construct cannot be read merely as a male incarnation of the femme fatale. Rather than being a subject or object of paranoid expression, I contend that the homme fatal is instead a catalyst for it. Psychoanalysis and the School of SuspicionThe premise of Freudian theory is that our consciousness is just the surface of our mental apparatus, and that hidden underneath in the unconscious part of our mind is a vast body of other material such as fears and desires that we have repressed because they are too disturbing for the conscious mind to contend with. Although we are unaware of these buried emotions they still impact upon our lives, surfacing in the form of neurotic symptoms (Freud 357–58). For Freud, the latent content of the psyche can be brought to the fore through psychoanalysis and by accessing and understanding unpalatable truths, the manifest symptoms they create can be alleviated (358). Thus, for Ricoeur psychoanalysis functions as a “demystification of meaning” (32) because it seeks to explain irrational symptoms. Ricoeur argues that Freud and fellow theorists Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche are “masters of suspicion” (35) because of their common view of consciousness as false, opening the path for critical interpretation as an “exercise of suspicion” (33). However, suspicious interpretation is not just a practice for mental health practitioners and philosophers. It also has an established history as a method for exploring the relationship between socio-cultural anxieties and their expression in film and popular culture. According to literary theorist Rita Felski, the popularity of the use of psychoanalysis to study culture is partly inspired by the deeply ingrained and taken-for-granted nature of Freudian schemata (5), but a suspicious analysis also brings with it a form of substantive pleasure: “a sense of prowess in the exercise of ingenious interpretation, the satisfying economy and elegance of explanatory patterns; the gratifying charge of inciting surprise or admiration in fellow readers” (Felski 18). In film theory psychoanalysis is a well-recognised way of exploring underlying socio-cultural fears and anxieties that manifest on screen through visual and narrative depictions. The Femme Fatale and SuspicionThe femme fatale of film noir is a popular subject for suspicious interpretation by feminist film scholars including Mary Ann Doane, Elisabeth Bronfen, Pam Cook, and Kate Stables. Her beautiful, powerfully seductive exterior juxtaposed with a cold, cunning, and ruthless interior has earned the femme fatale a reputation as a manifestation of male fears about female sexuality and feminism (Doane 3). As Bronfen asserts: “One could speak of her as a male fantasy, articulating both fascination for the sexually aggressive woman, as well as anxieties about female domination” (106). In classic film noir of the 1940s and 1950s the femme fatale is generally considered to represent a projection of paranoid male fears over increased economic and sexual independence of women generated by World War II (Cook 70). Similarly, in neo-noir productions such as Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992) and The Last Seduction (John Dahl, 1994), the femme fatale is seen to function as an expression of anxiety over the postmodern collapse of traditional roles governing sexual difference occasioned by second-wave feminist movements, along with an increased presence of women in the public sphere (Stables 167). For example, in both Basic Instinct and The Last Seduction the femmes fatales are successful businesswomen who are also ruthless killers with an insatiable appetite for sex, wealth, and power. The Homme FatalWhile the femme fatale has been prowling around the dark alleys of noir, another deadly creature, the homme fatal, has also been skulking in the cinematic landscape. He can be found in early thrillers such as Alfred Hitchcock’s 1941 classic Suspicion, George Cukor’s Gaslight (1944), Experiment Perilous (Jacques Tourner, 1944), and A Kiss Before Dying (Gerd Oswald, 1956). He can also be located in many neo-noir thrillers including Blue Steel (Kathryn Bigelow, 1990), Internal Affairs (Mike Figgis, 1990), Guilty as Sin (Sidney Lumet, 1993), In The Cut (Jane Campion, 2003), Twisted (Phillip Kaufman, 2004), Taking Lives (J.D. Caruso, 2004), as well as Mr Brooks and The Killer Inside Me. One of the few scholars to examine the homme fatal from a psychoanalytic perspective is Margaret Cohen. In her paper “The ‘Homme Fatal,’ the Phallic Father, and the New Man” Cohen explores breakdown of gender divisions to emerge in neo-noir thrillers of the 1980s and 1990s, which saw a popular movement towards films featuring a female investigator pitted against a deadly male (for example, Internal Affairs, Blue Steel, and Guilty as Sin). Focusing on Internal Affairs, Cohen contends that corrupt cop and homme fatal Dennis Peck (Richard Gere) is a “larger-than-life alternative to the femme fatale” (113). Like the deadly woman, Peck has no morals, he is obsessed with power and wealth, and has no qualms about employing his sex appeal or collapsing sexual intimacy into business in order to get what he wants (Cohen 115–16). According to Cohen, just as the femme fatale is a manifestation of male paranoia about social transformations of gendered power, Internal Affairs crystallises male anxieties about the transformations in gender roles and the place of the new man in 1980s and 1990s postmodern culture (114). However, while hommes fatals such as Dennis Peck can be aligned with the femme fatale as a subject or object of psychoanalytic interpretation regarding repressed fears, other hommes fatals subvert such an analysis through their predisposed insight into psychoanalytic theory and suspicious interpretation. Aside from the films Mr Brooks and The Killer Inside Me, which I will explore in detail in the coming section, the hommes fatals in Gaslight and Experiment Perilous display a knowledge of Freudian theory, using it to convince their female victims that they are insane, and in Taking Lives the homme fatal uses his psychological prowess to fool a female FBI behavioural specialist assigned to profile him. The psychoanalytical insight depicted by these deadly men is something the femme fatale is not ordinarily privy to (with the exception of Catherine Trammell [Sharon Stone] in Basic Instinct, who has a degree in psychology). This suggests that the homme fatal is not simply a male incarnation of the female archetype, but rather a figure with a certain insight into latent socio-cultural anxieties who deliberately sabotages suspicious interpretation. Pleasure, Subversion, and the Homme Fatal Part of the pleasure of a suspicious analysis of a text is that it allows the critical theorist to act as a detective—“solving mysteries, nailing down answers, piecing together a coherent narrative, explaining away ambiguity through interpretation of clues” (Felski 13). However, in The Killer Inside Me, homme fatal Lou Ford subverts this process, using his knowledge of psychoanalysis in a way that prevents him from being subject to suspicious interpretation. In her paper on the source text from which Winterbottom’s film was adapted, “Being’s Wound: (Un) Explaining Evil in Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me,” literary theorist Dorothy Clark argues that “if Lou Ford provides a Grand Narrative, it is one in which he uses the appearance/reality outer/inner world motif to pitch to us a too-apparent Freudian psychoanalytic explanation for his actions” (54). A suspicious reading of The Killer Inside Me is disrupted and subverted by Lou’s employment of a psychoanalytic model to explain what he calls “the sickness.” By offering up a rational explanation for his otherwise irrational behaviour and grounding it in suspicion, Lou continually constructs and then deconstructs the narrative in such a way that it “conceals rather than reveals, continually eluding containment and definition” (Clark 59). According to Clark (51), what distinguishes The Killer Inside Me from the standard detective narrative is that rather than progressing from a state of enigma to one of knowledge, the story eludes knowledge, becoming increasingly complex and uncertain. Although Clark’s discussion focuses on the hard-boiled novel by Jim Thompson (1952), her observations about the character of Lou Ford are equally relevant to the 2010 neo-noir cinematic remake, which is a direct adaptation of the original novel. (Many classic films noir are reworkings of hard-boiled novels. For example, director Robert Montgomery’s 1947 film The Lady in the Lake was based on a novel originally written in 1943 by Raymond Chandler.) In the film The Killer Inside Me, as in the novel, Lou pragmatically detaches himself from his behaviour, and his dialogue creates a continuous state of puzzlement and perplexity that constantly undermines any attempt at understanding through interpretation. In Mr Brooks, any effort at a suspicious reading is equally well thwarted, but the strategy employed is the polar opposite to that used in The Killer Inside Me. In a more conventional “whodunit” narrative structure, Brooks, known as the “thumbprint killer,” might be presented as a mystery. The audience might be provided with the same clues and limited insights that Detective Atwood (Demi Moore) is given, embarking on the same journey of reconstruction, conjecture, and interpretation that she does. A picture might gradually emerge about the killer: his motivations, his rationale, what his fetishes and weak points are, and ultimately, who he is. Instead, the audience is presented not only with the identity of the killer, but the inner-most workings of his mind. According to psychoanalytic theorists, the psychical mechanism that cuts off unpleasant repressed material, blocking it from entering and disrupting the consciousness, is the ego. For Freud, the ego responds to the external world and is grounded in common sense, control, planning, and intellectual rationale (“Ego & Id” 363). However, the repressed can still communicate with the ego through the id. The psychical id is where the powerful pleasure principle reigns unrestricted; it is the primitive, infantile part of the mind in which immediate satisfaction is all that counts, despite the ego’s best attempts to “bring the influence of the external world to bear upon the id and its tendencies” (Freud, “Ego & Id” 363). For Freud, the psyche also contains a third element—the super-ego, a portion of the ego that sets itself over the rest of the ego, creating a tension that is felt consciously as a sense of guilt (Freud, “Ego & Super-Ego” 374). It is a part of Earl’s psyche that only surfaces when he realises that his daughter may have inherited the same killing impulses as him. In Mr Brooks, Marshall represents Earl’s id. He is like an evil clown, set up in opposition to the controlled, methodical, and sensible Earl, whose primary concern is that he might get caught. All Marshall wants to do is have “fun.” With pleasure his sole preoccupation, much of the film centres on the various levels of conflict between Earl and Marshall. Sometimes they are like best friends, laughing together, united in their pursuit of pleasure; at other times, when Earl tries to ignore Marshall or control him by attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings (without revealing the nature of his own addiction), it becomes a battle of wills, with Marshall trying to undermine, goad, and torment Earl into giving in to his impulses. Early in the film Marshall’s persistence pays off when Earl breaks his two-year drought and surrenders to Marshall, indulging in the pure ecstasy of murder. Here, the play between the two characters clearly represents the psychical interaction between the ego and the id. This interplay provides the audience with seemingly transparent insight into the latent mechanisms of Earl’s psyche, eluding enigma entirely and jumping straight into knowledge of the most intimate kind. One cannot speculate about Earl’s latent thoughts because they are there, laid bare on the screen. Further, Earl makes no apologies for his behaviour. He kills because he likes and enjoys it, period, a fact that Marshall is continually reminding him of. His desire to stop is motivated only by the logical, rational, common sense part of his psyche, his ego. Despite the two different approaches to the subject of the killer inside them, both Earl and Lou manage to successfully subvert a suspicious analysis and with it the pleasure to be found in such an investigation. Lou does so by playing games with the audience’s assumptions that there is an underlying reason for his behaviour, expending a great deal of energy providing psychoanalytically grounded excuses for it: he is the victim of childhood sexual trauma, a victim of elemental human passion, he has dementia praecox, he has paranoid schizophrenia, he wants revenge, he is a flower misplaced and wrongly labelled a weed, or perhaps he is just cold-blooded and as smart as hell (Clark 46–49). Mr Brooks, on the other hand, cuts right through all the diversionary tactics and gets straight to the core of what really motivates Earl—a raw instinctual desire for pleasure. Conclusion In feminist film theory (and Western culture in general) suspicious interpretation has become a deeply ingrained and almost taken-for-granted way of understanding meaning. Part of the popularity of a suspicious analysis is the pleasure readers/viewers/critics find in the mystery-solving process of interpretation and the chance to act as detective. However, the neo-noir thrillers Mr Brooks and The Killer Inside Me exhibit a self-reflexive insight into Freudian theory, the school of suspicion, and the assumptions that accompany it, using that knowledge to deliberately subvert the opportunity for suspicious analysis. Lou plays guessing games with the audience’s desire to solve the riddle of his psyche, generating his own pleasure in the process. In Mr Brooks the audience is denied the opportunity for speculation when it comes to Earl’s mind because the innermost workings of it are laid bare for all to see, leaving no room for interpretation. The only pleasure to be had is Earl’s—the raw and brutal pleasure of killing. In patriarchal Western society the femme fatale is considered to be symptomatic of male paranoia surrounding the breakdown of gender difference and power relations. While, as Cohen suggests, this may also be true of the homme fatal, the figure’s propensity to undermine understanding through psychoanalysis suggests that as a male manifestation of male paranoia the construct of the homme fatal is an insightful catalyst of fear rather than a subject or object of it. ReferencesA Kiss Before Dying. Dir. Gerd Oswald, 1956.Blue Steel. Dir. Kathryn Bigelow, 1990.Bronfen, Elisabeth. “Femme Fatale: Negotiations of Tragic Desire.” New Literary History. 35.1 (2004): 103–16. Clark, Dorothy. “Being’s Wound: (Un) Explaining Evil in Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me.” The Journal of Popular Culture. 42.1 (2009): 49–65. Cohen, Margaret. “The ‘Homme Fatal,’ the Phallic Father, and the New Man.” Cultural Critique. 23 (1992–93): 111–36. Copjec, Joan. Shades of Noir: A Reader. New York: Verso, 1993. Doane, Mary Ann. Femme Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 1991. Experiment Perilous. Dir. Jacques Tourner. RKO, 1944.Felski, Rita. “Suspicious Minds.” Poetics Today. 32.2 (2011) 215–34. Freud, Sigmund. On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, The Ego and the Id and Other Works. London: Penguin, 1991. Gaslight. Dir. George Cukor. MGM, 1944.Guilty as Sin. Dir. Sidney Lumet. Hollywood Pictures, 1993.Internal Affairs. Dir. Mike Figgis. Paramount Pictures, 1990.In The Cut. Dir. Jane Campion. Screen Gems / Columbia Pictures, 2003.Killer Inside Me, The. Dir. Michael Winterbottom. Icon, 2010.Mr Brooks. Dir. Bruce A. Evans. Metro – Goldwyn – Mayer, 2007.Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Haven: Yale UP, 1970. Spicer, Andrew. Film Noir. Harlow: Pearson Education, 2002. Suspicion. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. RKO, 1941.Taking Lives. Dir. D. J. Caruso. Warner Brothers, 2004.Thompson, Jim. The Killer Inside Me. London: Orion, 2006.