Journal articles on the topic 'Redemptive-movement'

Should one take the redemptive spirit within the slavery texts and the women texts beyond certain time-locked components of the NT? Does the redemptive movement, begun in the OT and extended in the NT, need to be extended even further beyond the NT? Or, should we expect the NT to express a totally realized ethic or a completely finalized expression of redemptive-movement meaning in all of its concrete particulars? Thomas R. Schreiner’s critique of the book, Slaves, Women and Homosexuals: Exploring the Hermeneutics of Cultural Analysis levels a central criticism against a redemptive-movement hermeneutic (RM hermeneutic), namely, that it fails to rightly appreciate the NT as God’s final and definitive revelation. Schreiner’s central criticism expresses his conviction about limiting the Christian use of a RM hermeneutic to the OT only; a RM hermeneutic ought not to be applied to the NT. In reply to Schreiner, this article attempts to correct a fundamental misunderstanding in the debate as well as to argue the alternative thesis that indeed a RM hermeneutic ought to be applied to the NT.

Just as becoming-woman is a divided concept, looking back to a seemingly redemptive figure of the feminine beyond rigid being, but also forward to a positive annihilation of fixed genders, so modernism was also a doubled movement. But modernism was a pulverisation of ‘the’ subject for the sake of a plural and multiplying point of view, and like ‘becoming-woman’, should be read as a defiant and affirmative refusal.

The mass movement that made Bolsonaro is driven by the redemptive promise of resolving Brazil's social conflicts and ending its social differences: Bolsonarismo will create a community of equals in a Christian fatherland. It is a political phenomenon that seeks a major shift away from modern politics: instead of party mediation, a mass movement; instead of the law, male honour; instead of representation, identity; instead of pluralism, the brotherhood; instead of the Constitution, the Gospel; and, finally, in the place of communicative reason, raw violence. Its defining characteristic is aversion to difference. The article describes and analyses the contours of the movement, as well as the shock its success has produced among the elites and intelligentsia. It draws from ethnographical research in Brazil's urban peripheries to identify the forces that have driven Bolsonaro forward. And it highlights the central elements of the cyclical crisis that Brazil is experiencing in 2020, and its possible consequences.

Abstract This essay examines the ways in which Alice Walker’s 1976 novel Meridian is shaped by Martin Luther King Jr.’s notion of the Beloved Community, a religious and social ideal that epitomized the goals of the 1960s civil rights movement. Previous studies of Meridian focus on connections between the novel and the movement, but they do not explore the connections between the novel’s spiritual dimensions and King’s religious philosophy. As Walker pays tribute to King and his religious philosophy throughout Meridian, she also fleshes out her own womanist philosophy. Indeed, Walker’s womanist philosophy as revealed in Meridian is more congruent with King’s Christian theology than one might expect, for the values of redemptive suffering, nonviolence, love, and community are as central to the novel as they are to King’s thought.

This article aims to reflect on some aspects of the poem The Waste Land (1922), by T.S. Eliot, rethinking the poem's movement of equating modernity with a phantasmagoric and unreal dimension, from which it would be possible to escape by reaching an incorruptible sphere of being. However, it is necessary to inquire which tensions are present in the imaginary representations of the poem that conflict with the latent desire of transcendence, making this desire, in the course of the poem, lead, in the words of Slavoj Žižek (2013, p.26), to a sensation of “metaphysical malaise”, and not to a redemptive perspective. Thus, the Lacanian Materialism via Žižek, a Slovenian philosopher who writes in the scope of Political Theory, Film Criticism, Psychoanalysis and Cultural Studies, becomes essential for the possibility of detecting a deeper movement in the dynamics of the poem.

Abstract This article considers the approaches taken in the United States (US) and Australia to prioritising the resettlement of Christians from Syria and Iraq. Focusing first upon respective models and the immediate political factors that lead to their adoption, it analyses in depth the specific role played by the evangelical constituency in the US, and their theologically-infused concern for the “persecuted church” in “enslaved” lands. Recognising this movement enjoys less influence in Australia, the article considers the ways in which Australia’s resettlement policies and political narratives have nonetheless increasingly participated in tropes familiar to classical antinomian political theology, not least that resettlement is tied to a redemptive generosity of the State that works to denigrate and undermine the legal obligations demanded by those who arrive irregularly by boat. The article also critiques the use of “vulnerability” as a touchstone principle for the fair allocation of scarce resettlement places, and its propensity to be used for cherry-picking purposes. Finally, as part of the argument that resettlement is susceptible to being used as a vehicle for those motivated by more explicit theological concerns, the article explores the leveraging for political, redemptive, and eschatological purposes of images and narratives of the “martyred” middle-eastern Christian.

A dialogue between Aquinas and Volf mediated by Lonergan illuminates the practical significance of Christ’s redemptive work. Aquinas contemplates the mystery of Christ’s passion as an act of satisfaction proceeding from charity that makes amends for wrongdoing. Lonergan specifies this satisfaction as a fitting expression of sorrow for the granting of forgiveness. He further identifies the essential meaning and practical significance of redemption as the transformation of evil into good, and calls it the law of the cross. Volf delineates the significance of the cross for practices of reconciliation, the movement from exclusion to embrace through repentance, forgiveness, and making space for the other. I suggest that Volf’s framework is undergirded by Lonergan’s law of the cross and assists retrieving the latent practical significance of Aquinas’ contemplation. Satisfaction for another is interpreted as forgiveness in the movement from exclusion to embrace proceeding from charity interpreted as the will to embrace.

This article examines the emergence and influence of the restorative justice movement as a bridge between communities, civil society and the state in Ireland. It focuses on the Republic of Ireland, but also examines restorative conferencing in Northern Ireland. Separate sections reflect the emergence of a movement dedicated to the promotion of restorative justice as a vehicle for a holistic form of community-based justice in Ireland. The article covers the history, scope and philosophical-political background of the restorative justice movement, providing specific examples of the interchange between this restorative justice movement and civil society in Ireland, Northern Ireland, and the United States. The wider potential of the restorative justice movement is highlighted. This potential is demonstrated in the restorative movement's challenge to understandings of failed punitive approaches and through its socially redemptive alternative, which emphasises collective responsibility for crime amongst all of the community. The article examines the international background to restorative justice, and its theoretical understandings, with a focus on key theorists such as Strang and Braithwaite amongst others. It examines salient issues that underpin social justice and social control in Ireland, including the potential impacts of restorative justice policy and practice for the wider community and the state.

AbstractThis article reports original research conducted among animal rights activists and elites in Switzerland and the United States, and the finding that activism functioned in activists' and elites' lives like religious belief. The study used reference sampling to select Swiss and American informants. Various articles and activists have identified both latent and manifest quasi-religious components in the contemporary movement. Hence, the research followed upon these data and anecdotes and tested the role of activism in adherents' lives. Using extensive interviews, the research discovered that activists and elites conform to the five necessary components of Yinger's definition of functional religion: intense and memorable conversion experiences, newfound communities of meaning, normative creeds, elaborate and well-defined codes of behavior, and cult formation. The article elaborates on that schema in the context of animal rights belief, elucidates the deeply meaningful role of activism within a filigree of meaning, and concludes that the movement is facing schismatic forces not dissimilar to redemptive and religious movements

AbstractThis article reports original research conducted among animal rights activists and elites in Switzerland and the United States, and the finding that activism functioned in activists' and elites' lives like religious belief. The study used reference sampling to select Swiss and American informants.Various articles and activists have identified both latent and manifest quasi-religious components in the contemporary movement Hence, the research followed upon these data and anecdotes and tested the role of activism in adherents' lives. Using extensive interviews, the research discovered that activists and elites conform to the five necessary components of Yinger's definition of functional religion: intense and memorable conversion experiences, newfound communities of meaning, normative creeds, elaborate and well-defined codes of behavior, and cult formation. The article elaborates on that schema in the context of animal rights belief, elucidates the deeply meaningful role of activism within a filigree of meaning, and concludes that the movement is facing schismatic forces not dissimilar to redemptive and religious movements

This psychoanalytic reading of Hamlet places Shakespeare’s play in the theoretical contexts of Loewald on time and Winnicott on space. For Loewald the subject moves from past to present, in a therapeutic fashion, through the intervention of the analyst, a contemporary object. A redemption of time occurs in the internalized action of thought and dialogue. In Winnicott the redemptive movement is from an internal-subjective to an external-objective way of perceiving. The passage occurs in a transitional space where the presence of another allows the discovery of a world. Hamlet suffers from a ghosted self emptied in submission to the father-ghost. In the temporality of thought and the spatiality of action Hamlet moves toward an ancestral self, filled and stable, through the mediation of Horatio, his friend-counselor-analyst.

Abstract In this article I explore the central motif of vision in Annie Dillard’s short poetic narrative, Holy the Firm. Attention to the book’s tripartite structure reveals a movement through an aesthetic appreciation of creation, to an intellectual contemplation of the Fall, finally culminating in a mystical vision of wholeness in the redemptive descent of Christ. I turn to Julian of Norwich’s parable of the Lord and Servant in order to illuminate their shared attunement to the workings of divine love in the face of human suffering. For Dillard, Christ’s kenotic love is continually revealed in the Christian sacraments of baptism and communion. Finally, I suggest that through the artist, the thinker, and the nun, Dillard leads her reader toward a sacramental vision of the world, which locates the holy in the everyday.

Stillness occupies an ambivalent position in a world of flows. Opening up space required for reflective, contemplative thought, stillness is often posited as a vital supplement to movement. Yet, in spite of its reverence as a cornerstone of moral responsibility and a key technic of modernity, reflective thought is now taken to be just one modality of thinking amongst many others that compose the body. This paper explores what happens to the capacities of reflective thought when gathered into a vitalist diagram of the body. It does this by tracing how different forms of stillness participate in the constitution of differently susceptible bodies. It considers how habit works to both hold still and move the body in different ways which helps to disrupt an understanding of a body that has a particular capacity for wilful, reflective sovereign thought. As such, and parallel to suggestions that we currently inhabit an era of thought maximisation, this paper argues that reflective thought itself might be better understood as enrolled into a particular diagram of habit that allows us to consider how reflection and contemplation might function not as a redemptive force of liberation from habit, but as the turbulent reverberations of the shock of the outside that can become debilitating.

This paper compares the ritual management of fortunate and unfortunate dead (hungry ghosts) by a Chinese new religious movement named Déjiāo 徳教 (lit. Teaching of Virtue), which emerged in Chaozhou (the northeast of Guangdong province) in 1939, before spreading to Southeast Asia after World War II. Based on ethnographic data collected in Chaozhou and Thailand between 1993 and 2005, the analysis reveals significant differences concerning both the ideological and performative aspects of the ritual processing of the two categories of dead. The funeral care of orphaned dead by Déjiāo conforms to the Chaozhou tradition of xiū gūgú 修孤骨, a festival of second burial allegedly devised during the Song dynasty by a local Buddhist monk; most of his sequences require the activity of mediums. Turned toward the salvation of the unfortunate dead, this festival was enriched by a universalist ambition through its adaptation to the Thai context. In doing so, it perfectly expresses the moral and religious goals of Déjiāo, one of the most active Chinese redemptive societies.

Critics have long emphasized the stylistic distanced between Robert Schumann's early piano music and the more traditional works of the early 1840s. This essay clarifies-precisely by questioning-this seeming divide, showing how the finale of the 1842 Piano Quartet in Eb Major, Op. 47, interacts with Schumann's compositional and personal histories in multifarious and previously unexplored ways: (1) by reworking the effect of a lyrical arabesque within a sonata-form movement to a more "redemptive" end (thus deflecting a formal strategy for the first movement of the 1836 Fantasie, Op. 17); (2) by readopting the "parallel forms" of his earlier piano sonatas; and (3) by alluding to the fifth piece of Schumann's 1838 Novelletten, Op. 21, an idea that introduces within both works a play between private and public moments that echoes aspects of Robert and Clara's life as it evolved from their early betrothal to married life in 1842. The article also demonstrates links to the works of two significant predecessors: Schubert's F-Minor Impromptu, Op. 142, and Bb-Major Piano Trio, Op. 99, and Beethoven's "Hammerklavier" Sonata, Op. 106, works evoked by the finale in ways that gauge Schumann's affinity for, yet also distance from, his precursors.

AbstractThis article outlines the spread of the Bahá’í religion—known in Chinese as Datong jiao 大同教)— as a form of religious cosmopolitanism in Republican China (1912–1949). Originating in Iran, its spread to China can be traced to links with the Ottoman empire, British Palestine, the United States, and Japan. By tracking the individuals, connections, and events through which knowledge of the Bahá’í movement spread in China, our study reveals an overlapping nexus of networks—intellectual reformers, liberal Christians, Esperantists, Confucian modernizers, redemptive society activists, and socialists—that shared cosmopolitan ideals. The Bahá’í connections thus serve as a thread that reveals the influence of a unique ‘cosmopolitan moment’ in Republican China, hitherto largely ignored in the scholarly literature on this period, which has focused primarily on the growth of modern Chinese nationalism. Leading nationalist figures endorsed these movements at a specific juncture of Asian colonial modernity, showing that nationalism and cosmopolitanism were seen as expressions of the same ideal of a world community. We argue that the sociology of cosmopolitanism should attend to non-secular and non-state movements that advocated utopian visions of cosmopolitanism, map the circulations that form the nexus of such groups, and identify the contextual dynamics that produce ‘cosmopolitan moments’ at specific historical junctures and locations.

In his comparative analysis of various millennial movements, anthropologist Kenelm Burridge constructs a formula for cultural change, which he defines as “old rules” to “no rules” to “new rules.” The first phase of these movements invariably involves a period of social unrest. Society deviates from the old rules as old formulas fail and institutions malfunction. People flout the political, religious, and social establishments with seemingly unpatriotic, blasphemous, and antisocial acts. In the next phase, society hangs between the old order and the new in an interim period in which neither the old standards nor the new hold sway. At that point, millennial movements often materialize in search of a new society. Burridge defines them as new cultures or social orders coming into being. Rather than “oddities” or “diseases in the body social,” they involve “the adoption of new assumptions, a new redemptive process, a new political-economic framework, a new mode of measuring the man, a new integrity, a new community: in short, a new man.” In the third and final phase, the new rules solidify as the new culture takes shape, which in time may represent the old rules and old order for a future prophetic movement. Millenarians cannot last as millenanans. They endure only as they scuttle or transform their millenarian outlook.

Abstract This article examines how the ideological orientations of the Tonghak religion, particularly the eschatological vision of time, empowered its practitioners and peasants to imagine a new world and act out their faith. By paying attention to the notion of kaebyŏk, I explore how different temporalities—redemptive time, now-time, and progressive time—played a significant role in the Tonghak movement from its formation through its reconfiguration as Ch’ŏndogyo. In the shifting geopolitics of East Asia at the turn of the twentieth century, Tonghak emerged as a dissonant theology whose prediction of an apocalyptic upheaval of the universe was discordant with the conceptions of time dominant in both traditional Chosŏn and modern Korea. Viewing history as cyclical, the Tonghak founders conceptualized kaebyŏk as an unexpected critical event that could happen in an abrupt, ever-present now. This unique temporal consciousness underpinned the revolutionary characteristics of Tonghak thought and laid the foundation for its followers to manifest their aspirations for social change through a massive uprising at now-time. Yet Tonghak’s theoretical agenda gradually lost its revolutionary edge during the modernization of the church. By adopting ideologies of civilization and enlightenment as well as social Darwinism, Ch’ŏndogyo focused on the self-cultivating role that kaebyŏk played within the progressive vision of time.

The article describes Emerging Churches as a 21st century phenomenon. Emerging churches are not a new denomination, but are experimental forms of church life, found in all denominations; formulating and living Christian faith in a post-modern world. The importance of emerging churches is that they serve as risk-taking prototypes, researching ways of being a relevant church and expressing faith in a current language. Serving older churches with new insights which they can consider. They are a new expression of church. Emerging churches should be understood in terms of their strong missional orientation – even to the extent that they should rather be called emerging missional churches. The emerging movement is missional in the sense that they are seeking what changes God is doing in this world. They become missional by participating with God, in the redemptive work God is doing in a changing world. This missional understanding is profoundly influenced by David Bosch’ s elaboration of the concept of the Missio Dei: the understanding that the very life of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is a process of mission. Emerging Churches are a new expression of church - Christians who are doing what they can to get the church back in line with the kingdom vision of Jesus. Part 2 will describe and elaborates on core practices of emerging missional churches.

IN 1855, THE REVEREND GIRDLESTONE zealously promoted sanitary reform in Britain, claiming that the movement was “pregnant with the most important advantages to the human race, in every point of view — social, moral, and religious” (29). Girdlestone’s claim provides a useful starting point for considering representations of reform, as this view of the redemptive powers of cleanliness has been accepted by many historians as a characteristic Victorian attitude.1 But while it is true that many Victorians believed that sweeping public health reforms could fuel the physical and moral regeneration of the urban poor, it is also true that others responded to these reforms with fear, anger, and suspicion: an active strain of resistance flourished within Victorian sanitary discourse. That scholars have privileged the Victorians’ declarations of faith in matters of cleanliness and to some degree shared in these sentiments should not surprise us. The idea of public health reform as universally advantageous accords not only with our own sense of the desirability of sanitary techniques such as flush-toilets and water-borne sewerage, which have become naturalized in the West, but also with a narrative of historical progress.2 While this essay does not dispute the fact that the sanitary idea gained wide acceptance in the period, it does seek to shift the focus away from Victorian faith to Victorian apostasy in matters of reform.

Carol M. Swain, The New White Nationalism in America: Its Challenge to Integration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 526 pages, ISBN 0-521-80886-3, $30.00.Paul M. Kellstedt, The Mass Media and the Dynamics of American Racial Attitudes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, 174 pages, ISBN 0-521-82171-1, $60.00.Carol M. Swain's book, The New White Nationalism in American: Its Challenge to Integration, is an ambitious and, in many ways, novel blend of traditional social science and social advocacy. At the outset, Swain informs the reader that this book breaks with “… the tradition of impersonal, value-free social science insofar as I do not pretend to be neutral and do not hesitate to interject many personal observations and comments into the body of the text.” She does not disappoint on this score. This nearly 500-page book combines original interviews and survey and focus group data, with Swain's reflections on a range of topics including reparations, affirmative action, racial hate crimes, and the redemptive power of religion. To Swain's credit, she also steps outside her role as a (nominally) dispassionate social scientist to offer a range of policy prescriptions near the end of her book to combat what she views as the potentially alarming growth of the White power movement. In many ways, Swain's passion for her subject is refreshing, and even commendable. Unfortunately, her passion is also the source of the principal weakness of this book: its inability to match its uncompromising rhetoric with persuasive, or even plausible, supportive evidence for readers who do not already agree with her arguments.

Transhumanisme adalah sebuah pergerakan budaya dan filsafat yang melihat manusia memiliki hak dan kebebasan morfologis untuk berevolusi mencapai kondisi pascahuman dengan memodifikasi dan meningkatkan natur serta kapasitas manusia secara radikal menggunakan teknologi terkini seperti rekayasa genetika, robotika, kecerdasan buatan dan nanoteknologi. Pascahuman yang didambakan transhumanisme adalah kondisi manusia yang tidak dapat mengalami kemerosotan, penyakit, dan bahkan kematian. Tujuan akhirnya adalah hidup lebih panjang atau bahkan abadi untuk menikmati kebahagiaan yang tidak terbatas. Dengan mencermati perkembangan agenda transhumanis, muncul keprihatinan dari para sarjana bidang interdisipliner sains, teknologi dan teologi bahwa umat manusia akan diubahkan oleh teknologi atau bahkan malah menjadi tersingkir dan punah. Artikel ini bertujuan mengkaji transhumanisme dari perspektif antropologi Kristen, yang meliputi tiga aspek, yaitu asal-usul dan natur manusia, realitas kehidupan manusia serta solusi bagi masalah manusia. Hasil kajian menunjukkan bahwa janji transhumanisme mengenai evolusi manusia dengan kebebasan morfologis dan determinasi dirinya sendiri dapat mengupayakan perkembangan menuju kondisi pascahuman adalah hal yang tidak menjanjikan untuk tercapai karena natur manusia yang telah jatuh ke dalam dosa cenderung merusak atau menggantikan yang baik menjadi jahat. Agenda dan optimisme transhumanisme untuk menyingkirkan kemerosotan, penyakit dan kematian sepenuhnya dari kehidupan manusia dengan menggunakan teknologi terkini mustahil direalisasikan karena semua realitas tersebut adalah dampak dari kejatuhan manusia ke dalam dosa yang hanya bisa diatasi dengan cara ilahi melalui karya penebusan Kristus yang mengerjakan transformasi jiwa raga secara holistik. Transhumanism is a cultural and philosophical movement that sees humans as having the right and morphological freedom to evolve towards a posthuman state by radically modifying and enhancing human nature and capacity using the latest technologies such as genetic engineering, robotics, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology. The posthuman that transhumanism craves is the human condition impervious to degeneration, disease, and even death. The end goal is to live longer or even immortal to enjoy unlimited happiness. By observing the development of the transhumanist agenda, there are concerns from scholars in the interdisciplinary fields of science, technology, and theology that humanity will be transformed by technology or even become marginalized and extinct. This article aims to examine transhumanism from Christian anthropology, which includes three aspects: the origin and nature of man, the reality of human life, and solutions to human problems. The results of the study show that the promise of transhumanism regarding human evolution with morphological freedom and self-determination to strive for progress towards a posthuman state is unpromising to achieve because human nature, which has fallen into sin, tends to destroy or exchange good for evil. The agenda and optimism of transhumanism to completely remove degeneration, disease, and death from human life by using the latest technology is impossible to realize because all these realities are the impact of the fall of man into sin, which can only be overcome by divine means through redemptive work of Christ which carries out the transformation of soul and body holistically.

AbstractThis article interrogates the discursive relationship between school reform and redemption in the United States by examining the personal narratives of Teach For America corps members. After tracing the history of Teach For America and describing the rites of passage in which teachers’ “redemptive stories” are told, I analyze the generic arc that underlies them and show that it mirrors broader processes of in-group socialization. In doing so, I argue that Teach For America’s brand of redemptive storytelling – in addition to crafting individual identity, contributing to group cohesion, and enlivening performance at ritualized events – also affects organizational authority. As corps members master their stories of reform and redemption, paralleling the path to becoming “master teachers,” they participate in a process of “becoming” that reproduces in micro-scale the maturation of Teach For America. More profoundly, these transformations represent a distinct response to traditions of American confessional storytelling and the accountability-based education movement. Redemptive stories thus bind the socialization of the individual reformer to issues afoot more broadly in the province of education policy.

Agnes Monica as a common human has surely changed in her life naturally. In her context as an entertainer, she has surely changed either in her self concept, start from her performance, her mind and her style of achievement. Branding of “Agnes Monica” change to be “Agnez Mo” would be main thesis of this research. The author has tried to classify her image as an international singer seemed from perspective of communication psychology. Based on Theory of Function by Katz (1960), Psychology of Cognitive Movement, Agnez Mo’s act referenced from 4 main reason, Act as Instrumental Function, Act as Defense Mechanism Tool, Act as Object Receiver and Encode the Meaning, and Act as Value of Self Expression in Answering One Situation. Research Methodology: Descriptive Qualitative by Documentation and Study of Literature. Conclusion : Changed Typology of Agnez Mo’s Image as an International Singer consist of Natural Changed Typology, Planned Changed Typology, Readiness to Change of Typology , Alterative Movement and Redemptive Movement. Keywords : Changed, Image, Agnez Mo, Communication Psychology.

This paper uses the paradigmatic pairing of non-binary and lesbian as identity labels to investigate changes in conceptualizations of sexual specificity as gender becomes divorced from its founding binaries. Contrary to the belief that lesbian is threatened by movement away from binary gender, this analysis postulates that it is not individual identities that are becoming problematic as gender identity becomes less binary; rather, it is the fundamental structure of identity which, for decades, has sanctioned identities built on exclusions. This cultural shift has the potential to liberate structures of desire, giving way to a model in which sexuality without gender is more redemptive than contentious.

In 2016, the Five Stars Movement (5SM), one of the parties currently in power in Italy, launched the ‘Rousseau platform’. This is a platform meant to enhance direct democracy, transparency and the real participation of the people in the making of laws, policies and political proposals. Although ennobled with the name of Rousseau, the 5SM’s redemptive promise has been strongly criticised in the public sphere for being irresponsible and ideological. Political realism, I will argue, can perform both a diagnostic and a corrective task, by providing some tools to unveil populist distortions and by offering more solid grounds for political opponents’ critique. Three aspects of realism, in particular, will be pointed out as remedies against populist drifts. First, anti-moralism, complemented by anti-utopianism and contextualism, criticises the populists’ moralistic picture of politics, its anti-pluralistic attitude and its rejection of the role of experts in politics. Second, the Weberian ethic of responsibility offers standards to assess politicians’ actions, instead of embracing the populist aversion towards any professional politician; besides, it contrasts the populist image of politics as a derogatory activity. Finally, realism as ideology critique unveils the distorting narratives underlying populist propaganda and fostering uncritical support.

The end of the war is about the restoration of peace, law and order, and respect for human rights including improvement of the socio-economic situation of the country. Providing justice to the victims of war in the post-conflict situation is very challenging. It may take years to recover wounds of war victims. The attempt of conflict settlement mostly depends upon the will and skill of the government. Unlike this, the Nepalese government is not so far rigorously engaged for justice delivery to the wartime victims. Even after the resolution of conflict, there are many tough political agendas and many serious issues to address. Furthermore, the country was witnessing total restructuration from base to the superstructure. Still, minor ethnic skirmishes in the Terai region of the country were broken out. Many dissatisfied and disgruntled groups raised different types of voices of dissonance. As a result, the government had to act with prudence to tackle those issues. In the government’s involvement in addressing those issues like pragmatic challenges of restructuration, ethnic upsurge and Madhesi movement, less attention was given by the government to work for redressing, allaying and soothing the lingering vestige of a war crime, trauma and pangs of displacement. Even in the transitional phase, none of the strong redemptive measures were taken to cope with the lingering impact of wartime crime, traumatic onslaught and the prolonged effect of getting exposed to violence in the past. Due to the political instability in the country and lack of political consensus between major political parties, less attention has been paid to people’s sufferings and pains. Psychosocial rehabilitation has been a neglected issue in post-conflict reconstruction. People have gone through multiple aspects of war violence impacts, displacement, and traumatic experiences in the post-conflict context.

Futuristic fiction almost by definition enters into a dialogue with the present as a future past. As a consequence, history haunts even the most inane visions of the future in often quite subtle ways. An excellent prompt to speculate on this issue is provided by Luc Besson's popular film The Fifth Element (1997). Like many science-fiction films, it is about a future troubled by its own promises. It almost goes without saying that while not specifically figured around Y2K, the attention to dates and time in the film combined with its late '90s release date also inscribe it within Millennial anxieties about the end of the world. History plays a series of roles in The Fifth Element. In common with many science-fiction fables, the film stages an inverted fictional genealogy, in which the viewer is actively encouraged to revel in identifying extrapolated features and concerns of the present. This heralds a basic historicity: that is, it invites us to grasp our present as history through its defamiliarisation. Moreover, like another futuristic film of the same year, Gattaca, it is aesthetically marked by the pathos of what might be called millennial "nostalgia for the future" -- that lost utopian real of Modernist aesthetic desire which seems to haunt these "post-post-apocalyptic", Space-Age futures1. This is only enhanced by quoting generously from earlier moments of the science fiction genre (such as Blade Runner). Striking, however, is that despite all of this, everyday America -- globalised and projected two hundred and fifty years hence -- is not so much dystopian or utopian as just ordinary. People still smoke, but filters makes up three-quarters of a cigarette's length; we still get stuck in chaotic traffic, even if it flies above the ground; we still eat Chinese takeaway, only now the restaurants fly to you; and cops still eat take-away at drive-through McDonald's, which are now floating fixtures in the cityscape. That individuals are so stylish (thanks to costume design, everyone is wearing Jean-Paul Gaultier) also seems significant, because this aestheticised ordinariness helps focus attention on the lived time of everyday utopian yearnings. In these ways and more, our contemporary moment is immanent in the film. However, at certain other crucial moments in the film, History is directly presented as an excess. Let me explain. Two hundred and fifty years into the future, a "Supreme Being" -- Leeloo (Milla Jovovich) -- is genetically reconstructed by scientists. Dubbed the missing "fifth element", she belongs to a highly developed extra-terrestrial species who have a protectoral relation to humanity. In the beginning, Leeloo is cut off from human language -- speaking in a tongue that combines a mixture of European dialects with baby-speak (her favourite phrase, as anyone who has seen the film will recall, is "[Big] badda-boo!"). She speaks what a priest in the film calls the "Divine language", "spoken before time was time" -- evoking the theological dream of a universal pre-symbolic language, of a pure speech that speaks the world rather than speaks of it. Her very first English word is "Help!" -- which she reads off a taxi sticker advertisement for starving black orphans. And it is perhaps no accident that she identifies with this future's expropriated. Leeloo is a body cast into marginality. Caged as an exhibit from the moment of her arrival on Earth, with her exotic appearance, wide-eyed wonderment and capacity for mimicry, she displays all the tropes of the infantilised and sexualised Other. Romanticised as a primitivist fantasy, she represents a classically vulnerable redemptive figure2. Two hundred and fifty years into the future, a "Supreme Being" -- Leeloo (Milla Jovovich) -- is genetically reconstructed by scientists. Dubbed the missing "fifth element", she belongs to a highly developed extra-terrestrial species who have a protectoral relation to humanity. In the beginning, Leeloo is cut off from human language -- speaking in a tongue that combines a mixture of European dialects with baby-speak (her favourite phrase, as anyone who has seen the film will recall, is "[Big] badda-boo!"). She speaks what a priest in the film calls the "Divine language", "spoken before time was time" -- evoking the theological dream of a universal pre-symbolic language, of a pure speech that speaks the world rather than speaks of it. Her very first English word is "Help!" -- which she reads off a taxi sticker advertisement for starving black orphans. And it is perhaps no accident that she identifies with this future's expropriated. Leeloo is a body cast into marginality. Caged as an exhibit from the moment of her arrival on Earth, with her exotic appearance, wide-eyed wonderment and capacity for mimicry, she displays all the tropes of the infantilised and sexualised Other. Romanticised as a primitivist fantasy, she represents a classically vulnerable redemptive figure2. Leaving aside for the moment the perhaps inevitably romantic resolution to this predicament, we can interpret this scene as a critique of the Enlightenment pretension to "total History". The "arbitrary" order of alphabetisation, which replaces the seemingly determined disorder of historical narratives, is akin to the Kantian dream of a cosmopolitan state of "universal history". Think, too, of the aging Hegel, writing in 1830: We witness a vast spectacle of events and actions, of infinitely varied constellations of nations, states and individuals, in restless succession. ... Everywhere we see a motley confusion ... But ... we grow weary of particulars and ask ourselves to what end they all contribute. We cannot accept that their significance is exhausted by their own particular ends; everything must be part of a single enterprise. (325-7) Leaving aside for the moment the perhaps inevitably romantic resolution to this predicament, we can interpret this scene as a critique of the Enlightenment pretension to "total History". The "arbitrary" order of alphabetisation, which replaces the seemingly determined disorder of historical narratives, is akin to the Kantian dream of a cosmopolitan state of "universal history". Think, too, of the aging Hegel, writing in 1830: We witness a vast spectacle of events and actions, of infinitely varied constellations of nations, states and individuals, in restless succession. ... Everywhere we see a motley confusion ... But ... we grow weary of particulars and ask ourselves to what end they all contribute. We cannot accept that their significance is exhausted by their own particular ends; everything must be part of a single enterprise. (325-7) If The Fifth Element critiques the universal history lesson, it also revolves around a dialectical relation between past and present. Although the opening scene in late colonial Egypt locates the film's narrative historically, these later scenes suggest a break with conventional, clean historiographical separations between the past and the present5. Leeloo's reading of History implies that embodied historical reception is in a perpetual in-between state. Not only the representation of the past as History but the experience of Time itself becomes less a matter of chronology than of a Freudian retroactivity, a "present past" with everyday variations which belong as much to future possibilities as to what we perceive as the present. The necessary absence of a determinate "past object" (referent) in historical understanding means that historicity is a traumatic process of deferral. In psychoanalytic terms, Leeloo's forced recognition of the unnatural deaths of Others is a traumatic encounter which generates a hole in the symbolic order of Leeloo's "real". Leeloo's traumatised body metaphorically becomes the singular "truth" of the symbolic world6. A global history is in fact nobody's history in particular -- belonging to everybody and nobody. This is the fate of the CD-ROM: a "memory" overwhelmingly composed of media images, and an allegory for our own situation of image saturation (whose stereotypical symbol is the isolated individual glued to a flickering screen). Yet when Leeloo enters history with a kiss, a fragile dialogical exchange in which her own life "story" begins, the fate of media images is to become socialised as part of non-synchronous particular narratives7. The grand "nightmare" of History has become comprehensible through her particular access to universal History -- and the result is an appropriated, ongoing experience with an undisclosed future. The Fifth Element thus presents a distinctly everyday solution to the problem of historical time -- and is this not how media history is experienced? No doubt in the future no less than the present, history will be less a matter of the Past itself, than of the allegorical reverberation of events documented and encountered in the everyday mediasphere. Footnotes Mark Dery recently berated the trend for retro-futurism as a Wallpaper-inspired plot, poised to generate a nostalgia for ironic dreams of fading technological utopias, while revealing the banality of design fashions that demand the ever new. See "Back to the Future", posted to Nettime (5 Sep. 1999) It is also worth noting the sublime role of the Diva in the film, whose pained operatic performance embodies what Slavoj Zizek once called the jouissance of modernity. Humanity's potential will to "creative destruction" has previously been embodied in Gary Oldman's evil business figure of Zorg, who undoubtedly represents the excesses of corporate capitalism (he illustrates his Ayn Rand-style vitalist philosophy at one point by letting a glass fall from his desk and shatter on to the ground: gleefully watching as a team of mechanical robots whiz around the floor sweeping it up, he croons: "see -- a lovely ballet ensues, adding to the great chain of life -- by creating a little destruction, I am in fact encouraging life". See Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Vol. 10, Theory and History of Literature. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984; Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf. London: Routledge, 1994. Historiographical time can be distinguished from psychoanalytic time on the basis of two different ways of organising the space of memory. While the former conceives the temporal relation as one of succession and correlation, the latter treats the relation as one of imbrication and repetition. Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other. Translated by Brian Massumi. Vol. 17, Theory and History of Literature. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. 4. An interesting sf intertext here is Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris, in which a woman who is a projection of a man's memory unsuccessfully attempts to kill herself to prove that she is made of historical reality. In this traumatic scene, she consumes liquid nitrogen and writhes on a metallic floor in a frozen state until she gradually thaws into human movement. Leeloo is finally brought into the "un-Historical" time of everyday embodied subjectivity with a single kiss. To borrow the language of psychoanalytic film studies, her "screen memories" are reconfigured by an imaginary resolution in the present. I use the term screen memories with a nod to both the computer screen and Freud's compelling if problematic account of repressed mnemic material. Freud writes: "As the indifferent memories owe their preservation not to their own content but to an associative relation between their content and another which is repressed, they have some claim to be called 'screen memories'". Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Vol. 5, The Pelican Freud Library. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960. 83. References Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Avon Books, 1992. Hegel, G.W.F. "The Philosophical History of the World: Second Draft (1830)." German Idealist Philosophy. Ed. Rüdiger Buber. London: Penguin, 1997. 317-39. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Daniel Palmer. "Nostalgia for the Future: Everyday History and The Fifth Element." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.9 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0001/nostalgia.php>. Chicago style: Daniel Palmer, "Nostalgia for the Future: Everyday History and The Fifth Element," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 9 (2000), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0001/nostalgia.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Daniel Palmer. (2000) Nostalgia for the future: everyday history and The Fifth Element. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(9). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0001/nostalgia.php> ([your date of access]).

Despite the now-traditional tendency of noir scholarship to call attention to the retrospective and constructed nature of this genre— James Naremore argues that film noir is best regarded as a “mythology”— one feature that has rarely come under question is its association with the city (2). Despite the existence of numerous rural noirs, the depiction of urban space is associated with this genre more consistently than any other element. Even in critical accounts that attempt to deconstruct the solidity of the noir genre, the city is left as an implicit inclusion, and the country, an implict exclusion. Naremore, for example, does not include the urban environment in a list of the central tenets of film noir that he calls into question: “nothing links together all the things described as noir—not the theme of crime, not a cinematographic technique, not even a resistance to Aristotelian narratives or happy endings” (10). Elizabeth Cowie identifies film noir a “fantasy,” whose “tenuous critical status” has been compensated for “by a tenacity of critical use” (121). As part of Cowie’s project, to revise the assumption that noirs are almost exclusively male-centered, she cites character types, visual style, and narrative tendencies, but never urban spaces, as familiar elements of noir that ought to be reconsidered. If the city is rarely tackled as an unnecessary or part-time element of film noir in discursive studies, it is often the first trait identified by critics in the kind of formative, characteristic-compiling studies that Cowie and Naremore work against.Andrew Dickos opens Street with No Name: A History of the Classic American Film Noir with a list of noir’s key attributes. The first item is “an urban setting or at least an urban influence” (6). Nicholas Christopher maintains that “the city is the seedbed of film noir. […] However one tries to define or explain noir, the common denominator must always be the city. The two are inseparable” (37). Though the tendencies of noir scholars— both constructive and deconstructive— might lead readers to believe otherwise, rural locations figure prominently in a number of noir films. I will show that the noir genre is, indeed, flexible enough to encompass many films set predominantly or partly in rural locations. Steve Neale, who encourages scholars to work with genre terms familiar to original audiences, would point out that the rural noir is an academic discovery not an industry term, or one with much popular currency (166). Still, this does not lessen the critical usefulness of this subgenre, or its implications for noir scholarship.While structuralist and post-structuralist modes of criticism dominated film genre criticism in the 1970s and 80s, as Thomas Schatz has pointed out, these approaches often sacrifice close attention to film texts, for more abstract, high-stakes observations: “while there is certainly a degree to which virtually every mass-mediated cultural artifact can be examined from [a mythical or ideological] perspective, there appears to be a point at which we tend to lose sight of the initial object of inquiry” (100). Though my reading of these films sidesteps attention to social and political concerns, this article performs the no-less-important task of clarifying the textual features of this sub-genre. To this end, I will survey the tendencies of the rural noir more generally, mentioning more than ten films that fit this subgenre, before narrowing my analysis to a reading of Moonrise (Frank Borzage, 1948), Thieves’ Highway (Jules Dassin, 1949), They Live By Night (Nicholas Ray, 1949) and On Dangerous Ground (Nicholas Ray, 1952). Robert Mitchum tries to escape his criminal life by settling in a small, mountain-side town in Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947). A foggy marsh provides a dramatic setting for the Bonnie and Clyde-like demise of lovers on the run in Gun Crazy (Joseph Lewis, 1950). In The Asphalt Jungle (John Huston, 1950), Sterling Hayden longs to return home after he is forced to abandon his childhood horse farm for a life of organised crime in the city. Rob Ryan plays a cop unable to control his violent impulses in On Dangerous Ground (Nicholas Ray, 1952). He is re-assigned from New York City to a rural community up-state in hopes that a less chaotic environment will have a curative effect. The apple orchards of Thieves’ Highway are no refuge from networks of criminal corruption. In They Live By Night, a pair of young lovers, try to leave their criminal lives behind, hiding out in farmhouses, cabins, and other pastoral locations in the American South. Finally, the location of prisons explains a number of sequences set in spare, road-side locations such as those in The Killer is Loose (Budd Boetticher, 1956), The Hitch-Hiker (Ida Lupino, 1953), and Raw Deal (Anthony Mann, 1948). What are some common tendencies of the rural noir? First, they usually feature both rural and urban settings, which allows the portrayal of one to be measured against the other. What we see of the city structures the definition of the country, and vice versa. Second, the lead character moves between these two locations by driving. For criminals, the car is more essential for survival in the country than in the city, so nearly all rural noirs are also road movies. Third, nature often figures as a redemptive force for urbanites steeped in lives of crime. Fourth, the curative quality of the country is usually tied to a love interest in this location: the “nurturing woman” as defined by Janey Place, who encourages the protagonist to forsake his criminal life (60). Fifth, the country is never fully crime-free. In The Killer is Loose, for example, an escaped convict’s first victim is a farmer, whom he clubs before stealing his truck. The convict (Wendell Corey), then, easily slips through a motorcade with the farmer’s identification. Here, the sprawling countryside provides an effective cover for the killer. This farmland is not an innocent locale, but the criminal’s safety-net. In films where a well-intentioned lead attempts to put his criminal life behind him by moving to a remote location, urban associates have little trouble tracking him down. While the country often appears, to protagonists like Jeff in Out of the Past or Bowie in They Live By Night, as an ideal place to escape from crime, as these films unfold, violence reaches the countryside. If these are similar points, what are some differences among rural noirs? First, there are many differences by degree among the common elements listed above. For instance, some rural noirs present their location with unabashed romanticism, while others critique the idealisation of these locations; some “nurturing women” are complicit with criminal activity, while others are entirely innocent. Second, while noir films are commonly known for treating similar urban locations, Los Angeles in particular, these films feature a wide variety of locations: Out of the Past and Thieves’ Highway take place in California, the most common setting for rural noirs, but On Dangerous Ground is set in northern New England, They Live by Night takes place in the Depression-era South, Moonrise in Southern swampland, and the most dynamic scene of The Asphalt Jungle is in rural Kentucky. Third, these films also vary considerably in the balance of settings. If the three typical locations of the rural noir are the country, the city, and the road, the distribution of these three locations varies widely across these films. The location of The Asphalt Jungle matches the title until its dramatic conclusion. The Hitch-hiker, arguably a rural noir, is set in travelling cars, with just brief stops in the barren landscape outside. Two of the films I analyse, They Live By Night and Moonrise are set entirely in the country; a remarkable exception to the majority of films in this subgenre. There are only two other critical essays on the rural noir. In “Shadows in the Hinterland: Rural Noir,” Jonathan F. Bell contextualises the rural noir in terms of post-war transformations of the American landscape. He argues that these films express a forlorn faith in the agrarian myth while the U.S. was becoming increasingly developed and suburbanised. That is to say, the rural noir simultaneously reflects anxiety over the loss of rural land, but also the stubborn belief that the countryside will always exist, if the urbanite needs it as a refuge. Garry Morris suggests the following equation as the shortest way to state the thematic interest of this genre: “Noir = industrialisation + (thwarted) spirituality.” He attributes much of the malaise of noir protagonists to the inhospitable urban environment, “far from [society’s] pastoral and romantic and spiritual origins.” Where Bell focuses on nine films— Detour (1945), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), Out of the Past (1947), Key Largo (1948), Gun Crazy (1949), On Dangerous Ground (1952), The Hitch-Hiker (1953), Split Second (1953), and Killer’s Kiss (1955)— Morris’s much shorter article includes just The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and Gun Crazy. Of the four films I discuss, only On Dangerous Ground has previously been treated as part of this subgenre, though it has never been discussed alongside Nicholas Ray’s other rural noir. To further the development of the project that these authors have started— the formation of a rural noir corpus— I propose the inclusion of three additional films in this subgenre: Moonrise (1948), They Live by Night (1949), and Thieves’ Highway (1949). With both On Dangerous Ground and They Live by Night to his credit, Nicholas Ray has the distinction of being the most prolific director of rural noirs. In They Live by Night, two young lovers, Bowie (Farley Granger) and Keechie (Cathy O’Donnell), attempt to escape from their established criminal lives. Twenty-three year old Bowie has just been released from juvenile prison and finds rural Texas refreshing: “Out here, the air smells different,” he says. He meets Keechie through her father, a small time criminal organiser who would be happy to keep her secluded for life. When one of Bowie’s accomplices, Chicamaw (Howard DaSilva), shoots a policeman after a robbing a bank with Bowie, the young couple is forced to run. Foster Hirsch calls They Live by Night “a genre rarity, a sentimental noir” (34). The naïve blissfulness of their affection is associated with the primitive settings they navigate. Though Bowie and Keechie are the most sympathetic protagonists of any rural noir, this is no safeguard against an inevitable, characteristically noir demise. Janey Place writes, “the young lovers are doomed, but the possibility of their love transcends and redeems them both, and its failure criticises the urbanised world that will not let them live” (63). As indicated here, the country offers the young lovers refuge for some time, and their bond is depicted as wonderfully strong, but it is doomed by the stronger force of the law.Raymond Williams discusses how different characteristics are associated with urban and rural spaces:On the country has gathered the idea of a natural way of life: of peace, innocence, and simple virtue. On the city has gathered the idea of an achieved center: of learning, communication, light. Powerful hostile associations have also developed: on the city as a place of noise, worldliness and ambition; on the country as a place of backwardness, ignorance, limitation. (1) They Live By Night breaks down these dichotomies, showing the persistence of crime rooted in rural areas.Bowie desires to “get squared around” and live a more natural life with Keechie. Williams’ country adjectives— “peace, innocence, and simple virtue”— describe the nature of this relationship perfectly. Yet, criminal activity, usually associated with the city, has an overwhelmingly strong presence in this region and their lives. Bowie, following the doomed logic of many a crime film character, plans to launch a new, more honest life with cash raised in a heist. Keechie recognises the contradictions in this plan: “Fine way to get squared around, teaming with them. Stealing money and robbing banks. You’ll get in so deep trying to get squared, they’ll have enough to keep you in for two life times.” For Bowie, crime and the pursuit of love are inseparably bound, refuting the illusion of the pure and innocent countryside personified by characters like Mary Malden in On Dangerous Ground and Ann Miller in Out of the Past.In Ray’s other rural noir, On Dangerous Ground, a lonely, angry, and otherwise burned out cop, Wilson (Rob Ryan), finds both love and peace in his time away from the city. While on his up-state assignment, Wilson meets Mary Walden (Ida Lupino), a blind woman who lives a secluded life miles away from this already desolate, rural community. Mary has a calming influence on Wilson, and fits well within Janey Place’s notion of the archetypal nurturing woman in film noir: “The redemptive woman often represents or is part of a primal connection with nature and/or with the past, which are safe, static states rather than active, exciting ones, but she can sometimes offer the only transcendence possible in film noir” (63).If, as Colin McArthur observes, Ray’s characters frequently seek redemption in rural locales— “[protagonists] may reject progress and modernity; they may choose to go or are sent into primitive areas. […] The journeys which bring them closer to nature may also offer them hope of salvation” (124) — the conclusions of On Dangerous Ground versus They Live By Night offer two markedly different resolutions to this narrative. Where Bowie and Keechie’s life on the lam cannot be sustained, On Dangerous Ground, against the wishes of its director, portrays a much more romanticised version of pastoral life. According to Andrew Dickos, “Ray wanted to end the film on the ambivalent image of Jim Wilson returning to the bleak city,” after he had restored order up-state (132). The actual ending is more sentimental. Jim rushes back north to be with Mary. They passionately kiss in close-up, cueing an exuberant orchestral score as The End appears over a slow tracking shot of the majestic, snow covered landscape. In this way, On Dangerous Ground overturns the usual temporal associations of rural versus urban spaces. As Raymond Williams identifies, “The common image of the country is now an image of the past, and the common image of the city an image of the future” (297). For Wilson, by contrast, city life was no longer sustainable and rurality offers his best means for a future. Leo Marx noted in a variety of American pop culture, from Mark Twain to TV westerns and magazine advertising, a “yearning for a simpler, more harmonious style of life, and existence ‘closer to nature,’ that is the psychic root of all pastoralism— genuine and spurious” (Marx 6). Where most rural noirs expose the agrarian myth as a fantasy and a sham, On Dangerous Ground, exceptionally, perpetuates it as actual and effectual. Here, a bad cop is made good with a few days spent in a sparsely populated area and with a woman shaped by her rural upbringing.As opposed to On Dangerous Ground, where the protagonist’s movement from city to country matches his split identity as a formerly corrupt man wishing to be pure, Frank Borzage’s B-film Moonrise (1948) is located entirely in rural or small-town locations. Set in the fictional Southern town of Woodville, which spans swamps, lushly wooded streets and aging Antebellum mansions, the lead character finds good and bad within the same rural location and himself. Dan (Dane Clark) struggles to escape his legacy as the son of a murderer. This conflict is irreparably heightened when Dan kills a man (who had repeatedly teased and bullied him) in self-defence. The instability of Dan’s moral compass is expressed in the way he treats innocent elements of the natural world: flies, dogs, and, recalling Out of the Past, a local deaf boy. He is alternately cruel and kind. Dan is finally redeemed after seeking the advice of a black hermit, Mose (Rex Ingram), who lives in a ramshackle cabin by the swamp. He counsels Dan with the advice that men turn evil from “being lonesome,” not for having “bad blood.” When Dan, eventually, decides to confess to his crime, the sheriff finds him tenderly holding a search hound against a bucolic, rural backdrop. His complete comfortability with the landscape and its creatures finally allows Dan to reconcile the film’s opening opposition. He is no longer torturously in between good and evil, but openly recognises his wrongs and commits to do good in the future. If I had to select just a single shot to illustrate that noirs are set in rural locations more often than most scholarship would have us believe, it would be the opening sequence of Moonrise. From the first shot, this film associates rural locations with criminal elements. The credit sequence juxtaposes pooling water with an ominous brass score. In this disorienting opening, the camera travels from an image of water, to a group of men framed from the knees down. The camera dollies out and pans left, showing that these men, trudging solemnly, are another’s legal executioners. The frame tilts upward and we see a man hung in silhouette. This dense shot is followed by an image of a baby in a crib, also shadowed, the water again, and finally the execution scene. If this sequence is a thematic montage, it can also be discussed, more simply, as a series of establishing shots: a series of images that, seemingly, could not be more opposed— a baby, a universal symbol of innocence, set against the ominous execution, cruel experience— are paired together by virtue of their common location. The montage continues, showing that the baby is the son of the condemned man. As Dan struggles with the legacy of his father throughout the film, this opening shot continues to inform our reading of this character, split between the potential for good or evil.What a baby is to Moonrise, or, to cite a more familiar reference, what the insurance business is to many a James M. Cain roman noir, produce distribution is to Jules Dassin’s Thieves’ Highway (1949). The apple, often a part of wholesome American myths, is at the centre of this story about corruption. Here, a distribution network that brings Americans this hearty, simple product is connected with criminal activity and violent abuses of power more commonly portrayed in connection with cinematic staples of organised crime such as bootlegging or robbery. This film portrays bad apples in the apple business, showing that no profit driven enterprise— no matter how traditional or rural— is beyond the reach of corruption.Fitting the nature of this subject, numerous scenes in the Dassin film take place in the daylight (in addition to darkness), and in the countryside (in addition to the city) as we move between wine and apple country to the market districts of San Francisco. But if the subject and setting of Thieves’ Highway are unusual for a noir, the behaviour of its characters is not. Spare, bright country landscapes form the backdrop for prototypical noir behaviour: predatory competition for money and power.As one would expect of a film noir, the subject of apple distribution is portrayed with dynamic violence. In the most exciting scene of the film, a truck careens off the road after a long pursuit from rival sellers. Apples scatter across a hillside as the truck bursts into flames. This scene is held in a long-shot, as unscrupulous thugs gather the produce for sale while the unfortunate driver burns to death. Here, the reputedly innocent American apple is subject to cold-blooded, profit-maximizing calculations as much as the more typical topics of noir such as blackmail, fraud, or murder. Passages on desolate roads and at apple orchards qualify Thieves’ Highway as a rural noir; the dark, cynical manner in which capitalist enterprise is treated is resonant with nearly all film noirs. Thieves’ Highway follows a common narrative pattern amongst rural noirs to gradually reveal rural spaces as connected to criminality in urban locations. Typically, this disillusioning fact is narrated from the perspective of a lead character who first has a greater sense of safety in rural settings but learns, over the course of the story, to be more wary in all locations. In Thieves’, Nick’s hope that apple-delivery might earn an honest dollar (he is the only driver to treat the orchard owners fairly) gradually gives way to an awareness of the inevitable corruption that has taken over this enterprise at all levels of production, from farmer, to trucker, to wholesaler, and thus, at all locations, the country, the road, and the city.Between this essay, and the previous work of Morris and Bell on the subject, we are developing a more complete survey of the rural noir. Where Bell’s and Morris’s essays focus more resolutely on rural noirs that relied on the contrast of the city versus the country— which, significantly, was the first tendency of this subgenre that I observed— Moonrise and They Live By Night demonstrate that this genre can work entirely apart from the city. From start to finish, these films take place in small towns and rural locations. As opposed to Out of the Past, On Dangerous Ground, or The Asphalt Jungle, characters are never pulled back to, nor flee from, an urban life of crime. Instead, vices that are commonly associated with the city have a free-standing life in the rural locations that are often thought of as a refuge from these harsh elements. If both Bell and Morris study the way that rural noirs draw differences between the city and country, two of the three films I add to the subgenre constitute more complete rural noirs, films that work wholly outside urban locations, not just in contrast with it. Bell, like me, notes considerable variety in rural noirs locations, “desert landscapes, farms, mountains, and forests all qualify as settings for consideration,” but he also notes that “Diverse as these landscapes are, this set of films uses them in surprisingly like-minded fashion to achieve a counterpoint to the ubiquitous noir city” (219). In Bell’s analysis, all nine films he studies, feature significant urban segments. He is, in fact, so inclusive as to discuss Stanley Kubrick’s Killer’s Kiss as a rural noir even though it does not contain a single frame shot or set outside of New York City. Rurality is evoked only as a possibility, as alienated urbanite Davy (Jamie Smith) receives letters from his horse-farm-running relatives. Reading these letters offers Davy brief moments of respite from drudgerous city spaces such as the subway and his cramped apartment. In its emphasis on the centrality of rural locations, my project is more similar to David Bell’s work on the rural in horror films than to Jonathan F. Bell’s work on the rural noir. David Bell analyses the way that contemporary horror films work against a “long tradition” of the “idyllic rural” in many Western texts (95). As opposed to works “from Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman to contemporary television shows like Northern Exposure and films such as A River Runs Through It or Grand Canyon” in which the rural is positioned as “a restorative to urban anomie,” David Bell analyses films such as Deliverance and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre that depict “a series of anti-idyllic visions of the rural” (95). Moonrise and They Live By Night, like these horror films, portray the crime and the country as coexistent spheres at the same time that the majority of other popular culture, including noirs like Killer’s Kiss or On Dangerous Ground, portray them as mutually exclusive.To use a mode of generic analysis developed by Rick Altman, the rural noir, while preserving the dominant syntax of other noirs, presents a remarkably different semantic element (31). Consider the following description of the genre, from the introduction to Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference Guide: “The darkness that fills the mirror of the past, which lurks in a dark corner or obscures a dark passage out of the oppressively dark city, is not merely the key adjective of so many film noir titles but the obvious metaphor for the condition of the protagonist’s mind” (Silver and Ward, 4). In this instance, the narrative elements, or syntax, of film noir outlined by Silver and Ward do not require revision, but the urban location, a semantic element, does. Moonrise and They Live By Night demonstrate the sustainability of the aforementioned syntactic elements— the dark, psychological experience of the leads and their inescapable criminal past— apart from the familiar semantic element of the city.The rural noir must also cause us to reconsider— beyond rural representations or film noir— more generally pitched genre theories. Consider the importance of place to film genre, the majority of which are defined by a typical setting: for melodramas, it is the family home, for Westerns, the American west, and for musicals, the stage. Thomas Schatz separates American genres according to their setting, between genres which deal with “determinate” versus “indeterminate” space:There is a vital distinction between kinds of generic settings and conflicts. Certain genres […] have conflicts that, indigenous to the environment, reflect the physical and ideological struggle for its control. […] Other genres have conflicts that are not indigenous to the locale but are the results of the conflict between the values, attitudes, and actions of its principal characters and the ‘civilised’ setting they inhabit. (26) Schatz discusses noirs, along with detective films, as films which trade in “determinate” settings, limited to the space of the city. The rural noir slips between Schatz’s dichotomy, moving past the space of the city, but not into the civilised, tame settings of the genres of “indeterminate spaces.” It is only fitting that a genre whose very definition lies in its disruption of Hollywood norms— trading high- for low-key lighting, effectual male protagonists for helpless ones, and a confident, coherent worldview for a more paranoid, unstable one would, finally, be able to accommodate a variation— the rural noir— that would seem to upset one of its central tenets, an urban locale. Considering the long list of Hollywood standards that film noirs violated, according to two of its original explicators, Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton— “a logical action, an evident distinction between good and evil, well-defined characters with clear motives, scenes that are more spectacular than brutal, a heroine who is exquisitely feminine and a hero who is honest”— it should, perhaps, not be so surprising that the genre is flexible enough to accommodate the existence of the rural noir after all (14). AcknowledgmentsIn addition to M/C Journal's anonymous readers, the author would like to thank Corey Creekmur, Mike Slowik, Barbara Steinson, and Andrew Gorman-Murray for their helpful suggestions. ReferencesAltman, Rick. “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre.” Film Genre Reader III. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: U of Texas P, 2003. 27-41.The Asphalt Jungle. Dir. John Huston. MGM/UA, 1950.Bell, David. “Anti-Idyll: Rural Horror.” Contested Countryside Cultures. Eds. Paul Cloke and Jo Little. London, Routledge, 1997. 94-108.Bell, Jonathan F. “Shadows in the Hinterland: Rural Noir.” Architecture and Film. Ed. Mark Lamster. New York: Princeton Architectural P, 2000. 217-230.Borde, Raymond and Etienne Chaumeton. A Panorama of American Film Noir. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2002.Christopher, Nicholas. Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997.Cowie, Elizabeth. “Film Noir and Women.” Shades of Noir. Ed. Joan Copjec. New York: Verso, 1993. 121-166.Dickos, Andrew. Street with No Name: A History of the Classic American Film Noir. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2002.Hirsch, Foster. Detours and Lost Highways: A Map of Neo-Noir. New York: Limelight Editions, 1999.Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden. New York: Oxford UP, 1964.McArthur, Colin. Underworld U.S.A. London: BFI, 1972.Moonrise. Dir. Frank Borzage. Republic, 1948.Morris, Gary. “Noir Country: Alien Nation.” Bright Lights Film Journal Nov. 2006. 13. Jun. 2008 http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/54/noircountry.htm Muller, Eddie. Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir. New York: St. Martin’s P, 1998.Naremore, James. More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts. Berkeley, C.A.: U of California P, 2008.Neale, Steve. “Questions of Genre.” Film Genre Reader III. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: U of Texas P, 2003. 160-184.On Dangerous Ground. Dir. Nicholas Ray. RKO, 1951.Out of the Past. Dir. Jacques Tourneur. RKO, 1947.Place, Janey. “Women in Film Noir.” Women in Film Noir. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. London: BFI, 1999. 47-68.Schatz, Thomas. Hollywood Genres. New York: Random House, 1981.Schatz, Thomas. “The Structural Influence: New Directions in Film Genre Study.” Film Genre Reader III. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: U of Texas P, 2003. 92-102.Silver, Alain and Elizabeth Ward. Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference Guide. London: Bloomsbury, 1980.They Live by Night. Dir. Nicholas Ray. RKO, 1949.Thieves’ Highway. Dir. Jules Dassin. Fox, 1949.Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.

After grossing more than $80 million at the international box office and winning the 2007 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, the international success of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s 2006 film The Lives of Others has popularised the word “Stasi” as a “default global synonym” for the terrors associated with surveillance (Garton Ash). Just as representations of Nazism have become inextricably entwined with a specific kind of authoritarian, murderous dictatorship, Garton Ash argues that so too the Stasi and its agents have come to stand in for a certain kind of authoritarian dictatorship in the popular imagination, whose consequences aren’t necessarily as physically harmful as those of National Socialism, but are, instead, dependent on strategies encompassing surveillance, control, and coercion to achieve their objectives.Surveillance societies, such as the former German Democratic Republic, have long been settings for both influential and popular fictions. Social theory has also been illuminated by some of these fictions, with theorists such as Haggerty and Ericson claiming that surveillance models originating in the work of Jeremy Bentham and George Orwell are central to conceptualising and understanding surveillance practices, as well as social attitudes towards them. Orwell’s terminology in particular and his ideas relating to “Thought Police,” “Big Brother,” “Room 101,” “Newspeak,” and others, have entered into popular discourse and, to a large extent, have become synonymous with the idea of surveillance itself. Even the adjective “Orwellian” has come to be associated with totalitarian regimes of absolute control, so much so that “when a totalitarian setup, whether in fact or in fantasy ... is called ‘Orwellian,’ it is as if George Orwell had helped to create it instead of helping to dispel its euphemistic thrall” (James 72).As sociologist David Lyon notes: “much surveillance theory is dystopian” (201). And while the fear, helplessness, and emotional experiences of living under the suspicion and scrutiny of security services such as Von Donnersmarck’s Stasi or Orwell’s Party are necessarily muted by theory, it is often through fictions such as The Lives of Others and Nineteen Eighty-Four that these can be fully expressed. In the case of The Lives of Others and Nineteen Eighty-Four, both use central love stories to express the affective experiences associated with constant surveillance and use these as a way of contrasting and critiquing the way in which surveillance, power, and control operate in both settings. Like many other texts which represent surveillance societies, both fictions present a bleak picture, with the surveillance undertaken by the Party or Stasi being framed as a deindividualising or depersonifying social force which eliminates privacy, compromises trust, and blurs the distinction between the self and the state, the personal and the social, the individual and the ideology. This brings me to the purpose of this paper, which is concerned with two things: firstly, it will discuss these oppositions alongside the role of social surveillance and private lives in Von Donnersmarck’s film. The existing scholarly work on The Lives of Others tends to focus on its historical setting—the former East Germany—and, consequently, emphasises its generic status as a “political thriller,” “fierce and gloomy historical drama” full of “psychological terror,” and so on. Nevertheless, this overstates the film’s social milieu at the expense of the personal drama which drives the narrative—the film is underpinned by multiple overlapping love stories—so my focus is more concerned with highlighting the latter, rather than the former. I am not going to attempt to provide any sort of a comparative case study between the film’s representation of the Stasi and the historical realities upon which it is based, for example. Secondly, much has been made of the transformation of the character Gerd Wiesler, who shifts from “a loyal Stasi officer with an unswervingly grim demeanour” into “a good man” with a conscience—to borrow from Von Donnersmarck’s commentary. I will conclude by briefly addressing this transformation with reference to surveillance and its place within the film’s narrative.The Lives of Others is a film which, like Nineteen Eighty-Four, carries the signifiers of a very specific kind of surveillance. Set in the former German Democratic Republic in the year 1984—perhaps a self-conscious reference to Orwell—the film is concerned with the playwright Georg Dreyman (played by Sebastian Koch), “the only nonsubversive writer who is still read in the West”; his girlfriend, the actress Christa-Maria Sieland (played by Martina Gedeck); and the Stasi Captain Wiesler (played by Ulrich Mühe). In his capacity as expert interrogator and security agent, Wiesler is assigned to spy on Dreyman and Sieland because they are suspected of being disloyal, and as a playwright and actress—and thus, persons of social, intellectual, and cultural influence—this will never do. Accordingly, Dreyman and Sieland’s apartment is bugged and the pair is constantly surveilled. Their home, previously a space of relative privacy, becomes the prime site for this surveillance, forcing their “private or ‘personal life’”—which is understood as “the special preserve of intimacy, affection, trust and elective affinity”—into “the larger world of impersonal and instrumental [social] relations” governed by the East German state (Weintraub and Kumar xiii). The surveillance in the film is a “creature of its social context,” to borrow James Rule’s terminology (300). Rule argued that all systems of surveillance are “distinctive of certain social orders” and that their “continued growth is closely tied to other changes in their social structural contexts” (300). This is certainly true of the surveillance in The Lives of Others, which is characterised by effectiveness through totality, rather than technological sophistication. Broadly speaking, surveillance in the former East Germany was top-down and hierarchical and connected with the maintenance of the ruling party’s power. Metaphors abound when describing the Stasi’s surveillance network—it was an “octopus,” a “multi-headed hydra,” a beast of gargantuan size at the very heart of the East German Party-State (Childs and Popplewell xiii). Needless to say, the Stasi was big. Since Die Wende, especially, much has been made of the enormity of the Stasi’s bureaucracy and its capacity to “intrude.” Between 1950 and 1989 it employed 274,000 people in an official capacity and, after the collapse of the East German regime anywhere up to 500,000 East German Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter—Unofficial Collaborators: ordinary citizens from the East German state who had been coerced into spying on friends or family members, or had volunteered their services—had been identified (Koehler 8). This equated to approximately one Stasi officer, informer or collaborator per 6.5 East German citizens (Koehler 9). Put in perspective, there was one KGB agent per 5,800 citizens in the Soviet Union, while the Gestapo—often held up as the ultimate example of the abuses and evils inherent in many secret police forces—had one officer for every 2,000 Germans (Koehler 9).And it is this hydra, this octopus that Dreyman and Sieland encounter in The Lives of Others. Led by Wiesler and driven by suspicion, the Stasi listens in on their conversations, follows the couple clandestinely, and gathers information which may reveal “politically incorrect behaviour” (Rainer and Siedler 251). The reach of the Stasi’s surveillance network and its capacity to collect information is demonstrated through a variety of means—beginning with the interrogation scene during the film’s opening where the scent of a dissident is stored in a jar for later use, to the final coercion in which Sieland becomes an IM. The Stasi in the film consistently demonstrates an uncanny ability to know: to gather information through surveillance, and to use this surveillance to demonstrate and secure its power. As Rule points out: “the ability of any system of surveillance to control and shape the behaviour of ... [those under surveillance] depends very much on the certainty with which it manages to bring information generated in one social and temporal setting to bear elsewhere” (302). Intense “surveillance and potent mechanisms of control are useless” if those under surveillance can simply hide behind closed doors or escape over a wall—so the “system must arrange its boundaries so that both its surveillance and control activities cover a sufficiently broad area” to prevent escape through movement (Rule 303–304). In a total surveillance society such as the one seen in The Lives of Others, there is no “escape” from the Stasi other than death—suicide—which defines many of the film’s key turning points. The surveillance undertaken by the Stasi may be stored in jars in some cases; however, it can also be retrieved to confirm suspicions, to coerce and control, and, ultimately, to further the objectives of the Party State.Despite the Stasi’s best attempts, however, Dreyman is consistently loyal—he believes in the principles of socialism and, to quote Wiesler’s superior Grubitz (played by Ulrich Tukur), he “thinks East Germany is the fairest land of them all.” Eventually it is revealed that the real reason for the surveillance is not about suspected disloyalty to the state, but a personal vendetta by the Party’s Minister for Culture, Bruno Hempf (played by Thomas Thieme), who wants Sieland for himself and is using his influence within the Stasi to bring Dreyman down. The use of surveillance for personal gain, rather than for social “good” proves too much for Wiesler who undergoes a “psychological and political transformation” and begins to empathise with the subjects of his investigation (Diamond 811). Dreyman undergoes a similar transformation after the suicide of his mentor and friend Albert Jerska (played by Volkmar Kleinert)—a theatre director whose life was made meaningless after he was blacklisted by the Stasi. This brings me back to the question of the personal and the social, which forms the fundamental tension within the film and is the basis of this paper. Historically, notions of “public” and “private,” “social” and “personal”—as understood in state-socialist societies such as the former East Germany—revolved around “the victimised ‘us’ and the newly powerful ‘them’ who ruled the state” (Gal 87). Nevertheless, the distinction between the personal and the social—or public and private—has long been a social organising principle and, as a result, has acted as a springboard into “many key issues of social and political analysis, of moral and political debate, and of ordering everyday life” (Weintraub and Kumar 1). The idea of “privacy”—which is often conceptualised simplistically as a “uni-dimensional, rigidly dichotomous and absolute, fixed and universal concept” (Marx 157)—is used as a shield against any number of perceived political, social, or moral infringements, including surveillance, and can be said to be organised around the idea of visibility, where “private” encompasses that which is “able and / or entitled to be kept hidden, sheltered or withdrawn from others” (Weintraub and Kumar 6). The private is thus connected with a life free of surveillance and scrutiny, where people have a reprieve from monitored social relations and the collective self. Privacy is “fundamentally rooted” in a personal life “delineated by private space” without surveillance, and is interlinked with the idea of a “society of strangers,” where strangers are, by definition, individuals who have been denied access to our personal lives and private spaces (Lyon 21). The act of disclosure and the provision of access to our personal affairs is thus regarded as a voluntary gesture of faith and trust—an invitation into the private, which makes our lives—the lives of strangers, the lives of “others”—familiar and knowable. In The Lives of Others it is Dreyman and Sieland who, because of the personal relationship they have maintained in the relative privacy of their apartment, are the “strangers” or “others” the Stasi wants to make knowable. When Wiesler first encounters the couple at the premiere of Dreyman’s play—the tellingly named The Faces of Love—he seems disturbed by the affection they share for one another and for their fellow artists. Later, it is a brief moment of intimacy between Dreyman and Sieland that motivates Wiesler into overseeing the surveillance himself—a decision that contributes to his eventual transformation. Wiesler is disturbed by Dreyman and Sieland’s relationship because it demonstrates personal loyalties born out of private emotions which exist beyond the gaze of the Stasi and, thus, beyond the control of the state. In Wiesler’s world the only true love is social love—the impersonal love of the state—and anything resembling the romantic or the personal is not only unfamiliar, but suspicious and potentially subversive. In Von Donnersmarck’s words, Wiesler has shut out his humanity to adhere to a principle, which he values above and beyond all else. His suspicion of Dreyman and Sieland thus exemplifies how the experience and interpretation of personal emotions is dependent, in part, on social and cultural circumstances. For Wiesler, private emotions are dangerous, unknowable, and unfamiliar. They belong to a realm “which places extraordinary emphasis on the concept of individuality and individual self-identity” in “a society which distinguishes more or less plainly between public positions and personal roles; ... and, perhaps most importantly, [they belong to] a society that grants a high degree of mobility and flexibility in relationships in general, [and] places personal choice at the core of mating and marriage rituals ...” (Solomon xxviii). A society, in other words, quite unlike the one in The Lives of Others. By monitoring the personal lives of Dreyman and Sieland, the Stasi thus collapses the distinction between the personal and the social, the private and the public. Surveillance transforms personal emotions into public information, and it is this information which is later manipulated for the social “good” and at the expense of Dreyman and Sieland’s personal lives. In The Lives of Others there is no separation between the personal and the social, the public and the private—there is only the Party and there is only the Stasi. I want to conclude by briefly discussing the transformation of Wiesler, which is emblematic of the film’s central message about the “capacity of human beings for goodness, [love], compassion and change” (Diamond 812–13). Von Donnersmarck makes this message clear in one of the film’s early scenes, where, at the opening of his play The Faces of Love, Dreyman appeals to Minister Hempf about Jerska’s blacklisting, suggesting that Jerska is remorseful and has changed. Hempf tells Dreyman: “That’s what we all love about your plays ... the idea that people can change. People don’t change.” Hempf is suggesting, of course, that there is no “normalising gaze” in the East German state; that there is only suspicion, discrimination and exclusion. Once you have been identified as “abnormal,” “subversive” or “an enemy” by the Stasi’s surveillance, you can never remove yourself from the category of suspicion—change is impossible. But Wiesler and Dreyman do change, however unlikely Wiesler’s transformation may be. While the film’s style suggest the men are opposites—Dreyman dresses like a chic (West) German intellectual in tweed jackets and horn-rimmed glasses, while Wiesler gets around in stiff Stasi uniforms and grey nylon tracksuits; Dreyman’s home reflects his status as a man of culture and taste, with literature, art, and music dominating the bohemian aesthetic, while Wiesler’s home is cold, empty, characterless, and generic; Dreyman shares a personal life with Sieland, while Wiesler is visited by a prostitute who services all the Stasi men in his building “on a tight schedule” and so on—they share a fundamental similarity: they both believe in socialism, in the East German state, and the utopian ideals that are now obscured under layers of bureaucracy, surveillance, corruption, and suspicion (Diamond 815). Nevertheless, after discovering that Sieland is being forced into sexual encounters with party Minister Hempf, the instigator of the surveillance, Wiesler begins to identify with the couple, and, for the first time, breaches the boundary between surveillance and interference, between social observation and personal intervention. After seeing the Minister’s car pull up with Sieland inside, Wiesler uses his surveillance technologies to alert Dreyman to her return—he rings the couple’s doorbell whilst muttering, “Time for some bitter truths.” Later, after Sieland showers and collapses “in mute despair,” Dreyman cradles her in his arms, after which the film cuts to a shot of Wiesler still listening, but mirroring their body language (Diamond 817). This is the moment at which the film makes clear that Wiesler’s role has shifted from social monitoring to something more personal—he has developed an emotional investment in the surveillance he is conducting and is identifying and empathising with the subjects of his surveillance. Eventually this goes further—he steals a copy of Brecht’s poems from their apartment and reads “Memory of Marie A.” a poem which “expresses poignant longings for a love that is both enticing and elusive” (Diamond 822). By breaching the boundary between the social and the personal, Wiesler undergoes a complete transformation, and his continued interventions drive the narrative and dictate outcomes not only for himself, but also for Dreyman and Sieland. In shifting his role from surveillance to engagement, from observation to intervention, and from state suspicion to personal investment, Wiesler eventually, and in his own way, falls in love. Surveillance is the defining characteristic of The Lives of Others—it is both oppressive and redemptive, sinister and salvational, an obstacle and an opening. It defines both the film’s social setting and enables and impacts on the personal relationships between characters. The Lives of Others brings home the horrors of East Germany under the Stasi—albeit in a stylised and technically accomplished fashion—by emphasising the personal and social costs associated with the corrupt, petty, and spiteful regime through human drama. The ultimate result is a film with a surveillance network that swings between care and control, observation and engagement, with Wiesler exemplifying all of these traits. And while the end result of the Stasi’s surveillance is destructive and despairing, in the words of Von Donnersmarck, it also gives characters “the ability to do the right thing, even in social conditions that seem to eradicate the very possibility of personal goodness.”ReferencesChilds, David and Richard Popplewell. The Stasi: The East German Intelligence and Security Service. New York: New York U P, 1996.Diamond, Diana. “Empathy and Identification in Von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others.” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 56.3 (2008): 811–32.Gal, Susan. “A Semiotics of the Public/Private Distinction.” Differences 13.1 (2002): 77–95.Garton Ash, Timothy. “The Stasi on Our Minds.” The New York Review of Books 31 May 2007. 7 November 2010. ‹http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2007/may/31/the-stasi-on-our-minds/›. Haggerty, Kevin D. and Richard V. Ericson. “The Surveillant Assemblage.” The British Journal of Sociology 51.4 (2000): 605–22.James, Clive. “The Truthteller.” The New Yorker 18 Jan 1999: 72–78.Koehler, John O. Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police. Boulder: Westview P, 1999. Lives of Others, The. Dir. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. Perf. Martina Gedeck, Ulrich Mühe, and Sebastian Koch. Arte, 2006.Lyon, David. The Electronic Eye. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994.Marx, Gary T. “Murky Conceptual Waters: The Public and the Private.” Ethics and Information Technology 3.3 (2001): 157–69.Nineteen Eighty-Four. Dir. Michael Radford. Perf. John Hurt, Richard Burton, and Suzanna Hamilton. Virgin Films, 1984.Rainer, Helmut and Thomas Siedler. “Does Democracy Foster Trust?” Journal of Comparative Economics 37 (2009): 251–69.Rule, James B. Private Lives and Public Surveillance: Social Control in the Computer Age. London: Allen Lane, 1973.Solomon, Robert C. Love: Emotion, Myth and Metaphor. Buffalo: Prometheus, 1990.Weintraub, Jeff Alan and Krishan Kumar, eds. Public and Private in Thought and Practice: Perspectives on a Grand Dichotomy. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997.

IntroductionAustralia is at a particular point in its history where there is a noticeable diaspora of artists and creative practitioners away from the major capitals of Sydney and Melbourne (in particular), driven in no small part by ballooning house prices of the last eight years. This has meant big changes for some regional spaces, and in turn, for the face of Australian cultural life. Regional cultural precincts are forming with tourist flows, funding attention and cultural economies. Likewise, there appears to be growing consciousness in the ‘art centres’ of Melbourne and Sydney of interesting and relevant activities outside their limits. This research draws on my experience as an art practitioner, curator and social researcher in one such region (Castlemaine in Central Victoria), and particularly from a recent interview series I have conducted in collaboration with art space in that region, Wide Open Road Art. In this, 23 regional and city-based artists were asked about the social, economic and local conditions that can and have supported their art practices. Drawing from these conversations and Bourdieu’s ideas around cultural production, the article suggests that authentic, diverse, interesting and disruptive creative practices in Australian cultural life involve the increasingly pressing need for security while existing outside the modern imperative of high consumption; of finding alternative ways to live well while entering into the shared space of cultural production. Indeed, it is argued that often it is the capacity to defy key economic paradigms, for example of ‘rational (economic) self-interest’, that allows creative life to flourish (Bourdieu Field; Ley “Artists”). While regional spaces present new opportunities for this, there are pitfalls and nuances worth exploring.Changes in Regional AustraliaAustralia has long been an urbanising nation. Since Federation our cities have increased from a third to now constituting two-thirds of the country’s total population (Gray and Lawrence 6; ABS), making us one of the most urbanised countries in the world. Indeed, as machines replaced manual labour on farms; as Australia’s manufacturing industry began its decline; and as young people in particular left the country for city universities (Gray and Lawrence), the post-war industrial-economic boom drove this widespread demographic and economic shift. In the 1980s closures of regional town facilities like banks, schools and hospitals propelled widespread belief that regional Australia was in crisis and would be increasingly difficult to sustain (Rentschler, Bridson, and Evans; Gray and Lawrence 2; Barr et al.; ABS). However, the late 1990s and early 21st century saw a turnaround that has been referred to by some as the rise of the ‘sea change’. That is, widespread renewed interest and idealisation of not just coastal areas but anywhere outside the city (Murphy). It was a simultaneous pursuit of “a small ‘a’ alternative lifestyle” and escape from rising living costs in urban areas, especially for the unemployed, single parents and those with disabilities (Murphy). This renewed interest has been sustained. The latest wave, or series of waves, have coincided with the post-GFC house price spike, of cheap credit and lenient lending designed to stimulate the economy. This initiative in part led to Sydney and Melbourne median dwelling prices rising by up to 114% in eight years (Scutt 2017), which alone had a huge influence on who was able to afford to live in city areas and who was not. Rapid population increases and diminished social networks and familial support are also considered drivers that sent a wave of people (a million since 2011) towards the outer fringes of the cities and to ‘commuter belt’ country towns (Docherty; Murphy). While the underprivileged are clearly most disadvantaged in what has actually been a global development process (see Jayne on this, and on the city as a consumer itself), artists and creatives are also a unique category who haven’t fared well with hyper-urbanisation (Ley “Artists”). Despite the class privilege that often accompanies such a career choice, the economic disadvantage art professions often involve has seen a diaspora of artists moving to regional areas, particularly those in the hinterlands around and train lines to major centres. We see the recent ‘rise of a regional bohemia’ (Regional Australia Institute): towns like Toowoomba, Byron Bay, Surf Coast, Gold Coast-Tweed, Kangaroo Valley, Wollongong, Warburton, Bendigo, Tooyday, New Norfolk, and countless more being re-identified as arts towns and precincts. In Australia in 2016–17, 1 in 6 professional artists, and 1 in 4 visual artists, were living in a regional town (Throsby and Petetskaya). Creative arts in regional Australia makes up a quarter of the nation’s creative output and is a $2.8 billion industry; and our regions particularly draw in creative practitioners in their prime productive years (aged 24 to 44) (Regional Australia Institute).WORA Conservation SeriesIn 2018 artist and curator Helen Mathwin and myself received a local shire grant to record a conversation series with 23 artists who were based in the Central Goldfields region of Victoria as well as further afield, but who had a connection to the regional arts space we run, WideOpenRoadArt (WORA). In videoed, in-depth, approximately hour-long, semi-structured interviews conducted throughout 2018, we spoke to artists (16 women and 7 men) about the relocation phenomenon we were witnessing in our own growing arts town. Most were interviewed in WORA’s roving art float, but we seized any ad hoc opportunity we had to have genuine discussions with people. Focal points were around sustainability of practice and the social conditions that supported artists’ professional pursuits. This included accessing an arts community, circles of cultural production, and the ‘art centre’; the capacity to exhibit; but also, social factors such as affordable housing and the ability to live on a low-income while having dependants; and so on. The conversations were rich with lived experiences and insights on these issues.Financial ImperativesIn line with the discussion above, the most prominent factor we noticed in the interviews was the inescapable importance of being able to live cheaply. The consistent message that all of the interviewees, both regional- and city-based, conveyed was that a career in art-making required an important independence from the need to earn a substantial income. One interviewee commented: “I do run my art as a business, I have an ABN […] it makes a healthy loss! I don’t think I’ve ever made a profit […].” Another put it: “now that I’m in [this] town and I have a house and stuff I do feel like there is maybe a bit more security around those daily things that will hopefully give me space to [make artworks].”Much has been said on the pervasive inability to monetise art careers, notably Bourdieu’s observations that art exists on an interdependent field of cultural capital, determining for itself an autonomous conception of value separate to economics (Bourdieu, Field 39). This is somewhat similar to the idea of art as a sacred phenomenon irreducible to dollar terms (Abbing 38; see also Benjamin’s “aura”; “The Work of Art”). Art’s difficult relationship with commodification is part of its heroism that Benjamin described (Benjamin Charles Baudelaire 79), its potential to sanctify mainstream society by staying separate to the lowly aspirations of commerce (Ley “Artists” 2529). However, it is understood, artists still need to attain professional education and capacities, yet they remain at the bottom of the income ladder not only professionally, but in the case of visual artists, they remain at the bottom of the creative income hierarchies as well. Further to this, within visual arts, only a tiny proportion achieve financially backed success (Menger 277). “Artistic labour markets are characterised by high risk of failure, excess supply of recruits, low artistic income level, skewed income distribution and multiple jobholding” (Mangset, Torvik Heian, Kleppe, and Løyland; Menger). Mangset et al. point to ideas that have long surrounded the “charismatic artist myth,” of a quasi-metaphysical calling to be an artist that can lead one to overlook the profession’s vast pitfalls in terms of economic sustainability. One interviewee described it as follows: “From a very young age I wanted to be an artist […] so there’s never been a time that I’ve thought that’s not what I’m doing.” A 1% rule seems widely acknowledged in how the profession manages the financial winners against those who miss out; the tiny proportion of megastar artists versus a vast struggling remainder.As even successful artists often dip below the poverty line between paid engagements, housing costs can make the difference between being able to live in an area and not (Turnbull and Whitford). One artist described:[the reason we moved here from Melbourne] was financial, yes definitely. We wouldn’t have been able to purchase a property […] in Melbourne, we would not have been able to live in place that we wanted to live, and to do what we wanted to do […]. It was never an option for us to get a big mortgage.Another said:It partly came about as a financial practicality to move out here. My partner […] wanted to be in the bush, but I was resistant at first, we were in Melbourne but we just couldn’t afford Melbourne in the end, we had an apartment, we had a studio. My partner was a cabinet maker then. You know, just every month all our money went to rent and we just couldn’t manage anymore. So we thought, well maybe if we come out to the bush […] It was just by a happy accident that we found a property […] that we could afford, that was off-grid so it cut the bills down for us [...] that had a little studio and already had a little cottage on there that we could rent that out to get money.For a prominent artist we spoke to this issue was starkly reflected. Despite large exhibitions at some of the highest profile galleries in regional Victoria, the commissions offered for these shows were so insubstantial that the artist and their family had to take on staggering sums of personal debt to execute the ambitious and critically acclaimed shows. Another very successful artist we interviewed who had shown widely at ‘A-list’ international arts institutions and received several substantial grants, spoke of their dismay and pessimism at the idea of financial survival. For all artists we spoke to, pursuing their arts practice was in constant tension with economic imperatives, and their lives had all been shaped by the need to make shrewd decisions to continue practising. There were two artists out of the 23 we interviewed who considered their artwork able to provide full-time income, although this still relied on living costs remaining extremely low. “We are very lucky to have bought a very cheap property [in the country] that I can [also] have my workshop on, so I’m not paying for two properties in Melbourne […] So that certainly takes a fair bit of pressure off financially.” Their co-interviewee described this as “pretty luxurious!” Notably, the two who thought they could live off their art practices were both men, mid-career, whose works were large, spectacular festival items, which alongside the artists’ skill and hard work was also a factor in the type of remuneration received.Decongested LivingBeyond more affordable real estate and rental spaces, life outside our cities offers other benefits that have particular relevance to creative practitioners. Opera and festival director Lindy Hume described her move to the NSW South Coast in terms of space to think and be creative. “The abundance of time, space and silence makes living in places like [Hume’s town] ideal for creating new work” (Brown). And certainly, this was a theme that arose frequently in our interviews. Many of our regionally based artists were in part choosing the de-pressurised space of non-metro areas, and also seeking an embedded, daily connection to nature for themselves, their art-making process and their families. In one interview this was described as “dreamtime”. “Some of my more creative moments are out walking in the forest with the dog, that sort of semi-daydreamy thing where your mind is taken away by the place you’re in.”Creative HubsAll of our regional interviewees mentioned the value of the local community, as a general exchange, social support and like-minded connection, but also specifically of an arts community. Whether a tree change by choice or a more reactive move, the diaspora of artists, among others, has led to a type of rural renaissance in certain popular areas. Creative hubs located around the country, often in close proximity to the urban centres, are creating tremendous opportunities to network with other talented people doing interesting things, living in close proximity and often open to cross-fertilisation. One said: “[Castlemaine] is the best place in Australia, it has this insane cultural richness in a tiny town, you can’t go out and not meet people on the street […] For someone who has not had community in their life that is so gorgeous.” Another said:[Being an artist here] is kind of easy! Lots of people around to connect—with […] other artists but also creatively minded people [...] So it means you can just bump into someone from down the street and have an amazing conversation in five minutes about some amazing thing! […] There’s a concentration here that works.With these hubs, regional spaces are entering into a new relevance in the sphere of cultural production. They are generating unique and interesting local creative scenes for people to live amongst or visit, and generating strong local arts economies, tourist economies, and funding opportunities (Rentschler, Bridson, and Evans). Victoria in particular has burgeoned, with tourist flows to its regions increasing 13 per cent in 5 years and generating tourism worth $10 billion (Tourism Victoria). Victoria’s Greater Bendigo is Australia’s most popularly searched tourist destination on Trip Advisor, with tourism increasing 52% in 10 years (Boland). Simultaneously, funding flows have increased to regional zones, as governments seek to promote development outside Australia’s urban centres and are confident in the arts as a key strategy in boosting health, economies and overall wellbeing (see Rentschler, Bridson, and Evans; see also the 2018 Regional Centre for Culture initiative, Boland). The regions are also an increasingly relevant participant in national cultural life (Turnbull and Whitford; Mitchell; Simpson; Woodhead). Opportunities for an openness to productive exchange between regional and metropolitan sites appear to be growing, with regional festivals and art events gaining importance and unique attributes in the consciousness of the arts ‘centre’ (see for example Fairley; Simpson; Farrelly; Woodhead).Difficulties of Regional LocationDespite this, our interviews still brought to light the difficulties and barriers experienced living as a regional artist. For some, living in regional Victoria was an accepted set-back in their ambitions, something to be concealed and counteracted with education in reputable metropolitan art schools or city-based jobs. For others there was difficulty accessing a sympathetic arts community—although arts towns had vibrant cultures, certain types of creativity were preferred (often craft-based and more community-oriented). Practitioners who were active in maintaining their links to a metropolitan art scene voiced more difficulty in fitting in and successfully exhibiting their (often more conceptual or boundary-pushing) work in regional locations.The Gentrification ProblemThe other increasingly obvious issue in the revivification of some non-metropolitan areas is that they can and are already showing signs of being victims of their own success. That is, some regional arts precincts are attracting so many new residents that they are ceasing to be the low-cost, hospitable environments for artists they once were. Geographer David Ley has given attention to this particular pattern of gentrification that trails behind artists (Ley “Artists”). Ley draws from Florida’s ideas of late capitalism’s ascendency of creativity over the brute utilitarianism of the industrial era. This has got to the point that artists and creative professionals have an increasing capacity to shape and generate value in areas of life that were previous overlooked, especially with built environments (2529). Now more than ever, there is the “urbane middle-class” pursuing ‘the swirling milieu of artists, bohemians and immigrants” (Florida) as they create new, desirable landscapes with the “refuse of society” (Benjamin Charles Baudelaire 79; Ley New Middle Class). With Australia’s historic shifts in affordability in our major cities, this pattern that Ley identified in urban built environments can be seen across our states and regions as well.But with gentrification comes increased costs of living, as housing, shops and infrastructure all alter for an affluent consumer-resident. This diminishes what Bourdieu describes as “the suspension and removal of economic necessity” fundamental to the avant-garde (Bourdieu Distinction 54). That is to say, its relief from heavy pressure to materially survive is arguably critical to the reflexive, imaginative, and truly new offerings that art can provide. And as argued earlier, there seems an inbuilt economic irrationality in artmaking as a vocation—of dedicating one’s energy, time and resources to a pursuit that is notoriously impoverishing. But this irrationality may at the same time be critical to setting forth new ideas, perspectives, reflections and disruptions of taken-for-granted social assumptions, and why art is so indispensable in the first place (Bourdieu Field 39; Ley New Middle Class 2531; Weber on irrationality and the Enlightenment Project; also Adorno’s the ‘primitive’ in art). Australia’s cities, like those of most developed nations, increasingly demand we busy ourselves with the high-consumption of modern life that makes certain activities that sit outside this almost impossible. As gentrification unfolds from the metropolis to the regions, Australia faces a new level of far-reaching social inequality that has real consequences for who is able to participate in art-making, where these people can live, and ultimately what kind of diversity of ideas and voices participate in the generation of our national cultural life. ConclusionThe revival of some of Australia’s more popular regional towns has brought new life to some regional areas, particularly in reshaping their identities as cultural hubs worth experiencing, living amongst or supporting their development. Our interviews brought to life the significant benefits artists have experienced in relocating to country towns, whether by choice or necessity, as well as some setbacks. It was clear that economics played a major role in the demographic shift that took place in the area being examined; more specifically, that the general reorientation of social life towards consumption activities are having dramatic spatial consequences that we are currently seeing transform our major centres. The ability of art and creative practices to breathe new life into forgotten and devalued ideas and spaces is a foundational attribute but one that also creates a gentrification problem. Indeed, this is possibly the key drawback to the revivification of certain regional areas, alongside other prejudices and clashes between metro and regional cultures. It is argued that the transformative and redemptive actions art can perform need to involve the modern irrationality of not being transfixed by matters of economic materialism, so as to sit outside taken-for-granted value structures. This emphasises the importance of equality and open access in our spaces and landscapes if we are to pursue a vibrant, diverse and progressive national cultural sphere.ReferencesAbbing, Hans. Why Artists Are Poor: The Exceptional Economy of the Arts. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2002.Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory. London: Routledge, 1983.Australian Bureau of Statistics. “Population Growth: Capital City Growth and Development.” 4102.0—Australian Social Trends. Canberra: Australian Bureau of Sttaistics, 1996. <http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/2f762f95845417aeca25706c00834efa/924739f180990e34ca2570ec0073cdf7!OpenDocument>.Barr, Neil, Kushan Karunaratne, and Roger Wilkinson. Australia’s Farmers: Past, Present and Future. Land and Water Resources Research and Development Corporation, 2005. 1 Mar. 2019 <http://inform.regionalaustralia.org.au/industry/agriculture-forestry-and-fisheries/item/australia-s-farmers-past-present-and-future>.Benjamin, Walter. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. London: NLB, 1973.———. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969.Boland, Brooke. “What It Takes to Be a Leading Regional Centre of Culture.” Arts Hub 18 July 2018. 1 Mar. 2019 <https://www.artshub.com.au/festival/news-article/sponsored-content/festivals/brooke-boland/what-it-takes-to-be-a-leading-regional-centre-of-culture-256110>.Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1984.———. The Field of Cultural Production. New York: Columbia UP, 1993.Brown, Bill. “‘Restless Giant’ Lures Queensland Opera’s Artistic Director Lindy Hume to the Regional Art Movement.” ABC News 13 Sep. 2017. 10 Mar. 2019 <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-09-12/regional-creative-industries-on-the-rise/8895842>.Docherty, Glenn. “Why 5 Million Australians Can’t Get to Work, Home or School on Time.” Sydney Morning Herald 17 Feb. 2019. 10 Mar. 2019 <https://www.smh.com.au/national/why-5-million-australians-can-t-get-to-work-home-or-school-on-time-20190215-p50y1x.html>.Fairley, Gina. “Big Hit Exhibitions to See These Summer Holidays.” Arts Hub 14 Dec. 2018. 1 Mar. 2019 <https://visual.artshub.com.au/news-article/news/visual-arts/gina-fairley/big-hit-exhibitions-to-see-these-summer-holidays-257016>.Farrelly, Kate. “Bendigo: The Regional City That’s Transformed into a Foodie and Cultural Hub.” Domain 9 Apr. 2019. 10 Mar. 2019 <https://www.domain.com.au/news/bendigo-the-regional-city-you-didnt-expect-to-become-a-foodie-and-cultural-hub-813317/>.Florida, Richard. “A Creative, Dynamic City Is an Open, Tolerant City.” The Globe and Mail 24 Jun. 2002: T8.Gray, Ian, and Geoffrey Lawrence. A Future For Regional Australia: Escaping Global Misfortune. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.Hume, Lindy. Restless Giant: Changing Cultural Values in Regional Australia. Strawberry Hills: Currency House, 2017.Jayne, Mark. Cities and Consumption. London: Routledge, 2005.Ley, David. The New Middle Class and the Remaking of the Central City. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.———. “Artists, Aestheticisation and Gentrification.” Urban Studies 40.12 (2003): 2527–44.Menger, Pierre-Michel. “Artistic Labor Markets: Contingent Works, Excess Supply and Occupational Risk Management.” Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture. Eds. Victor Ginsburgh and David Throsby. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2006. 766–811.Mangset, Per, Mari Torvik Heian, Bard Kleppe and Knut Løyland. “Why Are Artists Getting Poorer: About the Reproduction of Low Income among Artists.” International Journal of Cultural Policy 24.4 (2018): 539-58.Mitchell, Scott. “Want to Start Collecting Art But Don’t Know Where to Begin? Trust Your Own Taste, plus More Tips.” ABC Life, 31 Mar. 2019 <https://www.abc.net.au/life/tips-for-buying-art-starting-collection/10084036>.Murphy, Peter. “Sea Change: Re-Inventing Rural and Regional Australia.” Transformations 2 (March 2002).Regional Australia Institute. “The Rise of the Regional Bohemians.” Regional Australia Institute 24 May. 2017. 1 Mar. 2019 <http://www.regionalaustralia.org.au/home/2017/05/rise-regional-bohemians-painting-new-picture-arts-culture-regional-australia/>.Rentschler, Ruth, Kerrie Bridson, and Jody Evans. Regional Arts Australia Stats and Stories: The Impact of the Arts in Regional Australia. Regional Arts Australia [n.d.]. <https://www.cacwa.org.au/documents/item/477>.Simpson, Andrea. “The Regions: Delivering Exceptional Arts Experiences to the Community.” ArtsHub 11 Apr. 2019. <https://visual.artshub.com.au/news-article/sponsored-content/visual-arts/andrea-simpson/the-regions-delivering-exceptional-arts-experiences-to-the-community-257752>.

Augmented Reality—The Liminal Zone Within the larger context of the post-desktop technological philosophy and practice, an increasing number of efforts are directed towards finding solutions for integrating as close as possible virtual information into specific real environments; a short list of such endeavors include Wi-Fi connectivity, GPS-driven navigation, mobile phones, GIS (Geographic Information System), and various technological systems associated with what is loosely called locative, ubiquitous and pervasive computing. Augmented Reality (AR) is directly related to these technologies, although its visualization capabilities and the experience it provides assure it a particular place within this general trend. Indeed, AR stands out for its unique capacity (or ambition) to offer a seamless combination—or what I call here an effect of convergence—of the real scene perceived by the user with virtual information overlaid on that scene interactively and in real time. The augmented scene is perceived by the viewer through the use of different displays, the most common being the AR glasses (head-mounted display), video projections or monitors, and hand-held mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets, increasingly popular nowadays. One typical example of AR application is Layar, a browser that layers information of public interest—delivered through an open-source content management system—over the actual image of a real space, streamed live on the mobile phone display. An increasing number of artists employ this type of mobile AR apps to create artworks that consist in perceptually combining material reality and virtual data: as the user points the smartphone or tablet to a specific place, virtual 3D-modelled graphics or videos appear in real time, seamlessly inserted in the image of that location, according to the user’s position and orientation. In the engineering and IT design fields, one of the first researchers to articulate a coherent conceptualization of AR and to underlie its specific capabilities is Ronald Azuma. He writes that, unlike Virtual Reality (VR) which completely immerses the user inside a synthetic environment, AR supplements reality, therefore enhancing “a user’s perception of and interaction with the real world” (355-385). Another important contributor to the foundation of AR as a concept and as a research field is industrial engineer Paul Milgram. He proposes a comprehensive and frequently cited definition of “Mixed Reality” (MR) via a schema that includes the entire spectrum of situations that span the “continuum” between actual reality and virtual reality, with “augmented reality” and “augmented virtuality” between the two poles (283). Important to remark with regard to terminology (MR or AR) is that especially in the non-scientific literature, authors do not always explain a preference for either MR or AR. This suggests that the two terms are understood as synonymous, but it also provides evidence for my argument that, outside of the technical literature, AR is considered a concept rather than a technology. Here, I use the term AR instead of MR considering that the phrase AR (and the integrated idea of augmentation) is better suited to capturing the convergence effect. As I will demonstrate in the following lines, the process of augmentation (i.e. the convergence effect) is the result of an enhancement of the possibilities to perceive and understand the world—through adding data that augment the perception of reality—and not simply the product of a mix. Nevertheless, there is surely something “mixed” about this experience, at least for the fact that it combines reality and virtuality. The experiential result of combining reality and virtuality in the AR process is what media theorist Lev Manovich calls an “augmented space,” a perceptual liminal zone which he defines as “the physical space overlaid with dynamically changing information, multimedia in form and localized for each user” (219). The author derives the term “augmented space” from the term AR (already established in the scientific literature), but he sees AR, and implicitly augmented space, not as a strictly defined technology, but as a model of visuality concerned with the intertwining of the real and virtual: “it is crucial to see this as a conceptual rather than just a technological issue – and therefore as something that in part has already been an element of other architectural and artistic paradigms” (225-6). Surely, it is hard to believe that AR has appeared in a void or that its emergence is strictly related to certain advances in technological research. AR—as an artistic manifestation—is informed by other attempts (not necessarily digital) to merge real and fictional in a unitary perceptual entity, particularly by installation art and Virtual Reality (VR) environments. With installation art, AR shares the same spatial strategy and scenographic approach—they both construct “fictional” areas within material reality, that is, a sort of mise-en-scène that are aesthetically and socially produced and centered on the active viewer. From the media installationist practice of the previous decades, AR inherited the way of establishing a closer spatio-temporal interaction between the setting, the body and the electronic image (see for example Bruce Nauman’s Live-Taped Video Corridor [1970], Peter Campus’s Interface [1972], Dan Graham’s Present Continuous Pasts(s) [1974], Jeffrey Shaw’s Viewpoint [1975], or Jim Campbell’s Hallucination [1988]). On the other hand, VR plays an important role in the genealogy of AR for sharing the same preoccupation for illusionist imagery and—at least in some AR projects—for providing immersive interactions in “expanded image spaces experienced polysensorily and interactively” (Grau 9). VR artworks such as Paul Sermon, Telematic Dreaming (1992), Char Davies’ Osmose (1995), Michael Naimark’s Be Now Here (1995-97), Maurice Benayoun’s World Skin: A Photo Safari in the Land of War (1997), Luc Courchesne’s Where Are You? (2007-10), are significant examples for the way in which the viewer can be immersed in “expanded image-spaces.” Offering no view of the exterior world, the works try instead to reduce as much as possible the critical distance the viewer might have to the image he/she experiences. Indeed, AR emerged in great part from the artistic and scientific research efforts dedicated to VR, but also from the technological and artistic investigations of the possibilities of blending reality and virtuality, conducted in the previous decades. For example, in the 1960s, computer scientist Ivan Sutherland played a crucial role in the history of AR contributing to the development of display solutions and tracking systems that permit a better immersion within the digital image. Another important figure in the history of AR is computer artist Myron Krueger whose experiments with “responsive environments” are fundamental as they proposed a closer interaction between participant’s body and the digital object. More recently, architect and theorist Marcos Novak contributed to the development of the idea of AR by introducing the concept of “eversion”, “the counter-vector of the virtual leaking out into the actual”. Today, AR technological research and the applications made available by various developers and artists are focused more and more on mobility and ubiquitous access to information instead of immersivity and illusionist effects. A few examples of mobile AR include applications such as Layar, Wikitude—“world browsers” that overlay site-specific information in real-time on a real view (video stream) of a place, Streetmuseum (launched in 2010) and Historypin (launched in 2011)—applications that insert archive images into the street-view of a specific location where the old images were taken, or Google Glass (launched in 2012)—a device that provides the wearer access to Google’s key Cloud features, in situ and in real time. Recognizing the importance of various technological developments and of the artistic manifestations such as installation art and VR as predecessors of AR, we should emphasize that AR moves forward from these artistic and technological models. AR extends the installationist precedent by proposing a consistent and seamless integration of informational elements with the very physical space of the spectator, and at the same time rejects the idea of segregating the viewer into a complete artificial environment like in VR systems by opening the perceptual field to the surrounding environment. Instead of leaving the viewer in a sort of epistemological “lust” within the closed limits of the immersive virtual systems, AR sees virtuality rather as a “component of experiencing the real” (Farman 22). Thus, the questions that arise—and which this essay aims to answer—are: Do we have a specific spatial dimension in AR? If yes, can we distinguish it as a different—if not new—spatial and aesthetic paradigm? Is AR’s intricate topology able to be the place not only of convergence, but also of possible tensions between its real and virtual components, between the ideal of obtaining a perceptual continuity and the inherent (technical) limitations that undermine that ideal? Converging Spaces in the Artistic Mode: Between Continuum and Discontinuum As key examples of the way in which AR creates a specific spatial experience—in which convergence appears as a fluctuation between continuity and discontinuity—I mention three of the most accomplished works in the field that, significantly, expose also the essential role played by the interface in providing this experience: Living-Room 2 (2007) by Jan Torpus, Under Scan (2005-2008) by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Hans RichtAR (2013) by John Craig Freeman and Will Pappenheimer. The works illustrate the three main categories of interfaces used for AR experience: head-attached, spatial displays, and hand-held (Bimber 2005). These types of interface—together with all the array of adjacent devices, software and tracking systems—play a central role in determining the forms and outcomes of the user’s experience and consequently inform in a certain measure the aesthetic and socio-cultural interpretative discourse surrounding AR. Indeed, it is not the same to have an immersive but solitary experience, or a mobile and public experience of an AR artwork or application. The first example is Living-Room 2 an immersive AR installation realized by a collective coordinated by Jan Torpus in 2007 at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts FHNW, Basel, Switzerland. The work consists of a built “living-room” with pieces of furniture and domestic objects that are perceptually augmented by means of a “see-through” Head Mounted Display. The viewer perceives at the same time the real room and a series of virtual graphics superimposed on it such as illusionist natural vistas that “erase” the walls, or strange creatures that “invade” the living-room. The user can select different augmenting “scenarios” by interacting with both the physical interfaces (the real furniture and objects) and the graphical interfaces (provided as virtual images in the visual field of the viewer, and activated via a handheld device). For example, in one of the scenarios proposed, the user is prompted to design his/her own extended living room, by augmenting the content and the context of the given real space with different “spatial dramaturgies” or “AR décors.” Another scenario offers the possibility of creating an “Ecosystem”—a real-digital world perceived through the HMD in which strange creatures virtually occupy the living-room intertwining with the physical configuration of the set design and with the user’s viewing direction, body movement, and gestures. Particular attention is paid to the participant’s position in the room: a tracking device measures the coordinates of the participant’s location and direction of view and effectuates occlusions of real space and then congruent superimpositions of 3D images upon it. Figure 1: Jan Torpus, Living-Room 2 (Ecosystems), Augmented Reality installation (2007). Courtesy of the artist. Figure 2: Jan Torpus, Living-Room 2 (AR decors), Augmented Reality installation (2007). Courtesy of the artist.In this sense, the title of the work acquires a double meaning: “living” is both descriptive and metaphoric. As Torpus explains, Living-Room is an ambiguous phrase: it can be both a living-room and a room that actually lives, an observation that suggests the idea of a continuum and of immersion in an environment where there are no apparent ruptures between reality and virtuality. Of course, immersion is in these circumstances not about the creation of a purely artificial secluded space of experience like that of the VR environments, but rather about a dialogical exercise that unifies two different phenomenal levels, real and virtual, within a (dis)continuous environment (with the prefix “dis” as a necessary provision). Media theorist Ron Burnett’s observations about the instability of the dividing line between different levels of experience—more exactly, of the real-virtual continuum—in what he calls immersive “image-worlds” have a particular relevance in this context: Viewing or being immersed in images extend the control humans have over mediated spaces and is part of a perceptual and psychological continuum of struggle for meaning within image-worlds. Thinking in terms of continuums lessens the distinctions between subjects and objects and makes it possible to examine modes of influence among a variety of connected experiences. (113) It is precisely this preoccupation to lessen any (or most) distinctions between subjects and objects, and between real and virtual spaces, that lays at the core of every artistic experiment under the AR rubric. The fact that this distinction is never entirely erased—as Living-Room 2 proves—is part of the very condition of AR. The ambition to create a continuum is after all not about producing perfectly homogenous spaces, but, as Ron Burnett points out (113), “about modalities of interaction and dialogue” between real worlds and virtual images. Another way to frame the same problematic of creating a provisional spatial continuum between reality and virtuality, but this time in a non-immersive fashion (i.e. with projective interface means), occurs in Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Under Scan (2005-2008). The work, part of the larger series Relational Architecture, is an interactive video installation conceived for outdoor and indoor environments and presented in various public spaces. It is a complex system comprised of a powerful light source, video projectors, computers, and a tracking device. The powerful light casts shadows of passers-by within the dark environment of the work’s setting. A tracking device indicates where viewers are positioned and permits the system to project different video sequences onto their shadows. Shot in advance by local videographers and producers, the filmed sequences show full images of ordinary people moving freely, but also watching the camera. As they appear within pedestrians’ shadows, the figurants interact with the viewers, moving and establishing eye contact. Figure 3: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Under Scan (Relational Architecture 11), 2005. Shown here: Trafalgar Square, London, United Kingdom, 2008. Photo by: Antimodular Research. Courtesy of the artist. Figure 4: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Under Scan (Relational Architecture 11), 2005. Shown here: Trafalgar Square, London, United Kingdom, 2008. Photo by: Antimodular Research. Courtesy of the artist. One of the most interesting attributes of this work with respect to the question of AR’s (im)possible perceptual spatial continuity is its ability to create an experientially stimulating and conceptually sophisticated play between illusion and subversion of illusion. In Under Scan, the integration of video projections into the real environment via the active body of the viewer is aimed at tempering as much as possible any disparities or dialectical tensions—that is, any successive or alternative reading—between real and virtual. Although non-immersive, the work fuses the two levels by provoking an intimate but mute dialogue between the real, present body of the viewer and the virtual, absent body of the figurant via the ambiguous entity of the shadow. The latter is an illusion (it marks the presence of a body) that is transcended by another illusion (video projection). Moreover, being “under scan,” the viewer inhabits both the “here” of the immediate space and the “there” of virtual information: “the body” is equally a presence in flesh and bones and an occurrence in bits and bytes. But, however convincing this reality-virtuality pseudo-continuum would be, the spatial and temporal fragmentations inevitably persist: there is always a certain break at the phenomenological level between the experience of real space, the bodily absence/presence in the shadow, and the displacements and delays of the video image projection. Figure 5: John Craig Freeman and Will Pappenheimer, Hans RichtAR, augmented reality installation included in the exhibition “Hans Richter: Encounters”, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2013. Courtesy of the artists. Figure 6: John Craig Freeman and Will Pappenheimer, Hans RichtAR, augmented reality installation included in the exhibition “Hans Richter: Encounters”, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2013. Courtesy of the artists. The third example of an AR artwork that engages the problem of real-virtual spatial convergence as a play between perceptual continuity and discontinuity, this time with the use of hand-held mobile interface is Hans RichtAR by John Craig Freeman and Will Pappenheimer. The work is an AR installation included in the exhibition “Hans Richter: Encounters” at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, in 2013. The project recreates the spirit of the 1929 exhibition held in Stuttgart entitled Film und Foto (“FiFo”) for which avant-garde artist Hans Richter served as film curator. Featured in the augmented reality is a re-imaging of the FiFo Russian Room designed by El Lissitzky where a selection of Russian photographs, film stills and actual film footage was presented. The users access the work through tablets made available at the exhibition entrance. Pointing the tablet at the exhibition and moving around the room, the viewer discovers that a new, complex installation is superimposed on the screen over the existing installation and gallery space at LACMA. The work effectively recreates and interprets the original design of the Russian Room, with its scaffoldings and surfaces at various heights while virtually juxtaposing photography and moving images, to which the authors have added some creative elements of their own. Manipulating and converging real space and the virtual forms in an illusionist way, AR is able—as one of the artists maintains—to destabilize the way we construct representation. Indeed, the work makes a statement about visuality that complicates the relationship between the visible object and its representation and interpretation in the virtual realm. One that actually shows the fragility of establishing an illusionist continuum, of a perfect convergence between reality and represented virtuality, whatever the means employed. AR: A Different Spatial Practice Regardless the degree of “perfection” the convergence process would entail, what we can safely assume—following the examples above—is that the complex nature of AR operations permits a closer integration of virtual images within real space, one that, I argue, constitutes a new spatial paradigm. This is the perceptual outcome of the convergence effect, that is, the process and the product of consolidating different—and differently situated—elements in real and virtual worlds into a single space-image. Of course, illusion plays a crucial role as it makes permeable the perceptual limit between the represented objects and the material spaces we inhabit. Making the interface transparent—in both proper and figurative senses—and integrating it into the surrounding space, AR “erases” the medium with the effect of suspending—at least for a limited time—the perceptual (but not ontological!) differences between what is real and what is represented. These aspects are what distinguish AR from other technological and artistic endeavors that aim at creating more inclusive spaces of interaction. However, unlike the CAVE experience (a display solution frequently used in VR applications) that isolates the viewer within the image-space, in AR virtual information is coextensive with reality. As the example of the Living-Room 2 shows, regardless the degree of immersivity, in AR there is no such thing as dismissing the real in favor of an ideal view of a perfect and completely controllable artificial environment like in VR. The “redemptive” vision of a total virtual environment is replaced in AR with the open solution of sharing physical and digital realities in the same sensorial and spatial configuration. In AR the real is not denounced but reflected; it is not excluded, but integrated. Yet, AR distinguishes itself also from other projects that presuppose a real-world environment overlaid with data, such as urban surfaces covered with screens, Wi-Fi enabled areas, or video installations that are not site-specific and viewer inclusive. Although closely related to these types of projects, AR remains different, its spatiality is not simply a “space of interaction” that connects, but instead it integrates real and virtual elements. Unlike other non-AR media installations, AR does not only place the real and virtual spaces in an adjacent position (or replace one with another), but makes them perceptually convergent in an—ideally—seamless way (and here Hans RichtAR is a relevant example). Moreover, as Lev Manovich notes, “electronically augmented space is unique – since the information is personalized for every user, it can change dynamically over time, and it is delivered through an interactive multimedia interface” (225-6). Nevertheless, as our examples show, any AR experience is negotiated in the user-machine encounter with various degrees of success and sustainability. Indeed, the realization of the convergence effect is sometimes problematic since AR is never perfectly continuous, spatially or temporally. The convergence effect is the momentary appearance of continuity that will never take full effect for the viewer, given the internal (perhaps inherent?) tensions between the ideal of seamlessness and the mostly technical inconsistencies in the visual construction of the pieces (such as real-time inadequacy or real-virtual registration errors). We should note that many criticisms of the AR visualization systems (being them practical applications or artworks) are directed to this particular aspect related to the imperfect alignment between reality and digital information in the augmented space-image. However, not only AR applications can function when having an estimated (and acceptable) registration error, but, I would state, such visual imperfections testify a distinctive aesthetic aspect of AR. The alleged flaws can be assumed—especially in the artistic AR projects—as the “trace,” as the “tool’s stroke” that can reflect the unique play between illusion and its subversion, between transparency of the medium and its reflexive strategy. 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