Journal articles on the topic 'School verse, French'

Born in 1952, Professor of sciences of education at the University of Picardie Jules Verne (Amiens, France), Bruno Poucet is a French renowned historian of education in France. He has conducted and realized various researches on education (and their interactions with politics) in contemporary France. He worked on the history of education policies of the French ‘Fifth Republic’ (founded in 1958 by Charles de Gaulle) at the national level and in the Picardie region - where he lives and works. He is interested in the history of secondary and higher education, private sector of education, school secularism (called in France «laïcité») and the teaching and curriculum of philosophy. Eclectic in his areas of interest, he has also been deeply committed in the functioning of the French education system. He has been a long-time teachers’ union deputy leader at the CFDT (currently the major trade union in France). In 2011, he has created the CAREF research unit (Centre Aménois de Recherche en Éducation et en Formation, specialized in educational studies), at the University of Picardie Jules Verne.He has kindly accepted to be interviewed by Ismail Ferhat, Associate professor at the University of Picardie Jules Verne (CAREF research Unit/Teachers training school of Amiens), for the review Espacio, Tiempo y Educación, in spite of the difficult sanitary situation in France, in April 2020.

Juxtaposed these quotations, which are separated by three centuries and two continents, suggest that seventeenth-century classical French drama serves as a model for African theatre of the early post-colonial period. The first quotation is, of course, from Moliere, the Old Regime's brilliant comic writer. The second is taken from a play by Oyônô-Mbia, a contemporary dramatist from Cameroon. Given the powerful grip France held over its colonies, it is not surprising to find residual influence of France's theatrical culture on African drama. By the end of World War One, French authority in sub-Saharan Africa extended from Cape Verde to the Congo river. The Third Republic established French schools in the larger colonial towns which attracted the children of well-to-do urban families. France therefore held strong political and cultural sway over the development of African leaders and writers.

Bombings in the name of Islam, such as in Turkey, Indonesia, and the French have damaged the integrity of Islam. These acts of extremism are ubiquitous and lead to Islamophobia especially in western countries. While in fact, Islam has taught and promoted the concept of moderation (wasatiyyah) since its emergence in order to avoid extremism among humankind. One of the main underpinning verses in the Qur’an that talks about the concept of wasatiyyah is Surah Al-Baqarah, Verse 143. This paper explores two different views of theological schools, namely Al-Zamakhshari, who represents the Mu‘tazilites and Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, who represents the Ash’arites in dealing with the verse and its interpretations. In its analysis, the paper applied a theological approach to analyze the primary materials. It is expected that the findings will help in the implementation of the concept of moderation (Wasatiyyah) in the contemporary era. Finally, it will also serve as a guide on the ideal way of practicing Islam in order to eliminate and reduce extremism and foster peaceful co-existence between Muslims and adherents of other religions in the world.Pemboman atas nama Islam, seperti di Turki, Indonesia, dan Prancis telah merusak integritas Islam. Tindakan ekstremisme ini ada di mana-mana dan mengarah ke Islamofobia terutama di negara-negara barat. Padahal sebenarnya, Islam telah mengajarkan dan mempromosikan konsep moderasi (wasatiyyah) sejak kemunculannya untuk menghindari ekstremisme di antara umat manusia. Salah satu ayat utama yang mendasari dalam Al-Qur'an yang berbicara tentang konsep wasatiyyah adalah Surah Al-Baqarah, Ayat 143. Makalah ini mengeksplorasi dua pandangan yang berbeda dari sekolah-sekolah teologis, yaitu Al-Zamakhshari, yang mewakili Mu'tazilah dan Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, yang mewakili kaum Ash'ari dalam kaitannya dengan ayat dan interpretasinya. Dalam analisisnya, makalah ini menerapkan pendekatan teologis untuk menganalisis bahan-bahan primer. Diharapkan temuan ini akan membantu dalam penerapan konsep moderasi (wasatiyyah) di era kontemporer. Akhirnya, itu juga akan berfungsi sebagai panduan tentang cara ideal mempraktikkan Islam untuk menghilangkan dan mengurangi ekstrimisme dan menumbuhkan ko-eksistensi damai antara Muslim dan penganut agama lain di dunia.

This paper studies emotional inferencing triggered by emotion terms using Pragma-Dialectics and the Argumentum Model of Topics. The corpus, in French, is an excerpt of a video-recorded testimony in which a middle school teacher evokes her experience of being in class the day after the Charlie Hebdo attack, thus presenting a case of argumentation in context. The analysis focuses on the argumentative structure and on the rhetorical strategies that trigger emotional inferencing. The emotional inferencing derives from a Locus of Ontological Implication, which links a situation and an emotion (and vice-versa), while the culture-bound elements tend to be part of the endoxon.

"Mother – Son: Psychoanalytic Reflections in Joël Pommerat’s Play, This Child. This article proposes an analysis of the sixth scene of Joël Pommerat’s work, This Child, from the perspective of some theorems of psychoanalysis. The French writer introduces the reader/ viewer/ listener to a world of fast-paced plot with the help of autonomous characteristic snapshots that make up his works. In the sixth scene, Pommerat negotiates the unhealthy relationship between a young mother and her underage son where compulsion, possessiveness and latent Oedipal references reign supreme. On the verge of a creeping threat, the mother exerts psychological violence on the young student whom she prevents from leaving for school and pressures her to keep close to home creating a suffocating circle, a space-time that tends to assimilate people and things. Silence is inevitable… Keywords: Pommerat, Oedipus complex, mother-son relationship, possessiveness, obsession, denial, homeopathy. "

ABSTRACTThe learning of second language vocabulary in lists of word pairs is a widespread practice. A basic practical question in this respect is whether it is more effective for nonfluent bilinguals to learn word pairs in first language–second language order (Ll–L2), or vice versa. To date, experimental psychology has not given a clear answer to this question, partly because it has not addressed the relevant issues directly. This article reviews some aspects of psychology that are relevant to L2 vocabulary list learning and reports on an experiment conducted with comprehensive (high) school students, aged 11–13, who were learning French. The experiment examined the presentation of vocabulary items to be learned. It was found that presenting items in L1–L2 order was the more versatile form of presentation if both production and comprehension of L2 items were required on the part of the learner. The theoretical implications of the findings, relating to the structure of the bilingual lexicon, are also discussed.

SummaryThe intensification of research on Lithuanian translations of Italian literature and Italian translations of Lithuanian literature over the past twenty years is paralleled by the growth of interest in Italian literature in Lithuania. However, the existing research on diverse linguistic and cultural characteristics of texts translated from Italian into Lithuanian and vice versa has been sporadic, thus leaving much to be done to uncover links between the two languages and identify translation-related issues. The present article looks into one of the issues, namely, the lexical analytical construction of the Italian language and its translation into Lithuanian. Fictional texts by two representative Italian contemporary writers, Alesandro Baricco and Umberto Eco are chosen as a source of data including over three thousand pages of the source language (SL) and the target language (TL) texts. The results are compared with similar studies on translation of French literary texts into Lithuanian. The study on the translation of lexical analytical constructions in Italian literary texts translated into Lithuanian uses the theoretical framework and methodology provided by the Italian School of Semiotic Translation represented by Umberto Eco and Bruno Osimo among others. The study adopts a holistic approach to the analysis of lexical analytical constructions in Lithuanian translations of Italian literature. Comparative quantitative study has revealed three translation strategies: reformulation, translation without changes and remodelling. Reformulation has been identified to be the most frequent translation strategy. Its frequency was five times higher than that of translation without changes. The latter strategy was twice more frequent than the strategy of remodelling, which, accounts for less than ten per cent of all translation cases. Uses of calque or omission as translation strategies were not found. Comparison of quantitative results regarding the distribution of translation strategies adopted in the Lithuanian translations of Italian and French literary texts and a qualitative analysis of examples revealed similar tendencies in translation choices. It is important to note that changes of lexical analytical constructions into noun constructions were one and a half times less frequent in the translations of Italian literature than in the translations of French literature. Italian and French lexical analytical constructions were replaced by noun constructions in cases when in the SL text these constructions designated object and result but not action. Thus, it can be assumed that lexical analytical constructions in French literary texts were relatively more frequent than those in Italian literary texts.

The relationship of religion and politics is continuously fascinating and elusive, not least because it is rarely posed in a direct way. In stable democracies, incidents which are rather out of the ordinary, such as publishing the Satanic Verses in the United Kingdom or sporting the Islamic headscarf in a French state school, might push the issue temporarily to the centre of the political arena until the categories of normal politics, such as class, region, language or ethnicity, incorporate it or contrive to edge it beyond public visibility. In developing countries, one is accustomed to the more salient presence of religion in the public sphere: for example, the broad sweep of an Islamic revolution in Iran, popular jihad in the Middle East, the militant Sikhs in the Punjab, or the battle for the birthplace of Rama in North India. However, the intelligentsia in these countries who speak with the authority of modern science and the modern state see these events, important as they are, as the expression of primordial sentiments, and indicative of the underdeveloped nature of the people concerned, rather than as the political expression of unresolved issues, ill concealed by the fabric of normal politics and not articulated by political institutions.

The article is devoted to the cultural analysis of the influence of the theory of postfordism, which considers post-Fordist production with post-industrial technology as the basis of industrial reproduction at the global level and the reproduction of capitalist social relations after the crisis of the Fordist mode of production and consumption. The abstract social space of the city is studied, which is formed by abstraction of labor and fetishization of things at the level of practice and the formation of a visually geometric representation of space with sign power re- pressive in relation to reality. The basis of the concept of sociality as the basis of a unified theory of space was developed by the French philosopher and sociologist A. Lefebvre and further developed by American social geography and urban studies, in particular in the works of D. Harvey, E. Soggy, D. Gottdiener and others. The followers of Lefebvre (apart from those important are F. Jameson's influence) refer in particular to the interdisciplinary trend of post-Fordism, within which postmodernism is considered in connection with the post-Fordist regime of accumulation (a concept developed by the Marxist regulatory school). S. Lesch focuses on the cultural mode of signaling. Likewise, D. Hartmann considers the influence of postmodernism on the post-Fordist regime of capitalism. Paolo True and Pascal Gillen consider within the limits of post-Fordism the existence in modern conditions of the plural. V. Martyanov examines the links between post-Fordism and the post-industrial / information society conceptualized by D. Bell, E. Toffler, M. Castels and others. The article deals with the reconstruction of the theory of social space and post-Fordism and outlines the social transformations of the twentieth century. In essence, it was a search for confirmation that the accumulation mode produces and reproduces social space. Architecture and urban space have become an important structural link through which to consider this connection and justify the invariance of the basic mode of accumu- lation through the reproduction of abstract social space and vice versa. The analysis of the discourse around the urban abstract space associated with the identity of the bourgeois class and the need for the for- mation of a hierarchized homogeneous spatial texture of production is carried out. As well as post-Fordist globalization and post-industrialization, which led to a change in the function and structure of the city with the main role of the post-modernist regime of signification as the logic of late capitalism in the context of programmed consumption.

“I suppose in reality not a leaf goes yellow in autumn without ceasing to care about its sap and making the parent tree very uncomfortable by long growling and grumbling - but surely nature might find some less irritating way of carrying on business if she would give her mind to it. Why should the generations overlap one another at all? Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh1 Millenials or Generation Y physicians (born 1977/1980-1995) today form the majority of medical personnel, from medical students and residents in their early twenties and thirties to young attending physicians hitting forty; practicing side-by-side with Generation X (1965-1976/1980) in their late thirties to early fifties; Baby Boomers (1946-1964) in their mid-fifties, sixties and early seventies; and the last of the Silent Generation or Traditionalists (1925-1945) in their mid-seventies, eighties and nineties.2,3 Among 734 Fellows of the Philippine Society of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery alone, there are currently 18 Traditionalists, 192 Boomers, 360 Generation X, and 164 Millenials. Assuming the 862 board-certified Diplomates waiting to become full-fledged Fellows and 182 Residents-in-Training are also Millenials, there are a total of 1,208 Millenials in the field of Otolaryngology Head and Neck Surgery in the Philippines. With four distinct generations simultaneously in the workforce, it is not unusual to hear older physicians gripe about “these Millenials,” and how different they are from previous generations. The so-called generation gap has been used to characterize inter-generational relations, wherein the preceding generation historically puts down the younger, and the succeeding generation usually complains about the older one. I posit that central to this conflict is a clash between tradition -- the way things should be done (as perceived by the older generation) -- and disruption, the way things can be done differently (from the perspective of the younger generation). In particular (meaning no offense to the “in-between” Generation X, and at risk of being overly simplistic), this is highlighted by the supposed looming showdown between Baby Boomers who are not yet ready to leave and Millenials who can hardly wait to take over.4 Tradition, a “statement, belief or practice handed down from generation to generation” comes from the Old French tradicion “transmission, presentation, handing over” and directly from the Latin traditionem “delivery, surrender, a handing down, a giving up,” from tradere “deliver, hand over,” derived from trans – “over” + dare “to give.”5 Although older generations may like to think they uphold tradition (giving them the right and duty to pass it on to succeeding ones), a large part of what defines each generation in the first place is their departure from the statements, beliefs or practices of their predecessors. Such a transition may have been gradual or sudden, and more pronounced in some generations than in others. Our post-war Boomer generation grew up in a world where face-to-face communication was supplemented by the written (handwritten, typewritten, typeset or telegraphed) and spoken (rotary-dial telephone) word. In medicine and medical education, history and physical examination were taught through lectures (with overhead and opaque projectors, slides on carousels and filmstrips) and live demonstrations on patients and on one another. The advent of word processing and advances in telecommunications and technology that became available to Generation X (who in the Philippines include “martial law babies” oblivious to our “wonder years” of the sixties) gradually changed the landscape of medical education and practice, but it would take the digital and internet revolution to finally, drastically change the world-- and Millenials were the primary beneficiaries of this change. Disruption, from the Latin disruptionem “a breaking asunder,” which comes from disrumpere “break apart, split, shatter, break to pieces,” from dis- “apart” + rumpere “to break”6 perhaps best describes the Baby Boomer generation’s experience of the technological revolution that Millenials grew up with. Suddenly, everything could be had in a split-second and the world was connected in real time. No longer did one have to master penmanship, typing and speed-reading, and homes no longer displayed dictionaries and encyclopedias. Even the library card catalogue and periodicals index became obsolete, as most anything became instantly available and accessible – including information, fast food and relationships. Millenials grew up with this transition, and readily mastered the rapidly changing technology. The locus of socialization was no longer face-to-face interaction within the family, but the worldwide web and social media. In medical education, lectures gave way to podcasts and webinars; heavy textbooks gave way to electronic references; and even dissection gave way to 3D virtual human anatomy. The Millenials’ expertise in, and dependence on, technology can both be their boon and bane – as I often note when residents and students automatically search their peripheral brains (a.k.a. mobile devices) to answer a ward round question. But they are also as quick to intuitively master the diagnostic and therapeutic tools that did not exist when their older colleagues were in residency.7 The early access that Millenials and Generation X had to computer resources in childhood certainly laid “a critical foundation for use of these systems later in life,” compared to Baby Boomers and Traditionalists whose “lack of early experience may limit their enthusiasm” for such tools.3 As Cole puts it, “Baby Boomers don't react well to a 20-something coming in and disrupting the way things have ‘always been’ while Millennials don't react well when they're told to shoot for the moon and ‘do big things,’ and then when they walk in the door with new ideas ready to disrupt age-old models, get told to know their place.”8 Thus, older generations of physicians may question how the stock knowledge and clinical eye of Millenials can compare to theirs, who learned medicine without these tools, and wonder how Millenials would fare in conflict and catastrophic situations when technology fails, or in low- and middle-income rural settings where technology is scarce. Conversely, Millenials wonder why Boomers insist on their old ways and just don’t get it! Perhaps we can learn from Mohr et al.3 about bridging generational issues in medical and surgical education—for instance, between the Socratic Method whereby Boomers may appear to intimidate learners9 versus the Millenial expectation that presentation of information be tailored to their needs, individually or via available technology.10 It could be helpful for Millenials who are “outcomes-oriented and value doing more than knowing”11 “to realize that Traditionalists and Boomers ‘know how to do’ and are ready and able to teach.”3 On the other hand, “when instructing Boomers in new technology or information,” the Millenial teacher “should recognize that this role reversal is uncomfortable to older generations” and “mitigate discomfort … by focus(ing) on the relevance of the information and creat(ing) an environment in which it is ‘safe’ to ask questions and challenge the teacher.”3 Indeed, if inter-generational differences could be surmounted, there is much that Boomers can learn from Millenials, and vice versa. If as Cole observes, “this great debate is hauntingly similar to a parent/child argument,”8 it is because Boomers and Millennials are “also each other’s children and parents, bound together in an intricate web of love, support, anxiety, resentment, and interdependence.”4 Perhaps by involving Generation X in bridging the great divide, and fostering an environment that allows for inter-generational differences in teaching and learning styles, non-disruptive disruption of tradition can take place. Each generation must have the humility (as opposed to intellectual arrogance) to accept that they can learn from other generations – younger or older—for truly meaningful medical progress to take place. We cannot do otherwise, for Generation Z (born after 1995, and about to enter Medical School) is already poised to join the fray. References Butler S. The Way of All Flesh. New York: Dover Publications, 2004. 315 pages. The Center for Generational Kinetics. How to determine generational birth years. November 28, 2016 ©2016 [cited 2017 Nov 2.] Available from: http://genhq.com/generational_birth_years/ Mohr NM, Moreno-Walton L, Mills AM, Brunett PH, Promes SB. Generational Influences in Academic Emergency Medicine: Teaching and Learning, Mentoring, and Technology (Part I). Acad Emerg Med. 2011 Feb;18(2):190-199. DOI: 10.1111/j.1553-2712.2010.00985.x PMID: 21314779 PMCID: PMC3076332 Taylor P, Pew Research Center. The Next America: Boomers, Millenials, and the Looming Generational Showdown. New York: PublicAffairs, 2016. 384 pages. Harper D. Online Etymology Dictionary © 2001-2017 [Cited 2017 November 2.] Available from: https://www.etymonline.com/word/tradition Harper D. Online Etymology Dictionary © 2001-2017 [Cited 2017 November 2.] Available from: https://www.etymonline.com/word/disruption Sopher M. How Millenial Doctors Will Shape the Future of Health Care. Blog on the Internet, Baltimore: Rendia, 2016 October 26. [Cited 2017 November 2.] Available from: https://blog.rendia.com/millennials/ Cole N. The Real Reason Baby Boomers and Millenials Don’t See Eye to Eye (Written by a Millenial). Southeast Asia. 2017 Jan 20 [Cited 2017 November 2] Available from: https://www.inc.com/nicolas-cole/the-real-reason-baby-boomers-and-millennials-dont-see-eye-to-eye-written-by-a-mi.html Seabrook M. Intimidation in medical education: students' and teachers' perspectives. Studies Higher Educ. 2004;29(1):59–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1234567032000164877 Feiertag J, Berge ZL. Training generation N: How educators should approach the Net Generation. Education and Training. 2008 September;50(6):457–64. DOI: 10.1108/00400910810901782 Mangold K. Educating a new generation: teaching baby boomer faculty about millennial students. Nurse Educ. 2007 Jan-Feb;32(1):21-23. PMID: 17220763

Artiklis vaadeldakse eellugu nähtusele, mida Andrei Azov nimetas „bukvalistide kukutamiseks“ ning mis viis pooleks sajandiks nn nõukogude tõlkekoolkonna monopolini. Selle nähtuse algust näeme 1934. aastas, mil ilmusid ja said professionaalse arutelu objektiks silmapaistavate vene filoloog-tõlkijate Gustav Špeti ja Boriss Jarho novaatorlikud võõrapärastavad tõlked ja samal ajal seoses Nõukogude kirjanike esimese kongressiga leidis aset toores heteronoomia sissetung tõlkevälja ning tekkis sellest heteronoomiast kasu lõikav kriitiline diskursus. Olulisemate filoloog-tõlkijate hukkumine suure terrori ajal aitas kaasa kriitikute võidukäigule tõlkijate üle ja sealhulgas vene tõlkeajaloo retrospektiivsele moonutamisele, mida käesolev artikkel püüab parandada. Toetudes Lawrence Venuti tuntud teooriale võõrapärastavast ning kodustavast tõlkest, on seda dihhotoomiat diferentseeritud vastavalt nõukogude heteronoomsetele tingimustele. The article discusses the pre-history of what Andrey Azov famously called “the overthrow of the literalists”, and the beginning of the half-a-century domination of the “Soviet school of translation” in Russia. It aims to locate and scrutinise the moment when the previous translation trend, later pejoratively labelled as “literalism”, gave way to the “Soviet school”. In the post-war years, the Russian translators Evgeny Lann and Georgy Shengeli were subjected to harsh criticism as “literalists” by the literary critic, translator and translation theorist Ivan Kashkin. In the official history of Soviet translation as outlined in the Literary Encyclopedia (1968), they were presented as key figures of a translation trend, also labelled “formalist” and “technologically exact”, both post- and pre-war. This version of the history of Soviet translation, still resounding even in Azov’s study (2013), is strongly distorted and needs to be rewritten in a more analytical way. Primarily, the term “literalists”, that was used loosely and pejoratively at the time, can by no means serve as instrumental today. One of the most adequate self-labels of this trend in translation that had its heyday throughout the 1930s, notably in the activities of the Academia publishing house and the Commission for the Study of Literary Translation at the Moscow State Academy of Art Sciences (GAKhN), is “artistically scientific”. In order to describe the trend adequately it should be noted that the “nomination” of Lann and Shengeli as “literalists” and the main targets of post-war criticism owes primarily to the fact that the much more influential key figures of this “school”, mentioned in the Literary Encyclopedia (1934) as the “best present-day translators” – Mikhail Kuzmin, Adrian Pyotrovsky, Boris Yarkho, Mikhail Petrovsky – had either died (Kuzmin) or fallen victim to the great purges that hit also the GAKhNovites, including Gustav Shpet. Their names became unmentionable, while the translation projects and discussions of the 1930s associated with them could not be properly considered in translation histories. In order to reconstruct the true history of Soviet translation they have to be restored to their rightful place. The pivotal point that marked both the acme of the “artistically scientific” translation, as well as the beginning of its demise, was the year 1934. It famously saw the First All-Union Congress of Writers at which translation was declared not the “private domain of a couple of literary pedants, not the academic theme for a philologist’s thesis, but an affair of utmost state importance”. Integration of translation into Stalinist national politics (discussions at the Writers’ Congress were centred on the interests of Soviet nationalities and on praising the free translations made by poets) resulted in a drastic decline of autonomy in the field and in the competition between critics profiting from the heteronomy concerning who would define the true “Soviet translation” and thus have the power to judge. The brilliant samples of scientifically founded translations of classics that appeared in 1934 – Boris Yarkho’s rendition of the medieval romance La Chanson de Roland and Gustav Shpet’s new Russian Dickens and Shakespeare (both to become virtually erased from the history of Soviet translation later on) became the focal point of the dispute over what “Soviet translation” should be. The article reconstructs both Yarkho’s and Shpet’s philologically based translation premises and the conflicting reception of their work by fellow philologists and by politically motivated critics. The transcript of a 1934 discussion held after Evgeny Lann’s report on the principles of the new Dickens translations preserved in the archives clearly shows that, at the time, all discussants, including Kashkin, addressed not Lann but Shpet as the real source of these principles and that it was only after Shpet’s arrest and death that the spearhead of criticism was aimed at Lann (who, unlike Shpet, unfortunately lacked the philological and spiritual stamina and weight to confront it decisively). As for Yarkho’s attempt to invent a Russian poetic diction adequate for rendering French syllabic verse and the heterogeneous style of the medieval war epic, it was both daring and philologically grounded and had been highly praised as a model “Soviet translation” by major philologists working in the field of translation, e.g. Mikhail Alexeev, Alexander Smirnov and Rosalia Shor. At the same time, critics trying to speak in accordance with the political line would criticise it harshly, programmatically declaring their preference for the outdated free-verse translation into Russian made by de la Barthe. In the history of Soviet translation, the transition from the “artistically scientific” or, to use a more familiar term, foreignising trend that had been flourishing throughout the 1930s and given brilliant practical as well as theoretical results, to a domesticating, ahistorical “Soviet school” that lacked theoretical reflection was not a natural evolution. Instead, it constituted a brutal intrusion of heteronomy into the field of translation, the triumph of politically oriented literary critics over professional translators and philologists that was strongly facilitated by the fact that many of the latter were repressed and, consequently, their names and works were erased from the history of Soviet translation.

In one of the lectures a Russian philosopher said: philosophy today is literature. The noted philosopher in his statement relies on the ideas of the French (post)structuralism's. As you know, French thought in the mid-20th century influenced a variety of intellectual schools, from American literary studies to Russian academic philosophy in the 1990s. Literature-centered approach characteristic of modern philosophy. The process of centering on literature is not started in the XX century. Since the eighteenth century, France, Russia, and Germany have been plunging into the worlds of literature on the verge of philosophy or philosophy on the verge of literature. The idea was presented in a variety of ideological formats from socialism and liberalism to conservatism. And if ideologically, more or less, the authors can be identified, then it is impossible to give a clear answer to the question of who all these people are, writers or philosophers. This article analyzes the phenomenon of fantastic conservatism. Conservative values in Western and Russian science fiction literature are analyzed.

Biology teaches us that organisms adapt—or don’t; sociology claims that people adapt—or don’t. We know that ideas can adapt; sometimes even institutions can adapt. Or not. Various papers in this issue attest in exciting ways to precisely such adaptations and maladaptations. (See, for example, the articles in this issue by Lelia Green, Leesa Bonniface, and Tami McMahon, by Lexey A. Bartlett, and by Debra Ferreday.) Adaptation is a part of nature and culture, but it’s the latter alone that interests me here. (However, see the article by Hutcheon and Bortolotti for a discussion of nature and culture together.) It’s no news to anyone that not only adaptations, but all art is bred of other art, though sometimes artists seem to get carried away. My favourite example of excess of association or attribution can be found in the acknowledgements page to a verse drama called Beatrice Chancy by the self-defined “maximalist” (not minimalist) poet, novelist, librettist, and critic, George Elliot Clarke. His selected list of the incarnations of the story of Beatrice Cenci, a sixteenth-century Italian noblewoman put to death for the murder of her father, includes dramas, romances, chronicles, screenplays, parodies, sculptures, photographs, and operas: dramas by Vincenzo Pieracci (1816), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1819), Juliusz Slowacki (1843), Waldter Landor (1851), Antonin Artaud (1935) and Alberto Moravia (1958); the romances by Francesco Guerrazi (1854), Henri Pierangeli (1933), Philip Lindsay (1940), Frederic Prokosch (1955) and Susanne Kircher (1976); the chronicles by Stendhal (1839), Mary Shelley (1839), Alexandre Dumas, père (1939-40), Robert Browning (1864), Charles Swinburne (1883), Corrado Ricci (1923), Sir Lionel Cust (1929), Kurt Pfister (1946) and Irene Mitchell (1991); the film/screenplay by Bertrand Tavernier and Colo O’Hagan (1988); the parody by Kathy Acker (1993); the sculpture by Harriet Hosmer (1857); the photograph by Julia Ward Cameron (1866); and the operas by Guido Pannain (1942), Berthold Goldschmidt (1951, 1995) and Havergal Brian (1962). (Beatrice Chancy, 152) He concludes the list with: “These creators have dallied with Beatrice Cenci, but I have committed indiscretions” (152). An “intertextual feast”, by Clarke’s own admission, this rewriting of Beatrice’s story—especially Percy Bysshe Shelley’s own verse play, The Cenci—illustrates brilliantly what Northrop Frye offered as the first principle of the production of literature: “literature can only derive its form from itself” (15). But in the last several decades, what has come to be called intertextuality theory has shifted thinking away from looking at this phenomenon from the point of view of authorial influences on the writing of literature (and works like Harold Bloom’s famous study of the Anxiety of Influence) and toward considering our readerly associations with literature, the connections we (not the author) make—as we read. We, the readers, have become “empowered”, as we say, and we’ve become the object of academic study in our own right. Among the many associations we inevitably make, as readers, is with adaptations of the literature we read, be it of Jane Austin novels or Beowulf. Some of us may have seen the 2006 rock opera of Beowulf done by the Irish Repertory Theatre; others await the new Neil Gaiman animated film. Some may have played the Beowulf videogame. I personally plan to miss the upcoming updated version that makes Beowulf into the son of an African explorer. But I did see Sturla Gunnarsson’s Beowulf and Grendel film, and yearned to see the comic opera at the Lincoln Centre Festival in 2006 called Grendel, the Transcendence of the Great Big Bad. I am not really interested in whether these adaptations—all in the last year or so—signify Hollywood’s need for a new “monster of the week” or are just the sign of a desire to cash in on the success of The Lord of the Rings. For all I know they might well act as an ethical reminder of the human in the alien in a time of global strife (see McGee, A4). What interests me is the impact these multiple adaptations can have on the reader of literature as well as on the production of literature. Literature, like painting, is usually thought of as what Nelson Goodman (114) calls a one-stage art form: what we read (like what we see on a canvas) is what is put there by the originating artist. Several major consequences follow from this view. First, the implication is that the work is thus an original and new creation by that artist. However, even the most original of novelists—like Salman Rushdie—are the first to tell you that stories get told and retold over and over. Indeed his controversial novel, The Satanic Verses, takes this as a major theme. Works like the Thousand and One Nights are crucial references in all of his work. As he writes in Haroun and the Sea of Stories: “no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born of old” (86). But illusion of originality is only one of the implications of seeing literature as a one-stage art form. Another is the assumption that what the writer put on paper is what we read. But entire doctoral programs in literary production and book history have been set up to study how this is not the case, in fact. Editors influence, even change, what authors want to write. Designers control how we literally see the work of literature. Beatrice Chancy’s bookend maps of historical Acadia literally frame how we read the historical story of the title’s mixed-race offspring of an African slave and a white slave owner in colonial Nova Scotia in 1801. Media interest or fashion or academic ideological focus may provoke a publisher to foreground in the physical presentation different elements of a text like this—its stress on race, or gender, or sexuality. The fact that its author won Canada’s Governor General’s Award for poetry might mean that the fact that this is a verse play is emphasised. If the book goes into a second edition, will a new preface get added, changing the framework for the reader once again? As Katherine Larson has convincingly shown, the paratextual elements that surround a work of literature like this one become a major site of meaning generation. What if literature were not a one-stage an art form at all? What if it were, rather, what Goodman calls “two-stage” (114)? What if we accept that other artists, other creators, are needed to bring it to life—editors, publishers, and indeed readers? In a very real and literal sense, from our (audience) point of view, there may be no such thing as a one-stage art work. Just as the experience of literature is made possible for readers by the writer, in conjunction with a team of professional and creative people, so, arguably all art needs its audience to be art; the un-interpreted, un-experienced art work is not worth calling art. Goodman resists this move to considering literature a two-stage art, not at all sure that readings are end products the way that performance works are (114). Plays, films, television shows, or operas would be his prime examples of two-stage arts. In each of these, a text (a playtext, a screenplay, a score, a libretto) is moved from page to stage or screen and given life, by an entire team of creative individuals: directors, actors, designers, musicians, and so on. Literary adaptations to the screen or stage are usually considered as yet another form of this kind of transcription or transposition of a written text to a performance medium. But the verbal move from the “book” to the diminutive “libretto” (in Italian, little book or booklet) is indicative of a view that sees adaptation as a step downward, a move away from a primary literary “source”. In fact, an entire negative rhetoric of “infidelity” has developed in both journalistic reviewing and academic discourse about adaptations, and it is a morally loaded rhetoric that I find surprising in its intensity. Here is the wonderfully critical description of that rhetoric by the king of film adaptation critics, Robert Stam: Terms like “infidelity,” “betrayal,” “deformation,” “violation,” “bastardisation,” “vulgarisation,” and “desecration” proliferate in adaptation discourse, each word carrying its specific charge of opprobrium. “Infidelity” carries overtones of Victorian prudishness; “betrayal” evokes ethical perfidy; “bastardisation” connotes illegitimacy; “deformation” implies aesthetic disgust and monstrosity; “violation” calls to mind sexual violence; “vulgarisation” conjures up class degradation; and “desecration” intimates religious sacrilege and blasphemy. (3) I join many others today, like Stam, in challenging the persistence of this fidelity discourse in adaptation studies, thereby providing yet another example of what, in his article here called “The Persistence of Fidelity: Adaptation Theory Today,” John Connor has called the “fidelity reflex”—the call to end an obsession with fidelity as the sole criterion for judging the success of an adaptation. But here I want to come at this same issue of the relation of adaptation to the adapted text from another angle. When considering an adaptation of a literary work, there are other reasons why the literary “source” text might be privileged. Literature has historical priority as an art form, Stam claims, and so in some people’s eyes will always be superior to other forms. But does it actually have priority? What about even earlier performative forms like ritual and song? Or to look forward, instead of back, as Tim Barker urges us to do in his article here, what about the new media’s additions to our repertoire with the advent of electronic technology? How can we retain this hierarchy of artistic forms—with literature inevitably on top—in a world like ours today? How can both the Romantic ideology of original genius and the capitalist notion of individual authorship hold up in the face of the complex reality of the production of literature today (as well as in the past)? (In “Amen to That: Sampling and Adapting the Past”, Steve Collins shows how digital technology has changed the possibilities of musical creativity in adapting/sampling.) Like many other ages before our own, adaptation is rampant today, as director Spike Jonze and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman clearly realised in creating Adaptation, their meta-cinematic illustration-as-send-up film about adaptation. But rarely has a culture denigrated the adapter as a secondary and derivative creator as much as we do the screenwriter today—as Jonze explores with great irony. Michelle McMerrin and Sergio Rizzo helpfully explain in their pieces here that one of the reasons for this is the strength of auteur theory in film criticism. But we live in a world in which works of literature have been turned into more than films. We now have literary adaptations in the forms of interactive new media works and videogames; we have theme parks; and of course, we have the more common television series, radio and stage plays, musicals, dance works, and operas. And, of course, we now have novelisations of films—and they are not given the respect that originary novels are given: it is the adaptation as adaptation that is denigrated, as Deborah Allison shows in “Film/Print: Novelisations and Capricorn One”. Adaptations across media are inevitably fraught, and for complex and multiple reasons. The financing and distribution issues of these widely different media alone inevitably challenge older capitalist models. The need or desire to appeal to a global market has consequences for adaptations of literature, especially with regard to its regional and historical specificities. These particularities are what usually get adapted or “indigenised” for new audiences—be they the particularities of the Spanish gypsy Carmen (see Ioana Furnica, “Subverting the ‘Good, Old Tune’”), those of the Japanese samurai genre (see Kevin P. Eubanks, “Becoming-Samurai: Samurai [Films], Kung-Fu [Flicks] and Hip-Hop [Soundtracks]”), of American hip hop graffiti (see Kara-Jane Lombard, “‘To Us Writers, the Differences Are Obvious’: The Adaptation of Hip Hop Graffiti to an Australian Context”) or of Jane Austen’s fiction (see Suchitra Mathur, “From British ‘Pride’ to Indian ‘Bride’: Mapping the Contours of a Globalised (Post?)Colonialism”). What happens to the literary text that is being adapted, often multiple times? Rather than being displaced by the adaptation (as is often feared), it most frequently gets a new life: new editions of the book appear, with stills from the movie adaptation on its cover. But if I buy and read the book after seeing the movie, I read it differently than I would have before I had seen the film: in effect, the book, not the adaptation, has become the second and even secondary text for me. And as I read, I can only “see” characters as imagined by the director of the film; the cinematic version has taken over, has even colonised, my reader’s imagination. The literary “source” text, in my readerly, experiential terms, becomes the secondary work. It exists on an experiential continuum, in other words, with its adaptations. It may have been created before, but I only came to know it after. What if I have read the literary work first, and then see the movie? In my imagination, I have already cast the characters: I know what Gabriel and Gretta Conroy of James Joyce’s story, “The Dead,” look and sound like—in my imagination, at least. Then along comes John Huston’s lush period piece cinematic adaptation and the director superimposes his vision upon mine; his forcibly replaces mine. But, in this particular case, Huston still arguably needs my imagination, or at least my memory—though he may not have realised it fully in making the film. When, in a central scene in the narrative, Gabriel watches his wife listening, moved, to the singing of the Irish song, “The Lass of Aughrim,” what we see on screen is a concerned, intrigued, but in the end rather blank face: Gabriel doesn’t alter his expression as he listens and watches. His expression may not change—but I know exactly what he is thinking. Huston does not tell us; indeed, without the use of voice-over, he cannot. And since the song itself is important, voice-over is impossible. But I know exactly what he is thinking: I’ve read the book. I fill in the blank, so to speak. Gabriel looks at Gretta and thinks: There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of. If he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude. … Distant Music he would call the picture if he were a painter. (210) A few pages later the narrator will tell us: At last she turned towards them and Gabriel saw that there was colour on her cheeks and that her eyes were shining. A sudden tide of joy went leaping out of his heart. (212) This joy, of course, puts him in a very different—disastrously different—state of mind than his wife, who (we later learn) is remembering a young man who sang that song to her when she was a girl—and who died, for love of her. I know this—because I’ve read the book. Watching the movie, I interpret Gabriel’s blank expression in this knowledge. Just as the director’s vision can colonise my visual and aural imagination, so too can I, as reader, supplement the film’s silence with the literary text’s inner knowledge. The question, of course, is: should I have to do so? Because I have read the book, I will. But what if I haven’t read the book? Will I substitute my own ideas, from what I’ve seen in the rest of the film, or from what I’ve experienced in my own life? Filmmakers always have to deal with this problem, of course, since the camera is resolutely externalising, and actors must reveal their inner worlds through bodily gesture or facial expression for the camera to record and for the spectator to witness and comprehend. But film is not only a visual medium: it uses music and sound, and it also uses words—spoken words within the dramatic situation, words overheard on the street, on television, but also voice-over words, spoken by a narrating figure. Stephen Dedalus escapes from Ireland at the end of Joseph Strick’s 1978 adaptation of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with the same words as he does in the novel, where they appear as Stephen’s diary entry: Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. … Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead. (253) The words from the novel also belong to the film as film, with its very different story, less about an artist than about a young Irishman finally able to escape his family, his religion and his country. What’s deliberately NOT in the movie is the irony of Joyce’s final, benign-looking textual signal to his reader: Dublin, 1904 Trieste, 1914 The first date is the time of Stephen’s leaving Dublin—and the time of his return, as we know from the novel Ulysses, the sequel, if you like, to this novel. The escape was short-lived! Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has an ironic structure that has primed its readers to expect not escape and triumph but something else. Each chapter of the novel has ended on this kind of personal triumphant high; the next has ironically opened with Stephen mired in the mundane and in failure. Stephen’s final words in both film and novel remind us that he really is an Icarus figure, following his “Old father, old artificer”, his namesake, Daedalus. And Icarus, we recall, takes a tumble. In the novel version, we are reminded that this is the portrait of the artist “as a young man”—later, in 1914, from the distance of Trieste (to which he has escaped) Joyce, writing this story, could take some ironic distance from his earlier persona. There is no such distance in the film version. However, it stands alone, on its own; Joyce’s irony is not appropriate in Strick’s vision. His is a different work, with its own message and its own, considerably more romantic and less ironic power. Literary adaptations are their own things—inspired by, based on an adapted text but something different, something other. I want to argue that these works adapted from literature are now part of our readerly experience of that literature, and for that reason deserve the same attention we give to the literary, and not only the same attention, but also the same respect. I am a literarily trained person. People like me who love words, already love plays, but shouldn’t we also love films—and operas, and musicals, and even videogames? There is no need to denigrate words that are heard (and visualised) in order to privilege words that are read. Works of literature can have afterlives in their adaptations and translations, just as they have pre-lives, in terms of influences and models, as George Eliot Clarke openly allows in those acknowledgements to Beatrice Chancy. I want to return to that Canadian work, because it raises for me many of the issues about adaptation and language that I see at the core of our literary distrust of the move away from the written, printed text. I ended my recent book on adaptation with a brief examination of this work, but I didn’t deal with this particular issue of language. So I want to return to it, as to unfinished business. Clarke is, by the way, clear in the verse drama as well as in articles and interviews that among the many intertexts to Beatrice Chancy, the most important are slave narratives, especially one called Celia, a Slave, and Shelley’s play, The Cenci. Both are stories of mistreated and subordinated women who fight back. Since Clarke himself has written at length about the slave narratives, I’m going to concentrate here on Shelley’s The Cenci. The distance from Shelley’s verse play to Clarke’s verse play is a temporal one, but it is also geographic and ideological one: from the old to the new world, and from a European to what Clarke calls an “Africadian” (African Canadian/African Acadian) perspective. Yet both poets were writing political protest plays against unjust authority and despotic power. And they have both become plays that are more read than performed—a sad fate, according to Clarke, for two works that are so concerned with voice. We know that Shelley sought to calibrate the stylistic registers of his work with various dramatic characters and effects to create a modern “mixed” style that was both a return to the ancients and offered a new drama of great range and flexibility where the expression fits what is being expressed (see Bruhn). His polemic against eighteenth-century European dramatic conventions has been seen as leading the way for realist drama later in the nineteenth century, with what has been called its “mixed style mimesis” (Bruhn) Clarke’s adaptation does not aim for Shelley’s perfect linguistic decorum. It mixes the elevated and the biblical with the idiomatic and the sensual—even the vulgar—the lushly poetic with the coarsely powerful. But perhaps Shelley’s idea of appropriate language fits, after all: Beatrice Chancy is a woman of mixed blood—the child of a slave woman and her slave owner; she has been educated by her white father in a convent school. Sometimes that educated, elevated discourse is heard; at other times, she uses the variety of discourses operative within slave society—from religious to colloquial. But all the time, words count—as in all printed and oral literature. Clarke’s verse drama was given a staged reading in Toronto in 1997, but the story’s, if not the book’s, real second life came when it was used as the basis for an opera libretto. Actually the libretto commission came first (from Queen of Puddings Theatre in Toronto), and Clarke started writing what was to be his first of many opera texts. Constantly frustrated by the art form’s demands for concision, he found himself writing two texts at once—a short libretto and a longer, five-act tragic verse play to be published separately. Since it takes considerably longer to sing than to speak (or read) a line of text, the composer James Rolfe keep asking for cuts—in the name of economy (too many singers), because of clarity of action for audience comprehension, or because of sheer length. Opera audiences have to sit in a theatre for a fixed length of time, unlike readers who can put a book down and return to it later. However, what was never sacrificed to length or to the demands of the music was the language. In fact, the double impact of the powerful mixed language and the equally potent music, increases the impact of the literary text when performed in its operatic adaptation. Here is the verse play version of the scene after Beatrice’s rape by her own father, Francis Chancey: I was black but comely. Don’t glance Upon me. This flesh is crumbling Like proved lies. I’m perfumed, ruddied Carrion. Assassinated. Screams of mucking juncos scrawled Over the chapel and my nerves, A stickiness, as when he finished Maculating my thighs and dress. My eyes seep pus; I can’t walk: the floors Are tizzy, dented by stout mauling. Suddenly I would like poison. The flesh limps from my spine. My inlets crimp. Vultures flutter, ghastly, without meaning. I can see lice swarming the air. … His scythe went shick shick shick and slashed My flowers; they lay, murdered, in heaps. (90) The biblical and the violent meet in the texture of the language. And none of that power gets lost in the opera adaptation, despite cuts and alterations for easier aural comprehension. I was black but comely. Don’t look Upon me: this flesh is dying. I’m perfumed, bleeding carrion, My eyes weep pus, my womb’s sopping With tears; I can hardly walk: the floors Are tizzy, the sick walls tumbling, Crumbling like proved lies. His scythe went shick shick shick and cut My flowers; they lay in heaps, murdered. (95) Clarke has said that he feels the libretto is less “literary” in his words than the verse play, for it removes the lines of French, Latin, Spanish and Italian that pepper the play as part of the author’s critique of the highly educated planter class in Nova Scotia: their education did not guarantee ethical behaviour (“Adaptation” 14). I have not concentrated on the music of the opera, because I wanted to keep the focus on the language. But I should say that the Rolfe’s score is as historically grounded as Clarke’s libretto: it is rooted in African Canadian music (from ring shouts to spirituals to blues) and in Scottish fiddle music and local reels of the time, not to mention bel canto Italian opera. However, the music consciously links black and white traditions in a way that Clarke’s words and story refuse: they remain stubbornly separate, set in deliberate tension with the music’s resolution. Beatrice will murder her father, and, at the very moment that Nova Scotia slaves are liberated, she and her co-conspirators will be hanged for that murder. Unlike the printed verse drama, the shorter opera libretto functions like a screenplay, if you will. It is not so much an autonomous work unto itself, but it points toward a potential enactment or embodiment in performance. Yet, even there, Clarke cannot resist the lure of words—even though they are words that no audience will ever hear. The stage directions for Act 3, scene 2 of the opera read: “The garden. Slaves, sunflowers, stars, sparks” (98). The printed verse play is full of these poetic associative stage directions, suggesting that despite his protestations to the contrary, Clarke may have thought of that version as one meant to be read by the eye. After Beatrice’s rape, the stage directions read: “A violin mopes. Invisible shovelsful of dirt thud upon the scene—as if those present were being buried alive—like ourselves” (91). Our imaginations—and emotions—go to work, assisted by the poet’s associations. There are many such textual helpers—epigraphs, photographs, notes—that we do not have when we watch and listen to the opera. We do have the music, the staged drama, the colours and sounds as well as the words of the text. As Clarke puts the difference: “as a chamber opera, Beatrice Chancy has ascended to television broadcast. But as a closet drama, it play only within the reader’s head” (“Adaptation” 14). Clarke’s work of literature, his verse drama, is a “situated utterance, produced in one medium and in one historical and social context,” to use Robert Stam’s terms. In the opera version, it was transformed into another “equally situated utterance, produced in a different context and relayed through a different medium” (45-6). I want to argue that both are worthy of study and respect by wordsmiths, by people like me. I realise I’ve loaded the dice: here neither the verse play nor the libretto is primary; neither is really the “source” text, for they were written at the same time and by the same person. But for readers and audiences (my focus and interest here), they exist on a continuum—depending on which we happen to experience first. As Ilana Shiloh explores here, the same is true about the short story and film of Memento. I am not alone in wanting to mount a defence of adaptations. Julie Sanders ends her new book called Adaptation and Appropriation with these words: “Adaptation and appropriation … are, endlessly and wonderfully, about seeing things come back to us in as many forms as possible” (160). The storytelling imagination is an adaptive mechanism—whether manifesting itself in print or on stage or on screen. The study of the production of literature should, I would like to argue, include those other forms taken by that storytelling drive. If I can be forgiven a move to the amusing—but still serious—in concluding, Terry Pratchett puts it beautifully in his fantasy story, Witches Abroad: “Stories, great flapping ribbons of shaped space-time, have been blowing and uncoiling around the universe since the beginning of time. And they have evolved. The weakest have died and the strongest have survived and they have grown fat on the retelling.” In biology as in culture, adaptations reign. References Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. Bruhn, Mark J. “’Prodigious Mixtures and Confusions Strange’: The Self-Subverting Mixed Style of The Cenci.” Poetics Today 22.4 (2001). Clarke, George Elliott. “Beatrice Chancy: A Libretto in Four Acts.” Canadian Theatre Review 96 (1998): 62-79. ———. Beatrice Chancy. 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Introduction What French food is would seem to be an unproblematic idea. Depending on one’s taste and familiarity, a croissant, or snails, might spring to mind. Those who are a little more intimate with French cuisine might suggest the taste of a coq au vin or ratatouille, and fewer still might suggest tarte flambée or cancoillotte. Whatever the relative popularity of the dish or food, the French culinary tradition is arguably so familiar and, indeed, loved around the world that almost everyone could name one or two French culinary objects. Moreover, as the (self-proclaimed) leader of Western cuisine, the style and taste epitomised by French cuisine and the associated dining experience are also arguably some of the most attractive aspects of French gastronomy. From this perspective, where French cuisine appears to be so familiar to the non-French, seeking to define what constitutes a French meal could seem to be an inane exercise. Nonetheless, in 2010, the Mission Française du Patrimoine et des Cultures Alimentaires (not officially translated), under the aegis of the French Ministry of Culture and Communication, put forward the nomination file “The Gastronomic Meal of the French” to UNESCO, defining in clear terms a particular image of French taste, in a bid to have the meal recognised as part of the Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage. With the number of specifically culinary elements protected by UNESCO more than doubling with the 2013 session of the Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, and with a further two in line for protection in the 2014 session, it would seem that an examination of these protected culinary traditions is in order. Rather than focusing on the problems associated with creating an intangible heritage list (Kurin; Smith and Akagawa), this article proposes an analysis of one nomination file, “The Gastronomic Meal of the French,” and the ideas which structure it. More specifically, this article will investigate how the idea of taste is deployed in the document from two different yet interconnected points of view. That is, taste as the faculty of discerning what is aesthetically excellent, and taste in its more literal gustative sense. This study will demonstrate how these two ideas of taste are used to create a problematic notion of French culinary identity, which by focusing on the framework of local (terroir) taste seeks to define national taste. By specifically citing local food stuffs (produits du terroir) and practices as well as French Republicanism in the formation of this identity, I argue that the nomination file eschews problems of cultural difference. As a result, “non-French food” and the associated identities it embodies, inherent in contemporary multicultural societies such as France with its large immigrant population, are incorporated into a cohesive, singular, culinary identity. French taste, then, is represented as uniform and embodied by the shared love of the French “art of good eating and drinking”. “Intangible” Versus “Tangible” Cultural Heritage: A Brief Overview The Intangible Cultural Heritage list was created to compliment UNESCO’s Tangible Cultural Heritage, that is, the famous World Heritage, list, which focuses on places of unique heritage. The Intangible Cultural Heritage list, for its part, concentrates on: traditions or living expressions inherited from our ancestors and passed on to our descendants, such as oral traditions, performing arts, social practices, rituals, festive events, knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe or the knowledge and skills to produce traditional crafts (“What is Intangible Cultural Heritage?”) An examination of the elements which have been admitted to UNESCO’s Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage shows that there is a clear preference for traditional dances and songs. The culinary plays a very small role in the almost 300 elements currently protected by UNESCO. With the recent inscription of several additional, specifically culinary elements in December 2013, the number has more doubled but still remains low at ten elements. Out of the ten, only two of them seek to protect a cooking style: the “Mediterranean Diet” and “Traditional Mexican cuisine—ancestral, ongoing community culture, the Michoacán paradigm.” The other elements are specific culinary objects, such as Gingerbread from Northern Croatia, or culinary events, for instance the “Commemoration feast of the finding of the True Holy Cross of Christ in Ethiopia.” “The Gastronomic Meal of the French” belongs to the latter category, however is somewhat different since it is not an annual event and can take place at any time of the year as it is not related to a season or historical event. What really distinguishes the French document from the others on the list, however, is its emphasis on the idea of taste, which connects it to a long history of writing about taste in French cuisine, including of course Brillat-Savarin’s Physiology of Taste. In order to describe exactly what constitutes “The Gastronomic Meal of the French,” the authors refer frequently to two coextensive conceptions of taste, proposing that the taste of the meal is both a question of flavor and the aesthetic qualities of the diner as a whole. Whilst these ideas concerning the place of taste in French gastronomy appear to share numerous similarities to those elaborated in Brillat-Savarin’s work, I will focus on the way the conceptions of taste discussed in the dossier are used to formulate French identity. Taste: An Aesthetic Judgment, An Art When considering “The Gastronomic Meal of the French,” the closeness of the two ideas of aesthetic taste and gustative taste is perhaps clearer in French: the French verb dresser can be used to describe setting the table, an important aspect of the gastronomic meal, and arranging food on a plate. This link to aesthetics is important and in the nomination file the Gastronomic Meal of the French is taken as representative of the height of the French “art of good eating and drinking.” In the terms of the document the authors define the meal as “a festive meal bringing people together for an occasion to enjoy the art of good eating and drinking” (“Nomination file” 3). In evoking art here, they stress the importance that aesthetics play in the design of this meal. For them, the culinary art of the gastronomic meal involves both aesthetic and gustative concerns, since in order for the guests to savour the meal, the hosts must think as much about the delectability of their dishes as the classic French taste they must demonstrate in their table decoration and discussion about the food which they prepare. The participants’ conversation about the food during the meal and their comportment at the table are important elements of this taste, since they reinforce and aestheticize the dining experience. Moreover, both the host and guests must use “codified gestures” and certain expressions to discuss what they are eating and drinking so as to display by means of specific vocabulary that they are enjoying the meal (5). The art of conversation, then, is important in accomplishing one of the goals of the gastronomic meal, that being to share “the pleasure of taste” (8). The nomination file lists the gastronomic meal’s specific rites as involving the “setting [of] a beautiful table, the order of courses, food and wine pairing, [and] conversation about the dishes” (3). By listing these elements in this order, the authors highlight that aesthetic and gustative concerns are interrelated and equally important. What is more, just as the decoration of a table and conversing about the dishes could be seen to be arts in the largest sense of the term, so too should “the order of the courses” and the “food and wine pairing” be understood to be a question of aesthetic judgment. In other words, the role of these rites in the gastronomic meal is as much to reinforce the sophisticated aesthetics of the hosts’ meal as to delight the taste buds of the guests. The prominent role of the aestheticization of taste in the gastronomic meal is made even clearer elsewhere in the document when the authors specify how the table should be laid for a gastronomic meal. They write that this should be done according to the: classic French taste, based on symmetry that fans out from the centre and including a tablecloth, artistically folded napkins, objects whose shapes are appropriate for each course and designed to enhance tastes; and, depending on the circumstance, between two and five glasses, several plates and utensils, and sometimes a written menu. (5) Here the aesthetics of the table are not simply meant to be appreciated visually, but supposed to support and “enhance tastes”. The two forms of taste, then, are clearly complementary ingredients in the successful hosting of a gastronomic meal and hosts should pay equal attention to both. The authors state that the extra care paid to the aesthetics of the meal is meant to honour the guests and differentiate the meal from a standard, everyday meal (5). Since the two ideas of taste intersect, it naturally follows that the choice of the culinary products for the meal also contributes to the goal of creating a special dining experience. Taste as Gustative Experience, The Terroir For the authors, the French palate is not unified by a canon of specific dishes, but a shared “vision of eating well” (3). This collective vision encompasses several different ideas, including the structure of the meal, the recipes used and the choice of products. Just as with the aesthetic concerns above regarding table arrangements, the authors are quite particular about the configuration of the meal. For them, the gastronomic meal must respect the same structure: beginning with the apéritif (drinks before the meal) and ending with liqueurs, containing in between at least four successive courses, namely a starter, fish and/or meat with vegetables, cheese and dessert, the courses possibly numbering five or six depending on the occasion. (5) The structure of the meal is supposed to highlight the quality of the good products that the host has obtained and exhibit how their flavours go well together (5). In terms of the exact recipes used in the meal, the host might call upon a “repertoire of codified recipes” (3) in order to honour the shared “vision of eating well”. So deeply ingrained is this shared vision in the French psyche that the authors do not need to specify what the recipes are, and even go so far as to claim that the unknown list is “constantly growing” (5). This undefined catalogue of recipes and shared “vision of eating well,” then, arguably represent a banal form of national culinary identity, since these culinary practices constitute a “form of life, which is daily lived” (Billig 69) by the nation without being specified. More important than the recipes, however, is the “search for good products” (3). The hunt for good products begins with seeking out “local food products available at markets […] since they have a high cultural value” (6). The authors argue that the importance attached to these products symbolises the French commitment to non-standardised food products and “quality in terms of taste, nutrition and food safety” (6). The height of gustative taste is represented by the use of these local food products (produits du terroir) since they provide evidence of the hosts’ “knowledge of the characteristics of local production areas” (2). Just as above with the aesthetic concerns of the meal, when discussing one idea of taste, the other is never far away. In this case, the hosts’ knowledge of the local products, used in crafting the gustative experience, is meant to contribute the art of conversation which takes place during the meal. The hosts’ gustative and aesthetic tastes are on display and under analysis at every point in the meal. For the authors of the nomination file, then, French gustative taste is ruled by the idea of terroir. Successfully holding a gastronomic meal means that the hosts must be intimately familiar with France’s geography and the local products of France and use this knowledge to choose the right products. All of these very specific ideas concerning the aesthetic and gustative tastes illustrated in the document, then, raise interesting questions about inclusion and exclusion in the notion of French culinary identity they embody. Whose Taste Is It? So far I have argued that taste is the central preoccupation of the nomination file, which governs both aesthetic and gustative choices a host makes when organizing and holding a gastronomic meal. This discussion has elided some of the questions raised by the document’s definitions of taste, most notably the problem of whose taste is defined by the document. One possible response to this question is provided in quite clear terms by the document itself, when the authors talk about the antecedent of the current meal. For them, the meal evolved out of the values exemplified by “the high-society meal, transmitted through revolutionary France [and which] inspired working-class practices” (5). This reference to revolutionary French values reveals how the authors’ arguments about taste are informed by the values of the French Republic, a powerful notion in discussions about French national identity. As numerous critics have contended, the status of France as a republic significantly impacts on how national identity is constructed (McCaffrey), since it is conceived of through the idea of citizenship. Put simply, being a French citizen means that, for the state, one’s position as a citizen takes precedence over any cultural particularisms or clan and family solidarities (Jennings). To put it another way, whilst the individual person displays specificities, the citizen demonstrates the universal values held by all citizens of the French state (Schnapper). Citizenship is a political matter and any aspect of one’s private life is irrelevant to the state’s treatment of its citizens. In ignoring any particularisms that a citizen may have, French Republicanism seeks to universalise all values held by its citizens, simultaneously providing a common shared identity and a means to exclude anyone who fails to commit to these ideals. As Jennings has pointed out elsewhere, these Republican ideals have an interesting effect on how one considers French national identity in the contemporary diverse society that is France, since “despite an astonishing level of cultural and ethnic diversity, France has seen itself as and has sought to become a monocultural society” (575). In terms of the French culinary practices discussed here the associated problems with French Republicanism are clear, for such a “mono-culinary” representation of French foodways would potentially lead to significant portions of the population being left out of any such definition. Given the document’s reference to the Republic, the universalizing force displayed in the nomination file cannot simply be considered the result of the structure of UNESCO’s bureaucratic file, but should instead be understood as the expression of French Republican ideas of identity. Here it is the quality of local ingredients (produits du terroir) which characterise the universal pleasure of taste and the appreciation of local farming practices (terroirs) that the authors seek to elevate in the face of any imported tastes concurrently practised in France. The fact that the universal claims made in the French document are specific to it, and not inherent of UNESCO’s form, is evident when examining other nomination files, such as the traditional Mexican cuisine dossier. Whilst the Mexican dossier argues that the cuisine offers a “comprehensive cultural model” (4), its authors talk instead of communities whose identities display “distinct yet shared features, all of them together [making] for a flourishing cuisine throughout the country” (12). The Mexican file, thus, recognises that diversity is an integral part of its culinary model. For the French dossier, on the other hand, the Republican ideas are made patent by the authors’ insistence upon the homogenous nature of these culinary practices and tastes. They assert, for instance, that the meal is a “very popular practice, with which all French people are familiar” (3); that it displays a “homogeneity in the whole community” (3); that it embodies a “social practice […] associated with a shared vision of eating well” (3); and that it is part of a “shared history and that it carries the values on which French culture is based” (5). The authors also reference a small survey to support this supposition in which an incredible 95.7 per cent of respondents consider “the gastronomic meal to be part of their heritage and identity” (10). Furthermore they claim that the gastronomic meal transcends local customs, generations, social class and opinions, and adapts to religious and philosophical beliefs. Its values take in diversity and strengthen feelings of belonging for participants in the gastronomic meal. (5) This quotation demonstrates the Republic’s ability to transform the particular into the general, the individual into citizen. Here this transformative ability is seen in the authors’ assertion that the Gastronomic Meal of the French cuts across “local customs” and “social classes” to bring people together and reinforce the sense of a united nation. With this insistent discourse that the meal is unanimously accepted, understood, and practised by the entire nation, despite one’s particularisms, the authors of the file demonstrate how they seek to universalise the meal. The meal should no longer be considered as an object, for the authors seek to promote it to the status of a national myth which is deeply rooted in the national psyche, echoing the nation’s motto of “One Republic/cuisine united and indivisible for everyone.” The Republican nature of the universal tastes represented in the document is further reinforced when the authors emphasise the role of the State and its education system in ensuring that the right taste prevails. Just as many critics discussing the Republic regard the French education system’s role as one which constructs citizens (Janey), equipping them with the appropriate national values, the authors of nomination file argue that good taste is of national significance and ought to be taught in the education system. For them, this taste should be imparted to students in primary schools by regularly preparing and consuming meals so as to instruct them in “the rites of the gastronomic meal, including the choice of the right products” (8). The idea of the right taste is further impressed upon students through the annual “Taste Week” in which “educational activities on nutrition and the development of taste […] essential to maintaining the rites of the element [take place in schools]” (7). These activities include instruction in “the combining of flavours, pleasure of taste, choice of the right product, conversation and gastronomic discourse” (7). For those not at school, the “choice of the right product” (14) mentioned here is facilitated through yet another state sanctioned source of taste, the Inventory of Traditional Food and Agricultural Know-how. Conclusion The “Gastronomic Meal of the French” defines national culinary identity by combining several different ideas together. On one level, the authors draw together Benedict Anderson’s concept of “imagined communities” and Michael Billig’s notion of “banal nationalism.” They argue that there exists a state approved, written form this identity which is intimately linked to the French Republic and its history (Anderson), whilst also contending that the food practices are so well-known that they are banal facets of everyday lived experience (Billig). On another level, they draw these assertions regarding national identity together through the notion of taste, which the authors stress is integral to French culinary identity. In terms of gustative taste, the preference for terroir in the document points to how the local is used as a “conduit toward national self-understanding” (Gerson 215). Yet this approach leads to a problematic relationship between local and national concerns, which ought to be seen as part of a larger issue concerning the link between Republican values and the disciplining of French culinary identity and space. What it is tempting to ask—and the present paper is just the beginning—is how do state sanctioned bodies, like the Mission Française du Patrimoine et des Cultures Alimentaires combined with brotherhoods (confréries) and local organisations mentioned in the nomination file as well as the system of Appellations d’Origine Contrôlée, come together to discipline French culinary identity and taste? The examination of the present document seems to suggest that Republican Universalism is one key ingredient in this act of discipline. The hesitation between asserting a cohesive, national culinary identity whilst at the same time recognising the “diversity of traditions foods and cuisines” (5), appears to be representative of the hesitation in political discourse apparent in the modern Republic. The tensions exposed in this document are being played out in the policies concerning decentralisation and recognition to a certain extent of regional minorities in France. As Schnapper puts it, the great problem which the Republic currently faces is how can the state reconcile “the absolute of citizenship—the Republic—with the legitimate expression of particularistic allegiances in conformity with democratic values” (quoted, Jennings 152). Ultimately, what “The Gastronomic Meal of the French” shows is how pertinent Republican ideas still are in France, since, despite claims of a crisis in Republican values and the current debates in French parliament, they remain important in any consideration of French identity, not only in the political spectrum, but also in everyday cultural objects like food. References Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Billig, Michael. Banal Nationalism. London: Sage, 1995. Gerson, Stéphane. “The Local.” The French Republic: History, Values, Debate. Eds. Edward Berensen, Vincent Duclert, and Christophe Prochasson. London: Cornell UP, 2011. 213–20. Janey, Brigitte. “Frenchness in Perspective(s).” Hexagonal Varitations: Diversity, Plurality and Reinvention in Contemporary France. Eds Jo McCormack, Murray Pratt, and Alistair Rolls. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2011. 57–78. Jennings, Jeremy. “Citizenship, Republicanism and Multiculturalism in Contemporary France.” British Journal of Political Science 30 (2000): 575–98. Jennings, Jeremy. “Universalism.” The French Republic: History, Values, Debate. Eds. Edward Berensen, Vincent Duclert, and Christophe Prochasson. London: Cornell UP, 2011. Kurin, Richard, “Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage in the 2003 UNESCO Convention: A Critical Appraisal.” Museum International 56.1/2 (2004): 66–77. McCaffrey, Edna. The Gay Republic: Sexuality, Citizenship and Subversion in France. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Schnapper, Domonique. La Communauté des Citoyens. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Smith, Laurajane, and Natsuko Akagawa. Intangible Heritage. New York: Routledge, 2008. UNESCO. “Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage.” UNESCO, Culture Section 17 Oct. 2003. 12 Jun. 2013 ‹http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/en/convention›. UNESCO. “Dossier de Candidature : Le Repas Gastronomique des Français.” UNESCO, Culture Section. Nov. 2010. 12 Jun 2013 ‹http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/en/RL/00437›. UNESCO. “Nomination File: The Gastronomic Meal of the French.” UNESCO, Culture Section Nov. 2010. 12 Jun. 2013 ‹http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/en/RL/00437›. UNESCO. “Nomination File: Traditional Mexican Cuisine—Ancestral, Ongoing Community Culture, the Michoacán Paradigm.” UNESCO, Culture Section Nov. 2010. 12 Jun. 2013 ‹http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/en/RL/00400›. UNESCO. “What is Intangible Cultural Heritage?” UNESCO, Culture Section n.d. 12 Jun. 2013 ‹http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/index.php?lg=en&pg=00002›.

The article explores the Choral with Variations by Vincent d`Endy, a little-known work for the viola by the founder of the French School of Ancient Music neoclassical tendencies, that consisted in a revival and adaptation of wide palette of old polyphony genres that brightly showed up in work of this composer, the viola "Choral with Variations" op. 55. On verge of ХІХ-ХХ a century is observed the personal interest of composers by the genres of chaconne, passacalia, choral,by the baroque types of variations of soprano and basso - ostinato, fugues and others like that. As a follower of Cesar Frank and the founder of Schola Cantorum, Vincent d'Endy actively revives ancient genres, especially in instrumental music, completing his viola repertoire. Summarizing the observations regarding the form, the intonation-semantic content of the music, the timbre properties of the viola, aimed to embodiment of the tragical idea of this work, it should be noted that the composer builds a synthetic dramaturgical-compositional model that detects an alloy of different sources. With the prevalence of the choir basis (choir semantics appeals to choral singing in the spirit of majestic psalms, glorious hymns) there are signs of minor lullabies, monologues, elegies, nocturnes, etc., united under the denominator of baroque-type variations of passacalia. The individualized form of the work combines within the framework of a detailed one-piece composition the principles of strict and free variation, the sign of double variations, solved by late-romantic "characteristic" signs, and even the sonata structure with delineated zones exposition, development, and recapitulation. Difficult, semantically saturated canvas gravitates to the choral organ's timbral of C. Frank and the ancient masters; the psychologically-strained Tristan beginning, incarnate facilities of difficult harmonic vertical line finds out influence R. Wagner, symbolic-landscape soundtracks bring V.d`Endy closer to K. Debussy, which not sounds eclectic . The integrity and dramatic perfection of the composition, the depth of philosophical ideas embodied through the prism of the Chorale genre with variations, make it possible to define this work as one of the vivid examples of alt's polyphonic repertoire.

IntroductionCulinary education in Ireland has long been influenced by culinary education being delivered in catering colleges in the United Kingdom (UK). Institutionalised culinary education started in Britain through the sponsorship of guild conglomerates (Lawson and Silver). The City & Guilds of London Institute for the Advancement of Technical Education opened its central institution in 1884. Culinary education in Ireland began in Kevin Street Technical School in the late 1880s. This consisted of evening courses in plain cookery. Dublin’s leading chefs and waiters of the time participated in developing courses in French culinary classics and these courses ran in Parnell Square Vocational School from 1926 (Mac Con Iomaire “The Changing”). St Mary’s College of Domestic Science was purpose built and opened in 1941 in Cathal Brugha Street. This was renamed the Dublin College of Catering in the 1950s. The Council for Education, Recruitment and Training for the Hotel Industry (CERT) was set up in 1963 and ran cookery courses using the City & Guilds of London examinations as its benchmark. In 1982, when the National Craft Curriculum Certification Board (NCCCB) was established, CERT began carrying out their own examinations. This allowed Irish catering education to set its own standards, establish its own criteria and award its own certificates, roles which were previously carried out by City & Guilds of London (Corr). CERT awarded its first certificates in professional cookery in 1989. The training role of CERT was taken over by Fáilte Ireland, the State tourism board, in 2003. Changing Trends in Cookery and Culinary Textbooks at DIT The Dublin College of Catering which became part of the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT) is the flagship of catering education in Ireland (Mac Con Iomaire “The Changing”). The first DIT culinary award, was introduced in 1984 Certificate in Diet Cookery, later renamed Higher Certificate in Health and Nutrition for the Culinary Arts. On the 19th of July 1992 the Dublin Institute of Technology Act was enacted into law. This Act enabled DIT to provide vocational and technical education and training for the economic, technological, scientific, commercial, industrial, social and cultural development of the State (Ireland 1992). In 1998, DIT was granted degree awarding powers by the Irish state, enabling it to make major awards at Higher Certificate, Ordinary Bachelor Degree, Honors Bachelor Degree, Masters and PhD levels (Levels six to ten in the National Framework of Qualifications), as well as a range of minor, special purpose and supplemental awards (National NQAI). It was not until 1999, when a primary degree in Culinary Arts was sanctioned by the Department of Education in Ireland (Duff, The Story), that a more diverse range of textbooks was recommended based on a new liberal/vocational educational philosophy. DITs School of Culinary Arts currently offers: Higher Certificates Health and Nutrition for the Culinary Arts; Higher Certificate in Culinary Arts (Professional Culinary Practice); BSc (Ord) in Baking and Pastry Arts Management; BA (Hons) in Culinary Arts; BSc (Hons) Bar Management and Entrepreneurship; BSc (Hons) in Culinary Entrepreneurship; and, MSc in Culinary Innovation and Food Product Development. From 1942 to 1970, haute cuisine, or classical French cuisine was the most influential cooking trend in Irish cuisine and this is reflected in the culinary textbooks of that era. Haute cuisine has been influenced by many influential writers/chefs such as Francois La Varenne, Antoine Carême, Auguste Escoffier, Ferand Point, Paul Bocuse, Anton Mosiman, Albert and Michel Roux to name but a few. The period from 1947 to 1974 can be viewed as a “golden age” of haute cuisine in Ireland, as more award-winning world-class restaurants traded in Dublin during this period than at any other time in history (Mac Con Iomaire “The Changing”). Hotels and restaurants were run in the Escoffier partie system style which is a system of hierarchy among kitchen staff and areas of the kitchens specialising in cooking particular parts of the menu i.e sauces (saucier), fish (poissonnier), larder (garde manger), vegetable (legumier) and pastry (patissier). In the late 1960s, Escoffier-styled restaurants were considered overstaffed and were no longer financially viable. Restaurants began to be run by chef-proprietors, using plate rather than silver service. Nouvelle cuisine began in the 1970s and this became a modern form of haute cuisine (Gillespie). The rise in chef-proprietor run restaurants in Ireland reflected the same characteristics of the nouvelle cuisine movement. Culinary textbooks such as Practical Professional Cookery, La Technique, The Complete Guide to Modern Cooking, The Art of the Garde Mange and Patisserie interpreted nouvelle cuisine techniques and plated dishes. In 1977, the DIT began delivering courses in City & Guilds Advanced Kitchen & Larder 706/3 and Pastry 706/3, the only college in Ireland to do so at the time. Many graduates from these courses became the future Irish culinary lecturers, chef-proprietors, and culinary leaders. The next two decades saw a rise in fusion cooking, nouvelle cuisine, and a return to French classical cooking. Numerous Irish chefs were returning to Ireland having worked with Michelin starred chefs and opening new restaurants in the vein of classical French cooking, such as Kevin Thornton (Wine Epergne & Thorntons). These chefs were, in turn, influencing culinary training in DIT with a return to classical French cooking. New Classical French culinary textbooks such as New Classical Cuisine, The Modern Patisserie, The French Professional Pastry Series and Advanced Practical Cookery were being used in DIT In the last 15 years, science in cooking has become the current trend in culinary education in DIT. This is acknowledged by the increased number of culinary science textbooks and modules in molecular gastronomy offered in DIT. This also coincided with the launch of the BA (Hons) in Culinary Arts in DIT moving culinary education from a technical to a liberal education. Books such as The Science of Cooking, On Food and Cooking, The Fat Duck Cookbook and Modern Gastronomy now appear on recommended textbooks for culinary students.For the purpose of this article, practical classes held at DIT will be broken down as follows: hot kitchen class, larder classes, and pastry classes. These classes had recommended textbooks for each area. These can be broken down into three sections: hot kitche, larder, and pastry. This table identifies that the textbooks used in culinary education at DIT reflected the trends in cookery at the time they were being used. Hot Kitchen Larder Pastry Le Guide Culinaire. 1921. Le Guide Culinaire. 1921. The International Confectioner. 1968. Le Repertoire De La Cuisine. 1914. The Larder Chef, Classical Food Preparation and Presentation. 1969. Patisserie. 1971. All in the Cooking, Books 1&2. 1943 The Art of the Garde Manger. 1973. The Modern Patissier. 1986 Larousse Gastronomique. 1961. New Classic Cuisine. 1989. Professional French Pastry Series. 1987. Practical Cookery. 1962. The Curious Cook. 1990. Complete Pastrywork Techniques. 1991. Practical Professional Cookery. 1972. On Food and Cooking. The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. 1991. On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. 1991 La Technique. 1976. Advanced Practical Cookery. 1995. Desserts: A Lifelong Passion. 1994. Escoffier: The Complete Guide to the Art of Modern Cookery. 1979. The Science of Cooking. 2000. Culinary Artistry. Dornenburg, 1996. Professional Cookery: The Process Approach. 1985. Garde Manger, The Art and Craft of the Cold Kitchen. 2004. Grande Finales: The Art of the Plated Dessert. 1997. On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. 1991. The Science of Cooking. 2000. Fat Duck Cookbook. 2009. Modern Gastronomy. 2010. Tab.1. DIT Culinary Textbooks.1942–1960 During the first half of the 20th century, senior staff working in Dublin hotels, restaurants and clubs were predominately foreign born and trained. The two decades following World War II could be viewed as the “golden age” of haute cuisine in Dublin as many award-wining restaurants traded in the city at this time (Mac Con Iomaire “The Emergence”). Culinary education in DIT in 1942 saw the use of Escoffier’s Le Guide Culinaire as the defining textbook (Bowe). This was first published in 1903 and translated into English in 1907. In 1979 Cracknell and Kaufmann published a more comprehensive and update edited version under the title The Complete Guide to the Art of Modern Cookery by Escoffier for use in culinary colleges. This demonstrated that Escoffier’s work had withstood the test of the decades and was still relevant. Le Repertoire de La Cuisine by Louis Saulnier, a student of Escoffier, presented the fundamentals of French classical cookery. Le Repertoire was inspired by the work of Escoffier and contains thousands of classical recipes presented in a brief format that can be clearly understood by chefs and cooks. Le Repertoire remains an important part of any DIT culinary student’s textbook list. All in the Cooking by Josephine Marnell, Nora Breathnach, Ann Mairtin and Mor Murnaghan (1946) was one of the first cookbooks to be published in Ireland (Cashmann). This book was a domestic science cooking book written by lecturers in the Cathal Brugha Street College. There is a combination of classical French recipes and Irish recipes throughout the book. 1960s It was not until the 1960s that reference book Larousse Gastronomique and new textbooks such as Practical Cookery, The Larder Chef and International Confectionary made their way into DIT culinary education. These books still focused on classical French cooking but used lighter sauces and reflected more modern cooking equipment and techniques. Also, this period was the first time that specific books for larder and pastry work were introduced into the DIT culinary education system (Bowe). Larousse Gastronomique, which used Le Guide Culinaire as a basis (James), was first published in 1938 and translated into English in 1961. Practical Cookery, which is still used in DIT culinary education, is now in its 12th edition. Each edition has built on the previous, however, there is now criticism that some of the content is dated (Richards). Practical Cookery has established itself as a key textbook in culinary education both in Ireland and England. Practical Cookery recipes were laid out in easy to follow steps and food commodities were discussed briefly. The Larder Chef was first published in 1969 and is currently in its 4th edition. This book focuses on classical French larder techniques, butchery and fishmongery but recognises current trends and fashions in food presentation. The International Confectioner is no longer in print but is still used as a reference for basic recipes in pastry classes (Campbell). The Modern Patissier demonstrated more updated techniques and methods than were used in The International Confectioner. The Modern Patissier is still used as a reference book in DIT. 1970s The 1970s saw the decline in haute cuisine in Ireland, as it was in the process of being replaced by nouvelle cuisine. Irish chefs were being influenced by the works of chefs such as Paul Boucuse, Roger Verge, Michel Guerard, Raymond Olivier, Jean & Pierre Troisgros, Alain Senderens, Jacques Maniere, Jean Delaveine and Michel Guerard who advanced the uncomplicated natural presentation in food. Henri Gault claims that it was his manifesto published in October 1973 in Gault-Millau magazine which unleashed the movement called La Nouvelle Cuisine Française (Gault). In nouvelle cuisine, dishes in Carème and Escoffier’s style were rejected as over-rich and complicated. The principles underpinning this new movement focused on the freshness of ingredients, and lightness and harmony in all components and accompaniments, as well as basic and simple cooking methods and types of presentation. This was not, however, a complete overthrowing of the past, but a moving forward in the long-term process of cuisine development, utilising the very best from each evolution (Cousins). Books such as Practical Professional Cookery, The Art of the Garde Manger and Patisserie reflected this new lighter approach to cookery. Patisserie was first published in 1971, is now in its second edition, and continues to be used in DIT culinary education. This book became an essential textbook in pastrywork, and covers the entire syllabus of City & Guilds and CERT (now Fáilte Ireland). Patisserie covered all basic pastry recipes and techniques, while the second edition (in 1993) included new modern recipes, modern pastry equipment, commodities, and food hygiene regulations reflecting the changing catering environment. The Art of the Garde Manger is an American book highlighting the artistry, creativity, and cooking sensitivity need to be a successful Garde Manger (the larder chef who prepares cold preparation in a partie system kitchen). It reflected the dynamic changes occurring in the culinary world but recognised the importance of understanding basic French culinary principles. It is no longer used in DIT culinary education. La Technique is a guide to classical French preparation (Escoffier’s methods and techniques) using detailed pictures and notes. This book remains a very useful guide and reference for culinary students. Practical Professional Cookery also became an important textbook as it was written with the student and chef/lecturer in mind, as it provides a wider range of recipes and detailed information to assist in understanding the tasks at hand. It is based on classical French cooking and compliments Practical Cookery as a textbook, however, its recipes are for ten portions as opposed to four portions in Practical Cookery. Again this book was written with the City & Guilds examinations in mind. 1980s During the mid-1980s, many young Irish chefs and waiters emigrated. They returned in the late-1980s and early-1990s having gained vast experience of nouvelle and fusion cuisine in London, Paris, New York, California and elsewhere (Mac Con Iomaire, “The Changing”). These energetic, well-trained professionals began opening chef-proprietor restaurants around Dublin, providing invaluable training and positions for up-and-coming young chefs, waiters and culinary college graduates. The 1980s saw a return to French classical cookery textbook such as Professional Cookery: The Process Approach, New Classic Cuisine and the Professional French Pastry series, because educators saw the need for students to learn the basics of French cookery. Professional Cookery: The Process Approach was written by Daniel Stevenson who was, at the time, a senior lecturer in Food and Beverage Operations at Oxford Polytechnic in England. Again, this book was written for students with an emphasis on the cookery techniques and the practices of professional cookery. The Complete Guide to Modern Cooking by Escoffier continued to be used. This book is used by cooks and chefs as a reference for ingredients in dishes rather than a recipe book, as it does not go into detail in the methods as it is assumed the cook/chef would have the required experience to know the method of production. Le Guide Culinaire was only used on advanced City & Guilds courses in DIT during this decade (Bowe). New Classic Cuisine by the classically French trained chefs, Albert and Michel Roux (Gayot), is a classical French cuisine cookbook used as a reference by DIT culinary educators at the time because of the influence the Roux brothers were having over the English fine dining scene. The Professional French Pastry Series is a range of four volumes of pastry books: Vol. 1 Doughs, Batters and Meringues; Vol. 2 Creams, Confections and Finished Desserts; Vol. 3 Petit Four, Chocolate, Frozen Desserts and Sugar Work; and Vol. 4 Decorations, Borders and Letters, Marzipan, Modern Desserts. These books about classical French pastry making were used on the advanced pastry courses at DIT as learners needed a basic knowledge of pastry making to use them. 1990s Ireland in the late 1990s became a very prosperous and thriving European nation; the phenomena that became known as the “celtic tiger” was in full swing (Mac Con Iomaire “The Changing”). The Irish dining public were being treated to a resurgence of traditional Irish cuisine using fresh wholesome food (Hughes). The Irish population was considered more well-educated and well travelled than previous generations and culinary students were now becoming interested in the science of cooking. In 1996, the BA (Hons) in Culinary Arts program at DIT was first mooted (Hegarty). Finally, in 1999, a primary degree in Culinary Arts was sanctioned by the Department of Education underpinned by a new liberal/vocational philosophy in education (Duff). Teaching culinary arts in the past had been through a vocational education focus whereby students were taught skills for industry which were narrow, restrictive, and constraining, without the necessary knowledge to articulate the acquired skill. The reading list for culinary students reflected this new liberal education in culinary arts as Harold McGee’s books The Curious Cook and On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen explored and explained the science of cooking. On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen proposed that “science can make cooking more interesting by connecting it with the basic workings of the natural world” (Vega 373). Advanced Practical Cookery was written for City & Guilds students. In DIT this book was used by advanced culinary students sitting Fáilte Ireland examinations, and the second year of the new BA (Hons) in Culinary Arts. Culinary Artistry encouraged chefs to explore the creative process of culinary composition as it explored the intersection of food, imagination, and taste (Dornenburg). This book encouraged chefs to develop their own style of cuisine using fresh seasonal ingredients, and was used for advanced students but is no longer a set text. Chefs were being encouraged to show their artistic traits, and none more so than pastry chefs. Grande Finale: The Art of Plated Desserts encouraged advanced students to identify different “schools” of pastry in relation to the world of art and design. The concept of the recipes used in this book were built on the original spectacular pieces montées created by Antoine Carême. 2000–2013 After nouvelle cuisine, recent developments have included interest in various fusion cuisines, such as Asia-Pacific, and in molecular gastronomy. Molecular gastronomists strive to find perfect recipes using scientific methods of investigation (Blanck). Hervè This experimentation with recipes and his introduction to Nicholos Kurti led them to create a food discipline they called “molecular gastronomy”. In 1998, a number of creative chefs began experimenting with the incorporation of ingredients and techniques normally used in mass food production in order to arrive at previously unattainable culinary creations. This “new cooking” (Vega 373) required a knowledge of chemical reactions and physico-chemical phenomena in relation to food, as well as specialist tools, which were created by these early explorers. It has been suggested that molecular gastronomy is “science-based cooking” (Vega 375) and that this concept refers to conscious application of the principles and tools from food science and other disciplines for the development of new dishes particularly in the context of classical cuisine (Vega). The Science of Cooking assists students in understanding the chemistry and physics of cooking. This book takes traditional French techniques and recipes and refutes some of the claims and methods used in traditional recipes. Garde Manger: The Art and Craft of the Cold Kitchen is used for the advanced larder modules at DIT. This book builds on basic skills in the Larder Chef book. Molecular gastronomy as a subject area was developed in 2009 in DIT, the first of its kind in Ireland. The Fat Duck Cookbook and Modern Gastronomy underpin the theoretical aspects of the module. This module is taught to 4th year BA (Hons) in Culinary Arts students who already have three years experience in culinary education and the culinary industry, and also to MSc Culinary Innovation and Food Product Development students. Conclusion Escoffier, the master of French classical cuisine, still influences culinary textbooks to this day. His basic approach to cooking is considered essential to teaching culinary students, allowing them to embrace the core skills and competencies required to work in the professional environment. Teaching of culinary arts at DIT has moved vocational education to a more liberal basis, and it is imperative that the chosen textbooks reflect this development. This liberal education gives the students a broader understanding of cooking, hospitality management, food science, gastronomy, health and safety, oenology, and food product development. To date there is no practical culinary textbook written specifically for Irish culinary education, particularly within this new liberal/vocational paradigm. There is clearly a need for a new textbook which combines the best of Escoffier’s classical French techniques with the more modern molecular gastronomy techniques popularised by Ferran Adria. References Adria, Ferran. Modern Gastronomy A to Z: A Scientific and Gastronomic Lexicon. London: CRC P, 2010. Barker, William. The Modern Patissier. London: Hutchinson, 1974. Barham, Peter. The Science of Cooking. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2000. Bilheux, Roland, Alain Escoffier, Daniel Herve, and Jean-Maire Pouradier. Special and Decorative Breads. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1987. Blanck, J. "Molecular Gastronomy: Overview of a Controversial Food Science Discipline." Journal of Agricultural and Food Information 8.3 (2007): 77-85. Blumenthal, Heston. The Fat Duck Cookbook. London: Bloomsbury, 2001. Bode, Willi, and M.J. Leto. The Larder Chef. Oxford: Butter-Heinemann, 1969. Bowe, James. Personal Communication with Author. Dublin. 7 Apr. 2013. Boyle, Tish, and Timothy Moriarty. Grand Finales, The Art of the Plated Dessert. New York: John Wiley, 1997. Campbell, Anthony. Personal Communication with Author. Dublin, 10 Apr. 2013. Cashman, Dorothy. "An Exploratory Study of Irish Cookbooks." Unpublished M.Sc Thesis. Dublin: Dublin Institute of Technology, 2009. Ceserani, Victor, Ronald Kinton, and David Foskett. Practical Cookery. London: Hodder & Stoughton Educational, 1962. Ceserani, Victor, and David Foskett. Advanced Practical Cookery. London: Hodder & Stoughton Educational, 1995. Corr, Frank. Hotels in Ireland. Dublin: Jemma, 1987. Cousins, John, Kevin Gorman, and Marc Stierand. "Molecular Gastronomy: Cuisine Innovation or Modern Day Alchemy?" International Journal of Hospitality Management 22.3 (2009): 399–415. Cracknell, Harry Louis, and Ronald Kaufmann. Practical Professional Cookery. London: MacMillan, 1972. Cracknell, Harry Louis, and Ronald Kaufmann. Escoffier: The Complete Guide to the Art of Modern Cookery. New York: John Wiley, 1979. Dornenburg, Andrew, and Karen Page. Culinary Artistry. New York: John Wiley, 1996. Duff, Tom, Joseph Hegarty, and Matt Hussey. The Story of the Dublin Institute of Technology. Dublin: Blackhall, 2000. Escoffier, Auguste. Le Guide Culinaire. France: Flammarion, 1921. Escoffier, Auguste. The Complete Guide to the Art of Modern Cookery. Ed. Crachnell, Harry, and Ronald Kaufmann. New York: John Wiley, 1986. Gault, Henri. Nouvelle Cuisine, Cooks and Other People: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 1995. Devon: Prospect, 1996. 123-7. Gayot, Andre, and Mary, Evans. "The Best of London." Gault Millau (1996): 379. Gillespie, Cailein. "Gastrosophy and Nouvelle Cuisine: Entrepreneurial Fashion and Fiction." British Food Journal 96.10 (1994): 19-23. Gisslen, Wayne. Professional Cooking. Hoboken: John Wiley, 2011. Hanneman, Leonard. Patisserie. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1971. Hegarty, Joseph. Standing the Heat. New York: Haworth P, 2004. Hsu, Kathy. "Global Tourism Higher Education Past, Present and Future." Journal of Teaching in Travel and Tourism 5.1/2/3 (2006): 251-267 Hughes, Mairtin. Ireland. Victoria: Lonely Planet, 2000. Ireland. Irish Statute Book: Dublin Institute of Technology Act 1992. Dublin: Stationery Office, 1992. James, Ken. Escoffier: The King of Chefs. Hambledon: Cambridge UP, 2002. Lawson, John, and Harold, Silver. Social History of Education in England. London: Methuen, 1973. Lehmann, Gilly. "English Cookery Books in the 18th Century." The Oxford Companion to Food. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. 227-9. Marnell, Josephine, Nora Breathnach, Ann Martin, and Mor Murnaghan. All in the Cooking Book 1 & 2. Dublin: Educational Company of Ireland, 1946. Mac Con Iomaire, Máirtín. "The Changing Geography and Fortunes of Dublin's Haute Cuisine Restaurants, 1958-2008." Food, Culture and Society: An International Journal of Multidisiplinary Research 14.4 (2011): 525-45. ---. "Chef Liam Kavanagh (1926-2011)." Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture 12.2 (2012): 4-6. ---. "The Emergence, Development and Influence of French Haute Cuisine on Public Dining in Dublin Restaurants 1900-2000: An Oral History". PhD. Thesis. Dublin: Dublin Institute of Technology, 2009. McGee, Harold. The Curious Cook: More Kitchen Science and Lore. New York: Hungry Minds, 1990. ---. On Food and Cooking the Science and Lore of the Kitchen. London: Harper Collins, 1991. Montague, Prosper. Larousse Gastronomique. New York: Crown, 1961. National Qualification Authority of Ireland. "Review by the National Qualifications Authority of Ireland (NQAI) of the Effectiveness of the Quality Assurance Procedures of the Dublin Institute of Technology." 2010. 18 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.dit.ie/media/documents/services/qualityassurance/terms_of_ref.doc› Nicolello, Ildo. Complete Pastrywork Techniques. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1991. Pepin, Jacques. La Technique. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 1976. Richards, Peter. "Practical Cookery." 9th Ed. Caterer and Hotelkeeper (2001). 18 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.catererandhotelkeeper.co.uk/Articles/30/7/2001/31923/practical-cookery-ninth-edition-victor-ceserani-ronald-kinton-and-david-foskett.htm›. Roux, Albert, and Michel Roux. New Classic Cuisine. New York: Little, Brown, 1989. Roux, Michel. Desserts: A Lifelong Passion. London: Conran Octopus, 1994. Saulnier, Louis. Le Repertoire De La Cuisine. London: Leon Jaeggi, 1914. Sonnenschmidt, Fredric, and John Nicholas. The Art of the Garde Manger. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1973. Spang, Rebecca. The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000. Stevenson, Daniel. Professional Cookery the Process Approach. London: Hutchinson, 1985. The Culinary Institute of America. Garde Manger: The Art and Craft of the Cold Kitchen. Hoboken: New Jersey, 2004. Vega, Cesar, and Job, Ubbink. "Molecular Gastronomy: A Food Fad or Science Supporting Innovation Cuisine?". Trends in Food Science & Technology 19 (2008): 372-82. Wilfred, Fance, and Michael Small. The New International Confectioner: Confectionary, Cakes, Pastries, Desserts, Ices and Savouries. 1968.

The public discourse on asylum seekers in the past year or so and the generation of hatred against them contains a strong linguistic element marking clear boundaries between 'ourselves' and the asylum seekers. I will discuss this linguistic dimension, which calls for vigilance and critical awareness in future discourses of exclusion. One of John Howard's political platforms in the victorious campaign, in which he replaced Paul Keating as Prime Minister was to liberate Australia of the 'political correctness' imposed by his opponents. In this respect, at least, he came close to the far right in Australian politics. For instance, he said of far right ex-Labor Independent Graeme Campbell: 'His attacks on political correctness echo many of the attacks I made on political correctness' (The Age, 18 June 1996). 'Political correctness' is a negative term for 'inclusive language' -- avoiding or being encouraged by stylistic or policy guidelines to avoid the choice of lexical items that may be offensive to sections of the population. The converse is the discourse of exclusion. Whether it excludes on the basis of ethnicity, religion, gender or any other basis, the discourse of exclusion creates a division between 'us' and 'them', partly on the basis of different lexical items for the two groups (Clyne, Establishing Linguistic Markers of Racism). Asylum seekers have been projected by politicians (especially those in the government) as not only different from the Australian people and therefore not belonging, but also as a threat to the Australian people. To demonstrate this projection it is worth considering some of the terms and formulations of exclusion and division that have been used. As Mungo MacCallum (41) argues, 'The first step was to get rid of the term 'refugee'; it has a long and honourable history and is generally used to describe people forced to flee from their homelands.' It might be more accurate to say that the government limited its use so that no honourable associations could be made with the current group of asylum seekers. There had been newspaper columns which had focused on the achievements and contributions to the nation of previous vintages of refugees; some communities consisted largely or entirely of refugees and their descendants, including some who had given longstanding support to the Liberal Party. The semantic narrowing of 'refugee' was illustrated in the Prime Minister's pronouncement (Herald-Sun, 8 Oct. 2001) when it was alleged that asylum seekers had thrown their children overboard: 'Genuine refugees don't do that'. Thus, refugee status in the public discourse was being related to their moral representation and not to any consideration of the threat of persecution in their homeland. While refugee status was officially a legal issue, when the Prime Minister interacted with the media and the voters, the asylum seekers were already excluded by guided popular opinion, for 'I don't want people like that in Australia'. The exclusionary line based on moral grounds was echoed by Alexander Downer (The Age, 8 Oct. 2001), who described the asylum seekers as lacking the civilized behaviour to be worthy to live in Australia: 'Any civilized person wouldn't dream of treating their own children that way'. So what could the asylum seekers be called? MacCallum (2002: 43) attributes to Philip Ruddock the verbal masterstroke' of reducing the identification of the asylum seekers to a 'one word label': 'unlawful'. However, this identification came in a number of facets. They were described on both sides of parliament as 'illegals', illegal arrivals', 'illegal immigrants' (e.g. Hansard, 29 Aug. 2001). All of these terms encourage the view of intrusion. In actual fact, whether people's arrival had been authorized by the government or not, there is no such thing as an 'illegal refugee'. Other descriptions ranged from 'occasional tourists' (Gary Hardgrave, Minister for Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs; House of Representatives, 30 Aug. 2001) '; to 'café latte poor' (Senator Robert Ray, former Labor Minister for Immigration), which assumes that only the poor can be refugees. Such descriptions suggested that the asylum seekers were dishonest imposters. But the term 'illegals' lowers asylum seekers to the status of 'non-people' and this gives others the licence to treat them in a way that may be different to those who are 'people'. This is reinforced by the fact that the asylum seekers are neither nice nor poor, and therefore cannot expect to attract support from the government (and, to a large extent from the opposition). The 'bully' image of the asylum seekers was propagated by comments on the behaviour of those allegedly harming their children, described by Ruddock as 'carefully planned and premeditated' (The Age, 14 Feb. 2002). It was reinforced by Peter Reith, who described the action as a 'premeditated attempt to force their way into the country' (The Age, 8 Aug. 2001). When Kim Beazley said: 'It is not unhumanitarian (sic) to try to deter criminals' (The Age, 8 Nov. 2001), he left it to our imagination or choice whether, in supporting the government's position, he wanted to defend us from the asylum seekers or from the 'people smugglers' of whom they are victims. However he put the asylum seekers directly or by association into the criminal category. The suggestion that the asylum seekers might be economic migrants masquerading as refugees enabled the government to differentiate them from 'battlers', who are likely to support action against any 'crooks' who will take the little the battlers have away from them. So far asylum seekers as 'bad cruel people' have been differentiated from 'genuine refugees' of the past, from a nation of 'civilized', gentle, child-loving people, and from Aussie 'battlers'. 'Queue-jumper' is a term that differentiates asylum seekers from both the 'mainstream' and the succession of migrants who have come at various times. This term occurs in several debates (used e.g. by Senator Ron Boswell and Kay Ellison, 29 Aug. 2001). Firstly, it invokes the twin cultural concepts of fairness and orderliness. The 'destruction' of 'political correctness' and especially Pauline Hanson's expressed views regenerated the notion that the needy were unfairly getting something for nothing that others had to work for. This included Aborigines, recently arrived migrants or refugees, single mothers, and even the disabled. The fact that there were no queues in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, or the Palestinian Territories in which people could stand to fill in immigration applications was not taken into account. Queuing is very much an Anglo concept of orderliness, reflecting the strong linear emphasis in British-derived cultures, even in academic discourse and school essays and in formal meetings as I have discussed elsewhere (e.g. Clyne, Inter-cultural Communication at Work). In another sense, the 'queue jumper' is a repugnant person to migrants of all backgrounds. The impression is gained from the designation that asylum seekers are taking the place in a tight quota of their relatives (or people like them) waiting to be admitted under the family reunion scheme. In actual fact, the number of asylum seekers recognized as refugees does not affect other categories such as family reunion, and in fact, the quota for the humanitarian category wasn't nearly filled in 2001. The government's handling of asylum seekers is thus underpinned by two types of moral principles -- the schoolmaster principle -- They have to behave themselves, otherwise they will be punished, and the schoolchild principle (based on the perception)-- It ain't fair; he pushed in. Another term that has played an important role in the asylum seeker discourse is 'border protection'. This term featured prominently in the 2001 election campaign, when both major parties vied to persuade voters that they were best equipped to protect Australia. It lives on in the public discourse and relates both to contemporary international politics and to traditional Australian xenophobia. The 2001 federal election was fought in the context of the terrorist attacks on the twin towers and the American-led coalition against international terrorism. Thus, the term 'border protection' was necessarily ambiguous. Was it terrorists or asylum seekers who were being kept out? Or were they perhaps the same people? Even though many of the asylum seekers were claiming to be escaping from persecution by the terrorists or those who were harbouring them. Maybe the linking association is with Islam? It is possible that 'border protection' (like the Liberal Party's 1998 election slogan 'For all of us') is also ambiguous enough to attract opponents of multiculturalism without alienating its supporters.2 Boat-loads of new arrivals have long caused fear among Australians. For much of Australia's British history, we were terrified of invasions from our north -- not just the 'yellow peril', it even included the Russians and the French, from whom Australians were protected by fortresses along the coast. This was immortalized in the final verse of the politically incorrect early version of Advance Australia Fair: Should foreign foe e'er sight our coast Or dare a foot to land, We'll rouse to arms like siers of yore To guard our native strand; Brittania then shall surely know, Beyond wide oceans roll Her sons in fair Australia's land Still keep a British soul, In joyful strains, etc. In fact, the entire original version of Advance Australia Fair has a predominantly exclusionist theme which contrasts with the inclusive values embodied in the present national anthem. While our 'politically correct' version has 'boundless plains to share' with 'those who've come across the seas', they are only open to 'loyal sons' in the original, which is steeped in colonial jingoism. The gender-inclusive 'Australians all' replaces 'Australia's sons' as the opening appellation. Are our politicians leading us back from an inclusive and open identity? I do not have space to go into the opposing discourse, which has come largely from academic social scientists, former prime ministers, and ministers of both major parties, current politicians of the minor parties, and journalists from the broadsheet press and the ABC. Objections are often raised against the 'demonisation' and 'dehumanisation' of the asylum seekers. In this short article, I have tried to demonstrate the techniques used to do this. The use of 'illegal' and 'queue jumper' to represent asylum seekers differentiates them from 'refugees' and 'migrants' and has removed them from any category with whom existing Australians should show solidarity. What makes them different is that they are cruel, even to their children, dishonest and imposters, badly behaved, unfair and disorderly – enemies of the Australian people, who want to deprive them of their sovereignty. It is interesting to see this in contrast to the comment of a spokesperson from Rural Australians for Refugees (AM, Radio National, 26 Jan. 2002): 'We can't recognise our country anymore which was based on fairness and fair go'. Notes This is based on 'When the discourse of hatred becomes respectable – does the linguist have a responsibility?', a paper presented at the Australian Linguistic Society conference at Macquarie University, July 2001. Some of the same data was discussed in 'The discourse excluding asylum seekers – have we been brainwashed?' Australian Language Matters 10: 3-10, by the same author. Research assistance from Felicity Grey is gratefully acknowledged. 2 I thank Felicity Meakins for this suggestion. References Clyne, Michael. Inter-Cultural Communication at Work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Clyne, Michael. 'Establishing Linguistic Markers of Racism.' Language and Peace. Ed. C. Schäffner and A.Wenden. Dartmouth: Aldershot, 1995. 111-18. MacCallum, Mungo. Girt by Sea (Quarterly Essay). Melbourne: Black, 2002. Markus, Andrew. 'John Howard and the Naturalization of Bigotry.' The Resurgence of Racism. Ed. G.Gray and C.Winter. Clayton: Monash University, Department of History (Monash Publications in History 24), 1997. 79-86. Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Clyne, Michael. "Saving Us From Them" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.5 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Clyne.html &gt. Chicago Style Clyne, Michael, "Saving Us From Them" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 5 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Clyne.html &gt ([your date of access]). APA Style Clyne, Michael. (2002) Saving Us From Them. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(5). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Clyne.html &gt ([your date of access]).

Paul Virilio. The Information Bomb. London: Verso, 2000. 145 pp., ISBN: 1-85984-745-5 (hardback). Born in Paris in 1932, the French political and 'technocultural' theorist Paul Virilio is the leading exponent of the idea that 'dromology' (the logic of speed) stands at the centre of the political formation and technocultural transformation of the contemporary world. Virilio is an architect of the 'Brutalist' school and political 'critic of the art of technology' as well as a Husserlian phenomenologist and post-Einsteinian analyst of technoculture. In recent years Virilio has developed his own political approach to the technocultural and experiential effects of speed and technoscience on the organisation of cyberspace and cyberculture. It is an approach that is increasingly being adopted and adapted by a variety of pre-eminent thinkers on the Left such as Jean Baudrillard, Slavoj Zizek and Andre Gorz. As the son of a Breton mother and an Italian communist father in Nazi-occupied France, Virilio spent the majority of World War II as an anxious evacuee in Nantes. In 1950 he converted to Christianity in the fraternity of 'worker-priests'. Virilio was educated at the L'École des Métiers d'Art in Paris and first became a craftsman in stained glass before becoming a sort of intellectual provocateur and co-editor of Architecture Principe, an architectural group and occasional review devoted to radical political and architectural experimentation. Between 1963 and 1966 Virilio dedicated his time to studying the architecture of war and to the construction of the 'bunker church' of Sainte-Bernadette du Banlay at Nevers. Virilio became politically active during the 1968 May revolt and this led to an irrevocable split with his partner in Architecture Principe, the architect Claude Parent. In 1969 Virilio was instated as a professor of architecture at the École Speciale d'Architecture at the behest of the students there, a position he occupied until his retirement in 1997. Virilio's major work is Speed & Politics: An Essay on Dromology (1986), written, he maintains, to raise the political question of speed as the hidden side of economic development. Virilio's recent texts such as Open Sky (1997) and now The Information Bomb can therefore be regarded as important advances in his current work on the politics of techno, or, cyberculture. As the son of a Breton mother and an Italian communist father in Nazi-occupied France, Virilio spent the majority of World War II as an anxious evacuee in Nantes. In 1950 he converted to Christianity in the fraternity of 'worker-priests'. Virilio was educated at the L'École des Métiers d'Art in Paris and first became a craftsman in stained glass before becoming a sort of intellectual provocateur and co-editor of Architecture Principe, an architectural group and occasional review devoted to radical political and architectural experimentation. Between 1963 and 1966 Virilio dedicated his time to studying the architecture of war and to the construction of the 'bunker church' of Sainte-Bernadette du Banlay at Nevers. Virilio became politically active during the 1968 May revolt and this led to an irrevocable split with his partner in Architecture Principe, the architect Claude Parent. In 1969 Virilio was instated as a professor of architecture at the École Speciale d'Architecture at the behest of the students there, a position he occupied until his retirement in 1997. Virilio's major work is Speed & Politics: An Essay on Dromology (1986), written, he maintains, to raise the political question of speed as the hidden side of economic development. Virilio's recent texts such as Open Sky (1997) and now The Information Bomb can therefore be regarded as important advances in his current work on the politics of techno, or, cyberculture. Virilio's newest political and technocultural work, The Information Bomb, is set to become an important text of intellectual and dromological analysis. On its opening page Virilio quotes Werner Heisenberg, the German physicist, chief architect of quantum mechanics and founder of the 'uncertainty principle': 'No one can say what will be "real" for people when the wars which are now beginning come to an end'. Briefly, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle states that if a simultaneous calculation is made of the location and speed of a particle then, no matter how faithful the calculations, there is always an uncertainty in the values acquired. It deals with the simultaneous calculation of energy and time. The uncertainty occurs because the act of perceiving the system interferes with it in an unpredictable manner. But uncertainty is only significant at the atomic and subatomic levels and at these levels throws the principle of causality into confusion. Virilio's The Information Bomb therefore examines the dromological and uncertain relationships between the 'reality' of the war universe, speed and, crucially, our perception of its main causalities. The key question and the first sentence of Virilio's book is: 'The civilianisation or militarisation of science?' Virilio answers by describing what he calls the catastrophes of postmodern technoscience and globalisation, Americanisation, biotechnology, Internet pornography and the advertising industry in the most uncompromising terms. Virilio's riposte to the question is already contained in the book's title. This is because, for him, since the end of World War II, the militarisation of science and the construction of two kinds of bomb have overshadowed civilian life. The first is the atom bomb, 'which is capable of using the energy of radioactivity to smash matter'. The second is the information bomb, 'which is capable of using the interactivity of information to wreck the peace between nations'. Virilio delineates the existence of the information bomb, of an explosion of mediated misery around the world, in terms of the deterioration of language and the sheer seductive power of TV and computer screens, the acceleration of history and the emergence of new inter-generational conflicts. Virilio forcefully argues that the advent of the information bomb requires the creation of a new type of social deterrence if nations are to avoid the 'fission' of their 'social cores' as they enter into the uncertain and often shocking world of chronopolitics. For this is a topsy-turvy world where neo-liberalism confronts 'cyberfeminism' and the military-scientific complex contemplates the arrival of 'cyberwar' and 'grey ecology' (the pollution of distances) under the sign of cinematic disinformation from Hollywood and the technological transformation of work through the introduction of mobile phones and 'zero-hour' contracts. Or, as Virilio says at one point in The Information Bomb: in today's 'dromocratic' capitalism, when the biotech corporation calls, 'you come running'. It would, though, be incorrect to view Virilio's political opposition to the uncritical acceptance of technoculture and the explosion of the information bomb as a wholly pessimistic stance on the spread of neo-liberalism in realms such as the multimedia. Virilio's work is, for example, in no way analogous to that of Baudrillard, the intellectual high priest of postmodernism. In truth, Virilio manifestly frames his recent writings in relation to a guarded optimism concerning what I have elsewhere called his 'hypermodern' technocultural theory: a theory involved with the acceleration and dislocation of modern forms of thought about the contemporary world and how it is depicted. It is therefore perfectly plausible to derive from Virilio's dromological texts a scientifically 'uncertain' conception of 'reality' that focusses on the concepts of hypermodernism and 'hypermodernity'. The latter is an idea centred on coming to terms with the speeding-up of historical processes and a critical analysis of modernity based on a political perception of technoculture that is catastrophic. In this way, Virilio typically conceives of the developments he documents in The Information Bomb not as the psychoanalytic problems of progress but as the technoscientific and 'excessive' displacement of them. It is a conceptualisation that is evident in his dromological and dynamic writings on the subject of 'information superhighways' and the 'full range of communications disturbances acquired over the recent centuries of technology'. 'In this field', Virilio says, progress 'acts like a forensic scientist on us' since it violates 'each bodily orifice'. But such 'brutal incursions' do not merely influence individuals; they colonise them. For Virilio, then, progress 'heaps up, accumulates and condenses in each of us the full range of (visual, social, psycho-motor, affective, sexual, etc.) detrital disorders which it has taken on with each innovation, each with their full complement of specific injuries'. All criticism of technology having disappeared, 'we have slid unconsciously from pure technology to techno-culture and, lastly, to the dogmatism of a totalitarian techno-cult...' As can be ascertained from the above examples, Virilio's work sits uneasily with almost all the prevailing paradigms and methodological approaches currently on offer. Chasing a multitude of Foucauldian discontinuities and shape-shifting Deleuzian inflected 'lines of flight' simultaneously, The Information Bomb can thus be seen as a reflection of his self-professed 'anarcho-Christianity'. It is a methodological stance, political perspective and religious position Virilio shares to some extent with the author of The Technological Society (1964), the late Jacques Ellul. Viewed from this angle, Virilio's oppositional and overtly political writings on the 'hypermodern condition' present a comprehensible methodological outlook. It is, however, an outlook that is somewhat at odds with the political and intellectual terrain occupied by 'transpolitical' postmodernists such as Baudrillard, 'poststructuralist anarchists' like Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze and the deconstructionist and 'spectral Marxist' Jacques Derrida. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to imagine that Virilio's rather abstract writings in The Information Bomb opposing the rise of neo-liberalism and the hypermodern condition have not touched a nerve in France. Left-leaning theoreticians and the editors of newspapers such as Le Monde Diplomatique regularly pursue Virilio's forthright opinions in the form of articles and interviews on everything from Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man (1992) to his own thoughts on the end of geography and technoculture. Virilio is therefore a very creative political theorist who articulates himself with equal ease in academic and non-specialist technocultural works. Unlike Foucault, Virilio is the personification of the 'engaged intellectual'. Rather than simply opting for the life of a professor of architecture at the École Speciale d' Architecture, Virilio has always chosen to communicate his ideas to as wide an audience as possible, a strategy that earned him a 'National Award for Criticism' in 1987. Virilio's contemporary writings thus necessarily involve a dromological, political and technocultural encounter with the militarisation of science in the shape of the Internet. Even so, unlike Virilio's earlier texts such as Open Sky (1997), in The Information Bomb Virilio does not merely concentrate his gaze on society's apparent need for speed but, decisively, on its present-day extension into pornography and advertising and their integration into the commercialisation of the art world. Describing the 1997 London Royal Academy exhibition entitled 'Sensation' ostensibly held to present young British artists, Virilio suggests that, like many others, in actuality, this exhibition was designed and presented by 'the sex-culture-advertising movement'. This is because the '110 works on display (a portrait of child-murderer Myra Hindley, casts of childlike bodies with mouths replaced by phalluses, etc.) belonged, without exception, to Charles Saatchi, one of Britain's great advertising moguls'. What is at issue here for Virilio is the recognition that, like the need for speed and the example of the Internet, the distinctions between the world of pornography, the world of art and the world of advertising have all but been obliterated in the name of nothing more profound than 'breaking down the last taboos'. However, in Virilio's hypermodern conception of the 'terminal arts', a 'confrontation between a tortured body and an automatic camera' not only signifies the coming of the 'sex-culture-advertising-complex' but, equally importantly, the onset of 'endocolonisation' or, what takes place when militarised technoscience colonises the human body with the aim of reducing every member of humanity that has 'had its day' to the status of a 'specimen'. The political critiques provided by Virilio in The Information Bomb are a welcome development. For, today, it is sometimes all too easy to criticise the discipline of cultural studies for its celebration of political, technological and cultural différance without any corresponding recognition of economic and other inequalities founded on class, gender and race. Moreover, Virilio's fervent and occasionally maniacal critique of the art of technology stands out because it stretches from political and technocultural studies to economic and film studies, sometimes in the space of a single paragraph. Taking in Hollywood directors and obvious film productions such as Jan de Bont's Speed as well as the work of French cinematic pioneers like the Lumière brothers', Virilio's The Information Bomb is an important publication. But, unlike numerous other 'cybercultural' tomes, the significance of this book is derived from the fact that it also manages to extend the scope of political and technocultural studies through the provision of often-abstruse pronouncements such as Kafka's claim that the cinema 'involves putting the eye into uniform'. The political critiques provided by Virilio in The Information Bomb are a welcome development. For, today, it is sometimes all too easy to criticise the discipline of cultural studies for its celebration of political, technological and cultural différance without any corresponding recognition of economic and other inequalities founded on class, gender and race. Moreover, Virilio's fervent and occasionally maniacal critique of the art of technology stands out because it stretches from political and technocultural studies to economic and film studies, sometimes in the space of a single paragraph. Taking in Hollywood directors and obvious film productions such as Jan de Bont's Speed as well as the work of French cinematic pioneers like the Lumière brothers', Virilio's The Information Bomb is an important publication. But, unlike numerous other 'cybercultural' tomes, the significance of this book is derived from the fact that it also manages to extend the scope of political and technocultural studies through the provision of often-abstruse pronouncements such as Kafka's claim that the cinema 'involves putting the eye into uniform'. Yet it would be wrong to think that such an individualistic political and technocultural approach cannot be extended beyond Virilio's own anarcho-Christianity or the writings of Ellul. For example, Virilio's The Art of the Motor (1995) has been an important reference point in the recent writings of imaginative Marxists as distinct as Zizek in The Plague of Fantasies (1997) and Gorz in Reclaiming Work: Beyond the Wage-Based Society (1999). It would be difficult to believe that The Information Bomb will not become another significant source in the future works of other creative radicals, offering as it does not only a provisional pathway out of the quicksand of postmodernism but also a way into the sympathies of ordinary people. Firing off political concepts and technocultural neologisms at the speed of light, Virilio's passionately argued texts do not always hit their intended targets. But for anyone seeking a hypermodern critique of the cultural logic of late militarism that ranges from the Internet and the commercialisation of art to endocolonisation and the accident, Virilio's radical political and technocultural theory of speed contained in The Information Bomb is just what you have been waiting for. Citation reference for this article MLA style: John Armitage. "The Uncertainty Principle: Paul Virilio's 'The Information Bomb'." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.3 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0006/virilio.php>. Chicago style: John Armitage, "The Uncertainty Principle: Paul Virilio's 'The Information Bomb'," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 3 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0006/virilio.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: John Armitage. (2000) The uncertainty principle: Paul Virilio's 'The information bomb'. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(3). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0006/virilio.php> ([your date of access]).

Ever since the spread of cheap sampling technology in the 1980s, popular music has incorporated direct quotations from other songs. This trend reached its zenith in the “mash-up,” that genre of popular music which has emerged in the last 5 or 6 years. Most famously, DJ Dangermouse distributed his “Grey Album,” a concept that mashed together the a Capella vocals from Jay-Z’s Black Album with the music from the Beatles’ White Album. Distribution of the project was swiftly met with a Cease and Desist order from the Beatles’ label EMI, leading to the Grey Tuesday online protest in which many websites distributed the album for free in the name of free expression. As the name suggests, “mash-ups,” sometimes also called bootlegs, mash together two or more already released songs. This use of the term ‘bootlegs’ should not to be confused with bootleg recordings of albums or concerts, which are merely illegal copies sold for profit. Both mash-ups and bootlegs are new pieces of art, almost always unable to be bought from stores. In their most basic form, mash-ups take the vocal from one song and the instrumental from another—what bootleggers call an A+B. This has taken ever more elaborate forms, for instance, San Francisco’s DJ Earworm’s “Stairway to Bootleg Heaven” mashes together Dolly Parton, the Beatles, Art of Noise, Pat Benatar, the Eurythmics, and Laurie Anderson. By now, the history of mash-ups and illegal sampling in general has been well covered by many journalists (See, for instance, Sasha Frere Jones and Pete Rojas). The question, then, is not so much what mash-ups are so much as what they do. Many theories of consumer reception have often reductively posited a passive audience impelled by little more than the desire to consume. When it comes to popular culture in modernity, Frankfurt School theorist Theodor Adorno, both in his own writing and with Horkheimer, made the hugely influential argument that the only cultural work it can do is in the service of hegemonic capitalism. Adorno argued, “the entire practice of the culture industry transfers the profit motive naked onto cultural forms” (232). Painting his argument in rather stark terms, Adorno said that “the categorical imperative of the culture industry no longer has anything in common with freedom. It proclaims: you shall … conform to that which exists anyway” (236). As philosopher Jane Bennett points out, Adorno and Horkheimer construct a passive audience consuming the derivative, repetitious pleasures of mass culture, under the thrall of the fetishised commodity “as if it was alive” (Bennett 123). Horkheimer and Adorno’s influential work denies the “possibility of an affective response to commodities able to challenge the socioeconomic system that generates it” (Bennett 121). Adorno damns the modern culture industries, but in an interesting way he also elevates their power, for his theory privileges the producer of the text, not its consumer. The question presents itself, therefore, what happens when subjects are both consumers and producers? The makers of mash-ups are clearly both. Arguably, mash-ups are a fannish re-appropriation in the manner that Henry Jenkins uses to describe slash fan-fiction in Textual Poachers (Jenkins). Like slash writers, mash-up artists take a common popular culture (music in this case) and appropriate it for their own desires and creative impulses. Rather than a purely passive audience, mash-ups show there exists at least a segment of an engaged audience, able to deconstruct and rework popular culture. Jenkins argues that “fandom celebrates not exceptional texts but exceptional readings” (284), a facet clearly exemplified in mash-ups use of not only the rock canon but “disposable” pop and chart R&B. What makes a mash-up interesting is not that it uses quality critically-approved materials, but that it re-works its materials into new contexts. Bootlegs as a whole can embody the “dissonant possibilities” of the commodity (Bennett 127)—as disruption of the normative reading of songs, as a critique of postmodern capitalism, as an affirmation of consumption, as a critique of the pop auteur cult that privileges certain acts as “art” and not others, as frivolous party music, and more. Most obviously, of course, mash-ups illuminate Fredric Jameson’s thesis that postmodern art is an art of pastiche (Jameson). Mash-ups often take disparate elements, songs from different genres, and make songs that shouldn’t belong together somehow work. Freelance Hellraiser’s classic “Stroke of Genius” bootleg took then band du jour The Strokes and overlayed pop muppet Christina Aguilera’s “Genie in A Bottle” vocals into a surprisingly soulful new song, showing in the process that the gap between “manufactured” pop artist and “authentic” rock artist may not be as far as some would imagine. Alternatively, artists can mash together songs that are basically the same, pointedly noting their lack of originality—for instance, the mash-up from which this article takes its name, San Francisco bootlegger Party Ben’s “Boulevard of Broken Songs,” which takes Green Day’s recent “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” and shows its uncanny similarity to Oasis’s “Wonderwall,” as well as other songs by Travis, Coldplay and Aerosmith. Like any commodity, mash-ups are in some ways implicated in a hegemonic capitalist economy. They are an object to be consumed, and are reliant on the consumption of other texts. In a practical sense for its makers, making mash-ups requires the software to make music, often the Sony-owned ACID program, whose loop based lay-out lends itself to the use of sampled materials. Given their general immersion in technology, it is questionable whether bootleggers necessarily purchase these programs, given the availability of “cracked” software on peer-to-peer downloading programs and Bit-Torrent. Similarly, making mash-ups might require the purchase of CDs or mp3s, although again this is far from certain, given the easy accessibility of “illegal” mp3s downloadable on the internet (but of course that requires the money for an internet connection, as does the hosting of mp3s on individual mash-up sites). Compared to the money needed to “legitimately” release songs, though, mash-ups are a relatively inexpensive way to create “new” music. Most mash-up artists post their work with a disclaimer with words to the effect of “I don’t own these songs, I will take these songs down if asked by the copyright owners, don’t sue me.” Songs are usually available to download for free, and the selling of mash-up CDs on E-bay is highly frowned-upon. While this is partly an attempt to avoid being sued by copyright holders, it also suggests an opting-out of a capitalistic system—art for art’s sake. The most obvious critique of capitalism occurs in the form of the “cut-up,” which sees songs or speeches sampled and reassembled to form different meanings. This may be political, for example, the cut-up by RX that re-assembled George W Bush’s speeches into U2’s anti-war song “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” Australian readers may remember the satirical Pauline Pantsdown single “I Don’t Like It” which re-arranged right-wing One Nation politician Pauline Hanson’s voice into nonsensical sayings about shopping trolleys and discos. Like the slash that Jenkins applauds, this may also take the form of a rupture of the heteronormative surface of most pop music. One good example is Bristol mash-up artist Andrew Herring’s “Blue Cheese mix” which cut together Avril Lavigne’s “Sk8r Boi” into a homoerotic love song (“He was a boy/he was a boy/can I make it anymore obvious?”), over the top of such queer-friendly songs as Sylvester’s “You Make Me Feel Mighty Real” and Placebo’s “Nancy Boy.” This is not to suggest that queer sexuality is outside of a capitalistic economy, but rather that queer re-readings take popular music culture into new contexts less frequently taken by the largely heteronormative music industry. But while some mash-up culture exhibits a decidedly anti-capitalist out-look, a few mash-up artists have made the leap from bootlegger to major-label sanctioned artist. The press coverage for the aforementioned Dangermouse got him a production gig with the Gorillaz and the leverage to release his much-hyped Gnarls Barkley project with Cee-Lo (of course, it rather helped that he already had a record deal with rapper Gemini). Richard X’s bootlegs landed him a number one UK single when the Sugababes re-recorded his “Freak Like Me” mash-up, and a number of mash-ups have been licensed by the labels of the original artists and released officially (French bootleggers Loo & Placido’s “Horny Like A Dandy,” English bootleggers Phil & Dog’s “Dr Pressure”). Particularly in the first flush of the mash-up hype in the UK in 2001, there has been the potential at least for a few bootleggers to break into the music industry. Thus, one should not consider mash-ups as an unambiguous refusal of late capitalism, for many bootleggers would like nothing better than to become part of the system from which they currently pilfer. However, given the nature of the medium, its commercial co-option is far from assured, since the clearance fees for many bootlegs render them un-releasable. In their re-appropriations of popular music culture, though, mash-ups embody the contradictions inherent in late capitalism—fun and serious, nihilist and political, anti-capitalist and marked by hyper-consumption. Immersed in pop culture, but not quite of it, the liminal place of mash-ups on the edge of the culture should continue to make them of interest to critics of media culture. References Adorno, Theodor W. “Culture Industry Reconsidered.” In The Adorno Reader. Ed. Brian O’Connor. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. 230-239. Bennett, Jane. The Enchantment of Modern Life. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 1991. Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992. Jones, Sasha Frere. “1 + 1 + 1 = 1: The New Math of Mash-Ups.” The New Yorker 10 Jan. 2005. 22 Sep. 2006 http://www.newyorker.com/critics/music/?050110crmu_music>. Rojas, Pete. “Bootleg Culture.” Salon 1 Aug. 2002. 22 Sep. 2006 http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2002/08/01/bootlegs/index.html?pn=1>. Citation reference for this article MLA Style McAvan, Em. "“Boulevard of Broken Songs”: Mash-ups as Textual Re-appropriation of Popular Music Culture." M/C Journal 9.6 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0612/02-mcavan.php>. APA Style McAvan, E. (Dec. 2006) "“Boulevard of Broken Songs”: Mash-ups as Textual Re-appropriation of Popular Music Culture," M/C Journal, 9(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0612/02-mcavan.php>.

The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires. — William Arthur WardIntroductionThe first documented use of the term Mentor can be traced back to the 8th century BC poem by Homer entitled Odyssey (Hay, Gerber and Minichiello). Although this original representation of Mentor is contested in the literature (Colley), historically the term mentor has evolved to imply a wise and trusted other who advises, teaches, protects and supports someone younger who is inexperienced and not so knowledgeable with the ways of the world. The mentor within a 21st century construct still aligns to this historical portrayal, however the evolution of society, the influence of technology, the growth of entrepreneurship, and a greater understanding of the impact of our interactions with others has forced us to consider mentoring in contemporary ways. As such, popular culture, through books, film and images, provide many impressions of the mentor and what it means to mentor in both historical and contemporary circumstances. Similarly, popular culture provides us with a variety of impressions of the teacher. Throughout old and new history, teaching is considered to be a honourable profession, one that is complex and involves specific skills and knowledge to be effective (Marsh). Society has high expectations of teachers as they are entrusted with shaping the future generation (Parkay). Although the levels of respect and trust of teachers changes within different cultural circumstances, society allows teachers to be one of the most influential figures in a child’s life. Popular film often picks up on this theme and portrays teachers as inspirational figures, pillars of society and those that can have a major influence over the development of the student’s in their care. Within the brief story that a film provides, teachers are more often than not, positioned as a ‘mentor type’ figure to the students entrusted in their care, who guides and supports them to become who they want to be. This paper explores the constructs of the mentor and mentorship through a popular culture lens. Culture is broadly described as the “bricks and mortar of our most commonplace understandings” (Willis 185) and our understandings are shaped by what we see, hear and do. The paper is framed by and seeks to answer the following question: To what extent is the teacher as mentor portrayed in popular film a realistic image? Accordingly this paper will examine the rise of the teacher as mentor and determine what images are portrayed through the medium of film. In order to answer the question, the paper will briefly examine current literature for the characteristics and roles of mentors and teachers. The paper will then delve into the way that teachers are portrayed in film and will be followed by an examination of a selection of films that portray teachers as mentors. A comparison will be made between the characteristics of mentors and the characteristics that the movie teachers display. Analysis through the use of reader-response theory will provide insight into the extent of the reality of the teacher as mentor that are portrayed. Mentors and Teachers: A Review of Selected Literature Mentoring consists of a series of interactions that can be of a social, intellectual or emotional nature (Lentz and Allen). Mentoring can be described as a helping relationship whereby two or more people work together in order to achieve personal and professional goals (Johnson and Ridley). Effective mentoring is also known to be mutually beneficial to all participants (Ambrosetti, Knight and Dekkers). When scanning the literature there are a number of common descriptors that are used consistently to situate the interactions a mentor undertakes: supporter, guide, advisor, teacher, protector and counselor (Sundli; Hall et al.). Such descriptors indicate that a mentor performs a series of roles that change according to the needs of those being mentored (Ambrosetti and Dekkers). If the mentor has a series of roles to perform, then it is logical that the mentee also will also have a number of roles to play, however these are lnot well documented in the literature. The roles that both mentors and mentees play during a relationship can be identified and underpinned through the three dimensions of mentoring: the relationship itself, the developmental needs of the participants and the integration of the context in which the mentoring is situated (Ambrosetti, Knight and Dekkers). The interactions that a mentor engages in with a mentee span over a number of dimensions and are often reactive in nature. The three dimensions of mentoring can assist in describing a mentor and the roles they play. The relational dimension includes such roles as supporter, protector, friend and counselor. The roles of guide, teacher/trainer, collaborator, facilitator and reflector can be classified as developmental whereas being a role model can be both a developmental role and contextual role (230). There are a number of characteristics that are common to a mentor. Johnson and Ridley summarize them to include the following traits: exuding warmth, listening actively, showing unconditional regard, tolerating idealization, embracing humor, not expecting perfection, being trustworthy, having interpersonal competence, respecting another’s values and not being jealous of the mentee (43-62). The above list of traits are personal and often linked to personality, thus can be connected explicitly to the relational dimension of mentoring. The possession (or non-possession) of such traits can impact on the interactions that occur within mentorship. Accordingly it can be assumed that the characteristics, in conjunction with the roles that mentors play, that not everyone is suited to the role of mentor. Most people have experienced schooling at some stage in their life and is therefore familiar with the role of a teacher. Teaching is one most well known professions and can be described as a “creative act in which teachers continually shape and reshape lessons, events and the experiences of their students”(Parkay 45). The role of a teacher is to teach both knowledge and skills to their learners in order to prepare them as citizens for the future. More specifically, the role of the teacher is to design and deliver learning experiences that cater for and challenge the learners, that develop skills and knowledge both inside and outside of the classroom, and help them become confident, creative and responsible citizens. Despite this important role, the image of teachers is split between two types: one that is bitter, spiteful and egocentric, and the other being caring, accepting and reflective (Connell). We remember teachers according to such categories. The types of characteristics that teachers hold are extensive, however the following encompasses those that are key within the literature. Teachers generally have compassion, empathy and a caring nature. They can be flexible, creative, personable, humorous, positive, knowledgeable, motivational and dependable. Teachers are often well organised people, fair minded and resourceful (Howell). When examining the characteristics of teachers and the traits of mentors, similarities can be seen indicating that a particular type of person may be more suited to being a teacher and/or mentor. Teachers as Mentors in Film Teachers seem to be a popular subject of feature films. Films such as Goodbye Mr Chips (1939), Blackboard Jungle (1955) and To Sir with Love (1967) provide us with insight into the way teachers are portrayed in society and the role they play. Film however, has the specific ability to shape the cultural understanding we develop and allows us to make comparisons to our own experiences and those that are played out in fictional circumstances (Delamarter). While there are some films that provide a negative portrayal of teachers, generally they provide a view that teachers are positive influences on the students in their care.A search of the World Wide Web about the teacher as mentor brings up a treasure trove of film titles that span from the 1930s to the present day. Despite such a choice of titles, the following films have been selected to examine in this paper: Dead Poets Society (1989), Dangerous Minds (1995), Freedom Writers (2007) and the Harry Potter series of films (2001-2011). Selection of these films was based on the following two criteria: 1) they occurred within in a school setting and 2) are embedded within a contemporary theme of struggle where rebellion and/or other teenage angst are highlighted. Reader-response theory will underpin the analysis of the teachers in each of the films selected, so that an answer to the earlier posed question can be illuminated. Broadly speaking, reader-response theory is concerned with how readers, or in this case viewers, “make meaning from their experience with the text” (Beach 1). There are many perspectives on reader-response theory and how one might focus upon when responding to a text. In this instance the author will highlight the transaction that occurs between the reader, the text and the context. The transactions will include the social, cultural, experiential, psychological and textual viewpoints (Beach 8). Firstly, each film will be briefly described. This will be followed by an analysis of the teachers portrayed in the films. Dead Poets Society (1989) is set at a conservative secondary boys academy in the late 1950s and focuses on a group of students completing their senior year. Mr Keating is a new English teacher who uses unconventional teaching methods in the classroom. He inspires his students to ‘seize the day’ and ‘make your lives extraordinary’ and does this through the teaching of poetry. He encourages them to stand on desks during his lessons and to throw out tradition. It is Keating’s messages to his students to question what they believe that permeates the film and inspires his students to pursue what they want to do and become. The film Dangerous Minds (1995) is set in a low socio-economic area, where un-privilege and protecting yourself is a way of life. The teacher in this film is new and young, but is an ex US Marine. The class the film centres on is a difficult one to teach. This teacher uses unorthodox methods to gain the attention and trust of her students. The film makes a point to show us that she makes particular effort to relate the curriculum to the students’ interests in order to engage them in learning. Emphasis is also on the fact that she takes an interest in the students and many become her ‘personal projects’ and helping them to realize who they can become. Freedom Writers (2007) is set in the years directly following the Los Angeles riots of 1992 whereby issues of racism, segregation and inequality along with the changing view of the world is the focus. The students in the classrooms of this film are from diverse backgrounds and un-trusting of the education system. Their teacher is new and young and her first attempts to earn their trust fail until she begins to get to know the students and make links between what is being taught to their own lives. She inspires her class to learn tolerance, apply themselves and pursue further education. In the Harry Potter (2001-2011) series of films, there are several teachers who make an impact upon the young wizards. Although set in a fantasy world, the audience is treated to both inspirational teachers looking to nurture, protect and develop their charges, and teachers who are painted as egocentric and suspicious. Inspirational teachers include Dumbledore and McGonagall who offer subtle life lessons, specific skills and knowledge and protect the young wizards from danger. Egocentric and somewhat suspicious teachers include Snape and Quirrell who look to thwart the wizard’s time at school, however they too offer subtle life lessons to their students. The theme of good versus evil is paramount throughout the film series and the teachers are aligned with this theme.Teachers as Mentors – An AnalysisAlthough only a brief description of each film has been offered, the teachers as mentors to their students is the focus. Mr Keating (Dead Poets Society) and LouAnne Johnson (Dangerous Minds) are both described as unorthodox as they each use teaching methods that are frowned upon by others. However their purposeful and different teaching methods draw their students into their lessons so that life learning can occur. In each film, the unorthodox teaching touches the students in ways unknown to them before and in both cases the students demonstrate intellectual and personal growth. The unorthodox methods provide an avenue for a different relationship that is far from the traditional. In some scenes friendship is hinted at where guiding and supporting the students towards their hopes and dreams is highlighted. Aspects of mentoring can be seen through relational, developmental and contextual domains as the students are supported, guided and provided explicit role modeling. The young teacher in Freedom Writers, Erin Gruwell, uses a teaching approach that includes taking time to get to know her students. This approach, like Keating and Johnson, provides the opportunity to tweak the curriculum to the interests of the students and thus engage them in academic learning. They teach skills and knowledge in ways which relate to the students’ lives and interests. They guide, support the students towards the unfamiliar and facilitate opportunities for success. They help them to set goals and make them realise that they have a future and can be successful in their lives. The transformations that occur due to the teaching approaches used by the teachers cause their students admire and want to be like them. In Harry Potter, teachers Dumbledore and McGonagall are wise in years and life experience. They offer wisdom, protection and guidance to the young wizards throughout the series. These teachers, like Keating, Johnson and Gruwell, are role models in that they represent what life can be like and how best to achieve that life. Snape and Quirell also take an interest in their students, but represent an alternative view of life and learning. The difference between the four Harry Potter teachers can be drilled down to the traits of effective teachers. Two of which emulate the traits and two whom do not readily display any of the traits. Dumbledore and McGonagall can be considered as teacher mentors whereas Snape and Quirell cannot. In each film the student can be seen as central to the teacher as mentor and this in turn influences the way in which they behave. The teachers in these films pass on life lessons through their teaching. Throughout the films the teachers are guiding, supporting, befriending, protecting and training their charges. Interactions that occur between the teachers and the students are followed by a reflective phase by the teachers, whereby solutions to problems are sought or self-realisation occurs. In many instances the films show the teacher learning from the student and thus learning their own life lessons through reflection. From a social and cultural perspective, what is portrayed within the storylines are often close to the reality of what is expected from teachers. In many instances these lead towards a stereotyping of who teachers are and how they behave. However, from an experiential point of view, our expectations of the actions that teachers undertake do not usually take such form. In reality, teachers are busy people with a complex job to do (Connell) and often do not have time to take personal interest in all of their students individually. The teachers within the films chosen seem to have one class to prepare for, whereas in reality, a school teacher will have many classes to consider. Psychologically, some teachers and the style they embrace appeal to a particular a type of student or group of students. In the case of Dead Poets Society, Dangerous Minds and Freedom Writers, the storyline painted the students as those needing a particular type of teacher, someone who would save them from their circumstance and visa versa. The textual perspective was well highlighted by the teachers in the Harry Potter films as the viewer expects to see teachers with rather unusual but interesting teaching styles. However the text (within all films) included insight into mentor characteristics such as warmth, humour, tolerance, respect and unconditional regards. Generally, the films examined highlight two different types of teachers, challenging the categories written about by Connell. The first type of teacher highlighted was one who was seen as being more contemporary. One who is individual, unorthodox, and maybe a little rebellious; this teacher highlights that you need to be ‘different’ to make a difference. The second type was one who aligns to the traditional form of teacher; one who uses their knowledge, wisdom and life experience to break through to their student. Each of the films were underpinned by the relationship, the developmental needs and the context in which the narrative was played out, however the relationship between the students and the teacher was highlighted as being central to the storyline. Thus films of this nature often portray teachers as those who help their students in the emotional sense rather than the intellectual sense (Delamarter). Conclusion Several understandings about the teacher as mentor have been brought to light through the examination of the teacher as mentor in film. Firstly, in revisiting the mentoring definitions offered within this paper, it can be said that the teachers highlighted in the discussed films were mentoring their students in a way unique to the relationship developed between teacher and student. In each instance the teacher worked with their students to identify teaching approaches that would be successful in the context in which they were situated. Each film demonstrated that the teachers were committed to creating a relationship that met the developmental needs of their students. Interestingly, it was observed that the relationships were mutually beneficial in that the teachers grew along with the students with many coming to realisations about themselves through reflection and self thought. Secondly, the teachers within the films were portrayed as playing several important roles within their students’ lives. The teachers were role models inside and outside of the classroom. Each film’s storyline positioned the teacher as an influential other, whether they be portrayed as rebellious and unorthodox, evil and suspicious or inspirational and wise. The teachers in these films can be considered as mentors as they were supporting, guiding, protecting and nurturing the students to become better versions of themselves. However, the question that this article sought to answer was: to what extent is the teacher as mentor portrayed in popular film a realistic image? In looking back at the image the teacher in society and the role that they play in developing citizens of the future, it can be said the image presented has slivers of realism. In the real world, teachers must conform to society’s expectations, educational policies and codes of professionalism. Professional relationships with students do not encompass them in behave a student as a ‘personal project’, although catering to their needs is encouraged within the curriculum. It would be thought that if teachers did not encourage their students to be the best they can be, then they would not be doing their job. Many figures throughout our cultural history have been viewed as a mentor due to the role they play and how these roles align to societal beliefs and values. Thus, the portrayal of mentors and mentorship through a popular culture lens provides insight into our understanding about what mentorship is and how this may develop in the future. Both in the past and present, teachers are seen as inspirational figures and pillars of society, and are often considered a mentor by default. Films portray teachers in a variety of fashions, however there are many films that subtly position the teacher as a mentor to their students and it is this that this article has focused on. ReferencesAmbrosetti, Angelina, and John Dekkers. “The Interconnectedness of the Roles of Mentors and Mentees in Pre-Service Teacher Education Mentoring Relationships.” Australian Journal of Teacher Education 35.6 (2010): 42-55.Ambrosetti, Angelina, Bruce Allen Knight, and John Dekkers. “Maximizing the Potential of Mentoring: A Framework for Pre-Service Teacher Education.” Mentoring and Tutoring: Partnership in Learning 22.3 (2014): 224-39.Beach, Richard. A Teacher’s Response to Reader-Response Theories. Illinois: National Council Teachers of English, 1993.Blackboard Jungle. Directed by Richard Brooks. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1955.Colley, Helen. “Righting Rewritings of the Myth of Mentor: A Critical Perspective on Career Guidance Mentoring.” British Journal of Guidance & Counselling 29.2 (2001): 177-197.Connell, Raewyn. “Teachers.” Education, Change and Society. Eds. Raewyn Connell, Anthony Welch, Margaret Vickers, Dennis Foley, Nigel Bagnall, Debra Hayes, Helen Proctor, Arathi Sriprakash, and Craig Campbell. South Melbourne: Oxford, 2013. 261-275.Dangerous Minds. Directed by John N. Smith. Hollywood Pictures/Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer Films/Via Rosa Productions, 1995.Dead Poets Society. Directed by Peter Weir. Touchstone Pictures/Silver Screen Partners IV, 1989.Delamater, Jeremy. “Avoiding Practice Shock: Using Teacher Movies to Realign Pre-Service Teachers’ Expectations of Teaching.” Australian Journal of Teacher Education 40.2 (2015): 1-14.Freedom Writers. Directed by Richard LaGravenese. Paramount Pictures, 2007.Goodbye Mr Chips. Directed by Sam Wood. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Denham Studios, 1939.Hall, Kendra M., Rani Jo Draper, Leigh K. Smith, and Robert V. Bullough. “More than a Place to Teach: Exploring the Perceptions of the Roles and Responsibilities of Mentor Teachers.” Mentoring and Tutoring: Partnership in Learning 16.3 (2008): 328-45.Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Directed by Chris Columbus. Heyday Films/1492 Pictures, 2001.Hay, Terence, Rod Gerber, and Victor Minichiello. “Mentorship: A Review of the Concept.” Unicorn 25.2 (1999): 84-95.Howell, Jennifer. Teaching and Learning: Building Effective Pedagogies. South Melbourne, Vic.: Oxford University Press, 2014.Lentz, Elizabeth, and Tammy D. Allen. “Reflections on Naturally Occurring Mentoring Relationships.” The Blackwell Handbook of Mentoring: A Multiple Perspectives Approach. Eds. Tammy D. Allen and Lillian T. Eby. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007. 159-162.Johnson, W. Brad, and Charles R. Ridley. The Elements of Mentoring. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Marsh, Colin. Becoming a Teacher: Knowledge Skills and Issues. 5th ed. Frenchs Forest Pearson, 2010.Parkay, Forrest W. Becoming a Teacher. 9th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.Sundli, Liv. “Mentoring: A New Mantra for Education?” Teaching and Teacher Education 23 (2007): 201-14.To Sir with Love. Directed by James Clavell. Columbia British Productions, 1967.Willis, Paul. “Shop-Floor Culture, Masculinity and the Wage Form.” Working Class Culture: Studies in History and Theory. Eds. John Clarke, Chas Critcher, and Richard Johnson. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2007. 185-200.

Introduction The first “Aquarius Festival” came together in Canberra, at the Australian National University, in the autumn of 1971 and was reprised in 1973 in the small rural town of Nimbin, in northern New South Wales. Both events reflected the Zeitgeist in what was, in some ways, an inchoate expression of the so-called “counterculture” (Roszak). Rather than attempting to analyse the counterculture as a discrete movement with a definable history, I enlist the theory of cultural memes to read the counter culture as a Dawkinsian cluster meme, with this paper offered as “testimonio”, a form of quasi-political memoir that views shifts in the culture through the lens of personal experience (Zimmerman, Yúdice). I track an evolving personal, “internal” topography and map its points of intersection with the radical social, political and cultural changes spawned by the “consciousness revolution” that was an integral part of the counterculture emerging in the 1970s. I focus particularly on the notion of “consciousness raising”, as a Dawkinsian memetic replicator, in the context of the idealistic notions of the much-heralded “New Age” of Aquarius, and propose that this meme has been a persistent feature of the evolution of the “meme cluster” known as the counterculture. Mimesis and the Counterculture Since evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins floated the notion of cultural memes as a template to account for the evolution of ideas within political cultures, a literature of commentary and criticism has emerged that debates the strengths and weaknesses of his proposed model and its application across a number of fields. I borrow the notion to trace the influence of a set of memes that clustered around the emergence of what writer Marilyn Ferguson called The Aquarian Conspiracy, in her 1980 book of that name. Ferguson’s text, subtitled Personal and Social Transformation in Our Time, was a controversial attempt to account for what was known as the “New Age” movement, with its late millennial focus on social and personal transformation. That focus leads me to approach the counterculture (a term first floated by Theodore Roszak) less as a definable historical movement and more as a cluster of aspirational tropes expressing a range of aspects or concerns, from the overt political activism through to experimental technologies for the transformation of consciousness, and all characterised by a critical interrogation of, and resistance to, conventional social norms (Ferguson’s “personal and social transformation”). With its more overtly “spiritual” focus, I read the “New Age” meme, then, as a sub-set of this “cluster meme”, the counterculture. In my reading, “New Age” and “counterculture” overlap, sharing persistent concerns and a broad enough tent to accommodate the serious—the combative political action of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), say, (see Elbaum)—to the light-hearted—the sport of frisbee for example (Stancil). The interrogation of conventional social and political norms inherited from previous generations was a prominent strategy across both movements. Rather than offering a sociological analysis or history of the ragbag counterculture, per se, my discussion here focuses in on the particular meme of “consciousness raising” within that broader set of cultural shifts, some of which were sustained in their own right, some dropping away, and many absorbed into the dominant mainstream culture. Dawkins use of the term “meme” was rooted in the Greek mimesis, to emphasise the replication of an idea by imitation, or copying. He likened the way ideas survive and change in human culture to the natural selection of genes in biological evolution. While the transmission of memes does not depend on a physical medium, such as the DNA of biology, they replicate with a greater or lesser degree of success by harnessing human social media in a kind of “infectivity”, it is argued, through “contagious” repetition among human populations. Dawkins proposed that just as biological organisms could be said to act as “hosts” for replicating genes, in the same way people and groups of people act as hosts for replicating memes. Even before Dawkins floated his term, French biologist Jacques Monod wrote that ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms. Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their content; indeed they too can evolve, and in this evolution selection must surely play an important role. (165, emphasis mine) Ideas have power, in Monod’s analysis: “They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighbouring brains, and thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains” (Monod, cited in Gleick). Emblematic of the counterculture were various “New Age” phenomena such as psychedelic drugs, art and music, with the latter contributing the “Aquarius” meme, whose theme song came from the stage musical (and later, film) Hair, and particularly the lyric that runs: “This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius”. The Australian Aquarius Festivals of 1971 and 1973 explicitly invoked this meme in the way identified by Monod and the “Aquarius” meme resonated even in Australia. Problematising “Aquarius” As for the astrological accuracy of the “Age of Aquarius meme”, professional astrologers argue about its dating, and the qualities that supposedly characterise it. When I consulted with two prominent workers in this field for the preparation of this article, I was astonished to find their respective dating of the putative Age of Aquarius were centuries apart! What memes were being “hosted” here? According to the lyrics: When the moon is in the seventh house And Jupiter aligns with Mars Then peace will guide the planets And love will steer the stars. (Hair) My astrologer informants assert that the moon is actually in the seventh house twice every year, and that Jupiter aligns with Mars every two years. Yet we are still waiting for the outbreak of peace promised according to these astrological conditions. I am also informed that there’s no “real” astrological underpinning for the aspirations of the song’s lyrics, for an astrological “Age” is not determined by any planet but by constellations rising, they tell me. Most important, contrary to the aspirations embodied in the lyrics, peace was not guiding the planets and love was not about to “steer the stars”. For Mars is not the planet of love, apparently, but of war and conflict and, empowered with the expansiveness of Jupiter, it was the forceful aggression of a militaristic mind-set that actually prevailed as the “New Age” supposedly dawned. For the hippified summer of love had taken a nosedive with the tragic events at the Altamont speedway, near San Francisco in 1969, when biker gangs, enlisted to provide security for a concert performance by The Rolling Stones allegedly provoked violence, marring the event and contributing to a dawning disillusionment (for a useful coverage of the event and its historical context see Dalton). There was a lot of far-fetched poetic licence involved in this dreaming, then, but memes, according to Nikos Salingaros, are “greatly simplified versions of patterns”. “The simpler they are, the faster they can proliferate”, he writes, and the most successful memes “come with a great psychological appeal” (243, 260; emphasis mine). What could be retrieved from this inchoate idealism? Harmony and understanding Sympathy and trust abounding No more falsehoods or derisions Golden living dreams of visions Mystic crystal revelation And the mind’s true liberation Aquarius, Aquarius. (Hair) In what follows I want to focus on this notion: “mind’s true liberation” by tracing the evolution of this project of “liberating” the mind, reflected in my personal journey. Nimbin and Aquarius I had attended the first Aquarius Festival, which came together in Canberra, at the Australian National University, in the autumn of 1971. I travelled there from Perth, overland, in a Ford Transit van, among a raggedy band of tie-dyed hippie actors, styled as The Campus Guerilla Theatre Troupe, re-joining our long-lost sisters and brothers as visionary pioneers of the New Age of Aquarius. Our visions were fueled with a suitcase full of potent Sumatran “buddha sticks” and, contrary to Biblical prophesies, we tended to see—not “through a glass darkly” but—in psychedelic, pop-, and op-art explosions of colour. We could see energy, man! Two years later, I found myself at the next Aquarius event in Nimbin, too, but by that time I inhabited a totally different mind-zone, albeit one characterised by the familiar, intense idealism. In the interim, I had been arrested in 1971 while “tripping out” in Sydney on potent “acid”, or LSD (Lysergic acid diethylamide); had tried out political engagement at the Pram Factory Theatre in Melbourne; had camped out in protest at the flooding of Lake Pedder in the Tasmanian wilderness; met a young guru, started meditating, and joined “the ashram”—part of the movement known as the Divine Light Mission, which originated in India and was carried to the “West” (including Australia) by an enthusiastic and evangelical following of drug-toking drop-outs who had been swarming through India intent on escaping the dominant culture of the military-industrial complex and the horrors of the Vietnam War. Thus, by the time of the 1973 event in Nimbin, while other festival participants were foraging for “gold top” magic mushrooms in farmers’ fields, we devotees had put aside such chemical interventions in conscious awareness to dig latrines (our “service” project for the event) and we invited everyone to join us for “satsang” in the yellow, canvas-covered, geodesic dome, to attend to the message of peace. The liberation meme had shifted through a mutation that involved lifestyle-changing choices that were less about alternative approaches to sustainable agriculture and more about engaging directly with “mind’s true liberation”. Raising Consciousness What comes into focus here is the meme of “consciousness raising”, which became the persistent project within which I lived and worked and had my being for many years. Triggered initially by the ingestion of those psychedelic substances that led to my shocking encounter with the police, the project was carried forward into the more disciplined environs of my guru’s ashrams. However, before my encounter with sustained spiritual practice I had tried to work the shift within the parameters of an ostensibly political framework. “Consciousness raising” was a form of political activism borrowed from the political sphere. Originally generated by Mao Zedong in China during the revolutionary struggle to overthrow the vested colonial interests that were choking Chinese nationalism in the 1940s, to our “distant, foreign brains” (Monod), as Western revolutionary romantics, Chairman Mao and his Little Red Book were taken up, in a kind of international counterculture solidarity with revolutionaries everywhere. It must be admitted, this solidarity was a fairly superficial gesture. Back in China it might be construed as part of a crude totalitarian campaign to inculcate Marxist-Leninist political ideas among the peasant classes (see Compestine for a fictionalised account of traumatic times; Han Suyin’s long-form autobiography—an early example of testimonio as personal and political history—offers an unapologetic account of a struggle not usually construed as sympathetically by Western commentators). But the meme (and the processes) of consciousness raising were picked up by feminists in the United States in the late 1960s and into the 1970s (Brownmiller 21) and it was in this form I encountered it as an actor with the politically engaged theatre troupe, The Australian Performing Group, at Carlton’s Pram Factory Theatre in late 1971. The Performance Group I performed as a core member of the Group in 1971-72. Decisions as to which direction the Group should take were to be made as a collective, and the group veered towards anarchy. Most of the women were getting together outside of the confines of the Pram Factory to raise their consciousness within the Carlton Women’s Liberation Cell Group. While happy that the sexual revolution was reducing women’s sexual inhibitions, some of the men at the Factory were grumbling into their beer, disturbed that intimate details of their private lives—and their sexual performance—might be disclosed and raked over by a bunch of radical feminists. As they began to demand equal rights to orgasm in the bedroom, the women started to seek equal access within the performance group, too. They requested rehearsal time to stage the first production by the Women’s Theatre Group, newly formed under the umbrella of the wider collective. As all of the acknowledged writers in the Group so far were men—some of whom had not kept pace in consciousness raising—scripts tended to be viewed as part of a patriarchal plot, so Betty Can Jump was an improvised piece, with the performance material developed entirely by the cast in workshop-style rehearsals, under the direction of Kerry Dwyer (see Blundell, Zuber-Skerritt 21, plus various contributors at www.pramfactory.com/memoirsfolder/). I was the only male in the collective included in the cast. Several women would have been more comfortable if no mere male were involved at all. My gendered attitudes would scarcely have withstood a critical interrogation but, as my partner was active in launching the Women’s Electoral Lobby, I was given the benefit of the doubt. Director Kerry Dwyer liked my physicalised approach to performance (we were both inspired by the “poor theatre” of Jerzy Grotowski and the earlier surrealistic theories of Antonin Artaud), and I was cast to play all the male parts, whatever they would be. Memorable material came up in improvisation, much of which made it into the performances, but my personal favorite didn’t make the cut. It was a sprawling movement piece where I was “born” out of a symbolic mass of writhing female bodies. It was an arduous process and, after much heaving and huffing, I emerged from the birth canal stammering “SSSS … SSSS … SSMMMO-THER”! The radical reversioning of culturally authorised roles for women has inevitably, if more slowly, led to a re-thinking of the culturally approved and reinforced models of masculinity, too, once widely accepted as entirely biologically ordained rather than culturally constructed. But the possibility of a queer re-versioning of gender would be recognised only slowly. Liberation Meanwhile, Dennis Altman was emerging as an early spokesman for gay, or homosexual, liberation and he was invited to address the collective. Altman’s stirring book, Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation, had recently been published, but none of us had read it. Radical or not, the Group had shown little evidence of sensitivity to gender-queer issues. My own sexuality was very much “oppressed” rather than liberated and I would have been loath to use “queer” to describe myself. The term “homosexual” was fraught with pejorative, quasi-medical associations and, in a collective so divided across strict and sometimes hostile gender boundaries, deviant affiliations got short shrift. Dennis was unsure of his reception before this bunch of apparent “heteros”. Sitting at the rear of the meeting, I admired his courage. It took more self-acceptance than I could muster to confront the Group on this issue at the time. Somewhere in the back of my mind, “homosexuality” was still something I was supposed to “get over”, so I failed to respond to Altman’s implicit invitation to come out and join the party. The others saw me in relationship with a woman and whatever doubts they might have carried about the nature of my sexuality were tactfully suspended. Looking back, I am struck by the number of simultaneous poses I was trying to maintain: as an actor; as a practitioner of an Artaudian “theatre of cruelty”; as a politically committed activist; and as a “hetero”-sexual. My identity was an assemblage of entities posing as “I”; it was as if I were performing a self. Little gay boys are encouraged from an early age to hide their real impulses, not only from others—in the very closest circle, the family; at school; among one’s peers—but from themselves, too. The coercive effects of shaming usually fix the denial into place in our psyches before we have any intellectual (or political) resources to consider other options. Growing up trying to please, I hid my feelings. In my experience, it could be downright dangerous to resist the subtle and gross coercions that applied around gender normativity. The psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, of the British object-relations school, argues that when the environment does not support the developing personality and requires the person to sacrifice his or her own spontaneous needs to adapt to environmental demands, there is not even a resting-place for individual experience and the result is a failure in the primary narcissistic state to evolve an individual. The “individual” then develops as an extension of the shell rather than that of the core [...] What there is left of a core is hidden away and is difficult to find even in the most far-reaching analysis. The individual then exists by not being found. The true self is hidden, and what we have to deal with clinically is the complex false self whose function is to keep this true self hidden. (212) How to connect to that hidden core, then? “Mind’s true liberation...” Alienated from the performative version of selfhood, but still inspired by the promise of liberation, even in the “fuzzy” form for which my inchoate hunger yearned (sexual liberation? political liberation? mystical liberation?), I was left to seek out a more authentic basis for selfhood, one that didn’t send me spinning along the roller-coaster of psychedelic drugs, or lie to me with the nostrums of a toxic, most forms of which would deny me, as a sexual, moral and legal pariah, the comforts of those “anchorage points to the social matrix” identified by Soddy (cited in Mol 58). My spiritual inquiry was “counter” to these institutionalised models of religious culture. So, I began to read my way through a myriad of books on comparative religion. And to my surprise, rather than taking up with the religions of antique cultures, instead I encountered a very young guru, initially as presented in a simply drawn poster in the window of Melbourne’s only vegetarian restaurant (Shakahari, in Carlton). “Are you hungry and tired of reading recipe books?” asked the figure in the poster. I had little sense of where that hunger would lead me, but it seemed to promise a fulfilment in ways that the fractious politics of the APG offered little nourishment. So, while many of my peers in the cities chose to pursue direct political action, and others experimented with cooperative living in rural communes, I chose the communal lifestyle of the ashram. In these different forms, then, the conscious raising meme persisted when other challenges raised by the counterculture either faded or were absorbed in the mainstream. I finally came to realise that the intense disillusionment process I had been through (“dis-illusionment” as the stripping away of illusions) was the beginning of awakening, in effect a “spiritual initiation” into a new way of seeing myself and my “place” in the world. Buddhist teachers might encourage this very kind of stripping away of false notions as part of their teaching, so the aspiration towards the “true liberation” of the mind expressed in the Aquarian visioning might be—and in my case, actually has been and continues to be—fulfilled to a very real extent. Gurus and the entire turn towards Eastern mysticism were part of the New Age meme cluster prevailing during the early 1970s, but I was fortunate to connect with an enduring set of empirical practices that haven’t faded with the fashions of the counterculture. A good guitarist would never want to play in public without first tuning her instrument. In a similar way, it is now possible for me to tune my mind back to a deeper, more original source of being than the socially constructed sense of self, which had been so fraught with conflicts for me. I have discovered that before gender, and before sexuality, in fact, pulsing away behind the thicket of everyday associations, there is an original, unconditioned state of beingness, the awareness of which can be reclaimed through focused meditation practices, tested in a wide variety of “real world” settings. For quite a significant period of time I worked as an instructor in the method on behalf of my guru, or mentor, travelling through a dozen or so countries, and it was through this exposure that I was able to observe that the practices worked independently of culture and that “mind’s true liberation” was in many ways a de-programming of cultural indoctrinations (see Marsh, 2014, 2013, 2011 and 2007 for testimony of this process). In Japan, Zen roshi might challenge their students with the koan: “Show me your original face, before you were born!” While that might seem to be an absurd proposal, I am finding that there is a potential, if unexpected, liberation in following through such an inquiry. As “hokey” as the Aquarian meme-set might have been, it was a reflection of the idealistic hope that characterised the cluster of memes that aggregated within the counterculture, a yearning for healthier life choices than those offered by the toxicity of the military-industrial complex, the grossly exploitative effects of rampant Capitalism and a politics of cynicism and domination. The meme of the “true liberation” of the mind, then, promised by the heady lyrics of a 1970s hippie musical, has continued to bear fruit in ways that I could not have imagined. References Altman, Dennis. Homosexual Oppression and Liberation. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1972. Blundell, Graeme. The Naked Truth: A Life in Parts. Sydney: Hachette, 2011. Brownmiller, Susan. In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution. New York: The Dial Press, 1999. Compestine, Ying Chang. Revolution Is Not a Dinner Party. New York: Square Fish, 2009. Dalton, David. “Altamont: End of the Sixties, Or Big Mix-Up in the Middle of Nowhere?” Gadfly Nov/Dec 1999. April 2014 ‹http://www.gadflyonline.com/archive/NovDec99/archive-altamont.html›. Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1976. Elbaum, Max. Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che. London and New York: Verso, 2002. Ferguson, Marilyn. The Aquarian Conspiracy. Los Angeles: Tarcher Putnam, 1980. Gleick, James. “What Defines a Meme?” Smithsonian Magazine 2011. April 2014 ‹http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/What-Defines-a Meme.html›. Hair, The American Tribal Love Rock Musical. Prod. Michael Butler. Book by Gerome Ragni and James Rado; Lyrics by Gerome Ragni and James Rado; Music by Galt MacDermot; Musical Director: Galt MacDermot. 1968. Han, Suyin. The Crippled Tree. 1965. Reprinted. Chicago: Academy Chicago P, 1985. ---. A Mortal Flower. 1966. Reprinted. Chicago: Academy Chicago P, 1985. ---. Birdless Summer. 1968. Reprinted. Chicago: Academy Chicago P, 1985. ---. The Morning Deluge: Mao TseTung and the Chinese Revolution 1893-1954. Boston: Little Brown, 1972. ---. My House Has Two Doors. New York: Putnam, 1980. Marsh, Victor. The Boy in the Yellow Dress. Melbourne: Clouds of Magellan Press, 2014. ---. “A Touch of Silk: A (Post)modern Faerie Tale.” Griffith Review 42: Once Upon a Time in Oz (Oct. 2013): 159-69. ---. “Bent Kid, Straight World: Life Writing and the Reconfiguration of ‘Queer’.” TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses 15.1 (April 2011). ‹http://www.textjournal.com.au/april11/marsh.htm›. ---. “The Boy in the Yellow Dress: Re-framing Subjectivity in Narrativisations of the Queer Self.“ Life Writing 4.2 (Oct. 2007): 263-286. Mol, Hans. Identity and the Sacred: A Sketch for a New Social-Scientific Theory of Religion. Oxford: Blackwell, 1976. Monod, Jacques. Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970. Roszak, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition. New York: Doubleday, 1968. Salingaros, Nikos. Theory of Architecture. Solingen: Umbau-Verlag, 2006. Stancil, E.D., and M.D. Johnson. Frisbee: A Practitioner’s Manual and Definitive Treatise. New York: Workman, 1975 Winnicott, D.W. Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis: Collected Papers. 1958. London: Hogarth Press, 1975. Yúdice, George. “Testimonio and Postmodernism.” Latin American Perspectives 18.3 (1991): 15-31. Zimmerman, Marc. “Testimonio.” The Sage Encyclopedia of Social Science Research Methods. Eds. Michael S. Lewis-Beck, Alan Bryman and Tim Futing Liao. London: Sage Publications, 2003. Zuber-Skerritt, Ortrun, ed. Australian Playwrights: David Williamson. Amsterdam: Rodolpi, 1988.

augmentvb [ɔːgˈmɛnt]1. to make or become greater in number, amount, strength, etc.; increase2. Music: to increase (a major or perfect interval) by a semitone (Collins English Dictionary 107) Almost everything associated with Robert Johnson has been subject to some form of augmentation. His talent as a musician and songwriter has been embroidered by myth-making. Johnson’s few remaining artefacts—his photographic images, his grave site, other physical records of his existence—have attained the status of reliquary. Even the integrity of his forty-two surviving recordings is now challenged by audiophiles who posit they were musically and sonically augmented by speeding up—increasing the tempo and pitch. This article documents the promulgation of myth in the life and music of Robert Johnson. His disputed photographic images are cited as archetypal contested artefacts, augmented both by false claims and genuine new discoveries—some of which suggest Johnson’s cultural magnetism is so compelling that even items only tenuously connected to his work draw significant attention. Current challenges to the musical integrity of Johnson’s original recordings, that they were “augmented” in order to raise the tempo, are presented as exemplars of our on-going fascination with his life and work. Part literature review, part investigative history, it uses the phenomenon of augmentation as a prism to shed new light on this enigmatic figure. Johnson’s obscurity during his lifetime, and for twenty-three years after his demise in 1938, offered little indication of his future status as a musical legend: “As far as the evolution of black music goes, Robert Johnson was an extremely minor figure, and very little that happened in the decades following his death would have been affected if he had never played a note” (Wald, Escaping xv). Such anonymity allowed those who first wrote about his music to embrace and propagate the myths that grew around this troubled character and his apparently “supernatural” genius. Johnson’s first press notice, from a pseudonymous John Hammond writing in The New Masses in 1937, spoke of a mysterious character from “deepest Mississippi” who “makes Leadbelly sound like an accomplished poseur” (Prial 111). The following year Hammond eulogised the singer in profoundly romantic terms: “It still knocks me over when I think of how lucky it is that a talent like his ever found its way to phonograph records […] Johnson died last week at precisely the moment when Vocalion scouts finally reached him and told him that he was booked to appear at Carnegie Hall” (19). The visceral awe experienced by subsequent generations of Johnson aficionados seems inspired by the remarkable capacity of his recordings to transcend space and time, reaching far beyond their immediate intended audience. “Johnson’s music changed the way the world looked to me,” wrote Greil Marcus, “I could listen to nothing else for months.” The music’s impact originates, at least in part, from the ambiguity of its origins: “I have the feeling, at times, that the reason Johnson has remained so elusive is that no one has been willing to take him at his word” (27-8). Three decades later Bob Dylan expressed similar sentiments over seven detailed pages of Chronicles: From the first note the vibrations from the loudspeaker made my hair stand up … it felt like a ghost had come into the room, a fearsome apparition …When he sings about icicles hanging on a tree it gives me the chills, or about milk turning blue … it made me nauseous and I wondered how he did that … It’s hard to imagine sharecroppers or plantation field hands at hop joints, relating to songs like these. You have to wonder if Johnson was playing for an audience that only he could see, one off in the future. (282-4) Such ready invocation of the supernatural bears witness to the profundity and resilience of the “lost bluesman” as a romantic trope. Barry Lee Pearson and Bill McCulloch have produced a painstaking genealogy of such a-historical misrepresentation. Early contributors include Rudi Blesch, Samuel B Charters, Frank Driggs’ liner notes for Johnson’s King of the Delta Blues Singers collection, and critic Pete Welding’s prolific 1960s output. Even comparatively recent researchers who ostensibly sought to demystify the legend couldn’t help but embellish the narrative. “It is undeniable that Johnson was fascinated with and probably obsessed by supernatural imagery,” asserted Robert Palmer (127). For Peter Guralnick his best songs articulate “the debt that must be paid for art and the Faustian bargain that Johnson sees at its core” (43). Contemporary scholarship from Pearson and McCulloch, James Banninghof, Charles Ford, and Elijah Wald has scrutinised Johnson’s life and work on a more evidential basis. This process has been likened to assembling a complicated jigsaw where half the pieces are missing: The Mississippi Delta has been practically turned upside down in the search for records of Robert Johnson. So far only marriage application signatures, two photos, a death certificate, a disputed death note, a few scattered school documents and conflicting oral histories of the man exist. Nothing more. (Graves 47) Such material is scrappy and unreliable. Johnson’s marriage licenses and his school records suggest contradictory dates of birth (Freeland 49). His death certificate mistakes his age—we now know that Johnson inadvertently founded another rock myth, the “27 Club” which includes fellow guitarists Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain (Wolkewitz et al., Segalstad and Hunter)—and incorrectly states he was single when he was twice widowed. A second contemporary research strand focuses on the mythmaking process itself. For Eric Rothenbuhler the appeal of Johnson’s recordings lies in his unique “for-the-record” aesthetic, that foreshadowed playing and song writing standards not widely realised until the 1960s. For Patricia Schroeder Johnson’s legend reveals far more about the story-tellers than it does the source—which over time has become “an empty center around which multiple interpretations, assorted viewpoints, and a variety of discourses swirl” (3). Some accounts of Johnson’s life seem entirely coloured by their authors’ cultural preconceptions. The most enduring myth, Johnson’s “crossroads” encounter with the Devil, is commonly redrawn according to the predilections of those telling the tale. That this story really belongs to bluesman Tommy Johnson has been known for over four decades (Evans 22), yet it was mistakenly attributed to Robert as recently as 1999 in French blues magazine Soul Bag (Pearson and McCulloch 92-3). Such errors are, thankfully, becoming less common. While the movie Crossroads (1986) brazenly appropriated Tommy’s story, the young walking bluesman in Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) faithfully proclaims his authentic identity: “Thanks for the lift, sir. My name's Tommy. Tommy Johnson […] I had to be at that crossroads last midnight. Sell my soul to the devil.” Nevertheless the “supernatural” constituent of Johnson’s legend remains an irresistible framing device. It inspired evocative footage in Peter Meyer’s Can’t You Hear the Wind Howl? The Life and Music of Robert Johnson (1998). Even the liner notes to the definitive Sony Music Robert Johnson: The Centennial Edition celebrate and reclaim his myth: nothing about this musician is more famous than the word-of-mouth accounts of him selling his soul to the devil at a midnight crossroads in exchange for his singular mastery of blues guitar. It has become fashionable to downplay or dismiss this account nowadays, but the most likely source of the tale is Johnson himself, and the best efforts of scholars to present this artist in ordinary, human terms have done little to cut through the mystique and mystery that surround him. Repackaged versions of Johnson’s recordings became available via Amazon.co.uk and Spotify when they fell out of copyright in the United Kingdom. Predictable titles such as Contracted to the Devil, Hellbound, Me and the Devil Blues, and Up Jumped the Devil along with their distinctive “crossroads” artwork continue to demonstrate the durability of this myth [1]. Ironically, Johnson’s recordings were made during an era when one-off exhibited artworks (such as his individual performances of music) first became reproducible products. Walter Benjamin famously described the impact of this development: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art […] the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. (7) Marybeth Hamilton drew on Benjamin in her exploration of white folklorists’ efforts to document authentic pre-modern blues culture. Such individuals sought to preserve the intensity of the uncorrupted and untutored black voice before its authenticity and uniqueness could be tarnished by widespread mechanical reproduction. Two artefacts central to Johnson’s myth, his photographs and his recorded output, will now be considered in that context. In 1973 researcher Stephen LaVere located two pictures in the possession of his half–sister Carrie Thompson. The first, a cheap “dime store” self portrait taken in the equivalent of a modern photo booth, shows Johnson around a year into his life as a walking bluesman. The second, taken in the Hooks Bros. studio in Beale Street, Memphis, portrays a dapper and smiling musician on the eve of his short career as a Vocalion recording artist [2]. Neither was published for over a decade after their “discovery” due to fears of litigation from a competing researcher. A third photograph remains unpublished, still owned by Johnson’s family: The man has short nappy hair; he is slight, one foot is raised, and he is up on his toes as though stretching for height. There is a sharp crease in his pants, and a handkerchief protrudes from his breast pocket […] His eyes are deep-set, reserved, and his expression forms a half-smile, there seems to be a gentleness about him, his fingers are extraordinarily long and delicate, his head is tilted to one side. (Guralnick 67) Recently a fourth portrait appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, in Vanity Fair. Vintage guitar seller Steven Schein discovered a sepia photograph labelled “Old Snapshot Blues Guitar B. B. King???” [sic] while browsing Ebay and purchased it for $2,200. Johnson’s son positively identified the image, and a Houston Police Department forensic artist employed face recognition technology to confirm that “all the features are consistent if not identical” (DiGiacomo 2008). The provenance of this photograph remains disputed, however. Johnson’s guitar appears overly distressed for what would at the time be a new model, while his clothes reflect an inappropriate style for the period (Graves). Another contested “Johnson” image found on four seconds of silent film showed a walking bluesman playing outside a small town cinema in Ruleville, Mississippi. It inspired Bob Dylan to wax lyrical in Chronicles: “You can see that really is Robert Johnson, has to be – couldn’t be anyone else. He’s playing with huge, spiderlike hands and they magically move over the strings of his guitar” (287). However it had already been proved that this figure couldn’t be Johnson, because the background movie poster shows a film released three years after the musician’s death. The temptation to wish such items genuine is clearly a difficult one to overcome: “even things that might have been Robert Johnson now leave an afterglow” (Schroeder 154, my italics). Johnson’s recordings, so carefully preserved by Hammond and other researchers, might offer tangible and inviolate primary source material. Yet these also now face a serious challenge: they run too rapidly by a factor of up to 15 per cent (Gibbens; Wilde). Speeding up music allowed early producers to increase a song’s vibrancy and fit longer takes on to their restricted media. By slowing the recording tempo, master discs provided a “mother” print that would cause all subsequent pressings to play unnaturally quickly when reproduced. Robert Johnson worked for half a decade as a walking blues musician without restrictions on the length of his songs before recording with producer Don Law and engineer Vincent Liebler in San Antonio (1936) and Dallas (1937). Longer compositions were reworked for these sessions, re-arranging and edited out verses (Wald, Escaping). It is also conceivable that they were purposefully, or even accidentally, sped up. (The tempo consistency of machines used in early field recordings across the South has often been questioned, as many played too fast or slow (Morris).) Slowed-down versions of Johnson’s songs from contributors such as Angus Blackthorne and Ron Talley now proliferate on YouTube. The debate has fuelled detailed discussion in online blogs, where some contributors to specialist audio technology forums have attempted to decode a faintly detectable background hum using spectrum analysers. If the frequency of the alternating current that powered Law and Liebler’s machine could be established at 50 or 60 Hz it might provide evidence of possible tempo variation. A peak at 51.4 Hz, one contributor argues, suggests “the recordings are 2.8 per cent fast, about half a semitone” (Blischke). Such “augmentation” has yet to be fully explored in academic literature. Graves describes the discussion as “compelling and intriguing” in his endnotes, concluding “there are many pros and cons to the argument and, indeed, many recordings over the years have been speeded up to make them seem livelier” (124). Wald ("Robert Johnson") provides a compelling and detailed counter-thesis on his website, although he does acknowledge inconsistencies in pitch among alternate master takes of some recordings. No-one who actually saw Robert Johnson perform ever called attention to potential discrepancies between the pitch of his natural and recorded voice. David “Honeyboy” Edwards, Robert Lockwood Jr. and Johnny Shines were all interviewed repeatedly by documentarians and researchers, but none ever raised the issue. Conversely Johnson’s former girlfriend Willie Mae Powell was visibly affected by the familiarity in his voice on hearing his recording of the tune Johnson wrote for her, “Love in Vain”, in Chris Hunt’s The Search for Robert Johnson (1991). Clues might also lie in the natural tonality of Johnson’s instrument. Delta bluesmen who shared Johnson’s repertoire and played slide guitar in his style commonly used a tuning of open G (D-G-D-G-B-G). Colloquially known as “Spanish” (Gordon 2002, 38-42) it offers a natural home key of G major for slide guitar. We might therefore expect Johnson’s recordings to revolve around the tonic (G) or its dominant (D) -however almost all of his songs are a full tone higher, in the key of A or its dominant E. (The only exceptions are “They’re Red Hot” and “From Four Till Late” in C, and “Love in Vain” in G.) A pitch increase such as this might be consistent with an increase in the speed of these recordings. Although an alternative explanation might be that Johnson tuned his strings particularly tightly, which would benefit his slide playing but also make fingering notes and chords less comfortable. Yet another is that he used a capo to raise the key of his instrument and was capable of performing difficult lead parts in relatively high fret positions on the neck of an acoustic guitar. This is accepted by Scott Ainslie and Dave Whitehill in their authoritative volume of transcriptions At the Crossroads (11). The photo booth self portrait of Johnson also clearly shows a capo at the second fret—which would indeed raise open G to open A (in concert pitch). The most persuasive reasoning against speed tampering runs parallel to the argument laid out earlier in this piece, previous iterations of the Johnson myth have superimposed their own circumstances and ignored the context and reality of the protagonist’s lived experience. As Wald argues, our assumptions of what we think Johnson ought to sound like have little bearing on what he actually sounded like. It is a compelling point. When Son House, Skip James, Bukka White, and other surviving bluesmen were “rediscovered” during the 1960s urban folk revival of North America and Europe they were old men with deep and resonant voices. Johnson’s falsetto vocalisations do not, therefore, accord with the commonly accepted sound of an authentic blues artist. Yet Johnson was in his mid-twenties in 1936 and 1937; a young man heavily influenced by the success of other high pitched male blues singers of his era. people argue that what is better about the sound is that the slower, lower Johnson sounds more like Son House. Now, House was a major influence on Johnson, but by the time Johnson recorded he was not trying to sound like House—an older player who had been unsuccessful on records—but rather like Leroy Carr, Casey Bill Weldon, Kokomo Arnold, Lonnie Johnson, and Peetie Wheatstraw, who were the big blues recording stars in the mid–1930s, and whose vocal styles he imitated on most of his records. (For example, the ooh-well-well falsetto yodel he often used was imitated from Wheatstraw and Weldon.) These singers tended to have higher, smoother voices than House—exactly the sound that Johnson seems to have been going for, and that the House fans dislike. So their whole argument is based on the fact that they prefer the older Delta sound to the mainstream popular blues sound of the 1930s—or, to put it differently, that their tastes are different from Johnson’s own tastes at the moment he was recording. (Wald, "Robert Johnson") Few media can capture an audible moment entirely accurately, and the idea of engineering a faithful reproduction of an original performance is also only one element of the rationale for any recording. Commercial engineers often aim to represent the emotion of a musical moment, rather than its totality. John and Alan Lomax may have worked as documentarians, preserving sound as faithfully as possible for the benefit of future generations on behalf of the Library of Congress. Law and Liebler, however, were producing exciting and profitable commercial products for a financial gain. Paradoxically, then, whatever the “real” Robert Johnson sounded like (deeper voice, no mesmeric falsetto, not such an extraordinarily adept guitar player, never met the Devil … and so on) the mythical figure who “sold his soul at the crossroads” and shipped millions of albums after his death may, on that basis, be equally as authentic as the original. Schroeder draws on Mikhail Bakhtin to comment on such vacant yet hotly contested spaces around the Johnson myth. For Bakhtin, literary texts are ascribed new meanings by consecutive generations as they absorb and respond to them. Every age re–accentuates in its own way the works of its most immediate past. The historical life of classic works is in fact the uninterrupted process of their social and ideological re–accentuation [of] ever newer aspects of meaning; their semantic content literally continues to grow, to further create out of itself. (421) In this respect Johnson’s legend is a “classic work”, entirely removed from its historical life, a free floating form re-contextualised and reinterpreted by successive generations in order to make sense of their own cultural predilections (Schroeder 57). As Graves observes, “since Robert Johnson’s death there has seemed to be a mathematical equation of sorts at play: the less truth we have, the more myth we get” (113). The threads connecting his real and mythical identity seem so comprehensively intertwined that only the most assiduous scholars are capable of disentanglement. Johnson’s life and work seem destined to remain augmented and contested for as long as people want to play guitar, and others want to listen to them. Notes[1] Actually the dominant theme of Johnson’s songs is not “the supernatural” it is his inveterate womanising. Almost all Johnson’s lyrics employ creative metaphors to depict troubled relationships. Some even include vivid images of domestic abuse. In “Stop Breakin’ Down Blues” a woman threatens him with a gun. In “32–20 Blues” he discusses the most effective calibre of weapon to shoot his partner and “cut her half in two.” In “Me and the Devil Blues” Johnson promises “to beat my woman until I get satisfied”. However in The Lady and Mrs Johnson five-time W. C. Handy award winner Rory Block re-wrote these words to befit her own cultural agenda, inverting the original sentiment as: “I got to love my baby ‘til I get satisfied”.[2] The Gibson L-1 guitar featured in Johnson’s Hooks Bros. portrait briefly became another contested artefact when it appeared in the catalogue of a New York State memorabilia dealership in 2006 with an asking price of $6,000,000. The Australian owner had apparently purchased the instrument forty years earlier under the impression it was bona fide, although photographic comparison technology showed that it couldn’t be genuine and the item was withdrawn. “Had it been real, I would have been able to sell it several times over,” Gary Zimet from MIT Memorabilia told me in an interview for Guitarist Magazine at the time, “a unique item like that will only ever increase in value” (Stewart 2010). References Ainslie, Scott, and Dave Whitehall. Robert Johnson: At the Crossroads – The Authoritative Guitar Transcriptions. Milwaukee: Hal Leonard Publishing, 1992. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982. Banks, Russell. “The Devil and Robert Johnson – Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings.” The New Republic 204.17 (1991): 27-30. Banninghof, James. “Some Ramblings on Robert Johnson’s Mind: Critical Analysis and Aesthetic in Delta Blues.” American Music 15/2 (1997): 137-158. 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Crossroads: The Life and Afterlife of Blues Legend Robert Johnson. Spokane: Demers Books, 2008. Guralnick, Peter. Searching for Robert Johnson: The Life and Legend of the "King of the Delta Blues Singers". London: Plume, 1998. Hamilton, Marybeth. In Search of the Blues: Black Voices, White Visions. London: Jonathan Cape, 2007. Hammond, John. From Spirituals to Swing (Dedicated to Bessie Smith). New York: The New Masses, 1938. Johnson, Robert. “Hellbound.” Amazon.co.uk 2011. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hellbound/dp/B0063S8Y4C/ref=sr_1_cc_2?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1376605065&sr=1-2-catcorr&keywords=robert+johnson+hellbound›. ———. “Contracted to the Devil.” Amazon.co.uk 2002. 1 Aug. 2013. ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Contracted-The-Devil-Robert-Johnson/dp/B00006F1L4/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1376830351&sr=1-1-catcorr&keywords=Contracted+to+The+Devil›. ———. King of the Delta Blues Singers. Columbia Records CL1654, 1961. ———. “Me and the Devil Blues.” Amazon.co.uk 2003. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Me-Devil-Blues-Robert-Johnson/dp/B00008SH7O/ref=sr_1_16?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1376604807&sr=1-16&keywords=robert+johnson›. ———. “The High Price of Soul.” Amazon.co.uk 2007. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/High-Price-Soul-Robert-Johnson/dp/B000LC582C/ref=sr_1_39?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1376604863&sr=1-39&keywords=robert+johnson›. ———. “Up Jumped the Devil.” Amazon.co.uk 2005. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Up-Jumped-Devil-Robert-Johnson/dp/B000B57SL8/ref=sr_1_2?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1376829917&sr=1-2&keywords=Up+Jumped+The+Devil›. Marcus, Greil. Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music. London: Plume, 1997. Morris, Christopher. “Phonograph Blues: Robert Johnson Mastered at Wrong Speed?” Variety 2010. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.varietysoundcheck.com/2010/05/phonograph-blues-robert-johnson-mastered-at-wrong-speed.html›. Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou? DVD. Universal Pictures, 2000. Palmer, Robert. Deep Blues: A Musical and Cultural History from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago’s South Side to the World. London: Penguin Books, 1981. Pearson, Barry Lee, and Bill McCulloch. Robert Johnson: Lost and Found. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Prial, Dunstan. The Producer: John Hammond and the Soul of American Music. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. Rothenbuhler, Eric W. “For–the–Record Aesthetics and Robert Johnson’s Blues Style as a Product of Recorded Culture.” Popular Music 26.1 (2007): 65-81. Rothenbuhler, Eric W. “Myth and Collective Memory in the Case of Robert Johnson.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 24.3 (2007): 189-205. Schroeder, Patricia. Robert Johnson, Mythmaking and Contemporary American Culture (Music in American Life). Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Segalstad, Eric, and Josh Hunter. The 27s: The Greatest Myth of Rock and Roll. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2009. Stewart, Jon. “Rock Climbing: Jon Stewart Concludes His Investigation of the Myths behind Robert Johnson.” Guitarist Magazine 327 (2010): 34. The Search for Robert Johnson. DVD. Sony Pictures, 1991. Talley, Ron. “Robert Johnson, 'Sweet Home Chicago', as It REALLY Sounded...” YouTube.com 2012. 1 Aug. 2013. ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCHod3_yEWQ›. Wald, Elijah. Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues. London: HarperCollins, 2005. ———. The Robert Johnson Speed Recording Controversy. Elijah Wald — Writer, Musician 2012. 1 Aug. 2013. ‹http://www.elijahwald.com/johnsonspeed.html›. Wilde, John . “Robert Johnson Revelation Tells Us to Put the Brakes on the Blues: We've Been Listening to the Immortal 'King of the Delta Blues' at the Wrong Speed, But Now We Can Hear Him as He Intended.” The Guardian 2010. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2010/may/27/robert-johnson-blues›. Wolkewitz, M., A. Allignol, N. Graves, and A.G. Barnett. “Is 27 Really a Dangerous Age for Famous Musicians? Retrospective Cohort Study.” British Medical Journal 343 (2011): d7799. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.bmj.com/content/343/bmj.d7799›.

What creative techniques of resistance are available to a female filmmaker when she is the victim of a violent event and filmed at her most vulnerable? This article uses an autoethnographic lens to discuss my experience of a serious car crash my family and I were inadvertently involved in due to police negligence and a criminal act. Employing Creative Analytical Practice (CAP) ethnography, a reflexive form of research which recognises that the creative process, producer and product are “deeply intertwined” (Richardson, “Writing: A Method” 930), I investigate how the crash’s violent affects crippled my agency, manifested in my creative praxis and catalysed my identification of latent forms of institutionalised violence in film culture, its discourse and pedagogy that also contributed to my inertia. The article maps my process of writing a feature length screenplay during the aftermath of the crash as I set out to articulate my story of survival and resistance. Using this narrative inquiry, in which we can “investigate how we construct the world, ourselves, and others, and how standard objectifying practices...unnecessarily limit us” (Richardson, “Writing: A Method” 924), I outline how I attempted to disrupt the entrenched power structures that exist in dominant narratives of violence in film and challenge my subjugated positioning as a woman within this canon. I describe my engagement with the deconstructionist practices of writing the body and militant feminist cinema, which suggest subversive opportunities for women’s self-determination by encouraging us to embrace our exiled positioning in dominant discourse through creative experimentation, and identify some of the possibilities and limitations of this for female agency. Drawing on CAP ethnography, existentialism, film feminism, and narrative reframing, I assert that these reconstructive practices are more effective for the creative enfranchisement of women by not relegating us to the periphery of social systems and cultural forms. Instead, they enable us to speak back to violent structures in a language that has greater social access, context and impact.My strong desire to tell screen stories lies in my belief that storytelling is a crucial evolutionary mechanism of resilience. Narratives do not simply represent the social world but also have the ability to change it by enabling us to “try to figure out how to live our lives meaningfully” (Ellis 760). This conviction has been directly influenced by my personal story of trauma and survival when myself, my siblings, and our respective life partners became involved in a major car crash. Two police officers attending to a drunken brawl in an inner city park had, in their haste, left the keys in the ignition of their vehicle. We were travelling across a major intersection when the police car, which had subsequently been stolen by a man involved in the brawl – a man who was wanted on parole, had a blood alcohol level three times over the legal limit, and was driving at speeds exceeding 110kms per hour - ran a red light and crossed our path, causing us to crash into his vehicle. From the impact, the small four-wheel drive we were travelling in was catapulted metres into the air, rolling numerous times before smashing head on into oncoming traffic. My heavily pregnant sister was driving our vehicle.The incident attracted national media attention and our story became a sensationalist spectacle. Each news station reported erroneous and conflicting information, one stating that my sister had lost her unborn daughter, another even going so far as to claim my sister had died in the crash. This tabloidised, ‘if it bleeds, it leads’, culture of journalism, along with new digital technologies, encourages and facilitates the normalisation of violent acts, often inflicted on women. Moreover, in their pursuit of high-rating stories, news bodies motivate dehumanising acts of citizen journalism that see witnesses often inspired to film, rather than assist, victims involved in a violent event. Through a connection with someone working for a major news station, we discovered that leading news broadcasters had bought a tape shot by a group of men who call themselves the ‘Paparazzi of Perth’. These men were some of the first on the scene and began filming us from only a few metres away while we were still trapped upside down and unconscious in our vehicle. In the recording, the men are heard laughing and celebrating our tragedy as they realise the lucrative possibilities of the shocking imagery they are capturing as witnesses pull us out of the back of the car, and my pregnant sister incredibly frees herself from the wreckage by kicking out the window.As a female filmmaker, I saw the bitter irony of this event as the camera was now turned on me and my loved ones at our most vulnerable. In her discussion of the male gaze, a culturally sanctioned form of narrational violence against women that is ubiquitous in most mainstream media, Mulvey proposes that women are generally the passive image, trapped by the physical limits of the frame in a permanent state of powerlessness as our identity is reduced to her “to-be-looked-at-ness” (40). For a long period of time, the experience of performing the role of this commodified woman of a weaponised male gaze, along with the threat of annihilation associated with our near-death experience, immobilised my spirit. I felt I belonged “more to the dead than to the living” (Herman 34). When I eventually returned to my creative praxis, I decided to use scriptwriting as both my “mode of reasoning and a mode of representation” (Richardson, Writing Strategies 21), test whether I could work through my feelings of alienation and violation and reclaim my agency. This was a complex and harrowing task because my memories “lack[ed] verbal narrative and context” (Herman 38) and were deeply rooted in my body. Cixous confirms that for women, “writing and voice...are woven together” and “spring from the deepest layers of her psyche” (Moi 112). For many months, I struggled to write. I attempted to block out this violent ordeal and censor my self. I soon learnt, however, that my body could not be silenced and was slow to forget. As I tried to write around this experience, the trauma worked itself deeper inside of me, and my physical symptoms worsened, as did the quality of my writing.In the early version of the screenplay I found myself writing a female-centred film about violence, identity and death, using the fictional narrative to express the numbness I experienced. I wrote the female protagonist with detachment as though she were an object devoid of agency. Sartre claims that we make objects of others and of ourselves in an attempt to control the uncertainty of life and the ever-changing nature of humanity (242). Making something into an object is to deprive it of life (and death); it is our attempt to keep ourselves ‘safe’. While I recognise that the car crash’s reminder of my mortality was no doubt part of the reason why I rendered myself, and the script’s female protagonist, lifeless as agentic beings, I sensed that there were subtler operations of power and control behind my self-objectification and self-censorship, which deeply concerned me. What had influenced this dea(r)th of female agency in my creative imaginings? Why did I write my female character with such a red pen? Why did I seem so compelled to ‘kill’ her? I wanted to investigate my gender construction, the complex relationship between my scriptwriting praxis, and the context within which it is produced to discover whether I could write a different future for myself, and my female characters. Kiesinger supports “contextualizing our stories within the framework of a larger picture” (108), so as to remain open to the possibility that there might not be anything ‘wrong’ with us, per se, “but rather something very wrong with the dynamics that dominate the communicative system” (109) within which we operate: in the case of my creative praxis, the oppressive structures present in the culture of film and its pedagogy.Pulling FocusWomen are supposed to be the view and when the view talks back, it is uncomfortable.— Jane Campion (Filming Desire)It is a terrible thing to see that no one has ever taught us how to develop our vision as women neither in the history of arts nor in film schools.— Marie Mandy (Filming Desire)The democratisation of today’s media landscape through new technologies, the recent rise in female-run production companies (Zemler) in Hollywood, along with the ground-breaking #MeToo and Time’s Up movements has elevated the global consciousness of gender-based violence, and has seen the screen industry seek to redress its history of gender imbalance. While it is too early to assess the impact these developments may have on women’s standing in film, today the ‘celluloid ceiling’ still operates on multiple levels of indoctrination and control through a systemic pattern of exclusion for women that upholds the “nearly seamless dialogue among men in cinema” (Lauzen, Thumbs Down 2). Female filmmakers occupy a tenuous position of influence in the mainstream industry and things are not any better on the other side of the camera (Lauzen, The Celluloid Ceiling). For the most part, Hollywood’s male gaze and penchant for sexualising and (physically or figuratively) killing female characters, which normalises violence against women and is “almost inversely proportional to the liberation of women in society” (Mandy), continues to limit women to performing as the image rather than the agent on screen.Film funding bodies and censorship boards, mostly comprised of men, remain exceptionally averse to independent female filmmakers who go against the odds to tell their stories, which often violate taboos about femininity and radically redefine female agency through the construction of the female gaze: a narrational technique of resistance that enables reel woman to govern the point of view, imagery and action of the film (Smelik 51-52). This generally sees their films unjustly ghettoised through incongruent classification or censorship, and forced into independent or underground distribution (Sexton-Finck 165-182). Not only does censorship propose the idea that female agency is abject and dangerous and needs to be restrained, it prevents access to this important cinema by women that aims to counter the male gaze and “shield us from this type of violence” (Gillain 210). This form of ideological and institutional gatekeeping is not only enforced in the film industry, it is also insidiously (re)constituted in the epistemological construction of film discourse and pedagogy, which in their design, are still largely intrinsically gendered institutions, encoded with phallocentric signification that rejects a woman’s specificity and approach to knowledge. Drawing on my mutually informative roles as a former film student and experienced screen educator, I assert that most screen curricula in Australia still uphold entrenched androcentric norms that assume the male gaze and advocate popular cinema’s didactic three-act structure, which conditions our value systems to favour masculinity and men’s worldview. This restorative storytelling approach is argued to be fatally limiting to reel women (Smith 136; Dancyger and Rush 25) as it propagates the Enlightenment notion of a universal subjectivity, based on free will and reason, which neutralises the power structures of society (and film) and repudiates the influence of social positioning on our opportunity for agency. Moreover, through its omniscient consciousness, which seeks to efface the presence of a specific narrator, the three-act method disavows this policing of female agency and absolves any specific individual of responsibility for its structural violence (Dyer 98).By pulling focus on some of these problematic mechanisms in the hostile climate of the film industry and its spaces of learning for women, I became acutely aware of the more latent forms of violence that had conditioned my scriptwriting praxis, the ambivalence I felt towards my female identity, and my consequent gagging of the female character in the screenplay.Changing Lenses How do the specific circumstances in which we write affect what we write? How does what we write affect who we become?— Laurel Richardson (Fields of Play 1)In the beginning, there is an end. Don’t be afraid: it’s your death that is dying. Then: all the beginnings.— Helene Cixous (Cixous and Jensen 41)The discoveries I made during my process of CAP ethnography saw a strong feeling of dissidence arrive inside me. I vehemently wanted to write my way out of my subjugated state and release some of the anguish that my traumatised body was carrying around. I was drawn to militant feminist cinema and the French poststructuralist approach of ‘writing the body’ (l’ecriture feminine) given these deconstructive practices “create images and ideas that have the power to inspire to revolt against oppression and exploitation” (Moi 120). Feminist cinema’s visual treatise of writing the body through its departure from androcentric codes - its unformulaic approach to structure, plot, character and narration (De Lauretis 106) - revealed to me ways in which I could use the scriptwriting process to validate my debilitating experience of physical and psychic violence, decensor my self and move towards rejoining the living. Cixous affirms that, “by writing her self, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into…the ailing or dead figure” (Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa 880). It became clear to me that the persistent themes of death that manifested in the first draft of the script were not, as I first suspected, me ‘rehearsing to die’, or wanting to kill off the woman inside me. I was in fact “not driven towards death but by death” (Homer 89), the close proximity to my mortality, acting as a limit, was calling for a strengthening of my life force, a rebirth of my agency (Bettelheim 36). Mansfield acknowledges that death “offers us a freedom outside of the repression and logic that dominate our daily practices of keeping ourselves in order, within the lines” (87).I challenged myself to write the uncomfortable, the unfamiliar, the unexplored and to allow myself to go to places in me that I had never before let speak by investigating my agency from a much more layered and critical perspective. This was both incredibly terrifying and liberating and enabled me to discard the agentic ‘corset’ I had previously worn in my creative praxis. Dancyger and Rush confirm that “one of the things that happens when we break out of the restorative three-act form is that the effaced narrator becomes increasingly visible and overt” (38). I experienced an invigorating feeling of empowerment through my appropriation of the female gaze in the screenplay which initially appeased some of the post-crash turmoil and general sense of injustice I was experiencing. However, I soon, found something toxic rising inside of me. Like the acrimonious feminist cinema I was immersed in – Raw (Ducournau), A Girl Walks Home at Night (Amirpour), Romance (Breillat), Trouble Every Day (Denis), Baise-Moi (Despentes and Thi), In My Skin (Van), Anatomy of Hell (Breillat) – the screenplay I had produced involved a female character turning the tables on men and using acts of revenge to satisfy her needs. Not only was I creating a highly dystopian world filled with explicit themes of suffering in the screenplay, I too existed in a displaced state of rage and ‘psychic nausea’ in my daily life (Baldick and Sartre). I became haunted by vivid flashbacks of the car crash as abject images, sounds and sensations played over and over in my mind and body like a horror movie on loop. I struggled to find the necessary clarity and counterbalance of stability required to successfully handle this type of experimentation.I do not wish to undermine the creative potential of deconstructive practices, such as writing the body and militant cinema, for female filmmakers. However, I believe my post-trauma sensitivity to visceral entrapment and spiritual violence magnifies some of the psychological and physiological risks involved. Deconstructive experimentation “happens much more easily in the realm of “texts” than in the world of human interaction” (hooks 22) and presents agentic limitations for women since it offers a “utopian vision of female creativity” (Moi 119) that is “devoid of reality...except in a poetic sense” (Moi 122). In jettisoning the restorative qualities of narrative film, new boundaries for women are inadvertently created through restricting us to “intellectual pleasure but rarely emotional pleasure” (Citron 51). Moreover, by reducing women’s agency to retaliation we are denied the opportunity for catharsis and transformation; something I desperately longed to experience in my injured state. Kaplan acknowledges this problem, arguing that female filmmakers need to move theoretically beyond deconstruction to reconstruction, “to manipulate the recognized, dominating discourses so as to begin to free ourselves through rather than beyond them (for what is there ‘beyond’?)” (Women and Film 141).A potent desire to regain a sense of connectedness and control pushed itself out from deep inside me. I yearned for a tonic to move myself and my female character to an active position, rather than a reactive one that merely repeats the victimising dynamic of mainstream film by appropriating a reversed (female) gaze and now makes women the violent victors (Kaplan, Feminism and Film 130). We have arrived at a point where we must destabilise the dominance-submission structure and “think about ways of transcending a polarity that has only brought us all pain” (Kaplan, Feminism and Film 135). I became determined to write a screen narrative that, while dealing with some of the harsh realities of humanity I had become exposed to, involved an existentialist movement towards catharsis and activity.ReframingWhen our stories break down or no longer serve us well, it is imperative that we examine the quality of the stories we are telling and actively reinvent our accounts in ways that permit us to live more fulfilling lives.— Christine Kiesinger (107)I’m frightened by life’s randomness, so I want to deal with it, make some sense of it by telling a film story. But it’s not without hope. I don’t believe in telling stories without some hope.— Susanne Bier (Thomas)Narrative reframing is underlined by the existentialist belief that our spiritual freedom is an artistic process of self-creation, dependent on our free will to organise the elements of our lives, many determined out of our control, into the subjective frame that is to be our experience of our selves and the world around us (107). As a filmmaker, I recognise the power of selective editing and composition. Narrative reframing’s demand for a rational assessment of “the degree to which we live our stories versus the degree to which our stories live us” (Kiesinger 109), helped me to understand how I could use these filmmaking skills to take a step back from my trauma so as to look at it objectively “as a text for study” (Ellis 108) and to exercise power over the creative-destructive forces it, and the deconstructive writing methods I had employed, produced. Richardson confirms the benefits of this practice, since narrative “is the universal way in which humans accommodate to finitude” (Writing Strategies 65).In the script’s development, I found my resilience lay in my capacity to imagine more positive alternatives for female agency. I focussed on writing a narrative that did not avoid life’s hardships and injustices, or require them to be “attenuated, veiled, sweetened, blunted, and falsified” (Nietzsche and Hollingdale 68), yet still involved a life-affirming sentiment. With this in mind, I reintroduced the three-act structure in the revised script as its affectivity and therapeutic denouement enabled me to experience a sense of agentic catharsis that turned “nauseous thoughts into imaginations with which it is possible to live” (Nietzsche 52). Nevertheless, I remained vigilant not to lapse into didacticism; to allow my female character to be free to transgress social conventions surrounding women’s agency. Indebted to Kaplan’s writing on the cinematic gaze, I chose to take up what she identifies as a ‘mutual gaze’; an ethical framework that enabled me to privilege the female character’s perspective and autonomy with a neutral subject-subject gaze rather than the “subject-object kind that reduces one of the parties to the place of submission” (Feminism and Film 135). I incorporated the filmic technique of the point of view (POV) shot for key narrative moments as it allows an audience to literally view the world through a character’s eyes, as well as direct address, which involves the character looking back down the lens at the viewer (us); establishing the highest level of identification between the spectator and the subject on screen.The most pertinent illustration of these significant scriptwriting changes through my engagement with narrative reframing and feminist film theory, is in the reworking of my family’s car crash which became a pivotal turning point in the final draft. In the scene, I use POV and direct address to turn the weaponised gaze back around onto the ‘paparazzi’ who are filming the spectacle. When the central (pregnant) character frees herself from the wreckage, she notices these men filming her and we see the moment from her point of view as she looks at these men laughing and revelling in the commercial potential of their mediatised act. Switching between POV and direct address, the men soon notice they have been exposed as the woman looks back down the lens at them (us) with disbelief, reproaching them (us) for daring to film her in this traumatic moment. She holds her determined gaze while they glance awkwardly back at her, until their laughter dissipates, they stop recording and appear to recognise the culpability of their actions. With these techniques of mutual gazing, I set out to humanise and empower the female victim and neutralise the power dynamic: the woman is now also a viewing agent, and the men equally perform the role of the viewed. In this creative reframing, I hope to provide an antidote to filmic violence against and/or by women as this female character reclaims her (my) experience of survival without adhering to the culture of female passivity or ressentiment.This article has examined how a serious car crash, being filmed against my will in its aftermath and the attendant damages that prevailed from this experience, catalysed a critical change of direction in my scriptwriting. The victimising event helped me recognise the manifest and latent forms of violence against women that are normalised through everyday ideological and institutional systems in film and prevent us from performing as active agents in our creative praxis. There is a critical need for more inclusive modes of practice – across the film industry, discourse and pedagogy – that are cognisant and respectful of women’s specificity and our difference to the androcentric landscape of mainstream film. We need to continue to exert pressure on changing violent mechanisms that marginalise us and ghettoise our stories. As this article has demonstrated, working outside dominant forms can enable important emancipatory opportunities for women, however, this type or deconstruction also presents risks that generally leave us powerless in everyday spaces. While I advocate that female filmmakers should look to techniques of feminist cinema for an alternative lens, we must also work within popular film to critique and subvert it, and not deny women the pleasures and political advantages of its restorative structure. By enabling female filmmakers to (re)humanise woman though encouraging empathy and compassion, this affective storytelling form has the potential to counter violence against women and mobilise female agency. Equally, CAP ethnography and narrative reframing are critical discourses for the retrieval and actualisation of female filmmakers’ agency as they allow us to contextualise our stories of resistance and survival within the framework of a larger picture of violence to gain perspective on our subjective experiences and render them as significant, informative and useful to the lives of others. This enables us to move from the isolated margins of subcultural film and discourse to reclaim our stories at the centre.ReferencesA Girl Walks Home at Night. Dir. Ana Lily Amirpour. Say Ahh Productions, 2014.Anatomy of Hell. Dir. Catherine Breillat. Tartan Films, 2004. Baise-Moi. Dirs. Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi. FilmFixx, 2000.Baldick, Robert, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Nausea. 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Bochner and Carolyn Ellis. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2002. 107-111.Lauzen, Martha M. “Thumbs Down - Representation of Women Film Critics in the Top 100 U.S. Daily Newspapers - A Study by Dr. Martha Lauzen.” Alliance of Women Film Journalists, 25 July 2012. 4-5.———. The Celluloid Ceiling: Behind-the-Scenes Employment of Women on the Top 100, 250, and 500 Films of 2018. Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film San Diego State University 2019. <https://womenintvfilm.sdsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/2018_Celluloid_Ceiling_Report.pdf>.Mansfield, Nick. Subjectivity: Theories of the Self from Freud to Haraway. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2000.Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. London: Methuen, 2002.Mulvey, Laura. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema in Feminism and Film. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. 34-47.Nietzsche, Friedrich W. The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Francis Golffing. 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IntroductionThe American artist Ryan Trecartin makes digital videos that centre on the self-presentations common to video-sharing sites such as YouTube. Named by New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl as “the most consequential artist to have emerged since the 1980s” (84), Trecartin’s works are like high-octane domestic dramas told in the first-person, blending carnivalesque and horror sensibilities through multi-layered imagery, fast-paced editing, sprawling mise-en-scène installations and heavy-handed digital effects. Featuring narcissistic young-adult characters (many of whom are played by the artist and his friends), Trecartin’s scripted videos portray the self as fundamentally performed and kaleidoscopically mediated. His approach is therefore exemplary of some of the key concepts of automediality, which, although originating in literary studies, address concerns relevant to contemporary art, such as the blurring of life-story, self-performance, identity, persona and technological mediation. I argue that Trecartin’s work is a form of automedial art that combines camp personas with what Sianne Ngai calls the “zany” aesthetics of neoliberalism—the 24/7 production of affects, subjectivity and sociability which complicate distinctions between public and private life.Performing the Script: The Artist as Automedial ProsumerBoth “automedia” and “automediality” hold that the self (the “auto”) and its forms of expression (its “media”) are intimately linked, imbricated within processes of cultural and technological mediation. However, whereas “automedia” refers to general modes of self-presentation, “automediality” was developed by Jörg Dünne and Christian Moser to explicitly relate to the autobiographical. Noting a tendency in literary studies to under-examine how life stories are shaped by their mediums, Dünne and Moser argued that the digital era has made it more apparent how literary forms are involved in complex processes of mediation. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, in response, called for an expansion of autobiography into “life writing,” claiming that automediality is useful as a theoretical frame for contemplating the growth of self-presentation platforms online, shifting from the life-narrative genre of autobiography towards more discursive and irresolute forms of first-person expression (4). One’s life story, in this context, can be communicated obliquely and performatively, with the choice of media inextricably contributing to the subjectivity that is being produced, not just as a tool for rendering a pre-existent self. Lauren Berlant conceives of life writing as a laboratory for “theorizing ‘the event’” of life rather than its narration or transcription (Prosser 181). Smith and Watson agree, describing automediality as the study of “life acts” that operate as “prosthetic extension[s] of the self in networks” (78). Following this, both “automedia” and “automediality” can be understood as expanding upon the “underlying intermedial premises” (Winthrop-Young 188) of media theory, addressing how technologies and mediums do not just constitute sensory extensions of the body (Mcluhan) but also sensory extensions of identity—armed with the potential to challenge traditional ideas of how a “life” is conveyed. For Julie Rak, “automedia” describes both the theoretical framing of self-presentation acts and the very processes of mediation the self-presenter puts themselves through (161). She prefers “automedia” over “automediality” due to the latter’s tendency to be directed towards the textual products of self-presentation, rather than their processes (161). Given Trecartin’s emphasis on narrative, poetic text, performativity, technology and commodification, both “automedia” and “automediality” will be relevant to my account here, highlighting not just the crossovers between the two terms but also the dual roles his work performs. Firstly, Trecartin’s videos express his own identity through the use of camp personas and exaggerated digital tropes. Secondly, they reflexively frame the phenomenon of online self-presentation, aestheticizing the “slice of life” and “personal history” posturings found on YouTube in order to better understand them. The line between self-presenter and critic is further muddied by the fact that Trecartin makes many of his videos free to download online. As video artist and YouTuber, he is interested in the same questions that Smith and Watson claim are central to automedial theory. When watching Youtube performers, they remind themselves to ask: “How is the aura of authenticity attached to an online performance constructed by a crew, which could include a camera person, sound person, director, and script-writer? Do you find this self-presentation to be sincere or to be calculated authenticity, a pose or ‘manufactured’ pseudo-individuality?” (124). Rather than setting out to identify “right” from “wrong” subjectivities, the role of both the automedia and automediality critic is to illuminate how and why subjectivity is constructed across distinct visual and verbal forms, working against the notion that subjectivity can be “an entity or essence” (Smith and Watson 125).Figure 1: Ryan Trecartin, Item Falls (2013), digital video stillGiven its literary origins, automediality is particularly relevant to Trecartin’s work because writing is so central to his methods, grounding his hyperactive self-presentations in the literary as well as the performative. According to Brian Droitcour, all of Trecartin’s formal devices, from the camerawork to the constructed sets his videos are staged in, are prefigured by the way he uses words. What appears unstructured and improvised is actually closely scripted, with Trecartin building on the legacies of conceptual poetry and flarf poetry (an early 2000s literary genre in which poetry is composed of collages of serendipitously found words and phrases online) to bring a loose sense of narrativization to his portrayals of characters and context. Consider the following excerpt from the screenplay for K-Corea INC. K (Section A) (2009)— a work which centres on a CEO named Global Korea (a pun on “career”) who presides over symbolic national characters whose surnames are also “Korea”:North America Korea: I specialize in Identity Tourism, ?Agency...I just stick HERE, and I Hop Around–HEY GLOBAL KOREA!?Identifiers: That’s Global, That’s Global, That’s GlobalFrench adaptation Korea: WHAT!?Global Korea: Guys I just Wanted to show You Your New Office!Health Care, I don’t Care, It’s All WE Care, That’s WhyWE don’t Care.THIS IS GLOBAL!Identified: AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHGlobal Korea: Global, Global !!Identified: AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHFigure 2: Ryan Trecartin, K-Corea INC. K (Section A) (2009), digital video stillTrecartin’s performers are guided by their lines, even down to the apparently random use of commas, question marks and repeated capital letters. As a consequence, what can be alienating on the page is made lively when performed, his words instilled with the over-the-top personalities of each performer. For Droitcour, Trecartin’s genius lies in his ability to use words to subliminally structure his performances. Each character makes the artist’s poetic texts—deranged and derivative-sounding Internet-speak—their own “at the moment of the utterance” (Droitcour). Wayne Koestenbaum similarly argues that voice, which Trecartin often digitally manipulates, is the “anxiety point” in his works, fixing his “retardataire” energies on the very place “where orality and literacy stage their war of the worlds” (276).This conflict that Koestenbaum describes, between orality and literacy, is constitutive of Trecartin’s automedial positioning of the self, which presents as a confluence of life narrative, screenplay, social-media posing, flarf poetry and artwork. His videos constantly criss-cross between pre-production, production and postproduction, creating content at every point along the way. This circuitousness is reflected by the many performers who are portrayed filming each other as they act, suggesting that their projected identities are entangled with the technologies that facilitate them.Trecartin’s A Family Finds Entertainment (2004)—a frenetic straight-to-camera chronicle of the coming-out of a gay teenager named Skippy (played by the artist)—was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, after which time his work became known around the world as an example of “postproduction” art. This refers to French curator and theorist Nicholas Bourriaud’s 2001 account of the blurring of production and consumption, following on from his 1997 theory of relational aesthetics, which became paradigmatic of critical art practice at the dawn of Web 2.0. Drawing from Marcel Duchamp and the Situationists, in Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, Bourriaud addressed new forms of citation, recycling and détournement, which he saw as influenced by digital computing, the service economies and other forms of immaterial social relations that, throughout the 1990s, transformed art from a subcultural activity to a key signifier and instrument of global capitalism.Because “word processing” was “indexed to the formal protocol of the service industry, and the image-system of the home computer […] informed and colonized from the start by the world of work” (78), Bourriaud claimed that artists at the start of the twenty-first century were responding to the semiotic networks that blur daily and professional life. Postproduction art looked like it was “issued from a script that the artist projects onto culture, considered the framework of a narrative that in turn projects new possible scripts, endlessly” (19). However, whereas the artists in Bourriaud’s publication, such as Plamen Dejanov and Philippe Parreno, made art in order to create “more suitable [social] arrangements” (76), Trecartin is distinctive not only because of his bombastic style but also his apparent resistance to socio-political amelioration.Bourriaud’s call for the elegant intertextual “scriptor” as prosumer (88)—who creatively produces and consumes, arranges and responds—was essentially answered by Trecartin with a parade of hyper-affective and needy Internet characters whose aims are not to negotiate new social terrain so much as to perform themselves crazy, competing with masses of online information, opinions and jostling identities. Against Bourriaud’s strategic prosumerism, Trecartin, in his own words, chases “a kind of natural prosumerism synonymous with existence” (471). Although his work can be read as a response to neoliberal values, unlike Bourriaud, he refuses to treat postproduction methods as tools to conciliate this situation. Instead, his scripted videos present postproduction as the lingua franca of daily life. In aiming for a “natural prosumerism,” his work rhetorically asks, in paraphrase of Berlant: “What does it mean to have a life, is it always to add up to something?” (Prosser 181). Figure 3: Ryan Trecartin, A Family Finds Entertainment (2004), digital video stillPluralist CampTrecartin’s scripts direct his performers but they are also transformed by them, his words acquiring their individualistic tics, traits and nuances. As such, his self-presentations are a long way from Frederic Jameson’s account of pastiche as a neutral practice of imitation—“a blank parody” (125) that manifests as an addiction rather than a critical judgement. Instead of being uncritically blank, we could say that Trecartin’s characters have too much content and too many affects, particularly those of the Internet variety. In Ready (Re’Search Wait’S) (2009-2010), Trecartin (playing a character named J.J. Check, who wants to re-write the U.S constitution) states at one point: “Someone just flashed an image of me; I am so sure of it. I am such as free download.” Here, pastiche turns into a performed glitch, hinting at how authentic speech can be composed of an amalgam of inauthentic sources—a scrambling of literary forms, movie one-liners, intrusive online advertising and social media jargon. His characters constantly waver between vernacular clichés and accretions of data: “My mother accused me of being accumulation posing as independent free will,” says a character from Item Falls (2013)What makes Trecartin’s video work so fascinating is that he frames what once would have been called “pastiche” and fills it with meaning, as if sincerely attuned to the paradoxes of “anti-normative” posturing contained in the term “mass individualism.” Even when addressing issues of representational politics, his dialogue registers as both authentic and insipid, as when, in CENTER JENNY (2013), a conversation about sexism being “the coolest style” ends with a woman in a bikini asking: “tolerance is inevitable, right?” Although there are laugh-out-loud elements in all of his work—often from an exaggeration of superficiality—there is a more persistent sense of the artist searching for something deeper, perhaps sympathetically so. His characters are eager to self-project yet what they actually project comes off as too much—their performances are too knowing, too individualistic and too caught up in the Internet, or other surrounding technologies.When Susan Sontag wrote in 1964 of the aesthetic of “camp” she was largely motivated by the success of Pop art, particularly that of her friend Andy Warhol. Warhol’s work looked kitsch yet Sontag saw in it a genuine love that kitsch lacks—a sentiment akin to doting on something ugly or malformed. Summoning the dandy, she claimed that whereas “the dandy would be continually offended or bored, the connoisseur of Camp is continually amused, delighted. The dandy held a perfumed handkerchief to his nostrils and was liable to swoon; the connoisseur of Camp sniffs the stink and prides himself on his strong nerves” (292).As an artistic device, camp essentially wallows in all the bad fetishisms that Frankfurt School theorists lamented of capitalism. The camp appropriator, does, however, convey himself as existing both inside and outside this low culture, communicating the “stink” of low culture in affecting ways. Sontag viewed camp, in other words, as at once deconstructive and reconstructive. In playing appearances off against essences, camp denies the self as essence only to celebrate it as performance.In line with accounts of identity in automediality and automedia theory, camp can be understood as performing within a dialectical tension between self and its representation. The camp aesthetic shows the self as discursively mediated and embedded in subjective formations that are “heterogeneous, conflictual, and intersectional” (Smith and Watson 71). Affiliated with the covert expression of homosexual and queer identity, the camp artist typically foregrounds art as taste, and taste as mere fashion, while at the same time he/she suggests how this approach is shaped by socio-political marginalization. For Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the criticality of camp is “additive and accretive” rather than oppositional; it is a surplus form that manifests as “the ‘over’-attachment to fragmentary, marginal, waste or leftover products” (149).Trecartin, who identifies as gay, parodies the excesses of digital identity while at the same time, from camp and queer perspectives, he asks us to take these identifications seriously—straight, gay, transsexual, bisexual, inter-sexual, racial, post-racial, mainstream, alternative, capitalist or anarchist. This pluralist agenda manifests in characters who speak as though everything is in quotation marks, suggesting that everything is possible. Dialogue such as “I’m finally just an ‘as if’”, “I want an idea landfill”, and “It reminds me of the future” project feelings of too much and not enough, transforming Warhol’s cool, image-oriented version of camp (transfixed by TV and supermarket capitalism) into a hyper-affective Internet camp—a camp that feeds on new life narratives, identity postures and personalities, as stimuli.In emphasising technology as intrinsic to camp self-presentation, Trecartin treats intersectionality and intermediality as if corresponding concepts. His characters, caught between youthhood and adulthood, are inbetweeners. Yet, despite being nebulous, they float free of normative ideals only in the sense that they believe everybody not only has the right to live how they want to, but to also be condemned for it—the right to intolerance going hand-in-hand with their belief in plurality. This suggests the paradoxical condition of pluralist, intersectional selfhood in the digital age, where one can position one’s identity as if between social categories while at the same time weaponizing it, in the form of identity politics. In K-Corea INC. K (Section A) (2009), Global Korea asks: “Who the fuck is that baby shit-talker? That’s not one of my condiments,” which is delivered with characteristic confidence, defensiveness and with gleeful disregard for normative speech. Figure 4: Ryan Trecartin, CENTER JENNY (2013), digital video stillThe Zaniness of the Neoliberal SelfIf, as Koestenbaum claims, Trecartin’s host of characters are actually “evolving mutations of a single worldview” (275), then the worldview they represent is what Sianne Ngai calls the “hypercommodified, information saturated, performance driven conditions of late capitalism” (1). Self-presentation in this context is not to be understood so much as experienced through prisms of technological inflection, marketing spiel and pluralist interpretative schemas. Ngai has described the rise of “zaniness” as an aesthetic category that perfectly encapsulates this capitalist condition. Zany hyperactivity is at once “lighthearted” and “vehement,” and as such it is highly suited to the contemporary volatility of affective labour; its tireless overlapping of work and play, and the networking rhetoric of global interconnectedness (Ngai, 7). This is what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello have termed the “connexionist” spirit of capitalism, where a successful career is measured by one’s capacity to be “always pursuing some sort of activity, never to be without a project, without ideas, to be always looking forward to, and preparing for, something along with other persons, whose encounter is the result of being always driven by the drive for activity” (Chiapello and Fairclough 192).For Ngai, the zany—epitomized by Jim Carrey’s character in Cable Guy (1996) or Wile E. Coyote from the Looney Tunes cartoons—performs first and asks questions later. As such, their playfulness is always performed in a way that could spin out of control, as when Trecartin’s humour can, in the next moment, appear psychotic. Ngai continues:What is essential to zaniness is its way of evoking a situation with the potential to cause harm or injury […]. For all their playfulness and commitment to fun, the zany’s characters give the impression of needing to labor excessively hard to produce our laughter, straining themselves to the point of endangering not just themselves but also those around them. (10)Using sinister music scores, anxiety-inducing editing and lighting that references iconic DIY horror films such as the Blair Witch Project (1999), Trecartin comically frames the anxieties and over-produced individualism of the global neoliberalist project, but in ways that one is unsure what to do with it. “Don’t look at me—look at your mother, and globalize at her,” commands Global Korea. Set in temporary (read precarious) locations that often resemble both domestic and business environments, his world is one in which young adults are incessantly producing themselves as content, as if unstable market testers run riot, on whose tastes our future global economic growth depends.Michel Foucault defined this neoliberal condition as “the application of the economic grid to social phenomena” (239). As early as 1979 he claimed that workers in a neoliberal context begin to regard the self as an “abilities-machine” (229) where they are less partners in the processes of economic exchange than independent producers of human capital. As Jodi Dean puts it, with the totalization of economic production, neoliberal processes “simultaneously promote the individual as the primary unit of capitalism and unravel the institutions of solidaristic support on which this unit depends” (32). As entrepreneurs of the self, people under neoliberalism become producers for whom socialization is no longer a byproduct of capitalist production but can be the very means through which capital is produced. With this in mind, Trecartin’s portrayal of the straight-to-camera format is less a video diary than a means for staging social auditions. His performers (or contestants), although foregrounding their individualism, always have their eyes on group power, suggesting a competitive individualism rather than the countering of normativity. Forever at work and at play, these comic-tragics are ur-figures of neoliberalism—over-connected and over-emotional self-presenters who are unable to stop, in fear they will be nothing if not performing.ConclusionPortraying a seemingly endless parade of neoliberal selves, Trecartin’s work yields a zany vision that always threatens to spin out of control. As a form of Internet-era camp, he reproduces automedial conceptions of the self as constituted and expanded by media technologies—as performative conduits between the formal and the socio-political which go both ways. This process has been described by Berlant in terms of life writing, but it applies equally to Trecartin, who, through a “performance of fantasmatic intersubjectivity,” facilitates “a performance of being” for the viewer “made possible by the proximity of the object” (Berlant 25). Inflating for both comic and tragic effect a profoundly nebulous yet weaponized conception of identity, Trecartin’s characters show the relation between offline and online life to be impossible to essentialize, laden with a mix of conflicting feelings and personas. 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