Journal articles on the topic 'Second-order existential logic'

The aim of this paper is to show what sorts of logics are required by externalist and internalist accounts of the meanings of natural kind nouns. These logics give us a new perspective from which to evaluate the respective positions in the externalist--internalist debate about the meanings of such nouns. The two main claims of the paper are the following: first, that adequate logics for internalism and externalism about natural kind nouns are second-order logics; second, that an internalist second-order logic is a free logic—a second order logic free of existential commitments for natural kind nouns, while an externalist second-order logic is not free of existential commitments for natural kind nouns—it is existentially committed.

In [9] and [10] P. Kolaitis and M. Vardi proved that the 0-1 law holds for the second-order existential sentences whose first-order parts are formulas of Bernays-Schonfinkel or Ackermann prefix classes. They also provided several examples of second-order formulas for which the 0-1 law does not hold, and noticed that the classification of second-order sentences for which the 0-1 law holds resembles the classification of decidable cases of first-order prenex sentences. The only cases they have not settled are the cases of Gödel classes with and without equality.In this paper we confirm the conjecture of Kolaitis and Vardi that the 0-1 law does not hold for the existential second-order sentences whose first-order part is in Gödel prenex form with equality. The proof we give is based on a modification of the example employed by W. Goldfarb [5] in his proof that, contrary to the Gödel claim [6], the class of Gödel prenex formulas with equality is undecidable.

In 2001, Le Bars proved that there exists an existential monadic second-order (EMSO) sentence such that the probability that it is true on [Formula: see text] does not converge and conjectured that, for EMSO sentences with two first-order variables, the zero–one law holds. In this paper, we prove that the conjecture fails for [Formula: see text], and give new examples of sentences with fewer variables without convergence (even for [Formula: see text]).

AbstractWe show that the 0-1 law does not hold for the class(∀∃∀ without = ) by finding a sentence in this class which almost surely expresses parity. We also show that every recursive real in the unit interval is the asymptotic probability of a sentence in this class. This expands a result by Lidia Tendera, who in 1994 proved that everyrationalnumber in the unit interval is the asymptotic probability of a sentence in the class∀∃∀withequality.

AbstractThis paper studies the expressive power that an extra first order quantifier adds to a fragment of monadic second order logic, extending the toolkit of Janin and Marcinkowski [JM01].We introduce an operation existsn (S) on properties S that says “there are n components having S”. We use this operation to show that under natural strictness conditions, adding a first order quantifier word u to the beginning of a prefix class V increases the expressive power monotonically in u. As a corollary, if the first order quantifiers are not already absorbed in V, then both the quantifier alternation hierarchy and the existential quantifier hierarchy in the positive first order closure of V are strict.We generalize and simplify methods from Marcinkowski [Mar99] to uncover limitations of the expressive power of an additional first order quantifier, and show that for a wide class of properties S, S cannot belong to the positive first order closure of a monadic prefix class W unless it already belongs to W.We introduce another operation alt(S) on properties which has the same relationship with the Circuit Value Problem as reach(S) (defined in [JM01]) has with the Directed Reachability Problem. We use alt(S) to show that Πn ⊈ FO(Σn), Σn ⊈ FO(∆n). and ∆n+1 ⊈ FOB(Σn), solving some open problems raised in [Mat98].

AbstractWe propose an original use of techniques from random graph theory to find a Monadic(Minimal Scott without equality) sentence without an asymptotic probability. Our result implies that the 0-1 law fails for the logics(FO2) and](Minimal Gödel without equality). Therefore we complete the classification of first-order prefix classes with or without equality, according to the existence of the 0-1 law for the correspondingfragment. In addition, our counterexample can be viewed as a single explanation of the failure of the 0-1 law of all the fragments of existential second-order logic for which the failure is already known.

AbstractWe characterize the expressive power of extensions of Dependence Logic and Independence Logic by monotone generalized quantifiers in terms of quantifier extensions of existential second-order logic.

Abstract We introduce a restricted second-order logic $\textrm{SO}^{\textit{plog}}$ for finite structures where second-order quantification ranges over relations of size at most poly-logarithmic in the size of the structure. We demonstrate the relevance of this logic and complexity class by several problems in database theory. We then prove a Fagin’s style theorem showing that the Boolean queries which can be expressed in the existential fragment of $\textrm{SO}^{\textit{plog}}$ correspond exactly to the class of decision problems that can be computed by a non-deterministic Turing machine with random access to the input in time $O((\log n)^k)$ for some $k \ge 0$, i.e. to the class of problems computable in non-deterministic poly-logarithmic time. It should be noted that unlike Fagin’s theorem which proves that the existential fragment of second-order logic captures NP over arbitrary finite structures, our result only holds over ordered finite structures, since $\textrm{SO}^{\textit{plog}}$ is too weak as to define a total order of the domain. Nevertheless, $\textrm{SO}^{\textit{plog}}$ provides natural levels of expressibility within poly-logarithmic space in a way which is closely related to how second-order logic provides natural levels of expressibility within polynomial space. Indeed, we show an exact correspondence between the quantifier prefix classes of $\textrm{SO}^{\textit{plog}}$ and the levels of the non-deterministic poly-logarithmic time hierarchy, analogous to the correspondence between the quantifier prefix classes of second-order logic and the polynomial-time hierarchy. Our work closely relates to the constant depth quasipolynomial size AND/OR circuits and corresponding restricted second-order logic defined by David A. Mix Barrington in 1992. We explore this relationship in detail.

AbstractRobert Stalnaker has recently advocated propositional contingentism, the claim that it is contingent what propositions there are. He has proposed a philosophical theory of contingency in what propositions there are and sketched a possible worlds model theory for it. In this paper, such models are used to interpret two propositional modal languages: one containing an existential propositional quantifier, and one containing an existential propositional operator. It is shown that the resulting logic containing an existential quantifier is not recursively axiomatizable, as it is recursively isomorphic to second-order logic, and a natural candidate axiomatization for the resulting logic containing an existential operator is shown to be incomplete.

Abstract Team semantics is the mathematical framework of modern logics of dependence and independence in which formulae are interpreted by sets of assignments (teams) instead of single assignments as in first-order logic. In order to deepen the fruitful interplay between team semantics and database dependency theory, we define Polyteam Semantics in which formulae are evaluated over a family of teams. We begin by defining a novel polyteam variant of dependence atoms and give a finite axiomatization for the associated implication problem. We relate polyteam semantics to team semantics and investigate in which cases logics over the former can be simulated by logics over the latter. We also characterize the expressive power of poly-dependence logic by properties of polyteams that are downwards closed and definable in existential second-order logic ($\textsf{ESO}$). The analogous result is shown to hold for poly-independence logic and all $\textsf{ESO}$-definable properties. We also relate poly-inclusion logic to greatest fixed point logic.

AbstractWe consider disjunctive logic programs without function symbols but with existential quantification in rule heads, under the semantics of general stable models. There are at least two interesting prospects in these programs. The first is that a program can be made more succinct by using existential variables, and the second is on the potential in representing defeasible ontological knowledge by these logic programs. This paper studies some of the properties of these programs. First, we show a simple yet intuitive definition of stable models for these programs that does not resort to second-order logic. Second, the stable models of these programs can be characterized by an extension of progression for disjunctive programs, which provides a native characterization of justification for stable models. We then study the decidability issue. While the stable model existence problem for safe disjunctive programs is decidable, with existential quantification allowed in rule heads the problem becomes undecidable. We identify an interesting decidable fragment by exploring a new notion of stratification over existential quantification.

AbstractWe consider a family of finite universes. The second order existential quantifier Qℜ means for each U Є quantifying over a set of n(ℜ)-place relations isomorphic to a given relation. We define a natural partial order on such quantifiers called interpretability. We show that for every Qℜ, either Qℜ is interpretable by quantifying over subsets of U and one to one functions on U both of bounded order, or the logic L(Qℜ) (first order logic plus the quantifier Qℜ) is undecidable.

In this paper we consider an independence-friendly modal logic, IFML. It follows from results in the literature that qua expressive power, IFML is a fragment of second-order existential logic, $\Sigma _1^1$, that cannot be translated into first-order logic. It is also known that IFML lacks the tree structure property. We show that IFML has the ‘truncated structure property’, a weaker version of the tree structure property, and that its satisfiability problem is solvable in 2NEXP. This implies that this paper reveals a new decidable fragment of $\Sigma _1^1$. We also show that IFML becomes undecidable if we add the identity symbol to its vocabulary by means of a reduction from the tiling problem.

We present first-order (FO) and monadic second-order (MSO) logics with predicates ‘between’ and ‘neighbour’ that characterise the class of regular languages that are closed under the reverse operation and its subclasses. The ternary between predicate bet(x, y, z) is true if the position y is strictly between the positions x and z. The binary neighbour predicate N(x, y) is true when the the positions x and y are adjacent. It is shown that the class of reversible regular languages is precisely the class definable in the logics MSO(bet) and MSO(N). Moreover the class is definable by their existential fragments EMSO(bet) and EMSO(N), yielding a normal form for MSO formulas. In the first-order case, the logic FO(bet) corresponds precisely to the class of reversible languages definable in FO(<). Every formula in FO(bet) is equivalent to one that uses at most 3 variables. However the logic FO(N) defines only a strict subset of reversible languages definable in FO(+1). A language-theoretic characterisation of the class of languages definable in FO(N), called locally-reversible threshold-testable (LRTT), is given. In the second part of the paper we show that the standard connections that exist between MSO and FO logics with order and successor predicates and varieties of finite semigroups extend to the new setting with the semigroups extended with an involution operation on its elements. The case is different for FO(N) where we show that one needs an additional equation that uses the involution operator to characterise the class. While the general problem of characterising FO(N) is open, an equational characterisation is shown for the case of neutral letter languages.

AbstractAssume (ℵ0, ℵ1) → (λ, λ+). Assume M is a model of a first order theory T of cardinality at most λ+ in a language of cardinality ≤ λ. Let N be a model with the same language. Let Δ be a set of first order formulas in and let D be a regular filter on λ. Then M is Δ-embeddable into the reduced power Nλ/D, provided that every Δ-existential formula true in M is true also in N. We obtain the following corollary: for M as above and D a regular ultrafilter over λ, Mλ/D is λ++-universal. Our second result is as follows: For i < μ let Mi, and Ni, be elementarily equivalent models of a language which has cardinality ≤ λ. Suppose D is a regular filter on λ and (ℵ0, ℵ1) → (λ, λ+) holds. We show that then the second player has a winning strategy in the Ehrenfeucht-Fraïssé game of length λ+ on ΠiMi/D and ΠiNi/D. This yields the following corollary: Assume GCH and λ regular (or just (ℵ0, ℵ1) → (λ, λ+) and 2λ = λ+. For L, Mi and Ni be as above, if D is a regular filter on λ, then ΠiMi/D ≅ ΠiNi/D.

AbstractWe define classes Φn of formulae of first-order arithmetic with the following properties:(i) Every φ ϵ Φn is classically equivalent to a Πn-formula (n ≠ 1, Φ1 := Σ1).(ii) (iii) IΠn and iΦn (i.e., Heyting arithmetic with induction schema restricted to Φn-formulae) prove the same Π2-formulae.We further generalize a result by Visser and Wehmeier. namely that prenex induction within intuitionistic arithmetic is rather weak: After closing Φn both under existential and universal quantification (we call these classes Θn) the corresponding theories iΘn still prove the same Π2-formulae. In a second part we consider iΔ0 plus collection-principles. We show that both the provably recursive functions and the provably total functions of are polynomially bounded. Furthermore we show that the contrapositive of the collection-schema gives rise to instances of the law of excluded middle and hence .

Program synthesis is the mechanized construction of software, dubbed ‘self-writing code’. Synthesis tools relieve the programmer from thinking about how the problem is to be solved; instead, the programmer only provides a description of what is to be achieved. Given a specification of what the program should do, the synthesizer generates an implementation that provably satisfies this specification. From a logical point of view, a program synthesizer is a solver for second-order existential logic. Owing to the expressiveness of second-order logic, program synthesis has an extremely broad range of applications. We survey some of these applications as well as recent trends in the algorithms that solve the program synthesis problem. In particular, we focus on an approach that has raised the profile of program synthesis and ushered in a generation of new synthesis tools, namely counter-example-guided inductive synthesis (CEGIS). We provide a description of the CEGIS architecture, followed by recent algorithmic improvements. We conjecture that the capacity of program synthesis engines will see further step change, in a manner that is transparent to the applications, which will open up an even broader range of use-cases. This article is part of the themed issue ‘Verified trustworthy software systems’.

AbstractThis paper surveys a new perspective on tree automata and Monadic second-order logic (MSO) on infinite trees. We show that the operations on tree automata used in the translations of MSO-formulae to automata underlying Rabin’s Tree Theorem (the decidability of MSO) correspond to the connectives of Intuitionistic Multiplicative Exponential Linear Logic (IMELL). Namely, we equip a variant of usual alternating tree automata (that we call uniform tree automata) with a fibered monoidal-closed structure which in particular handles a linear complementation of alternating automata. Moreover, this monoidal structure is actually Cartesian on non-deterministic automata, and an adaptation of a usual construction for the simulation of alternating automata by non-deterministic ones satisfies the deduction rules of the !(–) exponential modality of IMELL. (But this operation is unfortunately not a functor because it does not preserve composition.) Our model of IMLL consists in categories of games which are based on usual categories of two-player linear sequential games called simple games, and which generalize usual acceptance games of tree automata. This model provides a realizability semantics, along the lines of Curry–Howard proofs-as-programs correspondence, of a linear constructive deduction system for tree automata. This realizability semantics, which can be summarized with the slogan “automata as objects, strategies as morphisms,” satisfies an expected property of witness extraction from proofs of existential statements. Moreover, it makes it possible to combine realizers produced as interpretations of proofs with strategies witnessing (non-)emptiness of tree automata.

The study offers a hermeneutic analysis of the apocryphal “Martyrdom of the Apostle Peter” (MPt). We argue that the main idea of Peter’s monologue from the cross is borrowed from Plato’s Timaeus (43e4–8), which describes a man who is placed upside down and thus perceives his right as left and considers truth a lie. MPt interpreted this account in the light of the Old Testament narrative about the expulsion of the first man Adam from paradise and the imperative to return to the “ancient fatherland”, following the “second Adam”, Jesus Christ, up to imitation of his death on the cross, transforming this instrument of shame and death into the tree of eternal life. The Apostle Peter, crucified on the cross with his head down, makes himself a living example of the existential overturn of man after the fall. Peter quotes an apocryphal λόγιον of Christ that exhorts to make everything upright: the earthly world order — right and left, top and bottom, front and back — should be again turned over and put from head to foot. Having established that Peter’s monologue constitutes a “discourse of reversal”, we argue that the starting point for constructing the λόγιον of Christ in the MPt was His saying in Matt 18:3: “if you don’t turn over (στραφῆτε) ..., you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven.” The apparently similar utterance from the “Gospel of Thomas”, usually indicated as a parallel, cannot be considered as such, since it urges not to reverse the “signs of nature”, but to overcome sexual differentiation. It is concluded that the “Martyrdom of Peter” demonstrates the primacy of its narrative (as well as the autonomy of its “hermetic” imagery) in comparison with the “Martyrdom of Philip”. Vocabulary, rhetoric, and contents of the MPt place it within the early Christian, Gnostic and Hermetic literature. A distinctive feature of the work is its distinct esotericism: it has an initiatory, mystagogical character, its own metaphysics and dramatic logic. On the contrary, the “Martyrdom of Philip” belongs to the genre of the lives of saints, saturated with wonders and fabulous details. The transformations which “Martyrdom of Peter” undergoes in the Latin paraphrase by ps.-Linus are analyzed. It is shown that ps.-Linus fundamentally changes the narrative in order to make it conform with orthodoxy, although this is achieved at the cost of destroying the logic of the Greek prototype. An annotated Russian translation of the Apostle Peter’s monologue on the cross is published in the Appendix.

We present syntactic characterisations for the union closed fragments of existential second-order logic and of logics with team semantics. Since union closure is a semantical and undecidable property, the normal form we introduce enables the handling and provides a better understanding of this fragment. We also introduce inclusion-exclusion games that turn out to be precisely the corresponding model-checking games. These games are not only interesting in their own right, but they also are a key factor towards building a bridge between the semantic and syntactic fragments. On the level of logics with team semantics we additionally present restrictions of inclusion-exclusion logic to capture the union closed fragment. Moreover, we define a team based atom that when adding it to first-order logic also precisely captures the union closed fragment of existential second-order logic which answers an open question by Galliani and Hella.

International audience Building on work of Gaifman [Gai82] it is shown that every first-order formula is logically equivalent to a formula of the form ∃ x_1,...,x_l, \forall y, φ where φ is r-local around y, i.e. quantification in φ is restricted to elements of the universe of distance at most r from y. \par From this and related normal forms, variants of the Ehrenfeucht game for first-order and existential monadic second-order logic are developed that restrict the possible strategies for the spoiler, one of the two players. This makes proofs of the existence of a winning strategy for the duplicator, the other player, easier and can thus simplify inexpressibility proofs. \par As another application, automata models are defined that have, on arbitrary classes of relational structures, exactly the expressive power of first-order logic and existential monadic second-order logic, respectively.

AbstractWe analyze the expressive resources of $$\mathrm {IF}$$ IF logic that do not stem from Henkin (partially-ordered) quantification. When one restricts attention to regular $$\mathrm {IF}$$ IF sentences, this amounts to the study of the fragment of $$\mathrm {IF}$$ IF logic which is individuated by the game-theoretical property of action recall (AR). We prove that the fragment of prenex AR sentences can express all existential second-order properties. We then show that the same can be achieved in the non-prenex fragment of AR, by using “signalling by disjunction” instead of Henkin or signalling patterns. We also study irregular IF logic (in which requantification of variables is allowed) and analyze its correspondence to regular IF logic. By using new methods, we prove that the game-theoretical property of knowledge memory is a first-order syntactical constraint also for irregular sentences, and we identify another new first-order fragment. Finally we discover that irregular prefixes behave quite differently in finite and infinite models. In particular, we show that, over infinite structures, every irregular prefix is equivalent to a regular one; and we present an irregular prefix which is second order on finite models but collapses to a first-order prefix on infinite models.

We introduce methods to generate uniform families of hard propositional tautologies. The tautologies are essentially generated from a single propositional formula by a natural action of the symmetric group Sn.<br />The basic idea is that any Second Order Existential sentence Psi can be systematically translated into a conjunction phi of a finite collection of clauses such that the models of size n of an appropriate Skolemization Psi~ are in one-to-one correspondence with the satisfying assignments to phi_n: the Sn-closure of phi, under a natural action of the symmetric group Sn. Each phi_n is a CNF and thus has depth at most 2. The size of the phi_n's is bounded by a polynomial in n. Under the assumption NEXPTIME |= co- NEXPTIME, for any such sequence phi_n for which the spectrum S := {n : phi_n satisfiable} is NEXPTIME-complete, the tautologies not phi_(n not in S) do not have polynomial length proofs in any propositional proof system.<br /> Our translation method shows that most sequences of tautologies being studied in propositional proof complexity can be systematically generated from Second Order Existential sentences and moreover, many natural mathematical statements can be converted into sequences of propositional tautologies in this manner.<br /> We also discuss algebraic proof complexity issues for such sequences of tautologies. To this end, we show that any Second Order Existential sentence Psi can be systematically translated into a finite collection of polynomial equations Q = 0 such that the models of size n of an appropriate skolemization Psi~ are in one-to-one correspondence with the solutions to Qn = 0: the Sn-closure of Q = 0, under a natural action of the symmetric group Sn. The degree of Qn is the same as that of Q, and hence is independent of n, and the number of variables is no more than a polynomial in n. Furthermore, using results in [19] and [20], we briefly describe how, for the corresponding sequences of tautologies phi_n, the rich structure of the Sn closed, uniformly generated, algebraic systems Qn has profound consequences on the algebraic proof complexity of phi_n.

Abstract Modern logics of dependence and independence are based on team semantics, which means that formulae are evaluated not on a single assignment of values to variables, but on a set of such assignments, called a team. This leads to high expressive power, on the level of existential second-order logic. As an alternative, Baltag and van Benthem have proposed a local variant of dependence logic, called logic of functional dependence ($ {\textsf {LFD}}$). While its semantics is also based on a team, the formulae are evaluated locally on just one of its assignments, and the team just serves as the supply of the possible assignments that are taken into account in the evaluation process. This logic thus relies on the modal perspective of generalized assignments semantics and can be seen as a fragment of first-order logic. For the variant of $ {\textsf {LFD}}$ without equality, the satisfiability problem is decidable. We extend the idea of localizing logics of dependence and independence in a systematic way, taking into account local variants of standard atomic dependency properties: besides dependence and independence, also inclusion, exclusion and anonymity. We study model-theoretic and algorithmic questions of the localized logics and also resolve some of the questions that had been left open by Baltag and van Benthem. In particular, we study decidability issues of the local logics and prove that satisfiability of $ {\textsf {LFD}}$ with equality is undecidable. Further, we establish characterization theorems via appropriate notions of bisimulation and study the complexity of model checking problems for these logics.

Abstract The 3-valued paraconsistent logic Ciore was developed by Carnielli, Marcos and de Amo under the name LFI2, in the study of inconsistent databases from the point of view of logics of formal inconsistency (LFIs). They also considered a first-order version of Ciore called LFI2*. The logic Ciore enjoys extreme features concerning propagation and retropropagation of the consistency operator: a formula is consistent if and only if some of its subformulas is consistent. In addition, Ciore is algebraizable in the sense of Blok and Pigozzi. On the other hand, the logic LFI2* satisfies a somewhat counter-intuitive property: the universal and the existential quantifier are inter-definable by means of the paraconsistent negation, as it happens in classical first-order logic with respect to the classical negation. This feature seems to be unnatural, given that both quantifiers have the classical meaning in LFI2*, and that this logic does not satisfy the De Morgan laws with respect to its paraconsistent negation. The first goal of the present article is to introduce a first-order version of Ciore (which we call QCiore) preserving the spirit of Ciore, that is, without introducing unexpected relationships between the quantifiers. The second goal of the article is to adapt to QCiore the partial structures semantics for the first-order paraconsistent logic LPT1 introduced by Coniglio and Silvestrini, which generalizes the semantic notion of quasi-truth considered by Mikeberg, da Costa and Chuaqui. Finally, some important results of classical Model Theory are obtained for this logic, such as Robinson’s joint consistency theorem, amalgamation and interpolation. Although we focus on QCiore, this framework can be adapted to other 3-valued first-order LFIs.

IntroductionAccording to Sigmund Freud (A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis 90), dreams can be seen as a “substitute for something else, unknown to the dreamer”. In Freud’s theory, dreams are regarded as a “depiction of the subconscious, a screen onto which the subconscious projects its suppressed desires and hallucinations about their fulfilment” (Khapaeva & Tweddle 6). It is likely due to these aspects that dreams and dreaming have become prevalent in contemporary literature, film and television, and an outlet for a greater examination of Freud’s work on the origins and nature of these "desires and hallucinations" (Eberwein). While considerable discussion exists on Freud’s psychoanalytical approach to dreams (Eberwein; Khapaeva & Tweddle; Moore Jr.), as well as the theoretical parallels between dreams and the mediums of storytelling, literature and film (Rheinschmiedt; Perlmutter; Khapeava & Tweddle), there has been limited research and representation of dreams in Gothic television. The Gothic is a “malleable notion” that is able to remould itself into various narrative forms and media (Piatti-Farnell & Brien 1), and is also “about the return of the past, of the repressed and denied, the buried secret that subverts and corrodes the present, whatever the culture does not want to know or admit” (Lloyd-Smith, 1). Given that in Freudian theory, dreams are generally regarded as a vehicle for the return of suppressed desires and the unconscious, dreams and nightmares themselves can be seen as inherently Gothic. Dreams and nightmares are often spaces where characters must confront the unfamiliar, the unknown, and the unseen future, and yet, these spaces also seem to contain aspects of the familiar, the known, and the previously seen past (Moore Jr.). Taking the inherent Gothic nature of dreams and nightmares into account, this article will critically examine the representation of dreams and nightmares in “Chapter Five: Dreams in a Witch House” in Netflix’s The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018-present). At the end of the previous episode, “Chapter Four: Witch Academy”, Sabrina inadvertently frees the sleep demon, Batibat, from her prison. In Chapter five, Batibat, in an effort to force them to release her from the house, places Sabrina, Ambrose, Zelda and Hilda into a deep sleep curse where they are tortured in their dream-turned nightmares. The episode features a number of Gothic tropes and conventions, including the return of the repressed and the unconscious, the uncanny and the double, and the blurring of the boundaries between reality and fantasy. This article will primarily focus on Ambrose, whose dream sequence highlights how dreams in Gothic texts are often spaces where the boundaries between everyday reality and fantasy scenarios become blurred, producing uncanny interactions. This can be seen in Ambrose’s experience of a dream loop, where he is compelled to repeat his death over and over again; this repetition produces a blurring of the boundary between the past, present and future. Additionally, this article will discuss how the episode uses both the “aesthetics and the politics of horror and the Gothic” (Piatti-Farnell and Mercer 1), in order illustrate how the realisation of our deepest fears and anxieties in dreams and nightmares are both terrifying and horrifying. Uncanny Doubles and the Repressed Unconscious According to Royle, the uncanny is “concerned with the strange, weird, and mysterious, with a flickering sense (but not conviction) of something supernatural” (1). The uncanny is a crisis of the proper as it entails a critical disturbance of what is proper (including names, places, people), and is concerned with the familiar becoming unfamiliar. Royle argues that the uncanny is described in terms of making things uncertain and the sense that things are not as they have come to appear through habit and familiarity, which often challenges rationality or logic. According to Wheatley (3), Gothic television narratives often involve a “proclivity towards the structures and images of the uncanny” including repetitions, déjà vu, doppelgangers and the double, and severed body parts. Ambrose’s dream, in particular, support’s Wheatley’s claim that Gothic television has a proclivity towards the images of the uncanny, as it includes a number of key features of the uncanny, including repetitions, the double, and severed body parts, are used to evoke the terror of Ambrose’s pain and death. At the start of Ambrose’s dream, he is in the Spellman Mortuary with Hilda opening a body bag – upon opening the bag, the corpse is revealed to be Ambrose’s body. This revelation produces an uncanny effect, as the double operates as a figure of displacement in that it characteristically appears out of place to displace its host (Webber). This displacement of both self and time can be seen with Ambrose’s reaction, who struggles too come to terms with seeing his double on the Mortuary table. According to Babicka, the doppelganger is perceived as both self and other, and the uncanny element is the fact that they are both familiar and strange. The encounter with other selves opens up possibilities for the uncanny, as any attempt at “a reflexive grasp of this mutual imbrication of self … involves a potential for precisely those uncanny figurations that people experience from the Gothic” (Collins & Jervis 6). After the body on the Mortuary table is revealed to be Ambrose’s double, Ambrose questions his aunt Hilda about the corpse, asking “doesn’t he remind you of someone, Auntie?” Collins and Jervis’s claim that the doppelganger is perceived as both self and other is supported by this interaction, as Ambrose’s question indicates that he recognises the corpse as himself, but given that the corpse appears to be his double, he also regards it as other. Furthermore, the uncanny resemblance between Ambrose and the corpse evokes a sense of terror and awe in him. Morris (307) argues that the uncanny "derives its terror not from something external, alien, or unknown but … something that is strangely familiar and defeats our efforts to separate ourselves from it". Terror has the potential to freeze the mind and body, and derives from whatever evokes in us an apprehension of pain or death. This apprehension of pain and death can be seen with Ambrose, as open seeing the body, a close up shot of Ambrose reveals his shock and terror of his own mortality. Moreover, the existential threat of death which the double poses can be connected to a key theme within the Gothic and the uncanny – our compulsion to return to the repressed moment or act. According to Mishra (294), the double can be regarded as the uncanny harbinger of death, and "death is the always recurring or repeating presence that threatens the subject to which it compulsively returns". In Ambrose’s dream, while his double is a direct visualisation of his death, he cannot seem to remember or understand how is body came to be on the table, as its presence appears to avoid all rational logic. In his discussion of the Gothic and psychoanalysis, Punter (307) argues that we work "continuously to maintain a simulacrum of congruence between fantasy and reality". However, those boundaries frequently blur in the most routine of everyday events, such as daydreams or dissonance between what other people mean as opposed to what we want to hear. When we can’t fill in this gap in knowledge, Punter argues that this gap can call forth the uncanny which is produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced. This dissonance between reality and fantasy can be seen with Ambrose’s reaction, as although his double’s corpse is right in front of him, he struggles to understand the gravity of the situation, and how he died. Unlike Ambrose’s dream, where the return of the repressed, his corpse, is a symbol of his desire to be free of house arrest, the return of the repressed in Sabrina’s dream is more literal as Harvey remembers a memory he had previously forgotten. Botting (107) argues that the uncanny is “easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced and occurs when infantile complexes which have been repressed are once more revived by some impression”. The uncanny is the recurrence or return of the repressed – something which is familiar and old established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through processes of repression. The return of repressed memories can be seen in Sabrina’s dream, where she reveals to her then-boyfriend, Harvey, her identity as half-witch and half-mortal. This revelation causes a moment of déjà vu for Harvey who, in the dream, remembers when Sabrina had cast a spell causing Harvey to forget about Sabrina’s identity. According to Royle (173), déjà vu can be defined as the "peculiar feeling or sensation that we have, in certain moments of situations, of having had exactly the same experience once before, or of having once before been in the same place". However, Royle argues that despite our best efforts, we never succeed in clearly remembering the previous occasion, and therefore the feeling of déjà vu corresponds to the recollection of an unconscious phantasy – we can never consciously remember it because it has never been conscious. In response to Sabrina’s revelation, Harvey asks “why am I suddenly having a strange sense of déjà vu?” Sabrina answers: “because I told you once, in the woods, and then I made you forget”. Harvey reveals that, despite Sabrina’s memory spell “a part of me remembers, even when you made me forget”. This revelation produces another uncanny moment where a repressed or ‘forgotten’ memory comes back to haunt the past. In Freud’s understanding of the uncanny, everything that was intended to remain a secret comes into the open, and the uncanny manifests itself when the repressed aspects buried in our unconscious suddenly return. By revealing her secret, the past event, the memory spell, suddenly returns and this forgotten moment causes Harvey anguish as he struggles to recollect the past experience. Repetition and Dream LoopsThe episode is segmented to focus on how the individual characters come to realise they are dreaming, before it brings them together. When first centred on Ambrose, we see him performing an autopsy on his double; after performing the operation, Ambrose is paid a visit by his coven’s High Priest, Father Blackwood, who informs him that he is no longer under house arrest. In this way, his dream initially appears to mirror the Freudian theory of dreams as simply being wish fulfilment; throughout the first season of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, Ambrose’s key storyline is his desire to leave the Spellman house and be free of his imprisonment. However, Ambrose’s wish is never fully actualised, as he is ultimately murdered by Batibat, and after his death, the episode jumps to the same close up shot of Ambrose and Hilda opening the body bag, like at the start of his dream. It appears that Ambrose is stuck in a time loop or a repetition of his own death, unable to leave the house forever – his greatest wish has become his greatest fear. Although it appears that Ambrose is ‘fated’ to die in his dream on a continuous loop, it is never clear when the loop actually begins, as at the beginning of the dream, we already see Ambrose’s corpse. Juranovszky argues that Gothic temporal loops play a key part in endeavours to establish sites of trauma re-enactment, and the aim of temporal confusion is to “evoke a disturbing sense of backward-pointing progress” which “allows for a reconsideration as well as a resolution of the past” (para 12). The re-enactment of Ambrose’s trauma, in this case his death, is seen in his dream, as he is stuck in an endless cycle of discovering his own corpse to only then be killed himself again. The temporality in the dream is non-linear as time flows in a circled repetition where Ambrose is at the Mortuary, is killed, and then the cycle repeats itself. Given that that dream loop begins at the Mortuary table, after Ambrose’s death, time itself in the dream is unclear as there is a blurring of the past, present, and future. Despite his awareness of being stuck in a loop of his own death, Ambrose is compelled to repeat the same action again and again until he relents and frees Batibat from the Spellman residence. This instance of repetition, where characters are compelled to act in a certain way, is a hallmark of the Gothic, and is one of the central characteristics of the uncanny (Lloyd-Smith). Lloyd-Smith argues that Gothic characters are often shown struggling in a web of repetitions caused by their unawareness of their unconscious drives and motives. However, in this case, Ambrose is shown struggling with the repetition of his own death, yet he is compelled to repeat such actions. Furthermore, the sequence highlights how dreams are a space outside of time, where the past and present are blurred. According to Perlmutter, “something happens to the narrative” when dream sequences in film and television begin, as “characters leave behind rational external reality and … cross over into a ‘between’ world where reality and imagination converge into hypothetical realms that are scrambled” and achronological” (128). Because of this blurring between reality and imagination, dreams in Gothic texts are often spaces where the past and future are highly contested, and are an extreme form of solitude outside of time. Ambrose’s home has become an unfamiliar place of torture, as although he is surrounded by familiar people and surroundings, it appears that he is stuck in solitude with little hope of escape. It is Ambrose’s awareness of being trapped in a time loop that results in his own death, and the realisation that he is trapped in existential solitude, as well as his inability to distinguish between nightmare and reality that makes his dream so terrifying. According to Piatti-Farnell and Mercer, “in our contemporary moment”, Gothic horror and terror “tend to merge and intersect, often forming hybrid visions”, that shifts between the two modes. Conventionally, terror has been “linked to fear triggered by indeterminate agents” (Cavallaro vii), and to hold characters and readers in anxious suspense about threats to life, safety, and sanity mostly out of sight or suggestions from a hidden past (Hogle). The claim that Gothic terror and horror often merge and intersect in contemporary texts can be supported by the revelation of the corpse on the Mortuary table. This revelation puts Ambrose in an anxious state, where he can only imagine the circumstances in which his double died. However, this terror of his mortality quickly shifts into horror when Ambrose realises that he is doomed to repeat his death in an endless cycle. Horror is usually triggered by “visible fear” (Cavallaro vii), and confronts characters “with the gross violence of physical or psychological dissolution, explicitly shattering the assumed norms … of everyday life with wildly shocking, and even revolting, consequences” (Hogle 3).This visualisation of fear and gross violence is explicitly shown when Ambrose performs an autopsy on his double for the second time, as he pleads “no … no … no … Auntie, please don’t leave me…” As Ambrose has encountered his death and entrapment in the Spellman residence, his fear of death has been realised as nothing remains for his imagination. The close up shot of Ambrose cutting into his own body can be considered as an instance of body horror, which Reyes argues, occurs when a “text generates fear from abnormal states of corporeality, or from an attack upon the body, we might find ourselves in front of an instance of body horror” (1). Reyes’s claim that body horror generates fear from an abnormal state of corporeality can be seen with Ambrose, as he is compelled to cut into his own body, knowing regardless of his actions, he will be killed by Batibat continuously, unless he relents and frees the demon from her trap. This compulsion to act creates a sense of horror, dread, and revulsion, which can be seen in a close up shot of Ambrose’s face, where he has an extremely visceral reaction to being stuck in his time loop, and being abandoned in solitude with no one to help him. While dreams in Freudian theory were considered as wish fulfilment, they can also be seen as a space where repressed and unconscious desires and fears manifest themselves. As seen in Ambrose’s dream, the return of these unconscious and repressed desires produced a number of uncanny and horrifying interactions. Ambrose’s growing realisation of being trapped in a nightmare loop of his death illustrate how dreams are Gothic because they disturb the boundary between the material world and fantasy. The use of Gothic horror and terror techniques and conventions in Ambrose’s dream demonstrate the horrifying nature of nightmares, not because it featured a single disturbing moment, but because Ambrose’s dream morphed from wish fulfilment to a narrative of his repressed and unconscious desires and fears. The inherent Gothic nature of dreams means they are highly effective and popularly used in literature, film, and television to evoke a sense of terror and horror because of the visceral reaction the return of the unconscious and repressed produces. ReferencesBabicka, Joanna. "Postmodern and Gothic Hybridity in Nick Cave's And the Ass Saw the Angel." The Gothic: Studies in History, Identity and Space. Ed. Katarzyna Wieckowska. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2012. 121-126.Botting, Fred. Limits of Horror: Technology, Bodies, Gothic. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2008.Cavallaro, Dani. The Gothic Vision: Three Centuries of Horror, Terror and Fear. London and New York: Continuum, 2002.“Chapter Four: Witch Academy.” The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina: Part One. Dir. Rob Seidenglanz. Netflix, 2018. “Chapter Five: Dreams in a Witch House.” The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina: Part One. Dir. Maggie Kiley. Netflix, 2018. Collins, Jo, and John Jervis. "Introduction." Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties. Eds. Jo Collins and John Jervis. New York: Macmillan Limited, 2008.Eberwein, Robert T. Film and the Dream Screen: A Sleep and a Forgetting. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.Freud, Sigmund. A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. Trans. G. Stanley Hall. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920. Freud, Sigmund. "The Uncanny." Fantastic Literature: A Critical Reader. Ed. David Sandner. Westport, Connecticut, and London: Praeger, 2004.Hogle, Jerrold E. "Introduction: The Gothic in Western Culture." The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Ed. Jerrold E. Hogle. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002.Juranovszky, Andrea. "Trauma Re-Enactment in the Gothic Loop: A Study on Structures of Circularity in Gothic Fiction." Inquiries Journal 6.5 (2014).Khapaeva, Dina, and Rosie Tweddle. Nightmare: From Literary Experiments to Cultural Project. Boston: Brill, 2012.Lloyd-Smith, Allan. American Gothic Fiction: An Introduction. New York: Bloomsbury, 2004.Mishra, Vijay. "The Gothic Sublime." A New Companion to the Gothic. Ed. David Punter. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2012. 288-306. Moore Jr., Richard W. "Dreaming Change, Changing Dreams in the British Gothic Novel, 1765-1818." New York: Fordham University, 2018.Morris, David B. “Gothic Sublimity.” New Literary History 12.2 (1985). 299-319. Perlmutter, Ruth. "Memories, Dreams, Screens." Quarterly Review of Film and Video (2005).Piatti-Farnell, Lorna, and Donna Lee Brien. "Introduction: The Gothic Compass." New Directions in 21st-Century Gothic: The Gothic Compass. Eds. Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Donna Lee Brien. Routledge, 2015. 1-10. Piatti-Farnell, Lorna, and Erin Mercer. "Gothic: New Directions in Media and Popular Culture." M/C Journal 17.4 (2014): 4.Punter, David. "Introduction: The Ghost of a History." A New Companion to the Gothic. Ed. David Punter. John Wiley & Sons, 2012. 1-9. Rheinschmiedt, Otto, M. The Fictions of Dreams: Dreams, Literature, and Writing. London and New York: Routledge, 2017.Royle, Nicholas. The Uncanny. Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 2003.Webber, Andrew J. The Doppelganger: Double Visions in German Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996.Wheatley, Helen. Gothic Television. Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 2006.

AbstractThis essay will be concerned with an evaluation, modification, and critique of van Inwagen’s famous argument for the existence of fictional characters. In the first section a reconstruction of the original argument will be provided, and three different challenges for this version of the argument will be pointed out. The first challenge concerns van Inwagen’s commitment to first-order predicate logic as a canonical language for the formal representation of truth-conditions of assertoric sentences in natural languages, and the problematic semantic complexity of van Inwagen’s original example sentences of quantifications about fictional objects. The second challenge concerns his commitment to a Quinean conception of ordinary language quantifications that conceives of first-order quantifiers as existentially loaded. The third challenge concerns van Inwagen’s tendency to interpret our ordinary intuitions about the truth-values of specific sentences as intuitions about the truth-values of the literal contents of these sentences. In the second section, a more detailed investigation of these three challenges will be provided; and a modified, and less problematic, alternative version of the argument will be proposed. It will be shown that the truth-conditions of van Inwagen’s original example sentences cannot be adequately represented on the basis of first-order predicate logic. I will propose alternative and less complex example sentences that are sufficient for the required purpose. Additionally, a reformulation of the argument will be proposed that avoids a commitment to a specific sort of formal framework. After that, it will be shown why the assumption of a Quinean conception of quantification unnecessarily increases the burden of proof. A reformulation of the argument will be proposed that avoids the commitment to a Quinean conception of quantification. Furthermore, I will make a third and final adjustment of the argument that allows us to remain neutral concerning the specific status of our truth-value intuitions concerning the proposed example sentences of generalisations about fictional objects. In the third and final section, three possible responses of an irrealist concerning fictional objects will be evaluated. The first option makes use of a recent semantic analysis of the modifying adjective ›fictional‹ proposed by Sainsbury. According to this analysis, a sentence like ›There are fictional mice that talk‹ is semantically equivalent with the claim ›There are fictional works according to which it is the case that at least one mouse talks‹. The second option additionally makes use of Sainsbury’s conception of spotty scope for ordinary language quantifiers and other related sentential operators. It will be shown why both options cannot account for the desired true readings of our example sentences. Finally, a third solution will be proposed and defended. This solution makes use of a substitutional interpretation of specific fictional generalisations based on a negative free logic to undermine the modified argument. It will be shown how this solution allows us to provide a correct analysis of the desired readings of our example sentences of generalisations about fictional characters. After that, two problems of this account will be discussed. The first problem concerns the extension of the proposed strategy to more complicated and sophisticated example sentences. The second problem concerns the independent motivation of a substitutional treatment of at least certain natural language quantificational expressions.

Briareos: If it's so quiet, then why do they need machines like that? I thought it was supposed to be peacetime. I'll tell you why-eighty per cent of the people here are artificial. Genetic engineering's out of control! -- Shirow, Appleseed 1.5: 37. Welcome to the 'machine' issue of M/C, appropriately mediated to you through the global network of machines sometimes known as the Internet. The question of the machine might seem a curious one for media and cultural studies scholars -- after all, commonsense tells us that whilst machines may let us practice culture or produce media, they are by definition not cultural. The cultural, the human, the social, is that which is left after all the nonhuman components have been properly contained within a 'machine'. And yet, what is a machine? When we talk of the machine in everyday discourse, it is always, explicitly or implicitly, part of a binary opposition between humans and machines, between motive biology and immobile artefacts, between active subjects and passive objects. In a similar vein the machine is always spectral, always metaphoric: it is one of the defining tropes of our industrialised civilisation. Whether it is the machinic Gehenna of H. G. Wells's or Fritz Lang's nightmares, all demonic steam engines and inhuman cogs; the shadowy, fifth column clones of Appleseed or the invasive 'Alien' that is micro-computerisation, the Human Genome project and nanotechnology, the machine is a metaphor that structures all levels of our relationships to culture. In scientific thought, at least since Newton and Descartes, the world has been composed of machines -- instruments which transmit and direct force, and which can be investigated, manipulated, invented. In humanistic thought, the machine is the other, the Frankenstein, the binary category against which the human gains its definition. It is the gleaming machine against which unruly women have been defined, the efficient machine against which uncontrollable mobs have had no recourse, the starkly military machine against which disenfranchised and colonised peoples have had no recourse but death. The machine is thus a significant cultural category, organising and policing ideological, discursive, historical, spiritual and political boundaries. In this issue of M/C, a range of authors address from different perspectives this question of the machine and its imbricated other, the human. Our feature writer, Anna Munster, in "Love Machines" critiques contemporary writing about sexuality and sexual experiences in cyberspace, commenting that "an erotic relation with the technological is occluded in most accounts of the sexual in cyberspace and in many engagements with digital technologies", arguing instead that these accounts engage in a kind of "onanistic" logic instead. She begins to address ways around this unsatisfactory arrangement by using the theories of Félix Guattari and Avital Ronell. Our second feature article is by the feminist philosopher and sociologist of technology, Zoë Sofoulis. In an article entitled "Machinic Musings with Mumford", Sofoulis returns to historian of technology Lewis Mumford for ideas about the role and purpose of machines in cultural development. She suggests that the machine's fascinating autonomy may inspire notions of the 'post-human', which can be critiqued from Mumford's humanist position as well as Latour's "non modern" stance. Taking up Mumford's point about the over-emphasis on machines in technology studies, Sofoulis argues that it is important to look at machines not just as things in themselves, but also the purposes they serve. A concern with the work of Guattari returns in Andreas Broeckmann's article "Minor Media -- Heterogenic Machines". Broeckmann reads a series of works by contemporary artists through the prism of Guattari's writings on art, media and the machine to argue that the "line of flight" of such media experimentation "is the construction of new and strong forms of subjectivity". Such artistic practices, which draw upon the networking and transformative features of digital media, Broeckmann suggests, "point us in the direction of the positive potentials of post media". 'Desire' Issue Editor Laurie Johnson takes a slightly different tack in this issue by developing a reading of classic 50s SF film Forbidden Planet in order to come to terms with deleuzoguattarian theorisations of the machine. He asks the question of Deleuze and Guattari: "how can we use a concept of machine that claims to go beyond the concept of utility (or techné, the function of technical machines)?" Johnson's article "Félix and Gilles's Tempestuous, Monstrous Machines" develops through a sophisticated cross-reading of Forbidden Planet with its source text, The Tempest, and the analysis of civilization that Deleuze and Guattari elaborate in Anti-Oedipus: "what the film demonstrates instead is that stripping a civilisation of its instrumentalities produces something other than just a return of the primitive repressed". In "From Haptic Interfaces to Man-Machine Symbiosis", Sonja Kangas provides an historicised account of the ways in which humans and machines interact with one another, which develops into a discussion of the problems of interactivity from the paradigm of game interface design. Drawing on the notions of cultural capital as developed by Pierre Bourdieu and the theorisations of the cyborg by Donna Haraway, Susan Luckman in "XX @ MM: Cyborg Subjectivity as Millennial Fashion Statement" addresses "some of the ways in which the traditional determinants of class are being redefined in light of the so-called postmodern capitalist information economy". In doing so she brings in "nerd chic", cyborgs, rave culture and I-Macs. Paul Benneworth, in his article "The Machine as Mythology -- The Case of the Joyce-Loebl Microdensitometer", takes us on an archeology of technology, examining the history and the fate of a small, pre-digital measuring device, the microdensitometer. His social history locates the device within its geographic and historical -- as well as its technological -- milieux, to demonstrate that the existence of any machine depends upon far more than merely its technical characteristics; that every machine is a social machine. If the machinic philosophy of Félix Guattari is the refrain of this issue of M/C, then Donna Haraway's cyborg metaphor is its melody. Drawing on the work of Haraway, Sophie Taysom's article "True Love Is a Trued Wheel: Technopleasure in Mountain Biking" seeks to make clear some of the ways in which mountain biking magazines have an important role in negotiating the boundaries between the "inside" and "outside" of mountain biking practices. Taysom achieves this by conducting a semiotic reading of this magazine genre, to prise open the trope of technology and see how it is reconfigured both literally and figuratively within their pages. Frances Bonner takes to task the highly gendered division in Science Fiction of "hard" and "soft" SF through an analysis of the representations of the 'technological' in Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan saga. As Bonner explains, this series is not so easily placed in either category, mixing as it does the tropes of space adventure with explorations of the ramifications of advanced reproductive technology. The engagement with the work of Guattari returns as a coda in Belinda Barnet's article "Machinic Heterogenesis and Evolution: Collected Notes on Sound, Machines and Sonicform". Hotwiring together Guattari's machinic philosophy with the work of the complexity theorists such as Stuart Kauffman and Ilya Prigogine, and using the example of the self-organising and evolving Sonicform Web site/sound system, Barnet examines the use and spread of evolutionary metaphors beyond their scientific origins. As she points out, "evolution is not just conflict, competition, selfish genes, tree diagrams, living and non-living systems. It's not just something furry, crawling things do. It's music. It's a dance. Poetic-existential. Hybrid subjectivities. And all the wor(l)ds in between". Nick Caldwell, Sean Aylward Smith -- 'Machine' Issue Editors Citation reference for this article MLA style: Nick Caldwell, Sean Aylward Smith. "Editorial: 'Machine'." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.6 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/edit.php>. Chicago style: Nick Caldwell, Sean Aylward Smith, "Editorial: 'Machine'," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 6 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/edit.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Nick Caldwell, Sean Aylward Smith. (1999) Editorial: 'machine'. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(6). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/edit.php> ([your date of access]).

The labyrinth is probably the most universal trope of complexity. Deriving from pre-Greek labyrinthos, a word denoting “maze, large building with intricate underground passages”, and possibly related to Lydian labrys, which signifies “double-edged axe,” symbol of royal power, the notion of the labyrinth primarily evokes the Minoan Palace in Crete and the myth of the Minotaur. According to this myth, the Minotaur, a monster with the body of a man and the head of a bull, was born to Pesiphae, king Minos’s wife, who mated with a bull when the king of Crete was besieging Athens. Upon his return, Minos commanded the artist Daedalus to construct a monumental building of inter-connected rooms and passages, at the center of which the King sought to imprison the monstrous sign of his disgrace. The Minotaur required human sacrifice every couple of years, until it was defeated by the Athenian prince Theuseus, who managed to extricate himself from the maze by means of a clue of thread, given to him by Minos’s enamored daughter, Ariadne (Parandowski 238-43). If the Cretan myth establishes the labyrinth as a trope of complexity, this very complexity associates labyrinthine design not only with disorientation but also with superb artistry. As pointed out by Penelope Reed Doob, the labyrinth is an inherently ambiguous construct (39-63). It presumes a double perspective: those imprisoned inside, whose vision ahead and behind is severely constricted, are disoriented and terrified; whereas those who view it from outside or from above – as a diagram – admire its structural sophistication. Labyrinths thus simultaneously embody order and chaos, clarity and confusion, unity (a single structure) and multiplicity (many paths). Whereas the modern, reductive view equates the maze with confusion and disorientation, the labyrinth is actually a signifier with two contradictory signifieds. Not only are all labyrinths intrinsically double, they also fall into two distinct, though related, types. The paradigm represented by the Cretan maze is mainly derived from literature and myth. It is a multicursal model, consisting of a series of forking paths, each bifurcation requiring new choice. The second type is the unicursal maze. Found mainly in the visual arts, such as rock carvings or coin ornamentation, its structural basis is a single path, twisting and turning, but entailing no bifurcations. Although not equally bewildering, both paradigms are equally threatening: in the multicursal construct the maze-walker may be entrapped in a repetitious pattern of wrong choices, whereas in the unicursal model the traveler may die of exhaustion before reaching the desired end, the heart of the labyrinth. In spite of their differences, the basic similarities between the two paradigms may explain why they were both included in the same linguistic category. The labyrinth represents a road-model, and as such it is essentially teleological. Most labyrinths of antiquity and of the Middle Ages were designed with the thought of reaching the center. But the fact that each labyrinth has a center does not necessarily mean that the maze-walker is aware of its existence. Moreover, reaching the center is not always to be desired (in case it conceals a lurking Minotaur), and once the center is reached, the maze-walker may never find the way back. Besides signifying complexity and ambiguity, labyrinths thus also symbolically evoke the danger of eternal imprisonment, of inextricability. This sinister aspect is intensified by the recursive aspect of labyrinthine design, by the mirroring effect of the paths. In reflecting on the etymology of the word ‘maze’ (rather than the Greek/Latin labyrinthos/labyrinthus), Irwin observes that it derives from the Swedish masa, signifying “to dream, to muse,” and suggests that the inherent recursion of labyrinthine design offers an apt metaphor for the uniquely human faculty of self-reflexitivity, of thought turning upon itself (95). Because of its intriguing aspect and wealth of potential implications, the labyrinth has become a category that is not only formal, but also conceptual and symbolic. The ambiguity of the maze, its conflation of overt complexity with underlying order and simplicity, was explored in ideological systems rooted in a dualistic world-view. In the early Christian era, the labyrinth was traditionally presented as a metaphor for the universe: divine creation based on a perfect design, perceived as chaotic due to the shortcomings of human comprehension. In the Middle-Ages, the labyrinthine attributes of imprisonment and limited perception were reflected in the view of life as a journey inside a moral maze, in which man’s vision was constricted because of his fallen nature (Cazenave 348-350). The maze was equally conceptualized in dynamic terms and used as a metaphor for mental processes. More specifically, the labyrinth has come to signify intellectual confusion, and has therefore become most pertinent in literary contexts that valorize rational thought. And the rationalistic genre par excellence is detective fiction. The labyrinth may serve as an apt metaphor for the world of detective fiction because it accurately conveys the tacit assumptions of the genre – the belief in the existence of order, causality and reason underneath the chaos of perceived phenomena. Such optimistic belief is ardently espoused by the putative detective in Paul Auster’s metafictional novella City of Glass: He had always imagined that the key to good detective work was a close observation of details. The more accurate the scrutiny, the more successful the results. The implication was that human behavior could be understood, that beneath the infinite façade of gestures, tics and silences there was finally a coherence, an order, a source of motivation. (67) In this brief but eloquent passage Auster conveys, through the mind of his sleuth, the central tenets of classical detective fiction. These tenets are both ontological and epistemological. The ontological aspect is subsumed in man’s hopeful reliance on “a coherence, an order, a source of motivation” underlying the messiness and blood of the violent deed. The epistemological aspect is aptly formulated by Michael Holquist, who argues that the fictional world of detective stories is rooted in the Scholastic principle of adequatio rei et intellectus, the adequation of mind to things (157). And if both human reality and phenomenal reality are governed by reason, the mind, given enough time, can understand everything. The mind’s representative is the detective. He is the embodiment of inquisitive intellect, and his superior powers of observation and deduction transform an apparent mystery into an incontestable solution. The detective sifts through the evidence, assesses the relevance of data and the reliability of witnesses. But, first of foremost, he follows clues – and the clue, the most salient element of the detective story, links the genre with the myth of the Cretan labyrinth. For in its now obsolete spelling, the word ‘clew’ denotes a ball of thread, and thus foregrounds the similarity between the mental process of unraveling a crime mystery and the traveler’s progress inside the maze (Irwin 179). The chief attributes of the maze – circuitousness, enclosure, and inextricability – associate it with another convention of detective fiction, the trope of the locked room. This convention, introduced in Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” a text traditionally regarded as the first analytic detective story, establishes the locked room as the ultimate affront to reason: a hermetically sealed space which no one could have penetrated or exited and in which a brutal crime has nevertheless been committed. But the affront to reason is only apparent. In Poe’s ur-text of the genre, the violent deed is committed by an orangutan, a brutal and abused beast that enters and escapes from the seemingly locked room through a half-closed window. As accurately observed by Holquist, in the world of detective fiction “there are no mysteries, there is only incorrect reasoning” (157). And the correct reasoning, dubbed by Poe “ratiocination”, is the process of logical deduction. Deduction is an enchainment of syllogisms, in which a conclusion inevitably follows from two valid premises; as Dupin elegantly puts it, “the deductions are the sole proper ones and … the suspicion arises inevitably from them as a single result” (Poe 89). Applying this rigorous mental process, the detective re-arranges the pieces of the puzzle into a coherent and meaningful sequence of events. In other words – he creates a narrative. This brings us back to Irwin’s observation about the recursive aspect of the maze. Like the labyrinth, detective fiction is self-reflexive. It is a narrative form which foregrounds narrativity, for the construction of a meaningful narrative is the protagonist’s and the reader’s principal task. Logical deduction, the main activity of the fictional sleuth, does not allow for ambiguity. In classical detective fiction, the labyrinth is associated with the messiness and violence of crime and contrasted with the clarity of the solution (the inverse is true of postmodernist detective mysteries). The heart of the labyrinth is the solution, the vision of truth. This is perhaps the most important aspect of the detective genre: the premise that truth exists and that it can be known. In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the initially insoluble puzzle is eventually transformed into a coherent narrative, in which a frantic orangutan runs into the street escaping the abuse of its master, climbs a rod and seeks refuge in a room inhabited by two women, brutally slashes them in confusion, and then flees the room in the same way he penetrated it. The sequence of events reconstructed by Dupin is linear, unequivocal, and logically satisfying. This is not the case with the ‘hard boiled’, American variant of the detective genre, which influenced the inception of film noir. Although the novels of Hammett, Chandler or Cain are structured around crime mysteries, these works problematize most of the tacit premises of analytic detective fiction and re-define its narrative form. For one, ‘hard boiled’ fiction obliterates the dualism between overt chaos and underlying order, between the perceived messiness of crime and its underlying logic. Chaos becomes all-encompassing, engulfing the sleuth as well as the reader. No longer the epitome of a superior, detached intellect, the detective becomes implicated in the mystery he investigates, enmeshed in a labyrinthine sequence of events whose unraveling does not necessarily produce meaning. As accurately observed by Telotte, “whether [the] characters are trying to manipulate others, or simply hoping to figure out how their plans went wrong, they invariably find that things do not make sense” (7). Both ‘hard-boiled’ fiction and its cinematic progeny implicitly portray the dissolution of social order. In film noir, this thematic pursuit finds a formal equivalent in the disruption of traditional narrative paradigm. As noted by Bordwell and Telotte, among others, the paradigm underpinning classical Hollywood cinema in the years 1917-1960 is characterized by a seemingly objective point of view, adherence to cause-effect logic, use of goal-oriented characters and a progression toward narrative closure (Bordwell 157, Telotte 3). In noir films, on the other hand, the devices of flashback and voice-over implicitly challenge conventionally linear narratives, while the use of the subjective camera shatters the illusion of objective truth (Telotte 3, 20). To revert to the central concern of the present paper, in noir cinema the form coincides with the content. The fictional worlds projected by the ‘hard boiled’ genre and its noir cinematic descendent offer no hidden realm of meaning underneath the chaos of perceived phenomena, and the trope of the labyrinth is stripped of its transcendental, comforting dimension. The labyrinth is the controlling visual metaphor of the Coen Brothers’ neo-noir film The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001). The film’s title refers to its main protagonist: a poker-faced, taciturn barber, by the name of Ed Crane. The entire film is narrated by Ed, incarcerated in a prison cell. He is writing his life story, at the commission of a men’s magazine whose editor wants to probe the feelings of a convict facing death. Ed says he is not unhappy to die. Exonerated of a crime he committed and convicted of a crime he did not, Ed feels his life is a labyrinth. He does not understand it, but he hopes that death will provide the answer. Ed’s final vision of life as a bewildering maze, and his hope of seeing the master-plan after death, ostensibly refer to the inherent dualism of the labyrinth, the notion of underlying order manifest through overt chaos. They offer the flicker of an optimistic closure, which subscribes to the traditional Christian view of the universe as a perfect design, perceived as chaos due to the shortcomings of human comprehension. But this interpretation is belied by the film’s final scene. Shot in blindingly white light, suggesting the protagonist’s revelation, the screen is perfectly empty, except for the electric chair in the center. And when Ed slowly walks towards the site of his execution, he has a sudden fantasy of the overhead lights as the round saucers of UFOs. The film’s visual metaphors ironically subvert Ed’s metaphysical optimism. They cast a view of human life as a maze of emptiness, to borrow the title of one of Borges’s best-known stories. The only center of this maze is death, the electric chair; the only transcendence, faith in God and in after life, makes as much sense as the belief in flying saucers. The Coen Brothers thus simultaneously construct and deconstruct the traditional symbolism of the labyrinth, evoking (through Ed’s innocent hope) its promise of underlying order, and subverting this promise through the images that dominate the screen. The transcendental dimension of the trope of the labyrinth, its promise of a hidden realm of meaning and value, is consistently subverted throughout the film. On the level of plot, the film presents a crisscrossed pattern of misguided intentions and tragi-comic misinterpretations. The film’s protagonist, Ed Crane, is estranged from his own life; neither content nor unhappy, he is passive, taking things as they come. Thus he condones Doris’s, his wife’s, affair with her employer, Big Dave, reacting only when he perceives an opportunity to profit from their liason. This opportunity presents itself in the form of Creighton Tolliver, a garrulous client, who shares with Ed his fail-proof scheme of making big money from the new invention of dry cleaning. All he needs to carry out his plan, confesses Creighton, is an investment of ten thousand dollars. The barber decides to take advantage of this accidental encounter in order to change his life. He writes an anonymous extortion letter to Big Dave, threatening to expose his romance with Doris and wreck his marriage and his financial position (Dave’s wife, a rich heiress, owns the store that Dave runs). Dave confides in Ed about the letter; he suspects the blackmailer is a con man that tried to engage him in a dry-cleaning scheme. Although reluctant to part with the money, which he has been saving to open a new store to be managed by Doris, Big Dave eventually gives in. Obviously, although unbeknownst to Big Dave, it is Ed who collects the money and passes it to Creighton, so as to become a silent partner in the dry cleaning enterprise. But things do not work out as planned. Big Dave, who believes Creighton to be his blackmailer, follows him to his apartment in an effort to retrieve the ten thousand dollars. A fight ensues, in which Creighton gets killed, not before revealing to Dave Ed’s implication in his dry-cleaning scheme. Furious, Dave summons Ed, confronts him with Creighton’s story and physically attacks him. Ed grabs a knife that is lying about and accidentally kills Big Dave. The following day, two policemen arrive at the barbershop. Ed is certain they came to arrest him, but they have come to arrest Doris. The police have discovered that she has been embezzling from Dave’s store (Doris is an accountant), and they suspect her of Dave’s murder. Ed hires Freddy Riedenschneider, the best and most expensive criminal attorney, to defend his wife. The attorney is not interested in truth; he is looking for a version that will introduce a reasonable doubt in the minds of the jury. At some point, Ed confesses that it is he who killed Dave, but Riedenschneider dismisses his confession as an inadequate attempt to save Doris’s neck. He concocts a version of his own, but does not get the chance to win the trial; the case is dismissed, as Doris is found hanged in her cell. After his wife’s death, Ed gets lonely. He takes interest in Birdy, the young daughter of the town lawyer (whom he initially approached for Doris’s defense). Birdy plays the piano; Ed believes she is a prodigy, and wants to become her agent. He takes her for an audition to a French master pianist, who decides that the girl is nothing special. Disenchanted, they drive back home. Birdy tells Ed, not for the first time, that she doesn’t really want to be a pianist. She hasn’t been thinking of a career; if at all, she would like to be a vet. But she is very grateful. As a token of her gratitude, she tries to perform oral sex on Ed. The car veers; they have an accident. When he comes to, Ed faces two policemen, who tell him he is arrested for the murder of Creighton Tolliver. The philosophical purport of the labyrinth metaphor is suggested in a scene preceding Doris’s trial, in which her cocky attorney justifies his defense strategy. To support his argument, he has recourse to the theory of some German scientist, called either Fritz or Werner, who claimed that truth changes with the eye of the beholder. Science has determined that there is no objective truth, says Riedenschneider; consequently, the question of what really happened is irrelevant. All a good attorney can do, he concludes, is present a plausible narrative to the jury. Freddy Riedenschneider’s seemingly nonchalant exposition is a tongue-in-cheek reference to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Succinctly put, the principle postulates that the more precisely the position of a subatomic particle is determined, the less precisely its momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa. What follows is that concepts such as orbits of electrons do not exist in nature unless and until we measure them; or, in Heisenberg’s words, “the ‘path’ comes into existence only when we observe it” (qtd. in Cassidy). Heisenberg’s discovery had momentous scientific and philosophical implications. For one, it challenged the notion of causality in nature. The law of causality assumes that if we know the present exactly, we can calculate the future; in this formulation, suggests Heisenberg, “it is not the conclusion that is wrong, but the premises” (qtd. in Cassidy). In other words, we can never know the present exactly, and on the basis of this exact knowledge, predict the future. More importantly, the uncertainty principle seems to collapse the distinction between subjective and objective reality, between consciousness and the world of phenomena, suggesting that the act of perception changes the reality perceived (Hofstadter 239). In spite of its light tone, the attorney’s confused allusion to quantum theory conveys the film’s central theme: the precarious nature of truth. In terms of plot, this theme is suggested by the characters’ constant misinterpretation: Big Dave believes he is blackmailed by Creighton Tolliver; Ed thinks Birdy is a genius, Birdy thinks that Ed expects sex from her, and Ann, Dave’s wife, puts her faith in UFOs. When the characters do not misjudge their reality, they lie about it: Big Dave bluffs about his war exploits, Doris cheats on Ed and Big Dave cheats on his wife and embezzles from her. And when the characters are honest and tell the truth, they are neither believed nor rewarded: Ed confesses his crime, but his confession is impatiently dismissed, Doris keeps her accounts straight but is framed for fraud and murder; Ed’s brother in law and partner loyally supports him, and as a result, goes bankrupt. If truth cannot be known, or does not exist, neither does justice. Throughout the film, the wires of innocence and guilt are constantly crossed; the innocent are punished (Doris, Creighton Tolliver), the guilty are exonerated of crimes they committed (Ed of killing Dave) and convicted of crimes they did not (Ed of killing Tolliver). In this world devoid of a metaphysical dimension, the mindless processes of nature constitute the only reality. They are represented by the incessant, pointless growth of hair. Ed is a barber; he deals with hair and is fascinated by hair. He wonders how hair is a part of us and we throw it to dust; he is amazed by the fact that hair continues to grow even after death. At the beginning of the film we see him docilely shave his wife’s legs. In a mirroring scene towards the end, the camera zooms in on Ed’s own legs, shaved before his electrocution. The leitmotif of hair, the image of the electric chair, the recurring motif of UFOs – all these metaphoric elements convey the Coen Brothers’ view of the human condition and build up to Ed’s final vision of life as a labyrinth. Life is a labyrinth because there is no necessary connection between cause and effect; because crime is dissociated from accountability and punishment; because what happened can never be ascertained and human knowledge consists only of a maze of conflicting, or overlapping, versions. The center of the existential labyrinth is death, and the exit, the belief in an after-life, is no more real than the belief in aliens. The labyrinth is an inherently ambiguous construct. Its structural attributes of doubling, recursion and inextricability yield a wealth of ontological and epistemological implications. Traditionally used as an emblem of overt complexity concealing underlying order and symmetry, the maze may aptly illustrate the tacit premises of the analytic detective genre. But this purport of the maze symbolism is ironically inverted in noir and neo-noir films. As suggested by its title, the Coen Brothers’ movie is marked by absence, and the absence of the man who wasn’t there evokes a more disturbing void. That void is the center of the existential labyrinth. References Auster, Paul. City of Glass. The New York Trilogy. London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1990. 1-132. Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: Wisconsin UP, 1985. Cassidy, David. “Quantum Mechanics, 1925-1927.” Werner Heisenberg (1901-1978). American Institute of Physics, 1998. 5 June 2007 http://www.aip.org/history/heisenberg/p08c.htm>. Cazenave, Michel, ed. Encyclopédie des Symboles. Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1996. Coen, Joel, and Ethan Coen, dirs. The Man Who Wasn’t There. 2001. Doob, Penelope Reed. The Idea of the Labyrinth. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992. Hofstadter, Douglas. I Am a Strange Loop. New York: Basic Books, 2007. Holquist, Michael. “Whodunit and Other Questions: Metaphysical Detective Stories in Post-War Fiction.” The Poetics of Murder. Eds. Glenn W. Most and William W. Stowe. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. 149-174. Irwin, John T. The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges and the Analytic Detective Story. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994. Parandowski, Jan. Mitologia. Warszawa: Czytelnik, 1960. Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Edgar Allan Poe: The Complete Illustrated Stories and Poems. London: Chancellor Press, 1994. 103-114. Telotte, J.P. Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir. Urbana: Illinois UP, 1989. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Shiloh, Ilana. "A Vision of Complex Symmetry: The Labyrinth in The Man Who Wasn’t There." M/C Journal 10.3 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/09-shiloh.php>. APA Style Shiloh, I. (Jun. 2007) "A Vision of Complex Symmetry: The Labyrinth in The Man Who Wasn’t There," M/C Journal, 10(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/09-shiloh.php>.

Drawing on my recent experience of working in collaboration with the artist-led project, Open City, I want to explore the potential of an active and resistant - rather than passive and acquiescent – form of stillness that can be activated strategically within a performance-based practice. The article examines how stillness and other forms of non-productive or non-teleological activity might contribute towards the production of a radically dissenting – yet affirmative – model of contemporary subjectivity. It will investigate how the performance of stillness within an artistic practice could offer a pragmatic model through which to approach certain philosophical concepts in relation to the construction of subjectivity, by proposing a practical application of the various ideas explored therein. Stillness is often presented as antithetical to the velocity, mobility, speed and supposed freedom proposed by new technologies and the various accelerated modes by which we are encouraged to engage with the world. In one sense, stillness and slowness have been deemed outmoded or anachronistic forms of temporality, as fastness and efficiency have become the privileged terms. Alternatively, stillness has been reclaimed as part of a resistant – or at least reactive – “counter-culture” for challenging the enforced and increased pace at which we are required to perform. The intent, however, is not to focus on the transcendent possibilities – or even nostalgic dimension – of stillness, where it could be seen as a form of escape from the accelerated temporalities of contemporary capitalism, a move towards a slower, more spiritual or meditative existence by the removal of or self-imposed isolation from contemporary societal pressures. Instead, this article attempts to explore the potential within those forms of stillness specifically produced in and by contemporary capitalism, by reflecting on how they might be (re)inhabited – or appropriated through an artistic practice – as sites of critical action. The article will suggest ways in which habitually resented, oppressive or otherwise tedious forms of stillness, inaction or immobility can be turned into active or resistant strategies for producing the self differently to dominant ideological expectations or pressures. With reference to selected theoretical ideas primarily within the writing of Gilles Deleuze – especially in relation to Spinoza’s Ethics – I want to explore how the collective performance of stillness in the public realm produces an affect that both reveals and disrupts habitual patterns of behaviour. Stillness presents a break or pause in the flow of events, illuminating temporal gaps and fissures in which alternative or unexpected possibilities – for life – might be encountered and encouraged. The act of collective stillness can be understood as a mode of playful resistance to, or refusal of, societal norms, a wilful and collaborative attempt to break or rupture habitual flows. However, collective stillness also has the capacity to exceed or move beyond resistance by producing germinal conditions for a nascent community of experience no longer bound by existing protocol; a model of “communitas” emerging from the shared act of being still. The focus then, is to reflect on how the gesture of stillness performed within the context of an artistic practice – such as that of Open City – might offer an exemplar for the production of an affirmative form of subjectivity, by arguing how the practice of stillness paradoxically has the potential for increasing an individual’s capacity to act. Open City is an investigation-led artistic project – led by Andrew Brown and Katie Doubleday – that explores how public space is conceptualised and organised by interrogating the ways in which our daily actions and behaviours are conditioned and controlled. Their research activity involves inviting, instructing or working with members of the public to create discreet interventions and performances, which put into question or destabilise habitual patterns or conventions of public behaviour, through the use of invitations, propositions, site-specific actions and performative events. The practical and theoretical research phase of the Open City project was initiated in 2006 in collaboration with artist/performer Simone Kenyon. During this phase of research Open City worked with teachers of the Alexander Technique deconstructing the mechanics of walking, and observed patterns of group behaviour and ‘everyday’ movements in public spaces. This speculative phase of research was expanded upon through a pilot project where the artists worked with members of the public, inviting them to attempt to get lost in the city, to consider codes of conduct through observation and mimicry, to explore behavioural patterns in the public realm as a form of choreography, and to approach the spaces of the city as an amphitheatre or stage upon which to perform. This culminated in a series of public performances and propositional/instructive works as part of the nottdance festival in Nottingham (2007) where audiences were invited to participate in choreographed events, creating a number of fleeting and partially visible performances throughout the city. Members of the public were issued specific time-based invitations for collective and individual actions such as ‘Day or night – take a walk in which you notice and deliberately avoid CCTV cameras’ or ‘On the high street during rush hour … suddenly and without warning, stop and remain still for five minutes … then carry on walking as before.’ Image 1: Open City, documentation of publicly-sited postcards. As part of this phase of activity, I was invited by Open City to produce a piece of writing in response to their work – to be serialised over a number of publicly distributed postcards – which would attempt to critically contextualise the various issues and concerns emerging from the investigation-led research that the project had been developing in the public realm. The postcards included an instruction written by Open City on one side, and my serialised text on the other. I have since worked more collaboratively with Open City on new research investigating how the different temporalities within the public realm might be harnessed or activated creatively; how movement and mobility affect the way in which place and locality are encountered or understood. My involvement with the project has specifically been in exploring the use of text-based elements, instructions and propositions and has included further publicly-sited postcard texts and the development of sound-based works using iPod technology to create synchronised actions. In 2008, I successfully secured Arts Council of England funding for a practice-based research trip to Japan with Open City in which we initiated our specific investigations around stillness, slowness, obstruction, and blockage. During this phase of research we became interested in how speed and slowness can be utilised within a performance practice to create points of anchor and location within the urban environment, or in order to affect a psychological shift in the way that space is encountered and understood. Image 2: Open City, research investigations, Japan, 2008.On one level, Open City can be located within a tradition of publicly-sited performance practices. This genealogy of politically – and more often playfully – resistant actions, interventions and models of spatial occupation or navigation can be traced back to the ludic practice of Surrealist errance or aimless wandering into and through the Situationists’ deployment of the dérive and conceptualisation of “psychogeography” during the 1950s and 60s. In its focus on collective action and inhabitation of the everyday as a site of practice, Open City is also part of a trajectory of artistic activity – epitomised perhaps by Allan Kaprow’s Happenings – intent on blurring the line between art and life, or in drawing attention to those aspects of reality marginalised by dominant discourses and ideologies. Performed as part of an artistic practice, non-habitual or even habitually discouraged actions such as aimless wandering, standing still, even the (non)event of 'doing nothing' operate as subtle methods through which to protest against increasingly legislated conditions of existence, by proposing alternative modes of behaviour or suggesting flexibility therein. Artistic practice can be seen as a site of investigation for questioning and dismantling the dominant order – or “major” language – through acts of minor rebellion that – whilst predominantly impotent or ineffective – might still remind us that we have some agency and do not always need to wholly and passively acquiesce. Life itself becomes the material for a work of art, and it is through such an encounter that we might be encouraged to conceive other possibilities for life. Through art, life is rendered plastic and capable of being actively shaped or made into something different to how it might habitually be. However the notion of ‘life as a work of art’ is not exclusive to artistic practice. Various theorists and philosophers – including Nietzsche, Foucault, Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari – have advocated the necessity of viewing life as a kind of project or mode of invention, suggesting ways in which one’s “style of life” or way of existing might be produced or constructed differently. They urge us to consider how we might actively and consciously attend to the full possibilities of life in order to become more human, by increasing our “affective capacity,” that is, our capacity to affect and be affected in affirming or “augmentative terms” (Deleuze, Spinoza and Us 124). In one sense, Spinoza’s Ethics offers a pragmatic model – or guide to living – through which to attempt to increase one’s potential capacity for being, by maximising the possibility of augmentative experiences or joyful encounters. Here, Spinoza formulates a plan or model through which one might attempt to move from the “inadequate” realm of signs and effects – the first order of knowledge in which the body is simply subject to external forces and random encounters of which it remains ignorant – towards a second order of knowledge. Here, the individual body is able to construct concepts of causes or “common notions” with other “bodies in agreement.” The “common notions” of the second order are produced at the point where the individual is able to rise above the condition of simply experiencing effects and signs in order to form agreements or joyful encounters with other bodies. These harmonious synchronicities with other bodies harness life-affirming affects whilst repelling those that threaten to absorb or deplete power. It is only through the construction of “concepts” – an understanding of causality – that it is possible to move from the realm of inadequate ideas towards the production of “adequate ideas from which true actions ensue” (Deleuze, Spinoza and the Three Ethics 143). According to Spinoza’s Ethics, the challenge is to attempt to move from a state in which existence is passively experienced – or suffered blindly – as a series of effects upon the body, towards understanding – and working harmoniously with – the causes themselves. In his reading of Spinoza’s Ethics, Gilles Deleuze suggests that this shift occurs through consciously selecting those affects that offer the possibilities of augmentation (an increase in power through joy) rather than diminution (the decrease of power through sadness). Whilst Spinoza appears to denounce affects as simply inadequate ideas that should be avoided, Deleuze argues that there are certain life-affirming or joyful affects that can be seen as the “dark precursors” of the notions (The Three Ethics 144). According to Deleuze, whilst such “signs of augmentation remain passions and the ideas that they presuppose remain inadequate,” they alone have the capacity to enable the individual to increase in power, for the “selection” of affect is in itself the “condition of leaving the first kind of knowledge, and for attaining the concept” (The Three Ethics 144). For Deleuze-Spinoza, the production of subjectivity is a form of endeavour or “passional struggle,” whereby the individual attempts to increase his or her capacity for turning affects or signs into common notions or concepts (The Three Ethics 145). Deleuze argues that the “common notions are an Art, the art of Ethics itself: organising good encounters, composing actual relations, forming powers, experimenting” (Spinoza and Us 119). This is then a life-long project or practice – the making of life into a work of art – focused on increasing one’s potential to affect and be affected by signs that increase power, whilst simultaneously reducing or minimising one’s threshold of affectivity towards those which diminish or reduce it. I am interested in the role that the artist or artist collective could have in the production of this Spinozist model of subjectivity; how they might function as an intermediary or catalyst, creating conditions or events in which augmentative affects – such as those made possible through a dynamic or active form of stillness – are increased and their energies harnessed. Here perhaps, the affective potential of an art practice is in itself the “dark precursor” of common notions, drawing together bodies in agreement by calling into being an audience or community of experience. On one level, the artist performs an analogous role to Spinoza’s “scholia” – the intermittent sequence of polemical notations “inserted into the demonstrative chain” of propositions – within the Ethics, which according to Deleuze:Operate in the shadows, trying to distinguish between what prevents us from reaching our common notions and what, on the contrary, allows us to do so, what diminishes and what augments our power, the sad signs of our servitude and the joyous signs of our liberations (The Three Ethics 146).Certainly the project, Open City, attempts to draw attention to the habitually endured –or suffered – signs and affects of contemporary experience; striving to remedy the sad affects of capitalism through the production of playful, disruptive or even joyful interventions, events and encounters between bodies in agreement. The disempowering experience or affect of being controlled – blocked, stopped or restricted – by societal or moral codes and civic laws, is replaced by a minor logic of ambiguous, arbitrary and optional rules. Such rules foreground experimentation and request an ethical rather than obedient engagement that in turn serves to liberate the individual from habitual passivity. Open City attempts to reveal – and then resist or refuse – the hidden rules that determine how to operate or perform within contemporary capitalism, the coded orders on how to behave, move and interact. It exposes such insidious legislation as constructs whose logic has been put in place or brought into effect over time, and which in turn might be revoked, dislocated or challenged. For Open City, the performance of stillness can be used as a gesture through which to break from or rupture the orchestrated and controlled flow of capitalist behaviours and its sad affects. Image 3: Open City, documentation of performance, Nottingham, 2008. Random acts of stillness produce moments of friction within the smooth, regulated flows of contemporary capitalism; singularised or inconsistent glitches or jolts that call to attention its unnoticed rhythms and temporal speeds, by becoming its counter-point or by appropriating its “language” for “strange and minor uses” (Deleuze and Guattari 17). Dawdling or meandering reveals the fierceness of the city’s unspoken bylaws, whilst the societal pressure towards speed and efficiency is thwarted by moments of deliberate non-production, inaction and the act of doing nothing. In one example of collective action – at noon on a shopping street – around fifty pedestrians, suddenly and without warning, stop still in their tracks and remain like this for five minutes before resuming their daily activity. In another, a group of individuals draw to a standstill and slowly sway from side to side; their stillness becomes a device for affecting a block or obstacle that limits or modifies others’ behaviour, creating an infinitely imaginable ricochet of further breaks and amendments to routine journeys and directional flows. Open City often mimics or misuses familiar behavioural patterns witnessed in the public realm, inhabiting their language or codes in a way that playfully transforms their use or proposes elasticity or flexibility therein. Habitual or routine actions are isolated and disinvested of their function or purpose, or become repeated until all sense of teleological imperative is wholly evacuated or rendered absurd. For example, a lone person stops still and holds their hand out to check for rain. Over and over, the same action is repeated but by different individuals; the authenticity of the original gesture shattered and separated from any causal motivation by the reverberations of its uncanny echo. Such performed actions remove or distance the response or reaction from its originary stimulus or excitation, creating an affective gap between – a no longer known or present – cause and its effect. This however, is not to return action back to realm of Spinoza’s first order of knowledge – where the body only experiences effects and remains ignorance of their cause – but rather an attempt to create a gap or space of “hesitancy” in which a form of creativity might emerge. Within the act of stillness, habitually imperceptible rhythms and speeds become visible. By being still it is possible to witness or attend to the presence of different or heterogeneous temporal “refrains” or durations operating beneath and within the surface appearance of capitalism’s homogeneous flow.Open City attempts to recuperate the creative potential within those moments of stillness generated through the accelerated technologies of contemporary capitalism: the situational ennui endured whilst waiting or queuing; the moments of collective and synchronised impasse controlled by technologies such as traffic lights and pedestrian crossings, and even – though perhaps more abstractly – the nebulous experience of paralysis and impotency induced by fear, anxiety and uncertainty. Performances attempt to neutralise these various diminutive affects by re-inhabiting or re-framing them; ‘turning’ their stillness towards a form of memorial, protest or social gathering, or alternatively rendering it seemingly empty, unreadable or absurd. This emptiness can also be understood as a form of disinterestedness that refuses to react to immediate stimulus – or lack of – and rather remains open to other possibilities of existence or inhabitation. Stillness is curiously equivocal, an “ambiguous or fluctuating sign” that has the capacity to “affect us with joy and sadness at the same time” (Deleuze The Three Ethics 140). The external appearance of stillness is ultimately blank, its “event” able to affect a “vectorial passage” of contradictory directions, towards an “increase or decrease, growth or decline, joy or sadness” (Deleuze, The Three Ethics 140). Open City attempts to transform the – potentially – diminutive affects of stillness into “augmentative powers” by occupying the stillness of contemporary capitalism as a disguise or camouflage for producing invisible performances that hijack a familiar language in order to misuse its terms. More recently Open City have adapted or occupied the moments of stillness made possible or enabled by everyday technologies: the inconsistent rhythm patterns of stopping, pausing or circling about on the spot exhibited by someone absorbed in a mobile-phone call, text messaging or changing a track on their MP3 player. Here, certain technologies allow, legitimate or even give permission for the disruption of the flow of movement within the city, or are used as a device through which to explore and exploit the potential of collective synchronised action through the use of recorded instructions.Image 4: Open City, public performance from the Dislocate festival (Yokohama, Japan, 2008).The alienating and atomising affects of such personal technologies – which are habitually used and isolate the individual from their immediate surroundings and from others around them – are transformed into tools for producing collective action. In one sense, Open City’s performances operate as a form of “minor art” as outlined by Deleuze and Guattari, where a major language – the dominant order of capitalism and control – is neutralised or deterritorialised before being “appropriated for strange and minor uses” (17). For Deleuze and Guattari a minor practice is always political and collective, signalling the “movement from the individual to a ‘collective multiplicity’” where there is no longer an individual subject as such but “only collective assemblages of enunciation”(18). The minor always operates within the terms of the major but functions as a destabilising agent where it attempts – according to Simon O’Sullivan – to “stammer and stutter the commodity form, disassembling those already existing forms of capital and indeed moving beyond the latter’s very logic” (73). However, as with all acts of deterritorialisation there is always the potential that they will in turn become reterritorialised; assimilated or absorbed back into the language of the “major”. This can be seen, for example, in the way that the proposed radical potential of the flash-mob phenomenon has been swiftly recuperated through the language of the corporate publicity campaigns of high-profile companies – specifically telecommunication multi-nationals - for whom the terms ‘community’ and ‘collectivity’ are developed as Unique Selling Points for further capitalist gain.By contrast, the intent of Open City is to create an event that operates not only as a visible rupture, but which also has the capacity to transform or radicalise the subjectivities of those involved beyond the duration of the event itself. Open City encourage the movement from the individual to a “collective multiplicity,” through performances that produce synchronised action where individuals become temporally united by a rule or instruction that they are collectively adhering to. Publicly distributed postcards have been used to invite or instruct as-yet-unknown publics to participate in collective action, setting the terms for the possibility of imagined or future assemblies. Or more recently, recorded spoken word instructions listened to using MP3 player technology have been used to harmonise the speeds, stillness and slowness of individual bodies to produce the possibility of a new collective rhythm or “refrain” (Guattari, Subjectivities). For example, within the Dislocate festival (Yokohama, Japan, 2008) a group of individuals were led on a guided walk in which they engaged with a series of spoken instructions listened to using MP3 player technology. The instructions invited a number of discreet performances culminating in a collective moment of stillness that was at once a public spectacle and a space of self-contained or private reflection. Image 5: Open City, public performance from the Dislocate festival (Yokohama, Japan, 2008). Once still, the individuals listened to a further spoken text which interrogated how the act of ‘being still’ might shift in meaning moving from or between different positions. For example, stillness can be experienced as a controlling or restrictive mode of enforced waiting, as an act of resistant refusal or protest, or alternatively as a model of quiet contemplation or idle daydreaming. For Spinoza, a body is defined by its speeds and slowness – by the relationship between motion and rest – and by its capacity to affect and be affected. In attempting to synchronise the speeds and affectivity of individuals through group action, Open City create the conditions for the production of Spinoza’s “common notions” – or second kind of knowledge – through the organisation of a collective or shared understanding of causality by bodies in agreement. Acts of collective stillness also function in an analogous manner to the transitional or liminal phase within ritual performance by producing the possibility of “communitas,” the transient experience of togetherness or even of collective subjectivity. In From Ritual to Theatre, The Human Seriousness of Play, anthropologist Victor Turner identifies a form of “existential or spontaneous communitas” – an acute experience of community – experienced by individuals immersed in the "no longer/not yet" liminal space of a given ritualistic process, in which “the past is momentarily negated, suspended or abrogated, and the future has not yet begun, an instant of pure potentiality when everything, as it were, trembles in the balance” (44). Stillness is presented as pure disinterestedness, a non-teleological event enabling nothing but the possibility of a community of experience to come into being.Within Open City then, the gesture of stillness recurs as a device or “event-encounter” for simultaneously producing a break or hiatus in an already existing formulation of experience, at the same time as creating a gap or space of possibility in which to imagine or affirm an alternative mode of being. Referring to the Deleuzian notion of encounter, O’Sullivan reflects on the dual presence of rupture and affirmation within the moment of encounter itself whereby “our typical ways of being in the world are challenged, our systems of knowledge disrupted” (Sullivan,xxiv). He argues that the encounter:Operates as a rupture in our habitual modes of being and thus in our habitual subjectivities. It produces a cut, a crack. However … the rupturing encounter also contains a moment of affirmation, the affirmation of a new world, in fact a way of seeing and thinking this world differently (Sullivan, xxv).Open City attempts to create the conditions for these dual possibilities – of rupture and affirmation – through the production of joyful encounters between bodies within the event of performed stillness. Stillness operates as a double gesture where it creates a stop or block – a break with the already existing or with the events of the past – and also a moment of pause, the liminal space of projection; a future-oriented or preparatory zone of pure potentiality. Stillness thus offers the simultaneous possibility of termination and of a new beginning, within which it becomes possible to move from a paradigm of resistance – to the present conditions of existence – towards one of augmentative refusal or proposal that invites reflection on a still future-possible way of life. Poised at a point of anticipation or as a prophetic mode of waiting, stillness offers the promise of as-yet-undecided possibilities where options for future action or existence remain momentarily open, not yet known. Collective stillness thus always has a quality of “futurity” by creating the transitional conditions of communitas or the possibility of a community emerging outside or beyond the temporal frame of capitalism: a community that is still in waiting. ReferencesBergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Trans. N. M. Paul and W. S Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 1991.De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari.“What Is a Minor Literature.” Kafka toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.Deleuze, Gilles. “Spinoza and the Three ‘Ethics’.” Essays Critical and Clinical. Trans D. W. Smith and M. A. Greco. London: Verso, 1998.———. “Life as a Work of Art.” Negotiations: 1972-1990. New York: Columbia U P, 1995.———. “Spinoza and Us.” Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Trans. R. Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988. Guattari, Felix. “Subjectivities: For Better and for Worse.” The Guattari Reader. Ed. G. Genosko. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996.Foucault, Michel. “An Aesthetics of Existence.” Politics, Philosophy, Culture. Ed. L. Kritzman. London: Routledge, 1990.O’Sullivan, Simon. Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.Spinoza, Benedict. Ethics. Trans. A Boyle. London: Everyman, 1989. Turner, Victor. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PAJ Publications, 1982.

"I write for a species that does not yet exist." -- Nietzsche (958) III. Note on Self-Organisation and Selectionism According to your mainstream brand neo-Darwinian biologist, natural selection is the stuff of which evolution is made, the First Principle of life. There is nothing in the natural world which cannot be explained by random mutations within the genome and subsequent selection of the fittest form by the natural environment. Beyond the constraints set by the period of waiting for mutations to occur and external conditions, there are no limits to this system, and an organism forms from scratch to a furry crawling thing in a gradual process reliant on external factors. Neo-Darwinism is an attempt to reconcile two theories which are quite simply at odds with one another: Mendelian genetics, which claims that organisms do not change with time, and Darwinism, which claims that they do. This is usually done in a mathematical way, with natural selection as the linchpin of some tight equations. There can be no internal feedback from the body (phenotype) to the genes (genotype). There is no self-organising adaptive order: all emerges from the process of selection as a carefully articulated tree diagram, and adapts over eons. As the Darwinian critic Arthur Koestler pointed out, natural selection is hence the only process found in nature which is devoid of feedback. Neo-Darwinian theory is both unfalsifiable and all-pervasive; it is easy to forget that it is a theory which has not yet been proven beyond doubt by paleontological fact, and that Darwin himself suggested there may be processes other than natural selection at work in the unfolding of life. There are a couple of rogue biologists and a-life crazies, however, that don't believe the Selectionist hype. They are not suggesting that natural selection is a dud theory, but simply that there might be other factors involved, and that the really interesting questions don't just concern life as a Darwinian competition between furry, crawling things, but the interplay between structure and chaos at the basic levels of the system which might give rise to it. Biologists such as Brian Goodwin and Stuart Kauffman take issue with this, claiming that an understanding of life should begin at a more fundamental level than tree diagrams and zoology -- molecular biology, biochemistry, complexity theory. This is the 'language' of life: the way that structure spontaneously emerges from chaos. Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould looked at the fossil record a few years back and decided that there is no proof that one species turns into another slowly: the mathematics of the Neo-Darwinists relied upon the idea that species took hundreds of millions of years to evolve eyes and ears and legs and wings, branching off into other species in the manner of a tree diagram over billions of years. What Eldredge and Gould found was that species seem to spontaneously emerge fully formed: there is minimal variation going on. A species emerges rapidly, it lasts for a time (often a short time), and then it dies off. The in-between period, the period of mutation and selectionism, is largely unaccounted for by the fossil record, especially considering the importance of such transitory phases to the neo-Darwinists. There are many 'missing links' in the record. For over twenty years, Stuart Kauffman has been going on about what we might call a Second Principle in evolutionary biology: self-organisation. He argues that because natural selection alone is not enough to explain the relatively short timescale on which life arose, some other ordering principle is necessary. He locates this, as Katherine Hayles observes, in the ability of complex systems to self-organise (241). A self-organising system involves the heresy of internal feedback and internally-produced constraints. Living creatures would converge upon certain forms as much as diverge from them due to the influence of mutations caused by cosmic rays, wild chance and external factors. Creatures will not just evolve over billions of years due to selection, but will appear in a more concerted and spontaneous manner. Systems will seek their own order. The heresy in this (as far as neo-Darwinians are concerned, but not all evolutionary biologists) is located in the fact that such enabling constraints emerge from within the system itself. Consequently, natural selection is not the only force at work in evolution. The system is its own material of expression, and can generate its own tendencies and limits. Kauffman calls this process antichaos, or "order for free" (335). One can sense that such a theory would be objectionable to biologists: there is nothing distinctively biological about this explanation, which in fact borrows from physics and complexity theory, and it explores living organisms, chemical compositions and non-biological aggregates alike as systems, privileging no particular machine. A 'complex system', in particular, can be anything from the stockmarket to a flock of birds. XI. Sonicform We might note here a similarity with virtual artist Keith Nettos's Java-based sound system, Sonicform, whose evolving sound structures can be obtained from the artist on request <lucidweave@usa.net>: the divide between living and non-living is not the issue. As Keith puts it, "it's an echo of that Descartian dichotomy between mind and matter. Do such distinctions help us to know ourselves better? I'm not sure that they do". Sonicform is more a world of Newtonian discovery than biblical creation. Self-organisation works on a generative systemic level, and is a prerequisite more so than a defining quality of life or evolution; it is necessary but not sufficient to characterise an organic system. The computer is the perfect environment in which to explore the confusion and commonalities between animate and inanimate systems, and in that confusion, reveal something of the processes underlying the actual generation of self and order in the universe. Information-processing, and life, require a certain type of complexity. The system must be dynamic, yet allow for novel patterns. The computer emphasises the logic as well as the mechanics of life, which are then honed and honoured by the more familiar conception of natural selection. IV. Self-organisation is the natural consequence of simple components (cells, units of sound, air molecules, genes) interacting via equally simple rules. Patterns and forms emerge from the collective raucous, and these forms give rise to other forms. The components in such a system are bimbos: they have no idea what is going on in the greater body, and don't care. In other words, a complex system emerges from lots of small but well-chosen components interacting in a rule-governed way, developing a larger behaviour or pattern which cannot be predicted or divined from these constituent parts. Random mutation and selection will act upon such a system -- this is how Selectionism fits in: forms will not just evolve from scratch via selection, but will spontaneously emerge from within the system, working in conjunction with the First Principle. IV. Sonicform In the Sonicform system, the components are 'sound fragments', the samples attached to the images in the top left-hand corner of the screen at startup, and also the people seated at terminals who interact with these fragments. Although it might seem to be stretching the concept of systemic components to include the user population, the fact that the emerging pattern is dependent on these users to evolve renders them part of the system. The organisation of a machine has less to do with its materiality than with the inter-relations of its components. The rules in Sonicform are the 'sound controllers' located on the right-hand side of the screen, containing basic instructions such as "play sound", "loop sound" and "stop sound" that control the sound fragments and consequently limit the structure of the emerging acoustic pattern. Because Sonicform is linked via the Net to 'sonicserver' and consequently the multiple versions of itself which are being executed at any point in time, any changes that a user makes (e.g. attraction towards a particular kind of sound) are detected by sonicserver and fed back into a primary chain structure. This is the formative basis of Sonicform's 'evolution': a selection of internal behavioural constraints generated by its constituent parts. The heresy in this is the implication that both biological and technical systems are capable of self-organisation and evolution, that both are constellations of universes which are capable of autonomy and complexity (and 'life' as a certain form of complexity). This is not anti-humanist. It's not even post-humanist. Ideology is a human concept which is brought to bear on technology. We're talking a different register altogether. Technical machines, organic machines, conceptual machines: each will beget the other, each will inscribe its own pattern on the process, each will redefine the limits of such connections. VII. The Death of Metaphor: All That Consists Is Real 'Machinic heterogenesis', a term used by Felix Guattari in his book Chaosmosis, is a mode of being and production that draws on complexity theory and the work of Francisco Varela (a biologist interested in self-organisation in immune networks) and Kauffman. Guattari extends the concept of self-organisation to create a pragmatic philosophy. Machinic heterogenesis is a term to describe the way that the machines which populate the universe connect with each other, mutually affect each other, exchange segments and then bifurcate into new machines. Collective existential mutation. When we sit at a computer screen, we are connected with the computer's universes of reference through the circuits of sight, the play of fingers across the keyboard, the conceptual and logical limits of the exchange laid down by both parties. There is a certain synchrony going on across the zone of intersection and compromise to the limits of this exchange. In other words, the limits of the medium define the exchange and what we are becoming as we connect with it. What is the 'ness' of the computer medium, and what are the possible universes of exchange which extend from this? Sonicform explores this exchange through sound, and through a system which explicitly invites us to be a part of an evolving structure. The use of complexity theory and evolution in Sonicform makes explicit the rethinking of machines which we have been doing here in general: machines speak to machines before they speak to Man, and the ontological domains that they reveal and secrete tend towards pattern in an innate way, determined by the mode of aggregation of their constituent parts. Sonicform rethinks technology in terms of evolutionary, collective entities. And this rethinking allows for the particular qualities of the medium itself, its own characteristics, its own unique interpretations of our model of evolution, to express themselves. Here I might note something: evolution cannot be naturalised and reified as an entity independent of the conceptual, technical and scientific machinery of its production. In the eagerness to import biological models to the computer in a-life, we sometimes forget that from its very origins, the human species has been constituted by technical evolution, and that it is the mediation afforded by technics which makes "it impossible simply to describe evolution in terms of a self-contained, or monadic, subject that passively 'adapts' to an object-like environment" (Pearson 4). Similarly, we have produced our various models of evolution by analysing the 'natural environment' through the mediation of technology. Technology has always enjoyed more than just the position of a neutral tool to locate and test Nature, and has its own unique limits and qualities to contribute to anything we produce with it. So this will be the beginning of our rethinking. Constellations of universes colliding, machines exchanging particularities, components that retain their autonomy and yet can collect and self-organise into complex systems, even life. "The ideas that we have been devoting space to here -- instability, fluctuation, complex systems -- diffuse into the social sciences", in the words of Ilya Prigogine (312). If we can create an evolving complex system on the screen which we ourselves are components of, we tend to rethink the interface between nature and technology. What does it say about the "reference point" of the natural world when creatures whose entire function consists of weird acoustic dances across computer circuitry begin to self-replicate and exhibit the signs of open-ended evolution, resulting in formations which no longer have analogues in the 'natural' world? I'd like to hesitate a start here. Biology is its own material of semiotic expression. Techné is its own material of semiotic expression. To address the interface between nature and technology, we need a philosophy of cells, flocks, patterns, components, motors, and elements. We need a philosophy that will create an interference pattern across the zone of intersection. References Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. Kauffman, Stuart. "Order For Free." The Third Culture. Ed. Brockman. New York: Touchstone Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. Trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Random House, 1968. Prigogine, Ilya, and Isabelle Stengers. Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature. London: Bantam Books, 1984. Pearson, Keith Ansell. Viroid Life. London: Routledge, 1997. This work is part of the Australian Network for Art and Technology's Deep Immersion: Creative Collaborations project, funded by the AFC. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Belinda Barnet. "Machinic Heterogenesis and Evolution: Collected Notes on Sound, Machines and Sonicform." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.6 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/sonic.php>. Chicago style: Belinda Barnet, "Machinic Heterogenesis and Evolution: Collected Notes on Sound, Machines and Sonicform," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 6 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/sonic.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Belinda Barnet. (1999) Machinic heterogenesis and evolution: collected notes on sound, machines and Sonicform. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(6). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/sonic.php> ([your date of access]).

In one of his final pieces of writing, Timothy Leary—one of the most singularly iconic and influential figures of the 1960s counterculture, known especially for his advocacy of a “molecular revolution” premised upon hallucinogenic self-medication—proposes that [c]ounterculture blooms wherever and whenever a few members of a society choose lifestyles, artistic expressions, and ways of thinking and being that wholeheartedly embrace the ancient axiom that the only true constant is change itself. The mark of counterculture is not a particular social form or structure, but rather the evanescence of forms and structures, the dazzling rapidity and flexibility with which they appear, mutate, and morph into one another and disappear. (ix) But it is not just radical activists and ancient philosophers who celebrate the constancy of change; on the contrary, it is a basic principle of post-industrial capitalism, a system which relies upon the constant extraction of surplus value—this being the very basis of the accumulation of capital—through an ever-accelerating creation of new markets and new desires fostered via a perpetual cycle of technical obsolescence and social destabilisation. Far from being unambiguously aligned with a mode of resistance then (as seemingly inferred by the quote above), the imperative for change would appear to be a basic constituent of that which the latter seeks to undermine. The very concept of “counterculture” as an ideal and a practice has been challenged and contested repeatedly over the past fifty or so years, both inside and outside of the academy. For the most part, the notion of counterculture is understood to have emerged out of the tumultuous cultural shifts of the 1960s, and yet, at the same time, as Theodore Roszak—who first coined the term—notes, the intellectual heritage of such a movement draws upon a “stormy Romantic sensibility, obsessed from first to last with paradox and madness, ecstasy and spiritual striving” (91) that dates back to nineteenth century Idealist philosophy and its critique of a rapidly industrialising civilisation. My purpose in this paper is not to address these numerous conceptualisations of counterculture but instead to analyse specifically the enigmatic definition given by Leary above, whereby he conflates counterculture with the demand for continual change or novelty, arguing that the former appears precisely at the point when “equilibrium and symmetry have given way to a complexity so intense as to appear to the eye as chaos” (ix). Concerned that this definition is internally inconsistent given Leary’s understanding of counterculture as a profoundly anti-capitalist force, I will cursorily illustrate the contradictions that proceed when the notion of counterculture as resistance to capitalist hegemony is combined with the identification of counterculture as an authentic and repeated irruption of the new, albeit one that is inevitably domesticated by and subsumed into the dominant culture against which it is posed, as occurs in Leary’s account. The claim that I make here is that this demand for change as an end in itself is inextricably capitalist in its orientation, and as such, cannot be meaningfully understood as a structural externality to the capitalist processes that it strives to interrupt. Capitalism and Growth The study of counterculture is typically, and probably inevitably premised upon an opposition between a dominant culture and those emergent forces that seek to undermine it. In the words of Roszak, the American counterculture of the 1960s arose in defiance of the “modernizing, up-dating, rationalizing, planning” tendencies of technocracy, “that social form in which an industrial society reaches the peak of its organizational integration” (5). Similarly, for Herbert Marcuse, the philosopher perhaps most closely associated with this counterculture, and whose writings formed the intellectual lynchpin of the student protest movement at that time, “intensified progress seems to be bound up with intensified unfreedom,” and as a consequence, we must strive for “a non-repressive civilization, based on a fundamentally different experience of being, a fundamentally different relation between man [sic] and nature, and fundamentally different existential relations” (Eros 4-5). In both cases, the dominant culture is associated with a particular form of repression, based upon the false sense of freedom imposed by the exigencies of the market. “Free choice among a wide variety of goods and services does not signify freedom,” argues Marcuse, “if these goods and services sustain social controls over a life of toil and fear” (One-Dimensional 10). Most importantly, Marcuse observes that this facile freedom of choice is propped up by processes of continual renewal, transformation, and rationalisation—“advertising, public relations, indoctrination, planned obsolescence”—operating on the basis of a “relentless utilization of advanced techniques and science,” such that “a rising standard of living is the almost unavoidable by-product of the politically manipulated industrial society” (One-Dimensional 52-53). Writing at a time when the Keynesian welfare state was still a foregone conclusion, Marcuse denounces the way in which an increase in the quality of life associated with the rise of consumerism and lifestyle culture “reduces the use-value of freedom”, for “there is no reason to insist on self-determination if the administered life is the comfortable and even the ‘good’ life” (One-Dimensional 53). The late industrial society, in other words, is presented as driven by a repressive desublimation which does not merely replace the objects of a so-called “high culture” with those of an inferior mass culture, but totally liquidates any such distinction, reducing all culture to a mere process of consumption, divorced from any higher goals or purposes. This desublimation is able to maintain growth through the constant production of novelty—providing new objects for the purposes of consumption. This society is not stagnant then; rather, “[i]ts productivity and efficiency, its capacity to increase and spread comforts, to turn waste into need, and destruction into construction” all represent the demand for a continual production of the new that undergirds its own stability (One-Dimensional 11). This necessary dynamism, and the creative destruction that goes along with it, is a result of the basic laws of competition: the need not only to generate profit, but to maintain this profitability means that new avenues for growth must constantly be laid down. This leads to both a geographical expansion in search of new markets, and a psychological manipulation in order to cultivate needs, desires, and fantasies in consumers that they never knew they had, combined with a dramatic shift in the search for both raw materials and labour power toward the developing economies of Asia. The result, notes David Harvey, is to “exacerbate insecurity and instability, as masses of capital and workers shift from one line of production to another, leaving whole sectors devastated, while the perpetual flux in consumer wants, tastes, and needs becomes a permanent locus of uncertainty and struggle” (106). What we are seeing then, as these processes of production and demands for consumption accelerate, is not so much the maintenance of the comfortable and carefree life that Marcuse sees as destructive to culture; conversely, this acceleration is engendering a sense of disorientation and even groundlessness that leaves us in a state of continual anxiety and disquietude. Although these processes have certainly accelerated in recent years—not least because of the rise of high-speed digital networking and telecommunications—they were prominent throughout the second-half of the twentieth century (in varying degrees), and indicate a general logic of rationalisation and technical efficiency that has been the focus of critique from the proto-countercultural romanticism of the nineteenth century onward. It is Marx who observes that “[t]he driving motive and determining purpose of capitalist production is the self-valorization of capital to the greatest possible extent,” and it is precisely this seemingly unstoppable impetus toward accumulation that finds its most acute manifestation in our age of digital, post-industrial capitalism (449). What needs to be kept in mind is that capitalism is not opposed to those exteriorities that resist its logic; on the contrary, it is through its ability to appropriate them in a double movement whereby it simultaneously claims to act as the condition of their production and claims the right to represent them on its terms (through the universal sign of money) that capitalism is able to maintain its continual growth. Put simply, capitalism as an economic system and an ideological constellation has proved itself time and time again to be remarkably resilient not only to intellectual critique, but also to the concrete production of new forms of living seemingly contrary to its principles, precisely because it is able to incorporate and thus nullify such threats. The production of the new does not harm capitalism; on the contrary, capitalism thrives on such production. The odd contradiction of the mass society, writes Walter Benjamin, coheres in the way that “the novelty of products—as a stimulus to demand—is accorded an unprecedented importance,” whilst at the same time, “‘the eternal return of the same’ is manifest in mass production” (331). This production of novelty is, in other words, restricted by the parameters of the commodity form—the necessity that it be exchangeable under the terms of capital (as money)—such that its potential heterogeneity is restrained by its identity as a commodity. Capitalism is perfectly capable of creating new modes of living, but it does so specifically according to its terms. This poses a difficulty then for the study and advocacy of counterculture in the terms for which Leary advocates above, because the progressivism of the latter—referring to its demand for continual change and innovation (a demand that admittedly runs counter to the nostalgic romanticism that has motivated a great deal of countercultural thought and praxis, and is certainly not a universally accepted definition of counterculture more broadly)—is not necessarily easily distinguishable from the dominant culture against which it is counterposed. Raymond Williams expresses this frustration well when he observes that “it is exceptionally difficult to distinguish between those which are really elements of some new phase of the dominant culture […] and those which are substantially alternative or oppositional to it” (123). In other words, given that capitalism as an economic system and hegemonic cultural formation is so effective in producing the novelty that we crave—creating objects, ideas, and practices often vastly different to those residual traditions that preceded them—there is no obvious metric for determining when we are looking at a genuine alternative to this hegemony, and when we are looking at yet another variegated product of it. Williams makes a distinction here, whereby the emergence (in the strict sense of coming-into-being or genesis) of a new culture is presumed to be qualitatively different to mere novelty. What is not adequately considered is the possibility that this distinction is entirely illusory—that holding out hope for a qualitatively different mode of existence that will mark a distinct break from capitalist hegemony is in fact the chimera by which this hegemony is sustained, and its cycle of production perpetuated. There is an anxiety here that is present within (and one might suggest even constitutive of) present-day debates over counterculture, particularly in regard to the question of resistance, and what form it might take under the conditions of late capitalism. From Williams’s perspective, it can be argued that “all or nearly all initiatives and contributions, even when they take on manifestly alternative or oppositional forms, are in practice tied to the hegemonic,” such that “the dominant culture, so to say, at once produces and limits its own forms of counter-culture” (114). To argue this though, he goes on to suggest, would: overlook the importance of works and ideas which, while clearly affected by hegemonic limits and pressures, are at least in part significant breaks beyond them, which may again in part be neutralized, reduced, or incorporated, but which in their most active elements nevertheless come through as independent and original. (114)Authentic breaks in specific social conditions are not just a fantasy, he correctly observes, but have occurred many times across history—and not merely in the guise of violent revolutionary activity. What is needed, therefore, is the development of “modes of analysis which instead of reducing works to finished products, and activities to fixed positions, are capable of discerning, in good faith, the finite but significant openness of many actual initiatives and contributions” (114). For Williams, this openness is located chiefly within the semiotic indeterminacy of the artwork, and the resultant potentiality contained within it for individuals to develop resistant readings contrary to any dominant interpretation. These divergent readings become the sites upon which we might imagine new worlds and new ways of living. There is a sense of resignation in his solution though: an appeal to the autonomy of an artwork, and a momentary sublime glimpse of another world, that will inevitably be domesticated by capital. The difficulty that comes with understanding counterculture as an uncompromising demand for the new, over and against the mundane repetitions of commodity culture and lifestyle consumerism, is that it must reckon with the seemingly inevitable appropriation of these new creations by the system against which they are opposed. In such cases, the typical result is a tragic and fundamentally romantic defeatism, in which the creative individual (or community, etc.) must continue to create anew, knowing full well that their output will immediately find itself domesticated and enervated by the forces of capital. This specific conception of counterculture as perpetual change knows that it is doomed to failure, but takes pleasure in the struggle that nonetheless ensues. The Subsumption of Counterculture “Marx and Freud, perhaps, do represent the dawn of our culture,” writes philosopher Gilles Deleuze, “but Nietzsche is something entirely different: the dawn of counterculture” (142). Friedrich Nietzsche seems like an unlikely candidate for the originator of counterculture—his writings certainly bear little overt resemblance to the premises of the various movements that emerged in the 1960s, even though, as Roszak remarks, these movements actually largely issued forth from “the work of Freud and of Nietzsche, the major psychologists of the Faustian soul” (91)—but what he does share with Leary is a belief, expressed most clearly in his posthumous text The Will to Power (1967), in the political and ethical power of becoming, and the need to celebrate and affirm, rather than resist, a world that appears to be in constant, ineluctable flux. Rather than seeking merely to improve the status quo, Nietzsche works toward total and perpetual upheaval—a transvaluation of all values. In Deleuze’s words, he “made thought into a machine of war—a battering ram—into a nomadic force” (149). At a time when resistance to capitalism seems futile; when the possibility of capitalism ending seems more and more distant (which is not to say that it is unlikely to end anytime soon, but merely that its plausible alternatives have been evacuated from the popular imagination), such a claim can seem rather appealing. But how might we distinguish this conception of perpetual revolution of values from the creative destruction of capitalism itself? Why do we presume that there is such a distinction to be made? Why should Leary’s call for rapidity and flexibility—and more broadly, a celebration of change over constancy—be seen as anything other than an acknowledgement and reinforcement of capitalism’s accelerating cycle of obsolescence? The uncomfortable reality we must consider is that the countercultural, as an apparent exteriority waiting to be appropriated, plays an essential role in the accumulation of capital that drives our economic system, and that accordingly, it cannot be plausibly understood as external to the structural conditions that it opposes. This is not to suggest that counterculture does not produce new possibilities, new opportunities, and new ways of living, but simply that its production is always already structured by capitalist relations—the precise anxiety acknowledged by Williams. Once again, this is not a dismissal of counterculture, just the opposite in fact. It is a rejection of the conflation that Leary makes between counterculture and novelty, the combination of which is supposed to provide a potent threat to capitalist hegemony. “The naive supposition of an unambiguous development towards increased production,” argues German philosopher Theodor Adorno, “is itself a piece of that bourgeois outlook which permits development because […] it is hostile to qualitative difference” (156). Capitalism produces many different types of commodities (within which we can include ideas, beliefs, means of communication, as well as physical goods in the traditional sense), but what unites them is their shared identity under the regime of exchange value (money). This exchange value masks their genuine heterogeneity. But what use is it simply reassuring us that if we continue to produce, we may eventually produce something so new, so different that it will evade capture by this logic? Does this not merely reinforce a complicity between the appeal of the countercultural as a force of change and the continuous accumulation of capital? I would contend that to define counterculture as the production of the new underwrites the inexhaustible productivism of the capitalist hegemony that it seeks to challenge. What if, then, this qualitative difference was created not through the production of the new, but the total rejection of this production as the means to resistance? This would not be to engender or encourage a state of total stasis (which is definitely not a preferable or plausible scenario), but rather, to detach the hope for a better world from the idea that we must achieve this by somehow adding to the world that we already have—to recognise, as Adorno would have it, that “the forces of production are not the deepest substratum of man [sic], but represent his historical form adapted to the production of commodities” (156). Leary’s peculiar conception of counterculture that we have been examining throughout this paper refuses to give countenance to any kind of stability or equilibrium, instead proffering an essentially Nietzschean mode of resistance in which incessant creativity becomes the means to the contrivance of a new world—this is part of what Roszak records as the rejection of Marx’s “compulsive hard-headedness” and the embrace of “[m]yth, religion, dreams, visions” which mark the fundamental romanticism of (post-)1960s counterculture, and its heritage in nineteenth century bourgeois sensibilities. For all the benefits that such a conception of counterculture has provided, it would seem misguided to ignore the ways in which Leary’s rhetoric is undermined by the simple fact that it presumes a hierarchy between a dominant culture (capitalism) and its resistant periphery that is already structured by and given through a capitalist mode of thought that presumes its own self-sufficiency (that is, it assumes the adequacy of the logic of exchange to homogenise all products under the commodity form). The postulate that grounds Leary’s understanding of counterculture is a covert identification of man/woman as a restless, alienated being who will never reach a state of stability or actualisation, and must instead continue to produce in the vain hope that this might finally and definitely change things for the better. Instead of embracing the constancy of change, an ideology that ends up justifying the excesses of a capitalist order that knows nothing other than production, perhaps it is possible to begin reconceptualising counterculture in terms that resist precisely this demand for novelty. As Alexander Galloway declares, “[i]t is time now to subtract from this world, not add to it,” for the “political does not arise from the domain of production” (138-139). We do not need more well-intentioned ideas regarding how the world could be a better place or what new possibilities are on offer—we know these things already, we hear about them every day. What we need, and what perhaps counterculture can offer, is to affirm the truth of that which does not need to be produced, which is always already given to us through the immanence of human thought. In the words of François Laruelle, this is an understanding of human individuals as ordinary, “stripped of qualities or attributes by a wholly positive sufficiency,” such that “they lack nothing, are not alienated,” whereby the identity of the individual “is defined by characteristics that are absolutely original, primitive, internal, and without equivalent in the World […] not ideal essences, but finite, inalienable (and consequently irrecusable) lived experiences” (48-49). The job of counterculture then becomes not so much creating that which did not exist prior, but of realising “what we already know to be true” (Galloway 139). References Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. London and New York: Verso, 1974. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Cambridge and London: The Belknapp Press, 1999. Deleuze, Gilles. “Nomad Thought.” The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation. Ed. David B. Allison. New York City: Dell Publishing, 1977: 142-149. Galloway, Alexander R. The Interface Effect. Cambridge and Malden: Polity, 2012. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge and Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. Laruelle, François. From Decision to Heresy: Experiments in Non-Standard Thought. Ed. Robin Mackay. Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2012. Leary, Timothy. “Foreword.” Counterculture through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House. Ken Goffman and Dan Joy. New York City: Villard Books, 2004: ix-xiv. Marcuse, Herbert. One Dimensional Man. London and New York: Routledge, 1991. ---. Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. London: Routledge, 1998. Marx, Karl. Capital, Volume One. London: Penguin, 1976. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. Ed. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1967. Roszak, Theodore. The Makings of a Counter Culture. Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1969. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

i) When I arrived in Aurukun, west Cape York, it was the heat that struck me first, knocking the city pace from my body, replacing it with a languor familiar to my childhood, although heavier, more northern. Fieldwork brings with it its own delights and anxieties. It is where I feel most competent and incompetent, where I am most indebted and thankful for the generosity and kindness of strangers. I love the way “no-where” places quickly become somewhere and something to me. Then there are the bodily visitations: a much younger self haunts my body. At times my adult self abandons me, leaving me nothing but an awkward adolescent: clumsy, sweaty, too much body, too white, too urban, too disconnected or unable to interpret the social rules. My body insists that this is not my home, but home for Wik and Wik Way people. Flailing about unmoored from the socio-cultural system that I take for granted, and take comfort from – and I draw sustenance. Anxiety circles, closes in on me, who grows distant and unsure, fragmented. Misusing Deborah Bird Rose, I’m tempted to say I’m separated from my nourishing terrain. Indeed it can feel like the nation (not the country) slipped out from under my feet.I want to consider the above as an affective event, which seemingly reveals a lack of fortitude, the very opposite of resilience. A settler Australian – myself – comfort and sense of belonging is disturbed in the face of Aboriginal – in this case Wik – jurisdiction and primacy. But could it be generative of a kind of resilience, an ethical, postcolonial resilience, which is necessary for facing up to and intervening in the continence of colonial power relations in Australia? Affects are very telling: deeply embodied cultural knowledge, which is largely invisible, is made present. The political and ethical potential of anxiety is that it registers a confrontation: a test. If resilience is the capacity to be flexible and to successfully overcome challenges, then can settler anxiety be rethought (and indeed be relearned) as signalling an opportunity for ethical intercultural engagements (Latukefu et. al., “Enabling”)? But it necessitates resilience thinking to account for socio-cultural power relations.Over the years, I have experienced many anxieties when undertaking research in Indigenous Australia (many of them warranted no doubt – What am I doing? Why? Why should people be interested? What’s in it for whom?) and have sensed, heard and read about many others. Encounters between Aboriginal and settler Australians are often highly emotional: indeed can make “good whitefellas” very anxious. My opening example could be explained away as an all too familiar experience of a new research environment in an unfamiliar place and, more so, cultural dissonance. But I am not convinced by such an argument. I think that unsettlement is a more general white response to encountering the materiality of Indigenous people and life: the density of people’s lives rather than representations. My interest is in what I am calling (in a crude sociological category) the “good white women”, in particular anxious progressive settlers, who wish to ethically engage with Indigenous Australians. If, as I’m arguing, that encounters with Indigenous people, not representations, cause the “good setter” to experience such deep uncertainty that transformation is resisted, if not even refused, then how are “we” to surmount such a challenge?I want to explore anxiety as both revealing the embodiment of colonialism but also its potential to disturb and rupture, which inturn might provide an opportunity for the creation of anti-colonial relationality. Decolonisation is a cultural process, which requires a lot more than good intentions. Collective and personal tenacity is needed. To do so requires activating resilience: renewed by postcolonial ethics. Scholarship emphasises that resilience is more than an individual quality but is environmental and social, and importantly can be enhanced or taught through experiential interventions (Lafukefu, “Fire”; Howard & Johnson). Why do white settlers become anxious when confronted with Indigenous politics and the demand to be recognised as peers, not a vulnerable people? Postcolonial and whiteness scholars’ have accused settlers of de-materialising Indigeneity and blocking the political by staying in an emotional register and thus resisting the political encounter (Gelder & Jacobs; Gooder & Jacobs; Moreton-Robinson; Povinelli). Largely I agree. Too many times I’ve heard whitefellas complain, “We’re here for culture not politics”. However, in the above analysis emotions are not the material of proper critique, yet anxiety is named as an articulation of the desire for the restoration of colonial order. Arguably anxiety is a jolt out of comfort and complacency. Anxiety is doing a lot of cultural work. Settler anxiety is thus not a retreat from the political but an everyday modality in which cultural politics is enacted. Thus a potential experiential, experimental site in which progressive settlers can harness their political, ethical will to face up to substantial collective challenges.Strangely Indigeneity is everywhere. And nowhere. There is the relentless bad news reported by the media, interspersed with occasional good news; Aboriginal television dramas; the burgeoning film industry; celebrated artists; musicians; sports people; and no shortage of corporate and government walls adorned with Indigenous art; and the now common place Welcome to Country. However, as Ken Gelder writes:in the contemporary postcolonial moment, Aboriginal people have more presence in the nation even as so many settler Australians (unlike their colonial counterparts) have less contact with them. Postcolonialism in Australia means precisely this, amongst other things: more presence, but – for non-Aboriginal Australians – less Aboriginal contact. (172).What happens when increased “presence” becomes contact? His concern, as is mine, is that political encounters have been replaced by the personal and social: “with contact functioning not as something traumatic or estranging any more, but as the thing that enables a settler Australian’s completion to happen” (Gelder 172). My interest is in returning to the estranging and traumatic. Mainstream perceptions of “Aborigines” and Aboriginality, Chris Healy argues, have little to nothing to do with experiences of historical or contemporary Indigenous peoples, but rather refer to a particular cultural assemblage and intercultural space that is the product of stories inherited from colonists and colonialism (4-5). The dominance of the assemblage “Aborigine” enables the forgetting of contemporary Indigenous people: everyday encounters, with people or self-representations, and Australia’s troubling history (Healy). There is an engagement with the fantasy or phantom Indigeneity but an inability to deal with the material embodied world – of Indigenous people. Sociality is denied or repressed. The challenge and thus potential change are resisted.ii) My initial pursuit of anxiety probably came from my own disturbances, and then observing, feeling it circulate in what sometimes seemed the most unlikely places. Imagine: forty or so “progressive” white Australians have travelled to a remote part of Australia for a cultural tourism experience on country, camping, learning and sharing experiences with Traditional Owners. A few days in, we gather to hear an Elder discuss the impact and pain of, what was formally known as, the Northern Territory Intervention. He speaks openly and passionately, and yes, politically. We are given the opportunity to hear from people who are directly affected by the policy, rather than relying on distant, southern, second hand, recycled ideologies and opinions. Yet almost immediately I felt a retreat, shrinking, rejection – whitefellas abandoning their alliances. Anxiety circulates, infects bodies: its visceral. None of the tourists spoke about what happened, how they felt, in fear of naming, what? Anxiety after all does not have an object, it is not produced from an immediate threat but rather it is much more existential or a struggle against meaninglessness (Harari). In anxiety one has nowhere else to turn but into one’s self. It feels bad. The “good white women” evaporates – an impossible position to hold. But is it all bad? Here is a challenge: adverse conditions. Thus it is an opportunity to practice resilience.To know how and why anxiety circulates in intercultural encounters enables a deeper understanding of the continuance of colonial order: the deep pedagogy of racial politics that shapes perception, sense making and orders values and senses of belonging. A critical entanglement with postcolonial anxiety exposes the embodiment of colonialism and, surprisingly, models for anti-colonial social relations. White pain, raw emotions and an inability to remain self possessed in the face of Indigenous conatus is telling; it is a productive space for understanding why settler Australia fails, despite the good intentions, to live well in a colonised country. Held within postcolonial anxiety are other possibilities. This is not to be an apologist for white people behaving badly or remaining relaxed and comfortable, or disappearing into white guilt, as if this is an answer or offers absolution. But rather if there is so much anxiety than what has it to tells us and, importantly, I think it gives us something to work with, to be otherwise. Does anxiety hold the potential to be redirected to more productive, ethical exchanges and modes of belonging? If so, there is a need to rethink anxiety, understand its heritage and to work with the disturbances it registers.iii) No doubt putting anxiety alongside resilience could seem a little strange. However, as I will discuss, I understand anxiety as productive, both in the sense that it reveals a continuing colonial order and is an articulation of the potential for transformation. In this sense, much like resilience thinking in ecological and social sciences, I am suggesting what is needed is to embrace “change and disturbance rather than denying or constraining it” (Walker & Salt 147). I will argue that anxiety is the registering of hazard. Albeit in extremely different circumstances than when resilience thinking is commonly evoked, which is most often responses to natural disasters (Wilson 1219). Settler Australians are not under threat or a vulnerable population. I am in no way suggesting they or “we” are, but rather I want to investigate the existential “threat” in intercultural encounters, which registers as postcolonial anxiety, a form of disturbance that in turn might provide an opportunity for positive change and an undoing of colonial relations (Wilson 1221).Understanding community resilience, according to Wilson, as the conceptual space at the intersection between economic, social and environmental capital is helpful for trying to re-conceptualise the knotty, power laden and intransigence of settler and Indigenous relations (1220). Wilson emphases that social resilience is about the necessity of people, or in his terms, human systems, learning to manage by change and importantly, pre-emptive change. In particular he is critical of resilience theorists “lack of attention to relations of power, politics and culture” (1221). If resilience, according to Ungar, is the protective processes that individuals, families and communities use to cope, adapt and take advantage of their “assets” when facing significant stress, and these protective processes are often unique to particular contexts, I am wondering if settler anxiety might be a strange protective factor that prevents, or indeed represses, settlers from engaging more positively with intercultural disturbance (“Researching” 387). Surely in unsettling intercultural encounters a better use of settler assets, such as racial power and privilege, is to mobilise assets to embrace change and experiment with the possibility of transforming or transferring racial power with the intent of creating a genuine postcolonial country. After all a population’s resilience is reliant on interdependence (Ungar, “Community” 1742).iv) What can anxiety tell about the motivations, desires for white belonging and intercultural relations? We need to pay attention to affects, or rather affects motivate attention and amplify experiences, and thus are very telling (Evers 54). The life of our bodies largely remains invisible; the study of affect and emotions enables the tracing of elements of the socio-cultural that are present and absent (Anderson & Harrison 16). And it is presence and absence that is my interest. Lacan, following Freud, famously wrote that anxiety does not have an object. He is arguing that anxiety is not caused by the loss of an object “but is fundamentally the affect that signals when the Other is too close, and the order of symbolization (substitution and displacement) is at risk of disappearing” (Harari xxxii). The “good white woman” feels the affects of encountering alterity, but how does she respond? To know to activate (or develop the capacity for) resilience requires understanding anxiety as a site for transformation, not just pain.Long before the current intensification of affect studies, theorists such as Freud, Kierkegaard and Rollo May argued that anxiety should be depathologied. Anxiety indicates vitality: a struggle against non-being. Not simply a threat of death but more so, meaninglessness (May 15). Anxiety, they argue, is a modern phenomenon, and thus emerged as a central concern of contemporary philosophers. Anxiety, as Kierkegaard held, “is always to be understood as orientated toward freedom” (qt May 37). Or as he famously wrote, “the dizziness of freedom” (Kierkegaard 138). The possibilities of life, and more so the human capacity for self-awareness of life’s potential – to imagine, dream, visualise a different, however unknown, future, self – and the potential, although not ensured, to creatively actualise these possibilities brings with it anxiety. “Anxiety is the affect, the structure of feeling that is inherent in the act of transition”, as Homi Bhabha writes, but it is also the affect of freedom (qt Farmer 358-9). Growth, expansion, transformation co-exist with anxiety (May). In a Spinozian sense, anxiety is thinking with our bodies.In a slightly different vein, Bhabha argues for what he terms “creative anxiety”. Albeit inadvertent, anxiety embraces a state of “unsettled negotiation” by refusing imperious demands of totalizing discourses, and in this sense is an important political tactic of “hybridization” (126). Drawing upon Deleuze, he calls this process becoming minor: relinquishing of power and privilege. Encounters with difference, the proximity to difference, whereby it is not possible to draw a clear and unambiguous line between one’s self and one’s identification with another produces anxiety. Thus becoming minor emerges through the affective processes of anxiety (Bhabha 126). Where there is anxiety there is hope. Bhabha refers to this as anxious freedom. The subject is painfully aware of her indeterminacy. Yet this is where possibility lies, or as Bhabha writes, there is no access to minority politics without a painful “bending” toward freedom (130). In the antagonism is the potential to be otherwise, or create an anti-colonial future. Out of the disturbance might emerge resilient postcolonial subjects.v) The intercultural does not just amplify divisions and difference. In an intercultural setting bodies are mingling and reacting to affective dimensions. It is the radical openness of the body that generates potential for change but also unsettles, producing the anxious white body. Anxiety gets into our bodies and shakes us up, alters self-understanding and experience. Arguably, these are experimental spaces that hold the potential for cultural interventions. There is no us and them; me here and you over there. Affect, the intensity of anxiety, as Moira Gatens writes, leads us to “question commonsense notions of privacy or ‘integrity’ of bodies through exposing the breaches on the borders between self and other evidenced by the contagious ‘collective’ affects” (115). Is it the breaches of borders that instigate anxiety? It can feel like something else, foreign, has taken possession of one’s body. What could be very unsettling about affect, Elspeth Probyn states, is it “radically disturbs different relations of proximity: to our selves, bodies, and pasts” (85). Our demarcations and boundaries are intruded upon.My preoccupation is in testing the double role that anxiety is playing: both reproducing distinctions and also perforating boundaries. I am arguing that ethical and political action takes place through developing a deep understanding of both the reproduction and breach, and in so doing, I “seek to generate new ways of thinking about how we relate to history and how we wish to live in the present” (Probyn 89). In this sense, following scholars of affect and emotion, I want to rework the meaning of anxiety and how it is experienced: to shake up the body or rather to generate an ethical project from the already shaken body. Different affects, as Probyn writes, “make us feel, write, think and act in different ways” (74). What is shaken up is the sense of one’s own body – integrity and boundedness – and with it how one relates to and inhabits the world. What is my body and how does it relate to other bodies? The inside and outside distinction evaporates. Resilience is a necessary attribute, or skill, to resist the lure of readily available cultural resistances.I am writing a book about progressive white women’s engagement with Indigenous people and politics, and the anxiety that ensues. The women I write about care. I do not doubt that: I am not questioning her as an individual. But I am intrigued by what prevents settler Australians from truly grappling with Indigenous conatus? After all, “good white women” want social justice. I am positing that settler anxiety issues from encountering the materiality of Indigenous life: or perhaps more accurately when the imaginary confronts the material. Thus anxiety signals the potential to experience ethical resilience in the messy materiality of the intercultural.By examining anxiety that circulates in intercultural spaces, where settlers are pulled into the liveliness of social encounters, I am animated by the possibility of disruptions to the prevailing order of things. My concern with scholarship that examines postcolonial anxiety is that much of it does so removed from the complexity of immersive engagement. To do so, affords a unifying logic and critique, which limits and contains intercultural encounters, yet settlers are moved, impressed upon, and made to feel. If one shifts perspective to immanent interactions, messy materialities, as Danielle Wyatt writes, one can see where ways of relating and belonging are actively and invariably (re)constructed (188). My interest is in the noisy and unruly processes, which potentially disrupt power relations. My wager is that anxiety reveals the embodiment of colonialism but it is also an opening, a loosening to a greater capacity to affect and be affected. Social resilience is about embracing change, developing positive interdependence, and seeing disturbance as an opportunity for development (Wilson). We have the assets; we just need the will.References Anderson, Ben, and Paul Harrison. Taking-Place: Non-Representational Theories and Geography. Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2010. Bhabha, Homi. “Anxiety in the Midst of Difference”. PoLAR 21.1 (1998): 123-37. Evers, Clifton. “Intimacy, Sport and Young Refugee Men”. Emotion, Space and Society 3.1 (2010): 56–61. Farmer, Brett, Martin Fran and Audrey Yue. “High Anxiety: Cultural Studies and Its Uses”. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 17.4 (2003): 357-362. Gatens, Moira. “Privacy and the Body: The Publicity of Affect”. Privacies: Philosophical Evaluations, Ed. B. Roessler. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004. 113-32. Gelder, Ken. “When the Imaginary Australian Is Not Uncanny: Nation, Psyche and Belonging in Recent Australian Cultural Criticism and History”. Journal of Australian Studies 86 (2006): 163-73. Gelder, Ken, and Jane M. Jacobs. Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1998. Gooder, Hayley, and Jane Jacobs. “Belonging and Non-Belonging: The Apology in a Reconciling Nation”. Postcolonial Geographies. Eds. Alison Blunt and Cheryl McEwan. London: Continuum, 2004. 200-13. Harari, Roberto. Lacan Seminar on Anxiety: An Introduction. New York: Other Press, 2001. Healy, Chris. Forgetting Aborigines. Sydney: U of New South Wales P, 2008. Howard, Sue & Johnson, Bruce. “Resilient Teachers: Resisting Stress and Burnout”. Social Psychology of Education 7 (2004): 399-420. Kierkegaard, Sørren. The Concept of Anxiety. Eds. and Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna V. Hong. Northfields: Minnesota, 1976. Latukefu, Lotte, Shawn Burns, Marcus O'Donnell & Andrew Whelan. “Enabling Music Students to Respond Positively to Adversity in Work after Graduation: A Reconsideration of Conventional Pedagogies in Higher Music Education.” Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice 11.2 (in press). Latukefu, Lotte, Marcus O'Donnell, Janys Hayes, Shawn Burns, Grant Ellmers & Joanna Stirling. “Fire in the Belly: Building Resilience in Creative Practitioners through Experiential and Authentically Designed Learning Environments.” The CALTN papers. Ed. J. Holmes. Hobart: Creative Arts Teaching and Learning Network, 2013. 59-65. May, Roland. The Meaning of Anxiety. New York: WW Norton, [1950] 1996. Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. “Towards a New Research Agenda?: Foucault, Whiteness and Indigenous Sovereignty”. Journal of Sociology 42 (2006): 383-95. Probyn, Elspeth. “Writing Shame.” The Affect Theory Reader. Eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth. Durham: Duke UP, 2010. 71-90. Povinelli, Elizabeth. The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism. Durham: Duke, 2002. Rose, Deborah Bird. Nourishing Terrain: Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness. Canberra: Australian Heritage Commission, 1996. Ungar, Michael. “Researching and Theorizing Resilience across Cultures and Contexts”. Preventive Medicine 55 (2012): 387–89. Ungar, Michael. “Community Resilience for Youth and Families: Facilitative Physical and Social Capital in Contexts of Adversity.” Children and Youth Services Review 33 (2011): 1742-48. Walker, Brian, and David Salt. Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World. Washington: Island Press, 2006. Wilson, Geoff. A. “Community Resilience, Globalization, and Transitional Pathways of Decision-Making.” Geoforum 43 (2012): 1218–31. Wyatt, Danielle. A Place in the Nation: Governing the Art of Being Local on the National Frontier. Unpublished PhD thesis. Melbourne: RMIT U, 2011.

“Say a body. Where none. No mind. Where none. That at least. A place. Where none. For the body. To be in. Move in. Out of. Back into. No out. No back. Only in. Stay in. On in. Still” (Beckett, Short Fiction 471). 1. Introduction – Wherefore to ‘still’?HIRST: As it is?SPOONER: As it is, yes please, absolutely as it is (Pinter, 1971-1981 77). These first lines of Harold Pinter’s play No Man’s Land are indeed the first lines: they were the first lines that came to Pinter, existing as the spark that drove the play into being. Pinter overhead the words ‘As it is’ whilst in a taxi cab and was struck by their poetry and utter uncertainty. That was it. In the play, they are referring to having a scotch – i.e. as it is, without ice. Here, they refer to the ‘still’ – the incessant constitutive moment of being in the world ‘as it is’. In this short paper I want to essay the phenomenon of ‘still’ as it is; as in there is ‘still’, and as in the ‘there is’ is the ‘still’ between presencing and absencing (as in No Man’s Land: two bodies in a room, a question, and a moment of comprehension). Three points need to be outlined from this desire to essay the phenomenon of ‘still’. First, it should be remembered and noted that to essay is to weigh something up in thought. Second, that ‘still’ is to be considered as a phenomena, both material and immaterial, and not as a concept or state, and where our endeavour with phenomenology here is understood as a concern with imagining ‘a body’ and ‘a place’ where there is neither – in this I want to think the vital and the vulnerable in non-oppositional terms “to work against conventional binaries such as stasis–movement, representation–practice (or the non-representational), textual–non-textual, and immaterial–material” (Merrimen et al 193). Third, that I was struck, in the call for papers for this issue of the Journal of Media and Culture, by the invocation of ‘still’ over that of ‘stillness’, or rather the persistent use of ‘still’ in the call focussing attention on ‘still’ as a noun or thing rather than as an adjective or verb. This exploration of being through the essaying of ‘still’ as a phenomenon will be exampled in the work of Samuel Beckett and Pinter and thought through in the philosophical and literary thought of the outside of Maurice Blanchot. Why Beckett? Beckett because he precisely and with distilled measure, exactitude and courage asks the question of being through the vain attempt to stage what remains when everything superfluous is taken away (Knowlson 463): what remains may well be the ‘still’ although this remainder is constitutive of presencing and not a relic or archive or dead space. Why Pinter? Pinter because, through restoring “theatre to its basic elements - an enclosed space and unpredictable dialogue” (Engdaht), he staged a certain vision of our life on earth which pulls on the very logic and power of silence in communication: this logic is that of ‘still’ – saying something while doing nothing; movement where stillness is perceived. Why Blanchot? Blanchot because he understood and gave expression to the fact that that which comes to be written, the work, will not succeed in communicating the experience that drives the writing and that as such the written work unworks the desire that brought it into being (see Smock 4). This ‘unworking’, this putting into question, is the ‘still’. * * * Apart from any other consideration, we are faced with the immense difficulty, if not the impossibility, of verifying the past. I don’t mean merely years ago, but yesterday, this morning. What took place, what was the nature of what took place, what happened? If one can speak of the difficulty of knowing what in fact took place yesterday, one can treat the present in the same way. We won’t know until tomorrow or in six months’ time, and we won’t know then, we’ll have forgotten, or our imagination will have attributed quite false characteristics to today. A moment is sucked away and distorted, often even at the time of its birth. We will all interpret a common experience quite differently, though we prefer to subscribe to the view that there’s a shared common ground, a known ground. I think there’s a shared common ground all right, but that it is more like a quicksand (Pinter, Voices 22). The ‘still’: treating the present in the same manner as the difficulty of knowing the past; seeing the present as being sucked away and distorted at its inception; taking knowing and the constitution of being as grounded on quicksand. At stake then is the work that revolves around the conceptualizations and empirical descriptions of the viscerally engraved being-there and the practical and social formations of embodiment that follow. I am concerned with the ways in which a performative re-emphasizing of practice and materiality has overlooked the central point of what ‘being-there’ means. Which is to say that what ‘being-there’ means has already been assumed in the exciting, extensive and particular engagements which concern themselves more with the different modes of being-there (walking, sitting, sleeping), the different potentialities of onto-technical connections connecting (to) the world (new image technologies, molecular stimulants, practised affecting words), and the various subjectivities produced in the subsequent placements being considered and being made in such connections whether materially or immaterially (imaginary) real (attentive, bored, thoughtful, exhausted). Such engagements do far more than this paper aims for, but what I want for this paper is for it to be a pause in itself, a provocation that takes a step back. What might this step back entail? Let’s start by pivoting off from a phrase that addresses the singular being-there of any performative material moment and that is “the event of corporeal exposure” alluded to by Paul Harrison in his paper ‘Corporeal Remains’ (432). Key to the question of ‘still’ or ‘stillness’ is the tension between thinking the body, embodiment and a sense of life that forms the social when what we are talking about or around is ‘a body. Where none. … A place. Where none’. What briefly do I mean by this? First, what can be said about the presencing of the body? Harrison, following Emmanuel Levinas, both inherits and withdraws from Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology primarily because, and this is what we want to move away from, the key concept of Dasein both covers up the sensible and vulnerable body in being discerned as a disembodied subjectivity and is too concerned forthwith with a sense of comprehension in a teleological economy of intent(ion) (429-430). Second, what is a stake in the ephemeral presence of place? Harrison signals that the eventhood of corporeal existence exists within a “specific relation between interior and exterior”, namely that of “the ‘sudden address from elsewhere’” (436). The Beckettian non-place can be read as that specific relation of the exterior to the interior, of the outside being part of that which brings the sense of self into being. In summary, these two points question the arguments raised by Harrison: ‘What is encountering'? if it isn’t quite the body as nominally thought. And ‘What is encountering?’ if such encountering is a radical asymmetrical address which nonetheless gives some orientation (placement) of comprehension for and of ourselves? 2. What is encountering? Never present still: ‘Say a body. Where none.’Literature is that experience through which the consciousness discovers its being in its inability to lose consciousness, in the movement whereby it disappears, as it tears itself away from the meticulousness of an I, it is re-created beyond consciousness as an impersonal spontaneity (Blanchot, Fire 331-332). I have used the textual extracts from literature and theatre because they present that constitutive and continual tearing away from consciousness (that sense that one is present, embodied, but always in the process of finding meaning or one’s place outside of one’s body). The ‘still’ I want to depict is then the incessant still point of presencing, the moment of disappearance and re-creation: take this passage in Blanchot’s Thomas the Obscure where the eye of the protagonist, Thomas, becomes useless for seeing in the normal way. Read this as a moment where the body doesn’t just function and gain definition within an economy of what we already know it can do, but that it places us and displaces us at the same time towards something more constitutive, indeterminate and existential because it is neither entirely animate flesh nor inanimate corpse but also the traced difference of the past and the differing affirmation of the future:Not only did this eye which saw nothing apprehend something, it apprehended the cause of its vision. It saw as object that which prevented it from seeing. Its own glance entered into it as an image, just when this glance seemed the death of all image (Blanchot, Reader 60). This is the ‘dark gaze’ that Kevin Hart unveils in his excellent book The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred, which he defines as: “the vision of the artist who sees being as image, already separated from the phenomenal world and yet not belonging to a separate order of being” (12). Again this quivering and incessant becoming of ‘a body where none and a place where none’ pushes us towards the openness and exposure of the ‘stilling’ experience of a ‘loss of knowledge’, a lack of comprehension and yet an immediate need for orientation. The ‘still’, shown for Blanchot in the space of literature, distinguishes “itself from the struggle of which it is the dazzling expression … and if it is an answer, the answer to the destiny of the man that calls himself into question, then it is an answer that does not suspend the question” (Blanchot, Fire 343).Thus the phenomenological hegemony that produces “a certain structuring and logos of orientation within the very grammar geographers use to frame spatial experience” (Romanillos 795) is questioned and fractured in the incessant exposure of being by an ever inaccessible outside in which we ironically access ourselves – in other words, find out who or what we are. This is indeed a performance of coherence in always already deconstructing world (Rose). So for me the question of ‘still’ is a question that opens our thought up to the very way in which we think the human, and how we then think the subject in the social in a much more existential and embodied manner. The concern here is less with the biology of this disposition (although I think ultimately such insights need to go in lockstep with the ones I wish to address here) than its ontological constitution. In that sense I am questioning our micro and immediate place-making embodiment and this tasks us to think this embodiment and phenomenological disposition not in a landscape (more broadly or because this concept has become too broad) but in-place. The argument here operates a post-phenomenological and post-humanist bent in arguing for this ‘–place’ to be the neutral ‘there is’ of worlding, and the ‘in-’ to be the always exposed body. One can understand this as the absolute separation of self or other in terms of a non-dialectical account of intersubjectivity (see Critchley 18). In turning to Blanchot the want of the still, “where being ceaselessly perpetuates itself as nothingness” (Blanchot, Space 243), is in ‘showing/forcing us to think’ the strangeness, openness and finitudinal terror of this non-dialectical (non-relational) interhuman relation without the affirmations Levinas makes of an alterity to be understood ethically in some metaphysical sense and in an interpretation of that non-relation as ultimately theological (Critchley 19). What encounters is then the indeterminate, finite and exposed body. 3. What is encountering? The topography of still: ‘A place. Where none’.One of the autobiographical images for Beckett was of an old man holding a child’s hand walking down a country road. But what does this say of being? Embodied being and being-there respectively act as sensation and orientation. The touch of another’s hand is equally a touch of minimal comprehension that acts as a momentary placement. But who is guiding who? Who is pre-occupying and giving occupation to whom? Or take Pinter and the end of No Man’s Land: two men centred in a room one hoping to be employed by the other in order to employ the other back into the ‘land of the living’ rather than wait for death. Are they reflections of the same person, an internal battle to will one’s life to live, or rather to move one’s living fleshy being to an occupation (of place or as a mode by which one opens oneself up to the surroundings in which you literally find oneself – to become occupied by something there and to comprehend in doing so). Either way, is that all there is? Is this how it is? Do we just accept ‘life’ as it is? Or does ‘life’ always move us?HIRST: There is nothing there. Silence SPOONER: No. You are in no man’s land. Which never moves, which never changes, which never grows older, but which remains forever, icy and silent. Silence HIRST: I’ll drink to that (Pinter, Complete Works 157). Disingenuously, taking Pinter at face value here, ‘no man’s land’ is impossible for us, it is literally a land within which no human can be: can you imagine a place where nothing moves, never changes, never ages, but remains forever? Of course you can: we can imagine such a place. The ‘still’ can be made tangible in artistic expressions partly because they provide a means of both communicating that of which we cannot speak and showing the communication of silence when we do not speak. So in the literary spaces of Beckett, Blanchot, and Pinter, “literature as experience is valuable not so much for what it tells us about literature but for what it reveals about experience” (Hart 139-140). So what we have is a communication that reveals but doesn’t define, and that therefore questions the orientation and certainty of subject positions: The literary renderings of certain landscapes, such as those presentations of spatialities outside-the-subject, of the anonymous there is of spaces, contribute to a dismantling and erasure of the phenomenological subject (Romanillos 797). So what I think thinking through ‘still’ can do is bring us to think the ‘neutral presence of life itself’ and thus solicit from us a non-oppositional accounting of vitalism and passivity. “Blanchot asked me: why not pursue my inner experience as if I were the last man?” – for Bataille the answer became a dying from inside without witness, “an impossible moment of paralysis” (Boldt-Irons 3); but for Blanchot it became a “glimpse into ‘the interminable, the incessant’” (ibid) from outside the dying. In other words we, as in humans that comprehend, are also what we are from outside our corporeal being, be that active or passively engaged. But let’s not forget that the outside is as much about actual lived matter and materialized worlds. Whilst what enables us to instil a place in the immaterial flow of absent-presencing or present-absencing is our visceral embodied placement, it is not the body per se but its capacity that enables us to relate or encounter that which is non-relational and that which disrupts our sense of being in place. Herein all sorts of matter (air, earth, water, fire) encounter us and “act as a lure for feeling” (Stengers; after Anderson and Wylie). Pursuing the exposing nature of matter under the notion of ‘interrogation’ Anderson and Wylie site the sensible world as an interrogative agent itself. Wylie’s post-phenomenological folding of the seer and seen, the material and the sensible (2006), is rendered further here in the materialization of Levinas’ call to respond in Lingis’ worlding imperative of “obedience in sensibility” (5) where the materialization is not just the face of the Other that calls but matter itself. It is not just about living, quivering flesh then because “the flesh is a process, not a ‘substance’, in the sense of something which is simply there” (Anderson and Wylie 7). And it is here that I think the ontological accounting of ‘still’ I want to install intervenes: for it is not that there is ever a ‘simply there’ but always a ‘there is’. And this ‘there is’ is not necessarily of sensuality or sensibility, nor is it something vitally felt in one form or another. Rather it persists and insists as a neutral, incessant, interminable presencing that questions us into being: ‘what are we doing here?’ Some form of minimal comprehension must ensue even if it is only ephemeral or only enough to ‘go on’ for a bit more. I can’t go on, you must go on, I’ll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain (Beckett, Unnameable 414). In a sense the question creates the questioner: all sorts of imperatives make us appear. But my point is that they are both of corporeal sensibility, felt pain or pleasure a la Lingis, and minimal comprehension of ontological placement, namely (as shown here) words as they say us, never ours and never finished. The task of reading such stuttering yet formative words is the question ‘still’ presents to social scientific explanation of being bodies in social formations. There is something unreal about the idea of stillness and the assertion that ‘still’ exists as a phenomenon and this unreality rests with the idea that ‘still’ presents both a principle of action and the incapacity to act (see Bissell for exemplary empirics on and theoretical insights into the relational constitution of activity and inactivity) – ‘I can’t go on, you must go on’. There is then a frustrated entitlement of being pre-occupied in space where we gain occupation not in equipmental activity but in the ontological attunement that makes us stall in fascination as a moment of comprehension. Such attunements are constitutive of being and as such are everywhere. They are however more readily seized upon as graspable in those moments of withdrawal from history, those moments that we don’t include when we bio-graph who we are to others, those ‘dull’ moments of pause, quiet, listlessness and apathy. But it is in these moments where, corporeally speaking, a suspension or dampening of sensibility heightens our awareness to perceive our being-there, and thus where we notice our coming to be inbetween heartbeat and thought. Such moments permanently wallpaper our world and as such provide room for perceiving that shadow mode of ‘stillness’ that “produces a strange insectlike buzzing in the margins” (Blanchot, Fire 333). Encountering is then the minimal sense of going on in the face of the questions asked of the body.Let us change the subject. For the last time (Pinter, Dramatic Works 149). Conclusion: ‘For the body. To be in. Move in. Out of. Back into. No out.’Thinking on ‘still’ seems to be a further turn away from vitalism, but such thinking acts as a fear (or a pause and therefore a demand to recognize) that what frightens us, what stills us, is the end of the end, the impossibility of dying (Blanchot, Fire 337): why are we here? But it is this fright that enlivens us both corporeally, in existing as beings, and meaningfully, in our ever ongoing encounter with the ‘there is’ that enables our sense of orientation, towards being something that can say/feel ‘there’.A human being is always on the way toward itself, in becoming, thwarted, thrown-into a situation, primordially ‘‘passive,’’ receptive, attuned, exposed …; far from limiting him, this exposure is the very ground of the emergence of a universe of meaning, of the ‘‘worldliness’’ of man (Žižek 273). The ‘still’ therefore names “the ‘site’ in which the event of Being occurs” (Calarco 34). It comes about from “glimpsing the abyss opened up by the recognition of the perspectival character of human knowledge and the concomitant awareness of … [its] limits” (Calarco 41) – that yes we are death-subjected beings and therefore corporeal and finite. And as such it fashions “a fascination for something ‘outside’ or other than the human” (Calarco 43) – that we are not alone in the world, and the world itself brings us into being. This counterpointing between body and place, sensation and meaning, exists at the very heart of what we call human: namely that we are tasked to know how to go on at the limits of what we know because to go on is the imperative of world. This essay has been a pause then on the circumflexion of ‘still’. If Levinas is right in suggesting that Blanchot overcomes Heidegger’s philosophy of the neuter (Levinas 298) it is because it is not just that we (Dasein) question the ontological from the ontic in which we are thrown but that also the ontological (the outside that ‘stills’ us) questions us:What haunts us is something inaccessible from which we cannot extricate ourselves. It is that which cannot be found and therefore cannot be avoided (Blanchot, Space 259). Thus, as Hart writes, we are transfixed “and risk standing where our ‘here’ will crumble into ‘nowhere’ (150).Neither just vital nor vulnerable, it is about the quick of meaning in the topography of finitude. The resultant non-ontological ethics that comes from this is voiced from an unsuspecting direction in a text written by Jacques Derrida to be read at his funeral. On 12th October 2004 Derrida’s son Pierre gave it oration: “Always prefer life and never cease affirming survival” (Derrida, quoted in Hill 7). Estragon: ‘I can’t go on like this’Vladimir: ‘That’s what you think’ (Beckett, Complete Works 87-88). ReferencesAnderson, Ben, and John Wylie. “On Geography and Materiality.” Environment and Planning A (advance online publication, 3 Dec. 2008). Beckett, Samuel. Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable. New York: Grove P, 1958. ———. Samuel Beckett: The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber & Faber, 1990. ———. Samuel Beckett, Volume 4: Poems, Short Fiction, Criticism. New York: Grove/Atlantic P, 2006. Blanchot, Maurice. The Work of Fire. Trans. Charlotte Mandell. Stanford: Stanford U P, 1995. ———. The Space of Literature. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1989. ———. The Infinite Conversation. Trans. Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. ———. The Station Hill Blanchot Reader. Trans. Lydia Davis. Barrytown: Station Hill P, 1999. Bissell, David. “Comfortable Bodies: Sedentary Affects.” Environment and Planning A 40 (2008): 1697-1712. Boldt-Irons, Lesile-Ann. “Blanchot and Bataille on the Last Man.” Angelaki 11.2 (2006): 3-17. Calarco, Matthew. Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida. New York: Columbia U P, 2008. Critchley, Simon. “Forgetfulness Must: Politics and Filiation in Blanchot and Derrida.” Parallax 12.2 (2006): 12-22. Engdaht, Horace. “The Nobel Prize in Literature – Prize Announcement.” 13 Oct. 2005. 8 Mar. 2009 ‹http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2005/announcement.html›. Hart, Kevin. The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004. Harrison, Paul. “Corporeal Remains: Vulnerability, Proximity, and Living On after the End of the World.” Environment and Planning A 40 (2008): 423-45. Hill, Leslie. The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Derrida. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity. Trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1999. Lingis, Alphonso. The Imperative. Bloomington: Indiana University P, 1998. Knowlson, John. Damned to Fame: Life of Samuel Beckett. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1997.Merriman, Peter. et al. “Landscape, Mobility, Practice.” Social & Cultural Geography 9 (2008): 191-212. Nancy, Jean-Luc. “The Being-With of Being-There.” Continental Philosophical Review 41 (2008): 1-15. Pinter, Harold. 1971–1981 Complete Works: 4. New York: Grove P, 1981 ———. Various Voices: Prose, Poetry, Politics 1948-2005. London: Faber & Faber, 2005. Romanillos, Jose Lluis. “‘Outside, It Is Snowing’: Experience and Finitude in the Nonrepresentational Landscapes of Alain Robbe-Grillet.” Environment and Planning D 26 (2008): 795-822. Rose, Mitch. "Gathering ‘Dreams of Presence’: A Project for the Cultural Landscape." Environment and Planning D 24 (2006): 537–54.Smock, Ann. "Translator’s Introduction.”The Space of Literature. Maurice Blanchot. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1989. 1-15. Wylie, John. “Depths and Folds: On Landscape and the Gazing Subject.” Environment and Planning D 24 (2006): 519-35. Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge: The MIT P, 2006.

‘Bitzer,’ said Thomas Gradgrind. ‘Your definition of a horse.’‘Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.’ Thus (and much more) Bitzer.‘Now girl number twenty,’ said Mr. Gradgrind. ‘You know what a horse is.’— Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854)Dickens’s famous pedant, Thomas Gradgrind, was not an anomaly. He is the pedagogical manifestation of the rise of quantification in modernism that was the necessary adjunct to massive urbanisation and industrialisation. His classroom caricatures the dominant epistemic modality of modern global democracies, our unwavering trust in numbers, “data”, and reproductive predictability. This brief quotation from Hard Times both presents and parodies the 19th century’s displacement of what were previously more commonly living and heterogeneous existential encounters with events and things. The world had not yet been made predictably repetitive through industrialisation, standardisation, law, and ubiquitous codes of construction. Theirs was much more a world of unique events and not the homogenised and orthodox iteration of standardised knowledge. Horses and, by extension, all entities and events gradually were displaced by their rote definitions: individuals of a so-called natural kind were reduced to identicals. Further, these mechanical standardisations were and still are underwritten by mapping them into a numerical and extensive characterisation. On top of standardised objects and procedures appeared assigned numerical equivalents which lent standardisation the seemingly apodictic certainty of deductive demonstrations. The algebraic becomes the socially enforced criterion for the previously more sensory, qualitative, and experiential encounters with becoming that were more likely in pre-industrial life. Here too, we see that the function of this reproductive protocol is not just notational but is the sine qua non for, in Althusser’s famous phrase, the manufacture of citizens as “subject subjects”, those concrete individuals who are educated to understand themselves ideologically in an imaginary relation with their real position in any society’s self-reproduction. Here, however, ideology performs that operation through that nominally least political of cognitive modes, the supposed friend of classical Marxism’s social science, the mathematical. The historical onset of this social and political reproductive hegemony, this uniform supplanting of time’s ineluctable differencing with the parasite of its associated model, can partial be found in the formation of metrics. Before the 19th century, the measures of space and time were local. Units of length and weight varied not just between nations but often by municipality. These parochial standards reflected indigenous traditions, actualities, personalities, and needs. This variation in measurement standards suggested that every exchange or judgment of kind and value relied upon the specificity of that instance. Every evaluation of an instance required perceptual acuity and not the banality of enumeration constituted by commodification and the accounting practices intrinsic to centralised governance. This variability in measure was complicated by similar variability in the currencies of the day. Thus, barter presented the participants with complexities and engagements of skills and discrete observation completely alien to the modern purchase of duplicate consumer objects with stable currencies. Almost nothing of life was iterative: every exchange was, more or less, an anomaly. However, in 1790, immediately following the French Revolution and as a central manifestation of its movement to rational democratisation, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand proposed a metrical system to the French National Assembly. The units of this metric system, based originally on observable features of nature, are now formally codified in all scientific practice by seven physical constants. Further, they are ubiquitous now in almost all public exchanges between individuals, corporations, and states. These units form a coherent and extensible structure whose elements and rules are subject to seemingly lossless symbolic exchange in a mathematic coherence aided by their conformity to decimal representation. From 1960, their basic contemporary form was established as the International System of Units (SI). Since then, all but three of the countries of the world (Myanmar, Liberia, and the United States), regardless of political organisation and individual history, have adopted these standards for commerce and general measurement. The uniformity and rational advantage of this system is easily demonstrable in just the absurd variation in the numeric bases of the Imperial / British system which uses base 16 for ounces/pounds, base 12 for inches/feet, base three for feet/yards, base 180 for degrees between freezing and cooling, 43,560 square feet per acre, eights for division of inches, etc. Even with its abiding antagonism to the French, Britain officially adopted the metric system as was required by its admission to the EU in 1973. The United States is the last great holdout in the public use of the metric system even though SI has long been the standard wanted by the federal government. At first, the move toward U.S. adoption was promising. Following France and rejecting England’s practice, America was founded on a decimal currency system in 1792. In 1793, Jefferson requested a copy of the standard kilogram from France in a first attempt to move to the metric system: however, the ship carrying the copy was captured by pirates. Indeed, The Metric Conversion Act of 1975 expressed a more serious national intention to adopt SI, but after some abortive efforts, the nation fell back into the more archaic measurements dominant since before its revolution. However, the central point remains that while the U.S. is unique in its public measurement standard among dominant powers, it is equally committed to the hegemonic application of a numerical rendition of events.The massive importance of this underlying uniformity is that it supplies the central global mechanism whereby the world’s chaotic variation is continuously parsed and supplanted into comparable, intelligible, and predictable units that understand individuating difference as anomaly. Difference, then, is understood in this method not as qualitative and intensive, which it necessarily is, but quantitative and extensive. Like Gradgrind’s “horse”, the living and unique thing is rendered through the Apollonian dream of standardisation and enumeration. While differencing is the only inherent quality of time’s chaotic flow, accounting and management requite iteration. To order the reproduction of modern society, the unique individuating differences that render an object as “this one”, what the Medieval logicians called haecceities, are only seen as “accidental” and “non-essential” deviations. This is not just odd but illogical since these very differences allow events to be individuated items so to appear as countable at all. As Leibniz’s principle, the indiscernibility of identicals, suggests, the application of the metrical same to different occasions is inherently paradoxical: if each unit were truly the same, there could only be one. As the etymology of “anomaly” suggests, it is that which is unexpected, irregular, out of line, or, going back to the Greek, nomos, at variance with the law. However, as the only “law” that always is at hand is the so-called “Second Law of Thermodynamics”, the inconsistently consistent roiling of entropy, the evident theoretical question might be, “how is anomaly possible when regularity itself is impossible?” The answer lies not in events “themselves” but exactly in the deductive valorisations projected by that most durable invention of the French Revolution adumbrated above, the metric system. This seemingly innocuous system has formed the reproductive and iterative bias of modern post-industrial perceptual homogenisation. Metrical modeling allows – indeed, requires – that one mistake the metrical changeling for the experiential event it replaces. Gilles Deleuze, that most powerful French metaphysician (1925-1995) offers some theories to understand the seminal production (not reproduction) of disparity that is intrinsic to time and to distinguish it from its homogenised representation. For him, and his sometime co-author, Felix Guattari, time’s “chaosmosis” is the host constantly parasitised by its symbolic model. This problem, however, of standardisation in the face of time’s originality, is obscured by its very ubiquity; we must first denaturalise the seemingly self-evident metrical concept of countable and uniform units.A central disagreement in ancient Greece was between the proponents of physis (often translated as “nature” but etymologically indicative of growth and becoming, process and not fixed form) and nomos (law or custom). This is one of the first ethical and so political debates in Western philosophy. For Heraclitus and other pre-Socratics, the emphatic character of nature was change, its differencing dynamism, its processual but not iterative character. In anticipation of Hume, Sophists disparaged nomos (νόμος) as simply the habituated application of synthetic law and custom to the fluidity of natural phenomena. The historical winners of this debate, Plato and the scientific attitudes of regularity and taxonomy characteristic of his best pupil, Aristotle, have dominated ever since, but not without opponents.In the modern era, anti-enlightenment figures such as Hamann, Herder, and the Schlegel brothers gave theoretical voice to romanticism’s repudiation of the paradoxical impulses of the democratic state for regulation and uniformity that Talleyrand’s “revolutionary” metrical proposal personified. They saw the correlationalism (as adumbrated by Meillassoux) between thought and thing based upon their hypothetical equitability as a betrayal of the dynamic physis that experience presented. Variable infinity might come either from the character of God or nature or, as famously in Spinoza’s Ethics, both (“deus sive natura”). In any case, the plenum of nature was never iterative. This rejection of metrical regularity finds its synoptic expression in Nietzsche. As a classicist, Nietzsche supplies the bridge between the pre-Socratics and the “post-structuralists”. His early mobilisation of the Apollonian, the dream of regularity embodied in the sun god, and the Dionysian, the drunken but inarticulate inexpression of the universe’s changing manifold, gives voice to a new resistance to the already dominate metrical system. His is a new spin of the mythic representatives of Nomos and physis. For him, this pair, however, are not – as they are often mischaracterised – in dialectical dialogue. To place them into the thesis / antithesis formulation would be to give them the very binary character that they cannot share and to, tacitly, place both under Apollo’s procedure of analysis. Their modalities are not antithetical but mutually exclusive. To represent the chaotic and non-iterative processes of becoming, of physis, under the rubric of a common metrics, nomos, is to mistake the parasite for the host. In its structural hubris, the ideological placebo of metrical knowing thinks it non-reductively captures the multiplicity it only interpellates. In short, the polyvalent, fluid, and inductive phenomena that empiricists try to render are, in their intrinsic character, unavailable to deductive method except, first, under the reductive equivalence (the Gradgrind pedagogy) of metrical modeling. This incompatibility of physis and nomos was made manifest by David Hume in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40) just before the cooptation of the 18th century’s democratic revolutions by “representative” governments. There, Hume displays the Apollonian dream’s inability to accurately and non-reductively capture a phenomenon in the wild, free from the stringent requirements of synthetic reproduction. His argument in Book I is succinct.Now as we call every thing custom, which proceeds from a past repetition, without any new reasoning or conclusion, we may establish it as a certain truth, that all the belief, which follows upon any present impression, is deriv'd solely from that origin. (Part 3, Section 8)There is nothing in any object, consider'd in itself, which can afford us a reason for drawing a conclusion beyond it; ... even after the observation of the frequent or constant conjunction of objects, we have no reason to draw any inference concerning any object beyond those of which we have had experience. (Part 3, Section 12)The rest of mankind ... are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement. (Part 4, Section 6)In sum, then, nomos is nothing but habit, a Pavlovian response codified into a symbolic representation and, pragmatically, into a reproductive protocol specifically ordered to exclude anomaly, the inherent chaotic variation that is the hallmark of physis. The Apollonian dream that there can be an adequate metric of unrestricted natural phenomena in their full, open, turbulent, and manifold becoming is just that, a dream. Order, not chaos, is the anomaly. Of course, Kant felt he had overcome this unacceptable challenge to rational application to induction after Hume woke him from his “dogmatic slumber”. But what is perhaps one of the most important assertions of the critiques may be only an evasion of Hume’s radical empiricism: “there are only two ways we can account for the necessary agreement of experience with the concepts of its objects: either experience makes these concepts possible or these concepts make experience possible. The former supposition does not hold of the categories (nor of pure sensible intuition) ... . There remains ... only the second—a system ... of the epigenesis of pure reason” (B167). Unless “necessary agreement” means the dictatorial and unrelenting insistence in a symbolic model of perception of the equivalence of concept and appearance, this assertion appears circular. This “reading” of Kant’s evasion of the very Humean crux, the necessary inequivalence of a metric or concept to the metered or defined, is manifest in Nietzsche.In his early “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” (1873), Nietzsche suggests that there is no possible equivalence between a concept and its objects, or, to use Frege’s vocabulary, between sense or reference. We speak of a "snake" [see “horse” in Dickens]: this designation touches only upon its ability to twist itself and could therefore also fit a worm. What arbitrary differentiations! What one-sided preferences, first for this, then for that property of a thing! The various languages placed side by side show that with words it is never a question of truth, never a question of adequate expression; otherwise, there would not be so many languages. The "thing in itself" (which is precisely what the pure truth, apart from any of its consequences, would be) is likewise something quite incomprehensible to the creator of language and something not in the least worth striving for. This creator only designates the relations of things to men, and for expressing these relations he lays hold of the boldest metaphors.The literal is always already a reductive—as opposed to literature’s sometimes expansive agency—metaphorisation of events as “one of those” (a token of “its” type). The “necessary” equivalence in nomos is uncovered but demanded. The same is reproduced by the habitual projection of certain “essential qualities” at the expense of all those others residing in every experiential multiplicity. Only in this prison of nomos can anomaly appear: otherwise all experience would appear as it is, anomalous. With this paradoxical metaphor of the straight and equal, Nietzsche inverts the paradigm of scientific expression. He reveals as a repressive social and political obligation the symbolic assertion homology where actually none can be. Supposed equality and measurement all transpire within an Apollonian “dream within a dream”. The concept captures not the manifold of chaotic experience but supplies its placebo instead by an analytic tautology worthy of Gradgrind. The equivalence of event and definition is always nothing but a symbolic iteration. Such nominal equivalence is nothing more than shifting events into a symbolic frame where they can be commodified, owned, and controlled in pursuit of that tertiary equivalence which has become the primary repressive modality of modern societies: money. This article has attempted, with absurd rapidity, to hint why some ubiquitous concepts, which are generally considered self-evident and philosophically unassailable, are open not only to metaphysical, political, and ethical challenge, but are existentially unjustified. All this was done to defend the smaller thesis that the concept of anomaly is itself a reflection of a global misrepresentation of the chaos of becoming. This global substitution expresses a conservative model and measure of the world in the place of the world’s intrinsic heterogenesis, a misrepresentation convenient for those who control the representational powers of governance. In conclusion, let us look, again too briefly, at a philosopher who neither accepts this normative world picture of regularity nor surrenders to Nietzschean irony, Gilles Deleuze.Throughout his career, Deleuze uses the word “pure” with senses antithetical to so-called common sense and, even more, Kant. In its traditional concept, pure means an entity or substance whose essence is not mixed or adulterated with any other substance or material, uncontaminated by physical pollution, clean and immaculate. The pure is that which is itself itself. To insure intelligibility, that which is elemental, alphabetic, must be what it is itself and no other. This discrete character forms the necessary, if often tacit, precondition to any analysis and decomposition of beings into their delimited “parts” that are subject to measurement and measured disaggregation. Any entity available for structural decomposition, then, must be pictured as constituted exhaustively by extensive ones, measurable units, its metrically available components. Dualism having established as its primary axiomatic hypothesis the separability of extension and thought must now overcome that very separation with an adequacy, a one to one correspondence, between a supposedly neatly measurable world and ideological hegemony that presents itself as rational governance. Thus, what is needed is not only a purity of substance but a matching purity of reason, and it is this clarification of thought, then, which, as indicated above, is the central concern of Kant’s influential and grand opus, The Critique of Pure Reason.Deleuze heard a repressed alternative to the purity of the measured self-same and equivalent that, as he said about Plato, “rumbled” under the metaphysics of analysis. This was the dark tradition he teased out of the Stoics, Ockham, Gregory of Rimini, Nicholas d’Autrecourt, Spinoza, Meinong, Bergson, Nietzsche, and McLuhan. This is not the purity of identity, A = A, of metrical uniformity and its shadow, anomaly. Rather than repressing, Deleuze revels in the perverse purity of differencing, difference constituted by becoming without the Apollonian imposition of normalcy or definitional identity. One cannot say “difference in itself” because its ontology, its genesis, is not that of anything itself but exactly the impossibility of such a manner of constitution: universal anomaly. No thing or idea can be iterative, separate, or discrete.In his Difference and Repetition, the idea of the purely same is undone: the Ding an sich is a paradox. While the dogmatic image of thought portrays the possibility of the purely self-same, Deleuze never does. His notions of individuation without individuals, of modulation without models, of simulacra without originals, always finds a reflection in his attitudes toward, not language as logical structure, but what necessarily forms the differential making of events, the heterogenesis of ontological symptoms. His theory has none of the categories of Pierce’s triadic construction: not the arbitrary of symbols, the “self-representation” of icons, or even the causal relation of indices. His “signs” are symptoms: the non-representational consequences of the forces that are concurrently producing them. Events, then, are the symptoms of the heterogenetic forces that produce, not reproduce them. To measure them is to export them into a representational modality that is ontologically inapplicable as they are not themselves themselves but the consequences of the ongoing differences of their genesis. Thus, the temperature associated with a fever is neither the body nor the disease.Every event, then, is a diaphora, the pure consequent of the multiplicity of the forces it cannot resemble, an original dynamic anomaly without standard. This term, diaphora, appears at the conclusion of that dialogue some consider Plato’s best, the Theaetetus. There we find perhaps the most important discussion of knowledge in Western metaphysics, which in its final moments attempts to understand how knowledge can be “True Judgement with an Account” (201d-210a). Following this idea leads to a theory, usually known as the “Dream of Socrates”, which posits two kinds of existents, complexes and simples, and proposes that “an account” means “an account of the complexes that analyses them into their simple components … the primary elements (prôta stoikheia)” of which we and everything else are composed (201e2). This—it will be noticed—suggests the ancient heritage of Kant’s own attempted purification of mereological (part/whole relations) nested elementals. He attempts the coordination of pure speculative reason to pure practical reason and, thus, attempts to supply the root of measurement and scientific regularity. However, as adumbrated by the Platonic dialogue, the attempted decompositions, speculative and pragmatic, lead to an impasse, an aporia, as the rational is based upon a correspondence and not the self-synthesis of the diaphorae by their own dynamic disequilibrium. Thus the dialogue ends inconclusively; Socrates rejects the solution, which is the problem itself, and leaves to meet his accusers and quaff his hemlock. The proposal in this article is that the diaphorae are all that exists in Deleuze’s world and indeed any world, including ours. Nor is this production decomposable into pure measured and defined elementals, as such decomposition is indeed exactly opposite what differential production is doing. For Deleuze, what exists is disparate conjunction. But in intensive conjunction the same cannot be the same except in so far as it differs. The diaphorae of events are irremediably asymmetric to their inputs: the actual does not resemble the virtual matrix that is its cause. Indeed, any recourse to those supposedly disaggregate inputs, the supposedly intelligible constituents of the measured image, will always but repeat the problematic of metrical representation at another remove. This is not, however, the traditional postmodern trap of infinite meta-shifting, as the diaphoric always is in each instance the very presentation that is sought. Heterogenesis can never be undone, but it can be affirmed. In a heterogenetic monism, what was the insoluble problem of correspondence in dualism is now its paradoxical solution: the problematic per se. What manifests in becoming is not, nor can be, an object or thought as separate or even separable, measured in units of the self-same. Dogmatic thought habitually translates intensity, the differential medium of chaosmosis, into the nominally same or similar so as to suit the Apollonian illusions of “correlational adequacy”. However, as the measured cannot be other than a calculation’s placebo, the correlation is but the shadow of a shadow. Every diaphora is an event born of an active conjunction of differential forces that give rise to this, their product, an interference pattern. Whatever we know and are is not the correlation of pure entities and thoughts subject to measured analysis but the confused and chaotic confluence of the specific, material, aleatory, differential, and unrepresentable forces under which we subsist not as ourselves but as the always changing product of our milieu. In short, only anomaly without a nominal becomes, and we should view any assertion that maps experience into the “objective” modality of the same, self-evident, and normal as a political prestidigitation motivated, not by “truth”, but by established political interest. ReferencesDella Volpe, Galvano. Logic as a Positive Science. London: NLB, 1980.Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.———. The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester. New York: Columbia UP, 1990.Guenon, René. The Reign of Quantity. New York: Penguin, 1972.Hawley, K. "Identity and Indiscernibility." Mind 118 (2009): 101-9.Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Oxford: Clarendon, 2014.Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Norman Kemp Smith. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1929.Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Trans. Ray Brassier. New York: Continuum, 2008.Naddaf, Gerard. The Greek Concept of Nature. Albany: SUNY, 2005. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy. Trans. Douglas Smith. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008.———. “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.” Trans. Walter Kaufmann. The Portable Nietzsche. New York: Viking, 1976.Welch, Kathleen Ethel. "Keywords from Classical Rhetoric: The Example of Physis." Rhetoric Society Quarterly 17.2 (1987): 193–204.

A political minimalism? That would obviously go against the grain of our current political ideology → in fact, we are in an era of political maximalisation (Roland Barthes 200, arrow in original).Barthes’ comment is found in the ‘Annex’ to his 1978 lecture course The Neutral. Despite the three decade difference I don’t things have changed that much, certainly not insofar as academic debate about the cultural and social is concerned. At conferences I regularly hear the demand that the speaker or speakers account for the ‘political intent’, ‘worth’ or ‘utility’ of their work, or observe how speakers attempt to pre-empt and disarm such calls through judicious phrasing and citing. Following his diagnosis Barthes (201-206) proceeds to write under the title ‘To Give Leave’. Here he notes the incessant demand placed upon us, as citizens, as consumers, as representative cultural subjects and as biopolitical entities and, in this context, as academics to have and to communicate our allegiances, views and opinions. Echoing the acts, (or rather the ‘non-acts’), of Melville’s Bartleby, Barthes describes the scandalous nature of suspending the obligation of holding views; the apparent immorality of suspending the obligation of being interested, engaged, opinionated, committed – even if one only ever suspends provisionally, momentarily even. For the length of a five thousand word essay perhaps. In this short, unfortunately telegraphic and quite speculative essay I want pause to consider a few gestures or figures of ‘suspension’, ‘decline’ and ‘remaining aside’. What follows is in three parts. First a comment on the nature of the ‘demand to communicate’ identified by Barthes and its links to longer running moral and practical imperatives within Western understandings of the subject, the social and the political. Second, the most substantial section but still an all too brief account of the apparent ‘passivity’ of the narrator of Imre Kertész’s novel Fatelessness and the ways in which the novel may be read as a reflection on the nature of agency and determination. Third, a very brief conclusion, the question directly; what politics or what apprehension of politics, could a reflection on stillness and its ‘political minimalism’ offer? 1.For Barthes, (in 1978), one of the factors defining the contemporary intellectual scene was the way in which “politics invades all phenomena, economic, cultural, ethical” coupled with the “radicalization” of “political behaviors” (200), perhaps most notably in the arrogance of political discourse as it assumes the place of a master discourse. Writing in 1991 Bill Readings identified a similar phenomenon. For Readings the category of the political and politically inspired critique were operating by encircling their objects within a presupposed “universal language of political significance into which one might translate everything according to its effectivity”, an approach which has the effect of always making “the political […] the bottom line, the last instance where meaning can be definitively asserted” (quoted in Clark 3) or, we may add, realized. There is, of course, much that could be said here, not least concerning the significant differences in context, (between, for example, the various forms of revolutionary Marxism, Communism and Maoism which seem to preoccupy Barthes and the emancipatory identity and cultural politics which swept through literature departments in the US and beyond in the last two decades of the twentieth century). However it is also possible to suggest that a general grammar and, moreover, a general acceptance of a telos of the political persists.Barthes' (204-206) account of ‘political maximalisation’ is accompanied by a diagnosis of its productivist virility, (be it, in 1978, on the part of the increasingly reduced revolutionary left or the burgeoning neo-liberal right). The antithesis, or, rather, the outside of such an arrangement or frame would not be another political program but rather a certain stammering, a lassitude or dilatoriness. A flaccidness even; “a devirilized image” wherein from the point of view of the (political) actor or critic, “you are demoted to the contemptible mass of the undecided of those who don’t know who to vote for: old, lost ladies whom they brutalize: vote however you want, but vote” (Barthes 204). Hence Barthes is not suggesting a counter-move, a radical refusal, a ‘No’ shouted back to the information saturated market society. What is truly scandalous he suggests, is not opposition or refusal but the ‘non-reply’. What is truly scandalous, roughish even, is the decline or deferral and so the provisional suspension of the choice (and the blackmail) of the ‘yes’ or ‘no’, the ‘this’ or the ‘that’, the ‘with us’ or ‘against us’.In Literature and Evil Georges Bataille concludes his essay on Kafka with a comment on such a decline. According to Bataille, the reason why Kafka remains an ambivalent writer for critics, (and especially for those who would seek to enrol his work to political ends), lays precisely in his constant withdrawal; “There was nothing he [Kafka] could have asserted, or in the name of which he could have spoken. What he was, which was nothing, only existed to the extent in which effective activity condemned him” (167). ‘Effective activity’ refers, contextually, to a certain form of Communism but more broadly to the rationalization or systematization intrinsic to any political program, political programs (or ideologies) as such, be they communist, liberal or libertarian. At least insofar as, as implied above, the political is taken to coincide with a certain metaphysics and morality of action and the consequent linking of freedom to work, (a factor common to communist, fascist and liberal political programs), and so to the labour of the progressive self-realization and achievement of the self, the autos or ipse (see Derrida 6-18). Be it via, for example, Marx’s account of human’s intrinsic ‘capacity for work’ (Arbeitskraft), Heidegger’s account of necessary existential (and ultimately communal) struggle (Kampf), or Weber’s diagnoses of the (Protestant/bourgeois) liberal project to realize human potentiality (see also Agamben Man without Content; François 1-64). Hence what is ‘evil’ in Kafka is not any particular deed but the deferral of deeds; his ambivalence or immorality in the eyes of certain critics being due to the question his writing poses to “the ultimate authority of action” (Bataille 153) and so to the space beyond action onto which it opens. What could this space of ‘worklessness’ or ‘unwork’ look like? This non-virile, anti-heroic space? This would not be a space of ‘inaction’, (a term still too dependent, albeit negatively, on action), but of ‘non-action’; of ‘non-productive’ or non-disclosive action. That is to say, and as a first attempt at definition, ‘action’ or ‘praxis’, if we can still call it that, which does not generate or bring to light any specific positive content. As a way to highlight the difficulties and pitfalls, (at least with certain traditions), which stand in the way of thinking such a space, we may highlight Giorgio Agamben’s comments on the widespread coincidence of a metaphysics of action with the determination of both the subject, its teleology and its orientation in the world:According to current opinion, all of man’s [sic] doing – that of the artist and the craftsman as well as that of the workman and the politician – is praxis – manifestation of a will that produces a concrete effect. When we say that man has a productive status on earth, we mean, that the status of his dwelling on the earth is a practical one […] This productive doing now everywhere determines the status of man on earth – man understood as the living being (animal) that works (laborans), and, in work, produces himself (Man without Content 68; 70-71 original emphasis).Beyond or before practical being then, that is to say before and beyond the determination of the subject as essentially or intrinsically active and engaged, another space, another dwelling. Maybe nocturnal, certainly one with a different light to that of the day; one not gathered in and by the telos of the ipse or the turning of the autos, an interruption of labour, an unravelling. Remaining still, unravelling together (see Harrison In the absence).2.Kertész’s novel Sorstalanság was first published in his native Hungary in 1975. It has been translated into English twice, in 1992 as Fateless and in 2004 as Fatelessness. Fatelessness opens in Budapest on the day before György Köves’ – the novel’s fourteen year old narrator – father has to report for ‘labour service’. It goes on to recount Köves’ own detention and deportation and the year spent in the camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buchenwald and Zeitz. During this period Köves’ health declines, gradually at first and then rapidly to a moment of near death. He survives and the novel closes with his return to his home town. Köves is, as Kertész has put it in various interviews and as is made clear in the novel, a ‘non-Jewish Jew’; a non-practicing and non-believing Hungarian Jew from a largely assimilated family who neither reads nor speaks Hebrew or Yiddish. While Kertész has insisted that the novel is precisely that, a novel, a work of literature and not an autobiography, we should note that Kertész was himself imprisoned in Buchenwald and Zeitz when fourteen.Not without reservations but for the sake of brevity I shall focus on only one theme in the novel; determination and agency, or what Kertész calls ‘determinacy’. Writing in his journal Galley Boat-Log (Gályanapló) in May 1965 Kertész suggests ‘Novel of Fatelessness’ as a possible title for his work and then reflects on what he means by ‘fate’, the entry is worth quoting at length.The external determinacy, the stigma which constrains our life in a situation, an absurdity, in the given totalitarianism, thwarts us; thus, when we live out the determinacy which is doled out to us as a reality, instead of the necessity which stems from our own (relative) freedom – that is what I call fatelessness.What is essential is that our determinacy should always be in conflict with our natural views and inclinations; that is how fatelessness manifests itself in a chemically pure state. The two possible modes of protection: we transform into our determinacy (Kafka’s centipede), voluntarily so to say, and I that way attempt to assimilate our determinacy to our fate; or else we rebel against it, and so fall victim to our determinacy. Neither of these is a true solution, for in both cases we are obliged to perceive our determinacy […] as reality, whilst the determining force, that absurd power, in a way triumphs over us: it gives us a name and turns us into an object, even though we were born for other things.The dilemma of my ‘Muslim’ [Köves]: How can he construct a fate out of his own determinacy? (Galley Boat-Log 98 original emphasis).The dilemma of determinacy then; how can Köves, who is both determined by and superfluous to the Nazi regime, to wider Hungarian society, to his neighbours and to his family, gain some kind of control over his existence? Throughout Fatelessness people prove repeatedly unable to control their destinies, be it Köves himself, his father, his stepmother, his uncles, his friends from the oil refinery, or even Bandi Citrom, Köves’ mentor in the camps. The case of the ‘Expert’ provides a telescoped example. First appearing when Köves and his friends are arrested the ‘Expert’ is an imposing figure, well dressed, fluent in German and the director of a factory involved in the war effort (Fatelessness 50). Later at the brickworks, where the Jews who have been rounded up are being held prior to deportation, he appears more dishevelled and slightly less confident. Still, he takes the ‘audacious’ step of addressing a German officer directly (and receives some placatory ‘advice’ as his reward) (68-69). By the time the group arrives at the camp Köves has difficulty recognising him and without a word of protest, the ‘Expert’ does not pass the initial selection (88).Köves displays no such initiative with regard to his situation. He is reactive or passive, never active. For Köves events unfold as a series of situations and circumstances which are, he tells himself, essentially reasonable and to which he has to adapt and conform so that he may get on. Nothing more than “given situations with the new givens inherent in them” (259), as he explains near the end of the novel. As Köves' identity papers testify, his life and its continuation are the effect of arbitrary sets of circumstances which he is compelled to live through; “I am not alive on my own account but benefiting the war effort in the manufacturing industry” (29). In his Nobel lecture Kertész described Köves' situation:the hero of my novel does not live his own time in the concentration camps, for neither his time nor his language, not even his own person, is really his. He doesn’t remember; he exists. So he has to languish, poor boy, in the dreary trap of linearity, and cannot shake off the painful details. Instead of a spectacular series of great and tragic moments, he has to live through everything, which is oppressive and offers little variety, like life itself (Heureka! no pagination).Without any wilful or effective action on the part of the narrator and with only ‘the dreary trap of linearity’ where one would expect drama, plot, rationalization or stylization, Fatelessness can read as an arbitrarily punctuated series of waitings. Köves waiting for his father to leave, waiting in the customs shed, waiting at the brick works, waiting in train carriages, waiting on the ramp, waiting at roll call, waiting in the infirmary. Here is the first period of waiting described in the book, it is the day before his father’s departure and he is waiting for his father and stepmother as they go through the accounts at the family shop:I tried to be patient for a bit. Striving to think of Father, and more specifically the fact that he would be going tomorrow and, quite probably, I would not see him for a long time after that; but after a while I grew weary with that notion and then seeing as there was nothing else I could do for my father, I began to be bored. Even having to sit around became a drag, so simply for the sake of a change I stood up to take a drink of water from the tap. They said nothing. Later on, I also made my way to the back, between the planks, in order to pee. On returning I washed my hands at the rusty, tiled sink, then unpacked my morning snack from my school satchel, ate that, and finally took another drink from the tap. They still said nothing. I sat back in my place. After that, I got terribly bored for another absolute age (Fatelessness 9). It is interesting to consider exactly how this passage presages those that will come. Certainly this scene is an effect of the political context, his father and stepmother have to go through the books because of the summons to labour service and because of the racial laws on who may own and profit from a business. However, the specifically familial setting should not be overlooked, particularly when read alongside Kertész’s other novels where, as Madeleine Gustafsson writes, Communist dictatorship is “portrayed almost as an uninterrupted continuation of life in the camp – which in turn [...] is depicted as a continuation of the patriarchal dictatorship of a joyless childhood” (no pagination, see, for example, Kertész Kaddish). Time to turn back to our question; does Fatelessness provide an answer to the ‘dilemma of determinacy’? We should think carefully before answering. As Julia Karolle suggests, the composition of the novel and our search for a logic within itreveal the abuses that reason must endure in order to create any story or history about the Holocaust […]. Ultimately Kertész challenges the reader not to make up for the lack of logic in Fatelessness, but rather to consider the nature of its absence (92 original emphasis).Still, with this point in mind, (and despite what has been said above), the novel does contain a scene in which Köves appears to affirm his existence.In many respects the scene is the culmination of the novel. The camps have been liberated and Köves has returned to Budapest. Finding his father and step-mother’s apartment occupied by strangers he calls on his Aunt and Uncle Fleischmann and Uncle Steiner. The discussion which follows would repay a slower reading, however again for the sake of brevity I shall focus on only a few short excerpts. Köves suggests that everyone took their ‘steps’ towards the events which have unfolded and that prediction and retrospection are false perspectives which give the illusion of order and inevitability whereas, in reality, “everything becomes clear only gradually, sequentially over time, step-by-step” (Fatelessness 249): “They [his Uncles] too had taken their own steps. They too […] had said farewell to my father as if we had already buried him, and even later has squabbled about whether I should take the train or the suburban bus to Auschwitz” (260). Fleischmann and Steiner react angrily, claiming that such an understanding makes the ‘victims’ the ‘guilty ones’. Köves responds by saying that they do not understand him and asks they see that:It was impossible, they must try to understand, impossible to take everything away from me, impossible for me to be neither winner nor loser, for me not to be right and not to be mistaken that I was neither the cause nor effect of anything; they should try to see, I almost pleaded, that I could not swallow that idiotic bitterness, that I should merely be innocent (260-261).Karolle (93-94) suggests that Köves' discussion with his uncles marks the moment where he accepts and affirms his existence and, from this point on begins to take control of and responsibility. Hence for Karolle the end of the novel depicts an ‘authentic’ moment of self-affirmation as Köves steps forward and refuses to participate in “the factual historical narrative of Auschwitz, to forget what he knows, and to be unequivocally categorized as a victim of history” (95). In distinction to Karolle, Adrienne Kertzer argues that Köves' moment of self-affirmation is, in fact, one of self-deception. Rather than acknowledging that it was “inexplicable luck” and a “series of random acts” (Kertzer 122) which saved his life or that his near death was due to an accident of birth, Köves asserts his personal freedom. Hence – and following István Deák – Kertzer suggests that we should read Fatelessness as a satire, ‘a modern Candide’. A satire on the hope of finding meaning, be it personal or metaphysical, in such experiences and events, the closing scenes of the novel being an ironic reflection on the “desperate desire to see […] life as meaningful” (Kertzer 122). So, while Köves convinces himself of his logic his uncles say to each other “‘Leave him be! Can’t you see he only wants to talk? Let him talk! Leave him be!’ And talk I did, albeit possibly to no avail and even a little incoherently” (Fatelessness 259). Which are we to choose then? The affirmation of agency (with Karolle) or the diagnosis of determination (with Kertzer)? Karolle and Kertzer give insightful analyses, (and ones which are certainly not limited to the passages quoted above), however it seems to me that they move too quickly to resolve the ‘dilemma’ presented by Köves, if not of Fatelessness as a whole. Still, we have a little time before having to name and decide Köves’ fate. Kertész’s use of the word ‘hero’ to describe Köves above – ‘the hero of my novel…’ – is, perhaps, more than a little ironic. As Kertész asks (in 1966), how can there be a hero, how can one be heroic, when one is one’s ‘determinacies’? What sense does it make to speak of heroic actions if “man [sic] is no more than his situation”? (Galley Boat-Log 99). Köves’ time, his language, his identity, none are his. There is no place, no hidden reservoir of freedom, from which way he set in motion any efficacious action. All resources have already been corrupted. From Kertész’s journal (in 1975): “The masters of thought and ideologies have ruined my thought processes” (Galley Boat-Log 104). As Lawrence Langer has argued, the grammar of heroics, along with the linked terms ‘virtue’, ‘dignity’, ‘resistance’ ‘survival’ and ‘liberation’, (and the wider narrative and moral economies which these terms indicate and activate), do not survive the events being described. Here the ‘dilemma of determinacy’ becomes the dilemma of how to think and value the human outside or after such a grammar. How to think and value the human beyond a grammar of action and so beyond, as Lars Iyer puts it, “the equation of work and freedom that characterizes the great discourses of political modernity” (155). If this is possible. If such a grammar and equation isn’t too all pervasive, if something of the human still remains outside their economy. It may well be that our ability to read Fatelessness depends in large part on what we are prepared to forsake (see Langar 195). How to think the subject and a politics in contretemps, beyond or after the choice between determination or autonomy, passive or active, inaction or action, immoral or virtuous – if only for a moment? Kertész wonders, (in 1966), ”perhaps there is something to be savaged all the same, a tiny foolishness, something ultimately comic and frail that may be a sign of the will to live and still awakens sympathy” (Galley Boat-Log 99). Something, perhaps, which remains to be salvaged from the grammar of humanism, something that would not be reducible to context, to ‘determinacies’, and that, at the same time, does not add up to a (resurrected) agent. ‘A tiny foolishness, something ultimately comic and frail’. The press release announcing that Kertész had been awarded the Nobel prize for literature states that “For Kertész the spiritual dimension of man lies in his inability to adapt to life” (The Swedish Academy no pagination). Despite the difficulties presented by the somewhat over-determined term ‘spiritual’, this line strikes me as remarkably perspicuous. Like Melville’s Bartleby and Bataille’s Kafka before him, Kertész’s Köves’ existence, insofar as he exists, is made up by his non-action. That is to say, his existence is defined not by his actions or his inaction, (both of which are purely reactive and functional), but rather by his irreducibility to either. As commentators and critics have remarked, (and as the quotes given from the text above hopefully illustrate), Köves has an oddly formal and neutral ‘voice’. Köves’ blank, frequently equivocal tone may be read as a sign of his immaturity, his lack of understanding and his naivety. However I would suggest that before such factors, what characterizes Köves’ mode of address is its reticence to assert or disclose. Köves speaks, he speaks endlessly, but he says nothing or almost nothing - ‘to no avail and even a little incoherently’. Hence where Karolle seeks to recover an ‘intoned self-consciousness’ and Kertzer the repressed determining context, we may find Köves' address. Where Karolle’s and Kertzer’s approaches seek in some way to repair Köves words, to supplement them with either an agency to-come or an awareness of a context and, in doing so, pull his words fully into the light, Köves, it seems to me, remains elusive. His existence, insofar as we may speak of it, lies in his ‘inability to adapt to life’. His reserves are not composed of hidden or recoverable sources of agency but in his equivocality, in the way he takes leave of and remains aside from the very terms of the dilemma. It is as if with no resources of his own, he has an echo existence. As if still remaining itself where a tiny foolishness, something ultimately comic and frail.3.Is this it? Is this what we are to be left with in a ‘political minimalism’? It would seem more resignation or failure, turning away or quietism, the conceit of a beautiful soul, than any type of recognisable politics. On one level this is correct, however any such suspension or withdrawal, this moment of stillness where we are, is only ever a moment. However it is a moment which indicates a certain irreducibility and as such is, I believe, of great significance. Great significance, (or better ‘signifyingness’), even though – and precisely because – it is in itself without value. Being outside efficacy, labour or production, being outside economisation as such, it resides only in its inability to be integrated. What purpose does it serve? None. Or, perhaps, none other than demonstrating the irreducibility of a life, of a singular existence, to any discourse, narrative, identity or ideology, insofar as such structures, in their attempt to comprehend (or apprehend) the existent and put it to use always and violently fall short. As Theodor Adorno wrote;It is this passing-on and being unable to linger, this tacit assent to the primacy of the general over the particular, which constitutes not only the deception of idealism in hypostasizing concepts, but also its inhumanity, that has no sooner grasped the particular than it reduces it to a thought-station, and finally comes all too quickly to terms with suffering and death (74 emphasis added).This moment of stillness then, of declining and remaining aside, represents, for me, the anarchical and all but silent condition of possibility for all political strategy as such (see Harrison, Corporeal Remains). A condition of possibility which all political strategy carries within itself, more or less well, more or less consciously, as a memory of the finite and corporeal nature of existence. A memory which may always and eventually come to protest against the strategy itself. Strategy itself as strategy; as command, as a calculated and calculating order. And so, and we should be clear about this, such a remaining still is a demonstration.A demonstration not unlike, for example, that of the general anonymous population in José Saramago’s remarkable novel Seeing, who ‘act’ more forcefully through non-action than any through any ends-directed action. A demonstration of the kind which Agamben writes about after those in Tiananmen Square in 1989:The novelty of the coming politics is that it will no longer be the struggle for control of the state, but a struggle between the State and the non-State (humanity) […] [who] cannot form a societas because they do not poses any identity to vindicate or bond of belonging for which to seek recognition (Coming Community 85-67; original emphasis).A demonstration like that which sounds through Köves when his health fails in the camps and he finds himself being wheeled on a handcart taken for dead;a snatch of speech that I was barely able to make out came to my attention, and in that hoarse whispering I recognized even less readily the voice that has once – I could not help recollecting – been so strident: ‘I p … pro … test,’ it muttered” (Fatelessness 187 ellipses in original).The inmate pushing the cart stops and pulls him up by the shoulders, asking with astonishment “Was? Du willst noch leben? [What? You still want to live?] […] and right then I found it odd, since it could not have been warranted and, on the whole, was fairly irrational (187).AcknowledgmentsMy sincere thanks to the editors of this special issue, David Bissell and Gillian Fuller, for their interest, encouragement and patience. Thanks also to Sadie, especially for her comments on the final section. ReferencesAdorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. London: Verso, 1974.Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990.———. The Man without Content. Stanford: Stanford U P, 1999.Barthes, Roland. The Neutral. New York: Columbia U P, 2005.Bataille, Georges. Literature and Evil. London: Marion Boyars, 1985.Clarke, Timothy. The Poetics of Singularity: The Counter-Culturalist Turn in Heidegger, Derrida, Blanchot and the Late Gadamer. Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P, 2005.Deák, István. "Stranger in Hell." New York Review of Books 23 Sep. 2003: 65-68.Derrida, Jacques. Rogues. Two Essays on Reason. Stanford: Stanford U P, 2005.François, Anne-Lise. Open Secrets. The Literature of Uncounted Experience. Stanford: Stanford U P, 2008.Gustafsson, Madeleine. 2003 “Imre Kertész: A Medium for the Spirit of Auschwitz.” 6 Mar. 2009 ‹http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/articles/gustafsson/index.html›.Harrison, Paul. “Corporeal Remains: Vulnerability, Proximity, and Living On after the End of the World.” Environment and Planning A 40 (2008): 423-445.———.“In the Absence of Practice.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space forthcoming.Heidegger, Martin. Introduction to Metaphysics. London: Yale U P, 2000.Iyer, Lars. Blanchot’s Communism: Art, Philosophy and the Political. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.Karolle, Julia. “Imre Kertész Fatelessness as Historical Fiction.” Imre Kertész and Holocaust Literature. Ed Louise O. Vasvári and Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek. West Lafayette: Purdue U P, 2005. 89-96.Kertész, Imre. 2002 “Heureka!” Nobel lecture. 6 Mar. 2009 ‹http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2002/kertesz-lecture-e.html›.———. Fatelessness. London: Vintage, 2004.———. Kaddish for an Unborn Child. London: Vintage International, 2004.———.“Galley Boat-Log (Gályanapló): Excerpts.” Imre Kertész and Holocaust Literature. Ed Louise O. Vasvári and Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2005. 97-110.Kertzer, Adrienne. “Reading Imre Kertesz in English.” Imre Kertész and Holocaust Literature. Ed Louise O. Vasvári, and Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek. West Lafayette: Purdue U P, 2005. 111-124.Langer, Lawrence. Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory. London: Yale U P, 1991.Melville, Herman. Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street. New Jersey: Melville House, 2004.Marx, Karl. Capital Volume 1. London: Penguin Books, 1976.Readings, Bill. “The Deconstruction of Politics.” In Deconstruction: A Reader. Ed Martin McQuillan. Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P, 2000. 388-396.Saramago, José. Seeing. London: Vintage, 2007. The Swedish Academy. "The Nobel Prize in Literature 2002: Imre Kertész." 2002. 6 Mar. 2009 ‹http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2002/press.html›.Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London: Routledge, 1992.

IntroductionAccording to Friedrich Nietzsche, the death of Man follows the death of God. Man as a concept must be overcome. Yet Nietzsche extends humanism’s jargon of creativity that privileges Man over animal. To truly overcome the notion of Man, one must undercome Man, in other words go below Man. Once undercome, creativity devolves into a type of building and unbuilding, affording art the ability to conceive of the subject emptied of divine creation. This article will examine how Man is unbuilt in three works by three different artists: Francis Bacon’s “Study of a Baboon” (1953), Jan Švankmajer’s Darkness, Light, Darkness (1989), and Patricia Piccinini’s “The Young Family” (2002). All three artists evoke the animalistic in their depiction of what could be called the sub-subject, a diminished agent. Unbuilding the subject becomes the basis for building the sub-subject in these depictions of the human remainder. Man, from this vantage, will be examined as a cultural construct. Man largely means human, yet the Renaissance concept favoured a certain type of powerful male. Instead of rescuing Man, Bacon, Švankmajer and Piccinini, present the remnants of the human amidst the animal rather than the human subject detached from the animal. Such works challenge humanism, expressed in Giorgio Vasari’s analysis of art and creativity as indicative of Man’s closeness to the divine, which in a strange way, is extended in Nietzsche’s writings. These artists dismantle and build a subhuman form of subjectivity and thereby provide a challenge to traditional conceptions of creativity that historically favour Man as the creator beneath only God Himself. In the course of this article, I explore the violence of Bacon’s painted devolution, the deflationary animation of Švankmajer and Piccinini’s subhuman tenderness. I do not argue that we must abandon humanism altogether as there are a multiplicity of humanisms, or attempt to invalidate all the various posthumanisms, transhumanisms and antihumanisms. Rather, I attempt to show that Nietzsche’s posthumanism is a suprahumanism and that one possible way to frame the death of Man is through undercoming Man. Art, held in high esteem by Renaissance humanism, becomes a vehicle to imagine and engage with subhuman subjectivity.What Is Humanism? Humanism has numerous connotations from designating atheism to celebrating culture to privileging humans above other animals. The type of humanism I am interested in is not secular humanism, but rather humanism that celebrates and conceptualises Man’s place in the universe and does so through accentuating his (and I mean his given humanism’s often sexist, masculinist history) creativity and intellectual power. This celebration of creativity depends in part on a type of religious view, where Man is at the centre of God’s design. Such a view holds that Man’s power to shape nature’s materials resembles God. This type of humanism remains today but usually in a more humbled form, enfeebled by the scientific realisations that characterised the Enlightenment, namely the realisation that Man was not the centre of God’s universe. The Enlightenment is sometimes characterised as the birth of modern humanism, where the human subject undergoes estrangement from his surroundings through the conceptualisation of the subject–object division, and gains control over nature. A common narrative is that the subject’s autonomy and power came to extend to art itself, which in turn, became valued as possessing its own aesthetic legitimacy and yet also becoming an alienated commodity. Yet Cary Wolfe, in What Is Posthumanism?, echoes Michel Foucault’s claim that the Enlightenment could be viewed in tension to humanism (“Introduction” n.p.). Indeed, the Enlightenment’s creation of modern science would come to seriously challenge any view of humanity’s privileged status in this world. In contrast, Renaissance humanism conceived of Man as the centrepiece of God’s design and gifted with artistic creation and the ability to uncover truth. Renaissance HumanismRenaissance humanism is encapsulated by Vasari’s preface to The Lives of the Artists. In his preface, Vasari contends that God was the first artist, being both a painter and sculptor: God on High, having created the great body of the world and having decorated the heavens with its brightest lights, descended with His intellect further down into the clarity of the atmosphere and the solidity of the earth, and, shaping man, discovered in the pleasing invention of things the first form of sculpture and painting. (3)Interestingly, God discovers creation, which is a type of decoration, where the skies are decorated with bright lights—the stars. Giving colour, light and shade to the world and heavens, qualifies God as a painter. The human body, according to Vasari, is sculpted by God, which in turn inspires artists to depict the human form. Art and design—God’s design—is thereby ‘at the origin of all things’ and not merely painting and sculpture, though the reality we know is still the product of God’s painting and sculpture. According to Vasari, God privileges Man not for his intellect per se, but by bestowing him with the ability of creation and design. Indeed, creativity and design are for Vasari a part of all intellectual discovery. Intellect is the mode of discovering design, which for Vasari, is also creation. Vasari claims “that divine light infused in us by a special act of grace which has not only made us superior to other animals but even similar, if it is permitted to say so, to God Himself” (4). God is more than just a maker, he is a creator with an aesthetic sense. All intellectual human endeavours, claims Vasari, are aesthetic and creative, in their comprehension of God’s design of the world. Vasari’s emphasis on design became outmoded as Renaissance humanism was challenged by the Enlightenment’s interest in humans and other animals as machines. However, evolution challenges even some mechanistic understandings of the human subject, which sometimes presupposed that the human-machine had a maker, as with William Paley’s watchmaker theory. As Richard Dawkins put it in The Blind Watchmaker, nature “has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If [evolution] can be said to play the role of the watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker” (“Chapter One: Explaining the Very Improbable” n.p.). No longer was God’s universe designed for Man’s comprehension and appreciation, foretelling humanity’s own potential extinction.Man and God’s DeathThe idea that humanity was created by blind processes raises the question of what sort of depiction of the human subject is possible after the death of God and the Enlightenment’s tendency toward disenchantment? An art and self-understanding founded on atheism would be in sharp distinction to Vasari’s characterisation of the nature as an artwork coloured by the divine painter and sculptor in the heavens. Man’s creativity and design are, for the Renaissance humanist, part of discovery, the embodied realisations and iterations of the Platonic realm of divine forms. But such designs, wondrous for Vasari, can be viewed as shadows without origin in a post-God world. In Vasari, Platonism is still present where the artist’s creation becomes a way of discerning the origin of all forms, God himself. Yet, without divine origin, these forms are no longer discoveries and the possibility emerges that they are not even creations, emptied of the divine meaning that gave Man’s creative and scientific work value. Nietzsche understood that the loss of God called for the revaluation of all values. This is why Nietzsche claims that God’s death signifies the death of Man. For Nietzsche, the last Man was such an iteration, a shadow of what man had been (Thus Spoke Zarathustra 9-10). The Post-Man, the Übermensch, is one who extends the human power of creation and evaluation. In Vasari, Man is a model created by God. Nietzsche extends this logic: Man is his own creation as is God Man’s model. Man is capable of self-construction and overcoming without the hindrance of the divine. This freedom unlocked by auto-creation renders Man capable of making himself God. As such, art remains a source of sacred power for Nietzsche since it is a process of creative evaluation. The sacred is affirmed against secular profanity. For Nietzsche, God must be envisaged as Dionysus, a God that Nietzsche claims takes on a human form in Greek festivals dedicated to creation and fecundity. Mankind, in order to continue to have value after God’s death, “must become gods”, must take the place of God (The Gay Science 120). Nietzsche, All-Too HumanistNietzsche begins a project of rethinking Man as a category. Yet there is much in common with Renaissance humanism generated by Nietzsche’s Dionysian belief in a merger between God and Man. Man is overcome by a stronger and more creative figure, that of the Übermensch. By comparing Nietzsche with Vasari we can understand just how humanist Nietzsche remained. Indeed, Nietzsche fervently admired the Renaissance as a rebirth of paganism. Such an assessment of the rebirth of pagan art and values can almost be found in Vasari himself. Vasari claimed that pagan art, far from being blasphemous, brought Man closer to the divine in a tribute to the creativity of God. Vasari’s criticism of Christianity is careful but present. Indeed, Vasari—in a way that anticipates Nietzsche’s view that secular sacrilege was merely an extension of Christian sacrilege—attacks Christian iconoclasm, noting that barbarians and Christians worked together to destroy sacred forms of art: not only did [early Christianity] ruin or cast to the ground all the marvellous statues, sculptures, paintings, mosaics, and ornaments of the false pagan gods, but it also did away with the memorials and testimonials to an infinite number of illustrious people, in whose honour statues and other memorials had been constructed in public places by the genius of antiquity. (5) In this respect, Vasari embodies the values Nietzsche so praised in the Italian Renaissance. Vasari emphasises the artistic creations that enshrine distinctions of value and social hierarchy. While Vasari continues Platonic notions that ideals exist before human creation, he nevertheless holds human creation as a realisation and embodiment of the ideal, which is not dissimilar to Nietzsche’s notion of divine embodiment. For Nietzsche and Vasari, Man is exulted when he can rise, like a god, above other men. Another possibility would be to lower Man to just another animal. One way to envision such a lowering would be to subvert the mode by which Man is deemed God-like. Art that engages with the death of Man helps conceptualise subhumanism and the way that the subject ceases to be raised above the animal. What follows are studies of artworks that unbuild the subject. Francis Bacon’s “Study of a Baboon”Francis Bacon’s work challenges the human subject by depicting nonhuman subjects, where the flesh is torn open and Man’s animal flesh is exposed. Sometimes Bacon does not merely disfigure the human form but violently abandons it to focus on animals that reveal animal qualities latent in the subject. Bacon’s “Study of a Baboon”, expresses a sense of human devolution: Man devolved to monkey. In the work, we see a baboon within an enclosure, sitting above a tree that simultaneously resembles a gothic shadow, a cross, and even a smear. The dark, cross-like tree may suggest the conquering of God by a baboon, a type of monkey, recalling the old slander of Darwin’s theory, namely that Darwinism entailed that humanity descended from monkeys (which Darwin’s theory does not claim). But far from victorious, the monkey is in a state of suffering. While the baboon is not crucified on or by the tree, suffering pervades the frame. Its head resembles some sort of skull. The body is faintly painted in a melancholy blue with smudges of purple and is translucent and ghostly—at once a lump of matter and a spectral absence. We do not see the baboon through the cage. Instead we see through the baboon at the cage. Indeed, its very physiology involves the encountering of trauma as the head of the baboon does not simply connect to the body but stabs through the body as a sharp bone, perhaps opaquely evoking the violence of evolution. Similarly, the baboon’s tail seems to stab through the tree. Its eye is an enlarged void and a pupil is indicated by a bluish white triangle splitting through the void. The tree has something of the menacing and looming quality of a shadow and there is a sense of wilderness confronted by death and entrapment, evoked through the background. The yellowy ground is suggestive of dead grass. While potentially gesturing to the psychical confusion and intensity of Vincent Van Gogh or Edvard Munch, the yellowed grass more likely evokes the empty, barren and hostile planes of the desert and contrasts with the darkened colours. The baboon sitting on the cross/tree may seem to have reached some sort of pinnacle but such a status is mocked by the tree that manages to continue outside the fence: the branches nightmarishly protrude through the fence to conquer the frame, which in turn furthers the sense of inescapable entrapment and threat. The baboon is thereby precluded from reaching a higher point on the tree, unable to climb the branches, and underscores the baboon’s confines. The painting is labelled a study, which may suggest it is unfinished. However, Bacon’s completed works preserve an unfinished quality. This unfinished quality conveys a sense in which Man and evolution are unfinished and that being finished in the sense of being completed is no longer possible. The idea that there can finished work of art, a work of art that preserves an eternal meaning, has been repeatedly subject to serious doubt, including by artists themselves. Indeed, Bacon’s work erases the potential for perfection and completion, and breaks down, through devolution, what has been achieved by Man and the forces that shaped him. The subject is lowered from that of human to that of a baboon and is therefore, by Vasari’s Renaissance reasoning, not a subject at all. Bacon’s sketch and study exist to evoke a sense of incompletion, involving pain without resolution. The animal state of pain is therefore married with existential entrapment and isolation as art ceases to express the Platonic ideal and aims to show the truth of the shadow—namely that humanity is without a God, a God that previously shed light on humanity’s condition and anchored the human subject. If there is a trace or echo of human nobility left, such a trace functions through the wild and violent quality of animal indignation. A scream of painful indignity is the last act approaching (or descending from) any dignity that is afforded. Jan Švankmajer’s Darkness, Light, DarknessAn even more extreme case of the subject no longer being the subject, of being broken and muted—so much so that animal protest is annulled—can be witnessed in Jan Švankmajer’s animated short Darkness, Light, Darkness. In the animation, green clay hands mould and form a human body in order to be part of it. But when complete, the human body is trapped, grotesquely out of proportion with its environment. The film begins in a darkened house. There is a knocking of the door, and then the first green hand opens the door and turns on the light. The hand falls to the floor, blindly making its way to another door on the opposite side of the house. The hand opens the door only for eyeballs to roll out. The eyes look around. The hand pushes its clay fingers against the eyeballs, and the eyeballs become attached to the fingers. Suddenly with sight, the hand is able to lift itself up. The hand discovers that another hand is knocking at the door. The first hand helps the second hand, and then goes to the window where a pair of ears are stuck together flapping like a moth. The hands work together and break the ears apart. The first hand, the one with eyes, attaches the ears to the second hand. Then a head with a snout, but missing eyes and ears, enters through the door. The hands pull the snout until it becomes a nose, suppressing and remoulding the animal until it becomes human. As with Bacon, the violence of evolution, of auto-construction is conveyed indirectly: in Bacon’s case, through painted devolution and, in the case of the claymation, through a violent construction based on mutilation and smashing body parts together.Although I have described only three minutes of the seven-minute film, it already presents an image of human construction devoid of art or divine design. Man, or rather the hands, become the blind watchman of evolution. The hands work contingently, with what they are provided. They shape themselves based on need. The body, after all, exists as parts, and the human body is made up of other life forms, both sustaining and being sustained by them. The hands work together, and sacrifice sight and hearing for the head. They tear off the ears and remove the eyes and give them to the head. Transcendence is exchanged for subsistence. The absurdity of this contingency becomes most apparent when the hands attempt to merge with the head, to be the head’s feet. Then the feet actually arrive and are attached to the head’s neck. The human subject in such a state is thereby deformed and incomplete. It is a frightened form, cowering when it hears banging at the door. It turns out that the banging is being produced by an angry erect penis pounding at the door. However, even this symbol of masculine potency is subdued, rendered harmless by the hands that splash a bucket of cold water on it. The introduction of the penis signifies the masculinist notions implicit in the term Man, but we only ever see the penis when it is flaccid. The human subject is able to be concluded when clay pours from both doors and the window. The hands sculpt the clay and make the body, which, when complete is oversized and barely fits within the house. The male subject is then trapped, cramped in a foetal position. With its head against the ceiling next to the light, breathing heavily, all it can do is turn out the light. The head opens its mouth either in horror or a state of exertion and gasps. The eyes bulge before one of the body’s hands turns switch, perhaps suggesting terror before death or simply the effort involved in turning off the light. Once completed and built, the human subject remains in the dark. Despite the evident quirky, playful humour, Švankmajer’s film reflects an exhaustion with art itself. Human life becomes clay comically finding its own form. For Vasari, the ideal of the human form is realised first by God and then by Man through marble; for Švankmajer it is green clay. He demotes man back to the substance for a God to mould but, as there is no God to breathe life into it and give form, there is just the body to imperfectly mould itself. The film challenges both Vasari’s humanism and the suprahumanism of Nietzschean spectacle. Instead of the self-generating power and radical interdependence and agency of Übermensch, Švankmajer’s sub-subject is Man undercome—man beneath as opposed to over man, man mocked by its ambition, and with no space to stand high. Švankmajer thereby realises the anti-Nietzschean potential inherent within cinema’s anti-spectacular nature. Antonin Artaud, who extends the aesthetics advanced by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, contrasts the theatre’s sense of animal life with cinema. Artaud observes that movies “murder us with second-hand reproductions […] filtered through machines” (84). Thus, films murder creative and animal power as film flattens life to a dead realm of reproduction. Continuing Jacques Derrida’s hauntological framing of the screen, the animation theorist Alan Cholodenko has argued that the screen implies death. Motion is dead and replaced by illusion, a recording relayed back to us. What renders cinema haunting also renders it hauntological. For Cholodenko, cinema’s animation challenges ontology and metaphysics by eschewing stable ontologies through a process that entails both presence and absence. As Cholodenko points out, all film is a type of animation and reanimation, of making images move that are not in fact moving. Thus, one can argue that the animated-animation (such as Švankmajer’s claymation) becomes a refinement of death, a Frankesteinian reanimation of dead material. Indeed, Darkness, Light, Darkness accentuates the presence of death with the green clay almost resembling putrefaction. The fingerprints on the clay accentuate a lack of life, for the autonomous and dead matter that constructs and shapes a dead body from seemingly severed body parts. Even the title of the film, Darkness, Light, Darkness reflects an experience of cinema as deflation rather than joyous spectacle. One goes to a darkened space, watches light flicker on a screen and then the light goes out again. The cartoonish motions of the hands and body parts in the film look only half alive and therefore seem half-dead. Made in the decaying Communist state of Czechoslovakia, Švankmajer’s film aptly acknowledges the deflation of cinema, reflecting that illumination—the light of God, is put out, or more specifically, switched off. With the light of God switched off, creation becomes construction and construction becomes reconstruction, filtered through cinema’s machine processes as framed through Cholodenko. Still, Švankmajer’s animation is not unsympathetic to the plight of the hands. We do see the body parts work together. When a vulgar, meaty, non-claymation tongue comes out through the door, it goes straight to the other door to let the teeth in. The teeth and tongue are aided by the hands to complete the face. Indeed, what they produce is a human being, which has some sense of coherence and success—a success enmeshed with failure and entrapment. Piccinini’s “The Young Family”Patricia Piccinini’s sculptural works offer a more tender approach to the subject, especially when her works focus on the nonhuman animal with human characteristics. Piccinini is interested in the combinations of the animal and the machine, so her ideas can be seen almost as transhuman, where the human is extended beyond humanism. Her work is based on connection and connectedness, but does not emphasise the humanist values of innovation and self-creation often inherent to transhumanism. Indeed, the emphasis on connection is distinct from the entrapment of Bacon’s baboon and Švankmajer’s clay human, which half lament freedom’s negation.The way that Piccinini preserves aspects of humanism within a framework of subhumanism is evident in her work “The Young Family”. The hypperrealistic sculpture depicts a humanoid pig form, flopped, presumably exhausted, as piglet-babies suckle on her nipples. The work was inspired by a scientific proposal for pigs to be genetically modified to provide organs for humans (“Educational Resource” 5). Such a transhuman setting frames a subhuman aesthetic. Care is taken to render the scene with sentiment but without a sense of the ideal, without perfection. One baby-piglet tenderly grasps its foot with both hands and stares with love at its mother. We see two piglets enthusiastically sucking their mother’s teat, while a third baby/piglet’s bottom is visible, indicating that there is a third piglet scrambling for milk. The mother gazes at us, with her naked mammalian body visible. We see her wrinkles and veins. There is some fur on her head and some hair on her eyebrows humanising her. Indeed, her eyes are distinctly human and convey affection. Affection seems to be a motif that carries through to the materials (carefully crafted by Piccinini’s studio). The affection displayed in the artwork is trans-special, emphasising that human tenderness is in fact mammalian tenderness. Such tenderness conflates the human, the nonhuman animal and the material out of which the humanoid creature and its young are constructed. The sub-agency brings together the young and the old by displaying the closeness of the family. Something of this sub-subjectivity is theorised in Malcolm Bull’s Anti-Nietzsche, where he contrasts Nietzsche’s idea of the Übermensch with the idea of the subhuman. Bull writes that subhumanism involves giving up on “becoming more than a man and think[ing] only of becoming something less” (n.p.; Chapter 2, sec. “The Subhuman”). Piccinini depicts vulnerability and tenderness with life forms that are properly speaking subhuman, and reject the displays of strength of Nietzsche’s suprahumanism or Vasari’s emphasis on art commemorating great men. But Piccinini’s subhumanism preserves enough humanism to understand art’s ability to encourage an ethics of nurturing. In this respect, her works offer an alternative to Bull’s subhumanism that aims, so Bull argues, to devalue art altogether. Instead, Piccinini affirms imagination, but through its ability to conjure new ways to perceive animal affection. The sub-subject thereby functions to reveal states of emotion common to mammals (including humans) and other animals. ConclusionThese three artists therefore convey distinct, if related and intersecting, ways of visualising the sub-subject: Bacon through animal suffering, Švankmajer through adaptation that ultimately leads to the agent’s entrapment, and Piccinini who, instead of marrying anti-humanism with the subhumanism (the procedure of Švankmajer, and Bacon), integrates aspects of transhumanism and Renaissance humanism into her subhuman vision. As such, these works present a realisation of how we might think of the going under of the human subject after Darwin, Nietzsche and the deaths of God, Man and the diminishment of creativity. Such works remain not only antithetical to Vasari’s humanism but also to Nietzsche’s suprahumanism. These artists use art’s power to humble—not through overpowering awe but through the visible breakdown of the human agent, speaking for and to the sub-subject. Such art, by unbuilding and dismantling the subject, draws on prehuman trajectories of evolution, and in the case of Piccinini, transhuman trajectories. Art ceases to be about the grandiose evocations of power. Rather, more modestly, these works build a connection between the human with other mammals. Acknowledgements I wish to acknowledge Daniel Canaris for his valuable insights into Christianity and the Italian Renaissance, Alan Cholodenko for providing copies of his works that were central to my interpretation of Švankmajer, and Rachel Franks and Simon Dwyer for their invaluable assistance and finding very helpful reviewers. References Artaud, Antonin. The Theatre and Its Double. New York: Grove P, 1958.Art Gallery of South Australia. “Educational Resource Patricia Piccinini.” Adelaide: Art Gallery of South Australia. 11 Dec. 2016 <https://www.artgallery.sa.gov.au/agsa/home/Learning/docs/Online_Resources/Piccinini_online_resource.pdf>.Bacon, Francis. “Head I.” 1948. Oil on Canvas. 100.3 x 74.9cm. ———. “Study of a Baboon.” 1953. Oil on Canvas. 198.3 x 137.3cm. Bull, Malcolm. Anti-Nietzsche. New York: Verso, 2011. Cholodenko, Alan. “First Principles of Animation.” Animating Film Theory. Ed. Karen Beckman. Duke UP, 2014. 98-110.———. “The Crypt, the Haunted House, of Cinema.” Cultural Studies Review 10.2 (2004): 99-113. Darkness, Light, Darkness. Jan Švankmajer, 1990. 35mm. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. ———. The Gay Science. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. ———. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006.Piccinini, Patricia. “The Young Family.” 2002. Silicone, Polyurethane, Leather, Plywood, Human Hair, 80 x 150 x 110cm. Vasari, Giorgio. The Lives of Artists. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.Wolfe, Cary. What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010.