Journal articles on the topic 'Two Twenty Two Berkeley Ventures'

Investments in new ventures are risky due to lack of conventional form of quantitative information and untested products. Venture capitalists (VCs) are seen to target such new ventures for high-risk premium but with little success. Existing research has investigated and identified a variety of qualitative factors that impact VCs’ investment decisions; however, many research gaps still exist. Works published in the last two decades show the evolution in the preference of factors with the focus shifting from venture’s team and product to factors such as intellectual property rights, economic crisis and social capital. It was found that the factor’s role was limited to the binary scale (positive and negative), which undermines its effect. The purpose of this review is to provide a comprehensive framework of factors that influence VCs’ investment decisions and show theoretical research gaps. Accordingly, we have segmented factors into two macro-categories: ‘internal’ and ‘external environment’, and presented a detailed framework of the factors that influence VCs’ investment decisions. Further, we argue to consider the subjectivity of qualitative factors and to explore the role of a factor in the decision-making.

Opaluch and Just reported the top 20 departments in pages per faculty of articles in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics for the five year period 1968–1972. To determine how much has changed and how much has not during the intervening two decades, the analysis was repeated for the five year period 1988–1992. Some things seem not to change. University of California, Berkeley, remains at the pinnacle twenty years later. And 13 of the top 20 departments two decades ago, remain there during the 1988–1992 period. But seven did change, and the most notable aspect is that the number of Northeast departments in the top 20 rose from two to five.

Over the past decade or so, two competing theoretical perspectives have arisen that explain participation in informal entrepreneurship as resulting from either too little or too much state intervention. To evaluate these competing explanations critically, the authors report on a 2012 UK survey of 595 small business owners. Twenty per cent of these owners said that they had traded informally when starting up their ventures, and the authors examine and evaluate their reasons for doing so. It was found that 41% of the entrepreneurs attributed their off-the-books trading to too little state intervention (for example, a lack of government advice and support), 35% to too much intervention (burdensome red tape, high taxes, etc) and 24% to a mix of both factors. However, a multivariate analysis displays significant socio-demographic, firm-level and regional variations in the reasons. The outcome is a call to move towards more nuanced context-bound explanations of entrepreneurship in the informal economy.

Economic inequality has become one of the most important themes in the social sciences. The debate has revolved around two basic models. Was Kuznets correct in his prediction that inequality declines with economic growth, or was Piketty, along with others in the Berkeley/Paris/Oxford group, correct to counter that capitalism without severe constraints inevitably leads to increasing inequality? The resolution will depend on long-term historical analysis. In Global Inequality, Milanovic proposed new models to analyze the social, economic, political, and historical factors that influence changes in inequality over time and space. In Capitalism, Alone, he changes direction to examine what patterns of capitalism and inequality will look like in the twenty-first century and beyond, as well as how inequality might be reduced without violence.

High voltage TEMs were introduced commercially thirty years ago, with the installations of 500 kV Hitachi instruments at the Universities of Nogoya and Tokyo. Since that time a total of 51 commercial instruments, having maximum accelerating potentials of 0.5-3.5 MV, have been delivered. Prices have gone from about a dollar per volt for the early instruments to roughly twenty dollars per volt today, which is not so unreasonable considerinp inflation and vastly improved electronics and other improvements. The most expensive HVEM (the 3.5 MV instrument at Osaka University) cost about 5 percent of the construction cost of the USA's latest synchrotron.Table 1 briefly traces the development of HVEM in this country for the materials sciences. There are now only three available instruments at two sites: the 1.2 MeV HVEM at Argonne National Lab, and 1.0 and 1.5 MeV instruments at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Fortunately, both sites are user facilities funded by DOE for the materials research community.

In his second year at the University of California, Berkeley, Arthur William Ryder (1877–1938), the Ohio-born Harvard scholar of Sanskrit language and literature, collaborated with the campus English Club and Garnet Holme, an English actor, to stage Ryder's translation of the Sanskrit classic Mrichchhakatikam, by Shudraka, as The Little Clay Cart. The 1907 production was described as “presented in true Hindu style. Under the direction of Garnet Holme, who … studied with Swamis of San Francisco … [and] the assistance of many Indian students of the university.” However, in the twenty-five-plus cast, there was not a single Indian actor with a speaking part. The intended objective was grandeur, and the production achieved that with elaborate sets and costumes, two live zebras, and elephants. Seven years later, the Ryder–Holme team returned with Ryder's translation of Kalidasa's Shakuntala, “bear cubs, a fawn, peacocks, and an onstage lotus pool with two real waterfalls.” While the archival materials do not indicate the involvement of any Indian actors (barring one Gobind B. Lal, who enacted the Prologue), its importance is evinced by the coverage it received in the Oakland Tribune, the Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine, and the Los Angeles Times.

The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has been a burden on the worldwide population, with mass fatalities and devastating socioeconomic consequences. It has particularly drawn attention to the lack of approved small-molecule drugs to inhibit SARS coronaviruses. Importantly, lessons learned from the SARS outbreak of 2002–2004, caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 1 (SARS-CoV-1), can be applied to current drug discovery ventures. SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 both possess two cysteine proteases, the main protease (Mpro) and the papain-like protease (PLpro), which play a significant role in facilitating viral replication, and are important drug targets. The non-covalent inhibitor, GRL-0617, which was found to inhibit replication of SARS-CoV-1, and more recently SARS-CoV-2, is the only PLpro inhibitor co-crystallised with the recently solved SARS-CoV-2 PLpro crystal structure. Therefore, the GRL-0617 structural template and pharmacophore features are instrumental in the design and development of more potent PLpro inhibitors. In this work, we conducted scaffold hopping using GRL-0617 as a reference to screen over 339,000 ligands in the chemical space using the ChemDiv, MayBridge, and Enamine screening libraries. Twenty-four distinct scaffolds with structural and electrostatic similarity to GRL-0617 were obtained. These proceeded to molecular docking against PLpro using the AutoDock tools. Of two compounds that showed the most favourable predicted binding affinities to the target site, as well as comparable protein-ligand interactions to GRL-0617, one was chosen for further analogue-based work. Twenty-seven analogues of this compound were further docked against the PLpro, which resulted in two additional hits with promising docking profiles. Our in silico pipeline consisted of an integrative four-step approach: (1) ligand-based virtual screening (scaffold-hopping), (2) molecular docking, (3) an analogue search, and, (4) evaluation of scaffold drug-likeness, to identify promising scaffolds and eliminate those with undesirable properties. Overall, we present four novel, and lipophilic, scaffolds obtained from an exhaustive search of diverse and uncharted regions of chemical space, which may be further explored in vitro through structure-activity relationship (SAR) studies in the search for more potent inhibitors. Furthermore, these scaffolds were predicted to have fewer off-target interactions than GRL-0617. Lastly, to our knowledge, this work contains the largest ligand-based virtual screen performed against GRL-0617.

The growth response of pre-pubertal rabbits and their gonadal sperm reserve potential at pubertal stage when fed diets containing a combination of 16% (50-50) bovine rumen digesta-blood meal (BRDBM) mixture and 18% cooked mucuna bean (CMBM). This was in replacement of 500/0 of the maize and 50% of the groundnut cake of a pre-pubertal control diet. Twenty-four male rabbits of mixed breed aged between 6-8 weeks and body weight range 900-915g were randomly allocated to two diets: the control (diet 1) and the experimental (diet 2). Daily feed intake (72.4±7.5g vs 64.0±9.1g), total weight gain (518±1g Vs 406±18g) and Terminal live weight (1427±48g vs 1317±410 were significantly (P <0.05) higher in the control than experimental group. Feed to gain ratio in group I was marginally lower (7.5±2.6g Vs 8.5±1.2g) than for diet 2. However, dressing percentage (68.6±7.00/6 Vs 75.4±9.0%) was significantly higher in the rabbits on diet 2 than diet l. The cost per kg of diet Vs as well as the cost per kg live weight gain (N352.6±O.l VsN344.5H).l) was significantly lower for diet 2 than diet l. The paired testes weight (1.8±0.6g Vs 1.9±0.40, daily sperm production (3.6x 108 Vs 3,8x 108) and testicular spermatozoa reserve were marginally higher in rabbit on diet 2 (experimental) than diet 1 (control). The paired epididymal weight for rabbits on diet 2 was significantly (P <0.05) higher (0.6±0.3g Vs 1.2±0.30 than those on diet l, indicating more efficient sperm storage. The hematological measured were not affected (P>O. 05) by the dietary treatments. The non-significant difference (P>O. 05) in the efficiency of sperm production and sperm reserve between the two diets confirmed that the inclusion of these materials, in the diet of rabbits supports the ventures Of increasing animal protein sources through cheaper rabbits production process in Nigeria

Jan Kott invited me to conduct this formal ‘final interview’ early in 2001, after I shared with him a draft of the essay ‘Arden and Absolute Milan’ that follows. The essay and the interview were the culmination of over fifteen years of friendship and intermittent writing about Kott, which had extended to the translation of his works. I first met Jan and his wife Lidia at Berkeley in 1986, when they travelled from Los Angeles to see a production of Tadeusz Różewicz's White Marriage that I had directed and designed there, which proved the start of a long personal and professional relationship. I interviewed Kott at his modest apartment in Santa Monica, California, over the weekend of 31 March to 2 April 2001. Lidia had passed away the summer before, and his own health was extremely frail, requiring twenty-four-hour care by a group of charming and attentive Polish-speaking women. He shared his apartment after Lidia's death with an energetic black-and-white kitten, whose energy and mischief amused him greatly. Born in the Chinese Year of the Tiger, he had a cereal box decal of Tony the Tiger stuck next to the name-plate on his apartment door (the name Kott also means ‘cat’ in Polish). He was not able to move about without a nurse and a walking frame, but he nevertheless insisted on inviting me out to dinner in a local Polish restaurant, where he heartily ate a meal of steak tartar and flaczki (Polish tripe soup), accompanied by a shot or two of vodka. His nurse, who was with us, seemed amused but not at all astonished by this performance. Afterwards, he admitted this was his first meal out of the house in months – it was possibly his last. In spite of his physical weakness, Kott's mind remained lucid, and he had clearly rehearsed the interview extensively before our meetings in person. Most of the questions I had prepared proved unnecessary. What is published here is culled from approximately five hours of taped material, which Kott later edited along with myself. I owe a great debt of gratitude to my Philadelphia colleague, Helena Morawska White, for her time and energy in transcribing the taped interviews in Polish, and to Michal Zadara for his careful work in translating the unedited text into English.

The French wars of religion, 1562–1629. By Mack P. Holt. (New Approaches to European History, 8.) Pp. xiv+239 incl. 9 maps and 7 figs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. £30 (cloth), £10.95 (paper). 0 521 35359 9; 0 521 35873 6Reformation in La Rochelle. Tradition and change in early modern Europe, 1500–1568. By Judith Pugh Meyer. (Travaux d'Humanisme et Renaissance, 298). Pp. 182 incl. frontispiece, 9 figs and 21 tables. Geneva: Droz, 1996. 2 600 00115 8A city in conflict. Troyes during the French wars of religion. By Penny Roberts. (Studies in Early Modern European History.) Pp. xi+228. Manchester–New York: Manchester University Press, 1996. £40. 0 7190 4694 7One king, one faith. The Parlement of Paris and the religious reformations of the sixteenth century. By Nancy Lyman Roelker. (A Centennial Book.) Pp. xiii+543. Berkeley–Los Angeles–London: University of California Press, 1996. £50 ($65). 0 520 08626 0When the French king Henri III appeared before the Parlement of Paris to enregister the Edict of Nemours on 18 July 1585, he was greeted with a eulogistic harangue from the first president of the parlement, Achille de Harlay. This was, he told the king, a true lit de justice, in which the king was united and reconciled with his people within a godly union around the one, true and Catholic religion. He went on to remind the king that it was twenty-five years ago to the month that the first edict of Catholicity had been promulgated. In the intervening period, the parlement had never accepted the principle behind the adventure of religious pluralism attempted in the various edicts of pacification with the Protestant minority. They had only enregistered them under the duress of ‘the explicit command of the king’ and the ‘urgent necessity of the times’, judging all such measures ‘contrary to the tranquility of your state’, and against the law of God. One observer recorded that the king wept during this speech. But these were not tears of joy, for this edict (which obliged the Protestant minority to abjure or depart the realm within months) had been forced upon him by the duke of Guise and the Catholic League. At a stroke it unwound the painfully slow efforts of the French monarchy to rebuild its authority on the basis of a royally imposed religious pluralism. The king appeared before his parlement to reap what rewards he could from a measure that also advertised his faiblesse. Like the more recent tear for the decommissioning of a royal yacht, these were the ways a monarch used to express the politically impossible. For us they are an important reminder of the passions that gripped French politics during its painful and bloody reformation and how sophisticated we must be in their interpretation. The four works under consideration here are very disparate – a socio-institutional study, an up-to-date, interpretative textbook, and two case-studies in the urban reformation. Their only common thread is that they represent the variety of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ (in the French denomination) scholarship on the wars of religion.

Abstract Nuclear factor erythroid-2 related factor 2 (Nrf2) is a transcription factor that regulates the cellular defense mechanism by mediating a coordinate induction of cytoprotective antioxidant responsive element-driven genes. Nrf2 agonists augment fetal hemoglobin expression in hematopoietic progenitors and have emerged as a new class of drugs for therapeutic induction of fetal hemoglobin in sickle cell anemia (SCA). However, the cytoprotective effect of Nrf2 on the pathobiology of SCA has not been previously defined. To investigate the role and mechanism of Nrf2 in SCA independent of globin gene modulation, we generated chimeric mice with disruption of Nrf2 in non-hematopoietic tissues. A total of twenty-six Nrf2-/- mice were transplanted with bone marrow harvested from the Berkeley sickle and hemizygous (Hemi) mice and the Townes sickle (SS) and control (AA) mice. All sickle/Nrf2-null chimeras (SSNHNrf2-/-; n=13) developed classical hematological and intravascular hemolysis features of SCA after eight weeks of transplantation. Despite the presence of erythrocyte Nrf2, SSNHNrf2-/- chimeras developed more severe intravascular hemolysis than SS wild-type (SSWT) donor-litter-mates. The concentration of plasma cell-free Hb (p<0.01), plasma heme (p<0.05) and lactate dehydrogenase (p<0.05) were 1.5 to 2.0-fold higher in the chimeras than in the SSWT mice. The chimeras had markedly higher concentrations of soluble vascular cell adhesion molecule-1 (p<0.01) and soluble P-selectin in their plasma (p<0.05), and more oxidizing extracellular redox status (p<0.05). The latter finding was corroborated by markedly lower reduced-glutathione in the SSNHNrf2-/- mouse lungs (19.07±0.32 vs 26.5 ±1.5 nmol/mg protein, p<0.01). The worsening of hemolysis, vascular inflammation and oxidative stress in the SSNHNrf2-/- chimeras was unrelated to the transplantation procedure since none of these effects were seen in the AANHNrf2-/- and HemiNHNrf2-/- controls. Next, we found that the SSNHNrf2-/- chimeras had hypoxemia at baseline (oxygen saturation, 95.8±1.7%) while age-matched SSWT mice had normal oxygen saturation (99.2±0.2%, p<0.05). Consistent with these disparate pulmonary phenotypes, the SSNHNrf2-/- but not the SSWT mice developed pulmonary edema at a relatively young age, which was confirmed by histological evidence of alveolar edema. Remarkably, the severely damaged SSNHNrf2-/- mouse lungs contained a similar quantity of heme oxygenase-1 (HO-1) mRNA and protein as the relatively less inflamed SSWT lungs. In addition, the amount of HO-1 in the plasma was also similar in these animals. These results indicate that other transcription factors modulate HO-1 induction, and that HO-1 may play a lesser role in mitigating the chronic effects of SCA. To test the latter idea, we performed a longitudinal study in a cohort of thirty-two SS and AA mice of both sexes. At 8 weeks of age, plasma HO-1 was 3-fold higher in both male and female SS mice than in the AA mice (p<0.001). The HO-1 values did not change at 12, 24 and 40 weeks in any group, however intravascular hemolysis, vascular inflammation and endothelial barrier integrity deteriorated progressively only in the SSWT mice. Overall, our results demonstrate that the elevated HO-1 expression typical of SCA is insufficient to blunt many of the chronic effects of the disease in mice. However, other Nrf2 target genes in non-hematopoietic tissues can slow down this process. Such genes offer an attractive prophylactic therapeutic strategy to preserve organ function in adults with SCA. Disclosures Archer: Global Blood Therapeutics: Consultancy.

I’ve always thought that I should have been a baker. The profession, as I imagine it, appeals to my romantic sense of the art: the thrill of being awake before everyone else with my fingers in a pliant ball of dough; the warmth of the baking ovens at my back, imagining, in between sips of espresso, the joy my fresh baked goods will bring the world as the people in it start their day. Destiny saw fit to set me on another path – that of tenure-track, assistant professor of American literature – and doomed my dreams of a baking career, along with the opportunity for any regular home cooking. With the exception of holiday and special occasion cooking, the nearest I come to my romanticised notion of being a baker is the seasonal session of jam-making. I choose jam-making over jelly-making because in making jam you utilise the whole fruit, as opposed to using only the juice of the fruit to make jelly. However, I console myself with the thought that it is now pointless for me, in this era, to wish to be either a baker or a jam-maker, since both jobs are far from my romanticised notions of them, having succumbed, for the most part, commercially, to the site of the factory and the industrialisation of the assembly line. In fact, why does anyone bother to make homemade jams when they can drive to the neighbourhood supermarket and buy a jar of it for less than half the price of what it might cost to make it at home? The answer to this question calls us to investigate the contemporary foodways of home fruit preservation and canning as they gesture to jam as a cultural sign system whose meaning surpasses mere physical nourishment. From the sixteenth century (when sugar became readily available to the general populace in Europe) until the Industrial Revolution, cooks “put up” seasonal fruits, as jam- and jelly-making used to be called, for three main reasons: in order to 1) enjoy them at other times of the year, 2) preserve an abundant harvest from going to waste, and 3) store them for possible future times of scarcity (see Wilson and Eden). However, with the Industrial Revolution came commercially prepared products at prices below the cost of the total ingredients for home preparation of such items (Hunter 140). In fact, cookbooks written and published after the mid-eighteen hundreds contain far fewer recipes for jams and jellies than previous cookbooks do, indicating the move away from home preservation of fruit condiments because of the ready availability of commercial ones (Hunter 140). By the twentieth century, it became simply unnecessary for homemakers to prepare jams and jellies at home. By this time, most Western countries offered consumers a year-round supply of fresh fruits (flown, shipped, or trucked in from somewhere else), as well as an array of choices in cheap, factory-processed condiments; and few households would have stockpiled jams and jellies to safeguard against food scarcity when agricultural subsidies by national governments guaranteed a surplus of production. So why is it that home canning, specifically the making of jams, has not disappeared entirely as a cooking practice? Its continued existence suggests that jam-making, as an art, has cultural symbolism beyond its mere preservation of fruit, and that a growing distrust of factory food products has provided a new rationale for jam-making at home, signifying it one of those “clandestine forms taken by the dispersed, tactical, and make-shift creativity of groups or individuals already caught in the net of ‘discipline,’” one of those “procedures and ruses of consumers [that] compose the network of an antidiscipline” (de Certeau xiv-xv). With the ready availability of jams at supermarkets, with no nutritional requirements of dietary sugar that require our daily consumption of it, and with no further need of it as a “travel” food (in its earlier history, jam was used to aid travel by sea without incurring scurvy, and as a food for military troops), the continued practice of jam-making in the home emerges in the twenty-first century with a different cultural identity. C. Anne Wilson, in her introduction to “Waste Not, Want Not”: Food Preservation from Early Time to the Present Day, identifies the apparent stakes in the continued practice of making jam at home when she states that freezing produce and making jam are probably the two kinds of preservation most often carried out at home. To some extent they link up with other present-day food trends, such as concern about the use of chemicals in growing and processing the factory-produced versions. Some of those who blanch and freeze their own vegetables have chosen to grow them organically in the first place because so many of the vegetables on sale in shops, whether fresh or frozen, contain the residues of chemical fertilisers and pesticides. (3-4) The stakes noted above by Wilson are part of a growing trend of resistance to industrialised process of food production. Another author in Wilson’s edited collection, Lynette Hunter, provides the historical context for reading jam-making as a form of cultural resistance. She states that Eliza Acton, a radical journalist, published her 1857 cookery book The English Bread Book as a way to take back control of bread baking processes; in other words, she wrote the cookbook “to address the problem of the adulteration of shop-bought bread by encouraging people to make their own” (141). Indicative of a large-scale historical shift in foodways, Hunter finds that Acton makes a similar argument about fruit preserving in her Modern Cookery book of 1868: Acton feels the need to make the same intentions clear for her section on preserving and scathingly criticises the ‘unwholesome [preserved] fruit vended and consumed in very large quantities’ by the shop-buying public. Acton’s stress on the ‘wholesome’ is a significant precursor of the direction that preserving recipes will take when they re-enter cookery books at the end of the nineteenth century. No longer can the housewife claim to be frugal when she uses preserving skills, but she can claim to produce more nutritious and healthy food. (141) Thus, Acton’s cookbook reveals a trend away from conceiving home preserving as a means to save money and toward viewing it as a healthier alternative to commercially produced preserves because the consumer maintains control over all steps in the process. However, in the twenty-first century, there is no nutritional need for jam-making in the home: contemporary proponents of healthy eating proclaim the nutritional values of fresh fruits, not those preserved in sugar, and marketing trends in jams reflect this with the advertisement of many “low sugar” or “no sugar” varieties. Hunter states that making jam at home appeals to cooks at the end of the twentieth-century because “there is the confidence of knowing exactly what has gone into the foodstuff: home preserving is the only sure way of evading major additives and of controlling sugar content, and so on” (153). However, with new varieties of low or no sugar jams available at this time, and with familiar brand names, as well as organic farms, producing organic lines of jam (many offering these for sale at local farmer’s markets or via the internet), Hunter’s argument no longer reflects a primary concern of the home jam-maker. Instead, consumers do not want a relationship with a faceless jar of jam whose conditions of production are beyond their control and whose ingredients and labour come from somewhere else. They want to maintain a relationship with their local landscapes. As Hunter writes, jam-making in the home permits us “to recognise quite precisely how the network of food distribution and supply, quality and quantity, changes from year to year” (153). The exchange of homemade foodstuffs may even suggest an economy of barter that thwarts the exchange of capital for goods. Thus, home jam-making in the twenty-first century breaks with earlier methods of this practice and comes to represent this contemporary historical moment. The practice of making jam at home is counterculture and radical if it seeks to resist the heavily advertised and marketed brand name jams and provide the consumer with a sense of agency and control over the processes of production. Although it may cost cooks more money and take more time than simply purchasing jam at the supermarket, every jar of jam they make themselves is an act of defiance, however small, because it refuses to put money into the pockets of multinational corporations. Here, to use the terms of Michel de Certeau in the Practice of Everyday Life, the consumer unmakes his own domination by developing practices of everyday life that “poach … on the property” of the corporation and factory owners. Making jam at home is one of the “‘ways of operating’ [that] form the counterpart, on the consumer’s … side, of the mute processes that organise the establishment of socioeconomic order” (xiv). Contrary to the romantic notion of baking with which I began this essay, where I imagine getting up early in the pre-dawn darkness to practice my craft, jam-making disturbs my sleep on the other end of the day: if I start a batch of jam at night after everyone is out of my way in the kitchen, I am frequently up until one or two o’clock in the morning with my fingers, hands, arms, apron, stove, and countertop coated with sticky smudges of jam, my face roasted from the heat of the hot steam coming off the liquid fruit and sugar mixture, and my stirring hand burned from its proximity to the rolling boil, imagining, as I sip my espresso, the joy my mattress and pillow would bring me if I were using them to sleep. Due to the amount of time, money, scrubbing, and lack of sleep associated with my late-night jam-making sessions, my relationship with homemade jam is a conflicted one; but one that I always manage to value whenever I offer a friend, neighbour, or relative a jar of homemade jam. This communal or social aspect of the place of homemade jam in gift-giving is perhaps one of the most enjoyable ways in which jam-making in the home thwarts global capitalism. References De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. Eden, Trudy. “The Art of Preserving: How Cooks in Colonial Virginia Imitated Nature to Control It.” Eighteenth-Century Life 23.2 (1999): 13-23. Hunter, Lynette. “Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Trends in Food Preserving: Frugality, Nutrition or Luxury.” “Waste Not, Want Not”: Food Preservation from Early Times to the Present Day. Ed. C. Anne Wilson. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1991. 134-158. Wilson, C. Anne. “Waste Not, Want Not”: Food Preservation from Early Times to the Present Day. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1991. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Houston, Lynn. "Putting Up with “Putting Up”: A Cultural Analysis of Homemade Jam in the Twenty-First Century." M/C Journal 9.6 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0612/06-houston.php>. APA Style Houston, L. (Dec. 2006) "Putting Up with “Putting Up”: A Cultural Analysis of Homemade Jam in the Twenty-First Century," M/C Journal, 9(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0612/06-houston.php>.

Introduction In the wake of the disaster of World War I, the Surrealists formulated a hostile critique of the novel that identified its limitations in expressing the depth of the mind's faculties and the fragmentation of the psyche after catastrophic events. From this position of crisis, the Surrealists undertook a series of experimental innovations in form, structure, and style in an attempt to renew the genre. This article examines how the praxis of shock is deployed in a number of Surrealist city novels as a conduit for revolt against a society that grew increasingly mechanised in the climate of post-war regeneration. It seeks to counter the contemporary view that Surrealist city dérives (drifts) represent an intriguing yet ultimately benign method of urban research. By reconsidering its origins in response to a world catastrophe, this article emphasises the Surrealist novel’s binding of the affective properties of shock to the dream-awakening dialectic at the heart of the political position of Surrealism. The Surrealist City Novel Today it has almost become a truism to assert that there is a causal link between the catastrophic devastation wrought by the events of the two World Wars and the ideology of rupture that characterised the iconoclasms of the Modernist avant-gardes. Yet, as we progress into the twenty-first century, it is timely to recognise that new generations are rediscovering canonical and peripheral texts of this era and refracting them through a prism of contemporary preoccupations. In many ways, the revisions of today’s encounters with that past era suggest we have travelled some distance from the rawness of such catastrophic events. One post-war body of work recently subjected to view via an unexpected route is the remarkable array of Surrealist city novels set in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, representing a spectrum of experimental texts by such authors as André Breton, Louis Aragon, Robert Desnos, Philippe Soupault, and Michel Leiris. Over the past decade, these works have become recuperated in the Anglophone context as exemplary instances of ludic engagement with the city. This is due in large part to the growing surge of interest in psychogeography, an urban research method concerned with the influence that geographical environments exert over the emotions and behaviours of individuals, and a concern for tracing the literary genealogies of walking and writing in broad sweeping encyclopaedic histories and guidebook style accounts (for prominent examples see Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust and Merlin Coverley’s Psychogeography). Yet as Surrealist novels continue to garner renewed interest for their erotic intrigue, their strolling encounters with the unconscious or hidden facets of the city, and as precursors to the apparently more radical practice of Situationist psychogeography, this article suggests that something vital is missing. By neglecting the revolutionary significance that the Surrealists placed upon the street and its inextricable connection to the shock of the marvellous, I suggest that we have arrived at a point of diminished appreciation of the praxis of the dream-awakening dialectic at the heart of Surrealist politics. With the movement firmly lodged in the popular imagination as concerned merely with the art of play and surprise, the Surrealists’ sensorial conception of the city as embedded within a much larger critique of the creators of “a sterile and dead world” (Rasmussen 372) is lost. This calls into question to what extent we can now relate to the urgency with which avant-gardes like the Surrealists responded to the disaster of war in their call for “the revolution of the subject, a revolution that destroyed identity and released the fantastic” (372). At the same time, a re-evaluation of the Surrealist city novel as a significant precursor to the psychogeograhical dérive (drift) can prove instructive in locating the potential of walking, in order to function as a form of praxis (defined here as lived practice in opposition to theory) that goes beyond its more benign construction as the “gentle art” of getting lost. The Great Shock To return to the origins of Surrealism is to illuminate the radical intentions of the movement. The enormous shock that followed the Great War represented, according to Roger Shattuck, “a profound organic reaction that convulsed the entire system with vomiting, manic attacks, and semi-collapse” (9). David Gascoyne considers 1919, the inaugural year of Surrealist activity, as “a year of liquidation, the end of everything but also of paroxysmic death-birth, incubating seeds of renewal” (17). It was at this time that André Breton and his collaborator Philippe Soupault came together at the Hôtel des Grands Hommes in Paris to conduct their early experimental research. As the authors took poetic license with the psychoanalytical method of automatic writing, their desire to unsettle the latent content of the unconscious as it manifests in the spontaneous outpourings of dream-like recollections resulted in the first collection of Surrealist texts, The Magnetic Fields (1920). As Breton recalls: Completely occupied as I still was with Freud at that time, and familiar with his methods of examination which I had had some slight occasion to use on some patients during the war, I resolved to obtain from myself what we were trying to obtain from them, namely, a monologue spoken as rapidly as possible without any intervention on the part of critical faculties, a monologue consequently unencumbered by the slightest inhibition and which was, as closely as possible, akin to spoken thought. (Breton, Manifesto 22–23) Despite their debts to psychoanalytical methods, the Surrealists sought radically different ends from therapeutic goals in their application. Rather than using analysis to mitigate the pathologies of the psyche, Breton argued that such methods should instead be employed to liberate consciousness in ways that released the individual from “the reign of logic” (Breton, Manifesto 11) and the alienating forces of a mechanised society. In the same manifesto, Breton links his critique to a denunciation of the novel, principally the realist novel which dominated the literary landscape of the nineteenth-century, for its limitations in conveying the power of the imagination and the depths of the mind’s faculties. Despite these protestations, the Surrealists were unable to completely jettison the novel and instead launched a series of innovations in form, structure, and style in an attempt to renew the genre. As J.H. Matthews suggests, “Being then, as all creative surrealism must be, the expression of a mood of experimentation, the Surrealist novel probes not only the potentialities of feeling and imagination, but also those of novelistic form” (Matthews 6). When Nadja appeared in 1928, Breton was not the first Surrealist to publish a novel. However, this work remains the most well-known example of its type in the Anglophone context. Largely drawn from the author’s autobiographical experiences, it recounts the narrator’s (André’s) obsessive infatuation with a mysterious, impoverished and unstable young woman who goes by the name of Nadja. The pair’s haunted and uncanny romance unfolds during their undirected walks, or dérives, through the streets of Paris, the city acting as an affective register of their encounters. The “intellectual seduction” comes to an abrupt halt (Breton, Nadja 108), however, when Nadja does in fact go truly mad, disappearing from the narrator’s life when she is committed to an asylum. André makes no effort to seek her out and after launching into a diatribe vehemently attacking the institutions that administer psychiatric treatment, nonchalantly resumes the usual concerns of his everyday life. At a formal level, Breton’s unconventional prose indeed stirs many minor shocks and tremors in the reader. The insertion of temporally off-kilter photographs and surreal drawings are intended to supersede naturalistic description. However, their effect is to create a form of “negative indexicality” (Masschelein) that subtly undermines the truth claims of the novel. Random coincidences charged through with the attractive force of desire determine the plot while the compressed dream-like narrative strives to recount only those facts of “violently fortuitous character” (Breton, Nadja 19). Strikingly candid revelations perpetually catch the reader off guard. But it is in the novel’s treatment of the city, most specifically, in which we can recognise the evolution of Surrealism’s initial concern for the radically subversive and liberatory potential of the dream into a form of praxis that binds the shock of the marvellous to the historical materialism of Marx and Engels. This praxis unfolds in the novel on a number of levels. By placing its events firmly at the level of the street, Breton privileges the anti-heroic realm of everyday life over the socially hierarchical domain of the bourgeois domestic interior favoured in realist literature. More significantly, the sites of the city encountered in the novel act as repositories of collective memory with the power to rupture the present. As Margaret Cohen comprehensively demonstrates in her impressive study Profane Illumination, the great majority of sites that the narrator traverses in Nadja reveal connections in previous centuries to instances of bohemian activity, violent insurrection or revolutionary events. The enigmatic statue of Étienne Dolet, for example, to which André is inexplicably drawn on his city walks and which produces a sensation of “unbearable discomfort” (25), commemorates a sixteenth-century scholar and writer of love poetry condemned as a heretic and burned at the Place Maubert for his non-conformist attitudes. When Nadja is suddenly gripped by hallucinations and imagines herself among the entourage of Marie-Antoinette, “multiple ghosts of revolutionary violence descend on the Place Dauphine from all sides” (Cohen 101). Similarly, a critique of capitalism emerges in the traversal of those marginal and derelict zones of the city, such as the Saint-Ouen flea market, which become revelatory of the historical cycles of decay and ruination that modernity seeks to repress through its faith in progress. It was this poetic intuition of the machinations of historical materialism, in particular, that captured the attention of Walter Benjamin in his 1929 “Surrealism” essay, in which he says of Breton that: He can boast an extraordinary discovery: he was the first to perceive the revolutionary energies that appear in the “outmoded”—in the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photos, objects that have begun to be extinct, grand pianos, the dresses of five years ago, fashionable restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebb from them. The relation of these things to revolution—no one can have a more exact concept of it than these authors. (210) In the same passage, Benjamin makes passing reference to the Passage de l’Opéra, the nineteenth-century Parisian arcade threatened with demolition and eulogised by Louis Aragon in his Surrealist anti-novel Paris Peasant (published in 1926, two years earlier than Nadja). Loosely structured around a series of walks, Aragon’s book subverts the popular guidebook literature of the period by inventorying the arcade’s quotidian attractions in highly lyrical and imagistic prose. As in Nadja, a concern for the “outmoded” underpins the praxis which informs the politics of the novel although here it functions somewhat differently. As transitional zones on the cusp of redevelopment, the disappearing arcades attract Aragon for their liminal status, becoming malleable dreamscapes where an ontological instability renders them ripe for eruptions of the marvellous. Such sites emerge as “secret repositories of several modern myths,” and “the true sanctuaries of a cult of the ephemeral”. (Aragon 14) City as Dreamscape Contemporary literature increasingly reads Paris Peasant through the lens of psychogeography, and not unproblematically. In his brief guide to psychogeography, British writer Merlin Coverley stresses Aragon’s apparent documentary or ethnographical intentions in describing the arcades. He suggests that the author “rails against the destruction of the city” (75), positing the novel as “a handbook for today’s breed of psychogeographer” (76). The nuances of Aragon’s dream-awakening dialectic, however, are too easily effaced in such an assessment which overlooks the novel’s vertiginous and hyperbolic prose as it consistently approaches an unreality in its ambivalent treatment of the arcades. What is arguably more significant than any documentary concern is Aragon’s commitment to the broader Surrealist quest to transform reality by undermining binary oppositions between waking life and the realm of dreams. As Hal Foster’s reading of the arcades in Surrealism insists: This gaze is not melancholic; the surrealists do not cling obsessively to the relics of the nineteenth-century. Rather it uncovers them for the purposes of resistance through re-enchantment. If we can grasp this dialectic of ruination, recovery, and resistance, we will grasp the intimated ambition of the surrealist practice of history. (166) Unlike Aragon, Breton defended the political position of Surrealism throughout the ebbs and flows of the movement. This notion of “resistance through re-enchantment” retained its significance for Breton as he clung to the radical importance of dreams and the imagination, creative autonomy, and individual freedom over blind obedience to revolutionary parties. Aragon’s allegiance to communism led him to surrender the poetic intoxications of Surrealist prose in favour of the more sombre and austere tone of social realism. By contrast, other early Surrealists like Philippe Soupault contributed novels which deployed the praxis of shock in a less explicitly dialectical fashion. Soupault’s Last Nights of Paris (1928), in particular, responds to the influence of the war in producing a crisis of identity among a generation of young men, a crisis projected or transferred onto the city streets in ways that are revelatory of the author’s attunement to how “places and environment have a profound influence on memory and imagination” (Soupault 91). All the early Surrealists served in the war in varying capacities. In Soupault’s case, the writer “was called up in 1916, used as a guinea pig for a new typhoid vaccine, and spent the rest of the war in and out of hospital. His close friend and cousin, René Deschamps, was killed in action” (Read 22). Memories of the disaster of war assume a submerged presence in Soupault’s novel, buried deep in the psyche of the narrator. Typically, it is the places and sites of the city that act as revenants, stimulating disturbing memories to drift back to the surface which then suffuse the narrator in an atmosphere of melancholy. During the novel’s numerous dérives, the narrator’s detective-like pursuit of his elusive love-object, the young streetwalker Georgette, the tracking of her near-mute artist brother Octave, and the following of the ringleader of a criminal gang, all appear as instances of compensation. Each chase invokes a desire to recover a more significant earlier loss that persistently eludes the narrator. When Soupault’s narrator shadows Octave on a walk that ventures into the city’s industrial zone, recollections of the disaster of war gradually impinge upon his aleatory perambulations. His description evokes two men moving through the trenches together: The least noise was a catastrophe, the least breath a great terror. We walked in the eternal mud. Step by step we sank into the thickness of night, lost as if forever. I turned around several times to look at the way we had come but night alone was behind us. (80) In an article published in 2012, Catherine Howell identifies Last Nights of Paris as “a lyric celebration of the city as spectacle” (67). At times, the narrator indeed surrenders himself to the ocular pleasures of modernity. Observing the Eiffel Tower, he finds delight in “indefinitely varying her silhouette as if I were examining her through a kaleidoscope” (Soupault 30). Yet it is important to stress the role that shock plays in fissuring this veneer of spectacle, especially those evocations of the city that reveal an unnerving desensitisation to the more violent manifestations of the metropolis. Reading a newspaper, the narrator remarks that “the discovery of bags full of limbs, carefully sawed and chopped up” (23) signifies little more than “a commonplace crime” (22). Passing the banks of the Seine provokes “recollection of an evening I had spent lying on the parapet of the Pont Marie watching several lifesavers trying in vain to recover the body of an unfortunate suicide” (10). In his sensitivity to the unassimilable nature of trauma, Soupault intuits a phenomenon which literary trauma theory argues profoundly limits the text’s claim to representation, knowledge, and an autonomous subject. In this sense, Soupault appears less committed than Breton to the idea that the after-effects of shock might be consciously distilled into a form of praxis. Yet this prolongation of an unintegrated trauma still posits shock as a powerful vehicle to critique a society attempting to heal its wounds without addressing their underlying causes. This is typical of Surrealism’s efforts to “dramatize the physical and psychological trauma of a war that everyone wanted to forget so that it would not be swept away too quickly” (Lyford 4). Woman and Radical Madness In her 2007 study, Surrealist Masculinities, Amy Lyford focuses upon the regeneration and nation building project that characterised post-war France and argues that Surrealist tactics sought to dismantle an official discourse that promoted ideals of “robust manhood and female maternity” (4). Viewed against this backdrop, the trope of madness in Surrealism is central to the movement’s disruptive strategies. In Last Nights of Paris, a lingering madness simmers beneath the surface of the text like an undertow, while in other Surrealist texts the lauding of madness, specifically female hysteria, is much more explicit. Indeed, the objectification of the madwoman in Surrealism is among the most problematic aspects of its praxis of shock and one that raises questions over to what extent, if at all, Surrealism and feminism can be reconciled, leading some critics to define the movement as inherently misogynistic. While certainly not unfounded, this critique fails to answer why a broad spectrum of women artists have been drawn to the movement. By contrast, a growing body of work nuances the complexities of the “blinds spots” (Lusty 2) in Surrealism’s relationship with women. Contemporary studies like Natalya Lusty’s Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis and Katharine Conley’s earlier Automatic Woman both afford greater credit to Surrealism’s female practitioners in redefining their subject position in ways that trouble and unsettle the conventional understanding of women’s role in the movement. The creative and self-reflexive manipulation of madness, for example, proved pivotal to the achievements of Surrealist women. In her short autobiographical novella, Down Below (1944), Leonora Carrington recounts the disturbing true experience of her voyage into madness sparked by the internment of her partner and muse, fellow Surrealist Max Ernst, in a concentration camp in 1940. Committed to a sanatorium in Santander, Spain, Carrington was treated with the seizure inducing drug Cardiazol. Her text presents a startling case study of therapeutic maltreatment that is consistent with Bretonian Surrealism’s critique of the use of psycho-medical methods for the purposes of regulating and disciplining the individual. As well as vividly recalling her intense and frightening hallucinations, Down Below details the author’s descent into a highly paranoid state which, somewhat perversely, heightens her sense of agency and control over her environment. Unable to discern boundaries between her internal reality and that of the external world, Carrington develops a delusional and inflated sense of her ability to influence the city of Madrid: In the political confusion and the torrid heat, I convinced myself that Madrid was the world’s stomach and that I had been chosen for the task of restoring that digestive organ to health […] I believed that I was capable of bearing that dreadful weight and of drawing from it a solution for the world. The dysentery I suffered from later was nothing but the illness of Madrid taking shape in my intestinal tract. (12–13) In this way, Carrington’s extraordinarily visceral memoir embodies what can be described as the Surrealist woman’s “double allegiance” (Suleiman 5) to the praxis of shock. On the one hand, Down Below subversively harnesses the affective qualities of madness in order to manifest textual disturbances and to convey the author’s fierce rebellion against societal constraints. At the same time, the work reveals a more complex and often painful representational struggle inherent in occupying the position of both the subject experiencing madness and the narrator objectively recalling its events, displaying a tension not present in the work of the male Surrealists. The memoir concludes on an ambivalent note as Carrington describes finally becoming “disoccultized” of her madness, awakening to “the mystery with which I was surrounded and which they all seemed to take pleasure in deepening around me” (53). Notwithstanding its ambivalence, Down Below typifies the political and historical dimensions of Surrealism’s struggle against internal and external limits. Yet as early as 1966, Surrealist scholar J.H. Matthews was already cautioning against reaching that point where the term Surrealist “loses any meaning and becomes, as it is for too many, synonymous with ‘strange,’ ‘weird,’ or even ‘fanciful’” (5–6). To re-evaluate the praxis of shock in the Surrealist novel, then, is to seek to reinstate Surrealism as a movement that cannot be reduced to vague adjectives or to mere aesthetic principles. It is to view it as an active force passionately engaged with the pressing social, cultural, and political problems of its time. While the frequent nods to Surrealist methods in contemporary literary genealogies and creative urban research practices such as psychogeography are a testament to its continued allure, the growing failure to read Surrealism as political is one of the more contradictory symptoms of the expanding temporal distance from the catastrophic events from which the movement emerged. As it becomes increasingly common to draw links between disaster, creativity, and renewal, the shifting sands of the reception of Surrealism are a reminder of the need to resist domesticating movements born from such circumstances in ways that blunt their critical faculties and dull the awakening power of their praxis of shock. To do otherwise is to be left with little more than cheap thrills. References Aragon, Louis. Paris Peasant (1926). Trans. Simon Watson Taylor. Boston: Exact Change, 1994. Benjamin, Walter. “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia” (1929). Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Walter Benjamin Selected Writings, Volume 2, Part I, 1927–1930. Eds. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap P, 2005. Breton, André. “Manifesto of Surrealism” (1924). Manifestoes of Surrealism. Trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P, 1990. ———. Nadja (1928). Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Grove P, 1960. Breton, André, and Philippe Soupault. The Magnetic Fields (1920). Trans. David Gascoyne. London: Atlas P, 1985. Carrington, Leonora. Down Below (1944). Chicago: Black Swan P, 1983. Cohen, Margaret. Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1993. Conley, Katharine. Automatic Woman: The Representation of Woman in Surrealism. Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P, 1996. Coverley, Merlin. Psychogeography. Harpenden: Pocket Essentials, 2010. Foster, Hal. Compulsive Beauty. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1993. Gascoyne, David. “Introduction.” The Magnetic Fields (1920) by André Breton and Philippe Soupault. Trans. David Gascoyne. London: Atlas P, 1985. Howell, Catherine. “City of Night: Parisian Explorations.” Public: Civic Spectacle 45 (2012): 64–77. Lusty, Natalya. Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. Lyford, Amy. Surrealist Masculinities: Gender Anxiety and the Aesthetics of Post-World War I Reconstruction in France. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2007. Masschelein, Anneleen. “Hand in Glove: Negative Indexicality in André Breton’s Nadja and W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.” Searching for Sebald: Photography after W.G. Sebald. Ed. Lise Patt. Los Angeles, CA: ICI P, 2007. 360–87. Matthews, J.H. Surrealism and the Novel. Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P, 1996. Rasmussen, Mikkel Bolt. “The Situationist International, Surrealism and the Difficult Fusion of Art and Politics.” Oxford Art Journal 27.3 (2004): 365–87. Read, Peter. “Poets out of Uniform.” Book Review. The Times Literary Supplement. 15 Mar. 2002: 22. Shattuck, Roger. “Love and Laughter: Surrealism Reappraised.” The History of Surrealism. Ed. Maurice Nadeau. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Penguin Books, 1978. 11–34. Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. London: Verso, 2002. Soupault, Philippe. Last Nights of Paris (1928). Trans. William Carlos Williams. Boston: Exact Change, 1992. Suleiman, Susan Robin. “Surrealist Black Humour: Masculine/Feminine.” Papers of Surrealism 1 (2003): 1–11. 20 Feb. 2013 ‹http://www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/papersofsurrealism/journal1›.

For the past twenty years, academics and other social commentators have, by and large, shared the view that the phase of modernity through which we are currently passing is defined by two interrelated catalysts of change: the physical movement of people and the virtual movement of information around the globe. As we enter the second decade of the new millennium, it is certainly a timely moment to reflect upon the ways in which the prognoses of the scholars and scientists writing in the late twentieth century have come to pass, especially since—during the time this special issue has been in press—the revolutions that are gathering pace in the Arab world appear to be realising the theoretical prediction that the ever-increasing “flows” of people and information would ultimately bring about the end of the nation-state and herald an era of transnationalism (Appadurai, Urry). For writers like Arjun Appadurai, moreover, the concept of diaspora was key to grasping how this new world order would take shape, and how it would operate: Diasporic public spheres, diverse amongst themselves, are the crucibles of a postnational political order. The engines of their discourse are mass media (both interactive and expressive) and the movement of refugees, activists, students, laborers. It may be that the emergent postnational order proves not to be a system of homogeneous units (as with the current system of nation-states) but a system based on relations between heterogeneous units (some social movements, some interest groups, some professional bodies, some non-governmental organizations, some armed constabularies, some judicial bodies) ... In the short run, as we can see already, it is likely to be a world of increased incivility and violence. In the longer run, free from the constraints of the nation form, we may find that cultural freedom and sustainable justice in the world do not presuppose the uniform and general existence of the nation-state. This unsettling possibility could be the most exciting dividend of living in modernity at large. (23) In this editorial, we would like to return to the “here and now” of the late 1990s in which theorists like Arjun Appaduri, Ulrich Beck, John Urry, Zygmunt Bauman, Robert Robertson and others were “imagining” the consequences of both globalisation and glocalisation for the twenty-first century in order that we may better assess what is, indeed, coming to pass. While most of their prognoses for this “second modernity” have proven remarkably accurate, it is their—self-confessed—inability to forecast either the nature or the extent of the digital revolution that most vividly captures the distance between the mid-1990s and now; and it is precisely the consequences of this extraordinary technological revolution on the twin concepts of “glocality” and “diaspora” that the research featured in this special issue seeks to capture. Glocal Imaginaries Appadurai’s endeavours to show how globalisation was rapidly making itself felt as a “structure of feeling” (Williams in Appadurai 189) as well as a material “fact” was also implicit in our conceptualisation of the conference, “Glocal Imaginaries: Writing/Migration/Place,” which gave rise to this special issue. This conference, which was the culmination of the AHRC-funded project “Moving Manchester: Literature/Migration/Place (2006-10)”, constituted a unique opportunity to gain an international, cross-disciplinary perspective on urgent and topical debates concerning mobility and migration in the early twenty-first century and the strand “Networked Diasporas” was one of the best represented on the program. Attracting papers on broadcast media as well as the new digital technologies, the strand was strikingly international in terms of the speakers’ countries of origin, as is this special issue which brings together research from six European countries, Australia and the Indian subcontinent. The “case-studies” represented in these articles may therefore be seen to constitute something of a “state-of-the-art” snapshot of how Appadurai’s “glocal imaginary” is being lived out across the globe in the early years of the twenty-first century. In this respect, the collection proves that his hunch with regards to the signal importance of the “mass-media” in redefining our spatial and temporal coordinates of being and belonging was correct: The third and final factor to be addressed here is the role of the mass-media, especially in its electronic forms, in creating new sorts of disjuncture between spatial and virtual neighborhoods. This disjuncture has both utopian and dystopian potentials, and there is no easy way to tell how these may play themselves out in the future of the production of locality. (194) The articles collected here certainly do serve as testament to the “bewildering plethora of changes in ... media environments” (195) that Appadurai envisaged, and yet it can clearly also be argued that this agent of glocalisation has not yet brought about the demise of the nation-state in the way (or at the speed) that many commentators predicted. Digital Diasporas in a Transnational World Reviewing the work of the leading social science theorists working in the field during the late 1990s, it quickly becomes evident that: (a) the belief that globalisation presented a threat to the nation-state was widely held; and (b) that the “jury” was undecided as to whether this would prove a good or bad thing in the years to come. While the commentators concerned did their best to complexify both their analysis of the present and their view of the future, it is interesting to observe, in retrospect, how the rhetoric of both utopia and dystopia invaded their discourse in almost equal measure. We have already seen how Appadurai, in his 1996 publication, Modernity at Large, looks beyond the “increased incivility and violence” of the “short term” to a world “free from the constraints of the nation form,” while Roger Bromley, following Agamben and Deleuze as well as Appadurai, typifies a generation of literary and cultural critics who have paid tribute to the way in which the arts (and, in particular, storytelling) have enabled subjects to break free from their national (af)filiations (Pearce, Devolving 17) and discover new “de-territorialised” (Deleuze and Guattari) modes of being and belonging. Alongside this “hope,” however, the forces and agents of globalisation were also regarded with a good deal of suspicion and fear, as is evidenced in Ulrich Beck’s What is Globalization? In his overview of the theorists who were then perceived to be leading the debate, Beck draws distinctions between what was perceived to be the “engine” of globalisation (31), but is clearly most exercised by the manner in which the transformation has taken shape: Without a revolution, without even any change in laws or constitutions, an attack has been launched “in the normal course of business”, as it were, upon the material lifelines of modern national societies. First, the transnational corporations are to export jobs to parts of the world where labour costs and workplace obligations are lowest. Second, the computer-generation of worldwide proximity enables them to break down and disperse goods and services, and produce them through a division of labour in different parts of the world, so that national and corporate labels inevitably become illusory. (3; italics in the original) Beck’s concern is clearly that all these changes have taken place without the nation-states of the world being directly involved in any way: transnational corporations began to take advantage of the new “mobility” available to them without having to secure the agreement of any government (“Companies can produce in one country, pay taxes in another and demand state infrastructural spending in yet another”; 4-5); the export of the labour market through the use of digital communications (stereotypically, call centres in India) was similarly unregulated; and the world economy, as a consequence, was in the process of becoming detached from the processes of either production or consumption (“capitalism without labour”; 5-7). Vis-à-vis the dystopian endgame of this effective “bypassing” of the nation-state, Beck is especially troubled about the fate of the human rights legislation that nation-states around the world have developed, with immense effort and over time (e.g. employment law, trade unions, universal welfare provision) and cites Zygmunt Bauman’s caution that globalisation will, at worst, result in widespread “global wealth” and “local poverty” (31). Further, he ends his book with a fully apocalyptic vision, “the Brazilianization of Europe” (161-3), which unapologetically calls upon the conventions of science fiction to imagine a worst-case scenario for a Europe without nations. While fourteen or fifteen years is evidently not enough time to put Beck’s prognosis to the test, most readers would probably agree that we are still some way away from such a Europe. Although the material wealth and presence of the transnational corporations strikes a chord, especially if we include the world banks and finance organisations in their number, the financial crisis that has rocked the world for the past three years, along with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the ascendancy of Al-Qaida (all things yet to happen when Beck was writing in 1997), has arguably resulted in the nations of Europe reinforcing their (respective and collective) legal, fiscal, and political might through rigorous new policing of their physical borders and regulation of their citizens through “austerity measures” of an order not seen since World War Two. In other words, while the processes of globalisation have clearly been instrumental in creating the financial crisis that Europe is presently grappling with and does, indeed, expose the extent to which the world economy now operates outside the control of the nation-state, the nation-state still exists very palpably for all its citizens (whether permanent or migrant) as an agent of control, welfare, and social justice. This may, indeed, cause us to conclude that Bauman’s vision of a world in which globalisation would make itself felt very differently for some groups than others came closest to what is taking shape: true, the transnationals have seized significant political and economic power from the nation-state, but this has not meant the end of the nation-state; rather, the change is being experienced as a re-trenching of whatever power the nation-state still has (and this, of course, is considerable) over its citizens in their “local”, everyday lives (Bauman 55). If we now turn to the portrait of Europe painted by the articles that constitute this special issue, we see further evidence of transglobal processes and practices operating in a realm oblivious to local (including national) concerns. While our authors are generally more concerned with the flows of information and “identity” than business or finance (Appaduri’s “ethnoscapes,” “technoscapes,” and “ideoscapes”: 33-7), there is the same impression that this “circulation” (Latour) is effectively bypassing the state at one level (the virtual), whilst remaining very materially bound by it at another. In other words, and following Bauman, we would suggest that it is quite possible for contemporary subjects to be both the agents and subjects of globalisation: a paradox that, as we shall go on to demonstrate, is given particularly vivid expression in the case of diasporic and/or migrant peoples who may be able to bypass the state in the manufacture of their “virtual” identities/communities) but who (Cohen) remain very much its subjects (or, indeed, “non-subjects”) when attempting movement in the material realm. Two of the articles in the collection (Leurs & Ponzanesi and Marcheva) deal directly with the exponential growth of “digital diasporas” (sometimes referred to as “e-diasporas”) since the inception of Facebook in 2004, and both provide specific illustrations of the way in which the nation-state both has, and has not, been transcended. First, it quickly becomes clear that for the (largely) “youthful” (Leurs & Ponzanesi) participants of nationally inscribed networking sites (e.g. “discovernikkei” (Japan), “Hyves” (Netherlands), “Bulgarians in the UK” (Bulgaria)), shared national identity is a means and not an end. In other words, although the participants of these sites might share in and actively produce a fond and nostalgic image of their “homeland” (Marcheva), they are rarely concerned with it as a material or political entity and an expression of their national identities is rapidly supplemented by the sharing of other (global) identity markers. Leurs & Ponzanesi invoke Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the “rhizome” to describe the way in which social networkers “weave” a “rhizomatic path” to identity, gradually accumulating a hybrid set of affiliations. Indeed, the extent to which the “nation” disappears on such sites can be remarkable as was also observed in our investigation of the digital storytelling site, “Capture Wales” (BBC) (Pearce, "Writing"). Although this BBC site was set up to capture the voices of the Welsh nation in the early twenty-first century through a collection of (largely) autobiographical stories, very few of the participants mention either Wales or their “Welshness” in the stories that they tell. Further, where the “home” nation is (re)imagined, it is generally in an idealised, or highly personalised, form (e.g. stories about one’s own family) or through a sharing of (perceived and actual) cultural idiosyncrasies (Marcheva on “You know you’re a Bulgarian when …”) rather than an engagement with the nation-state per se. As Leurs & Ponzanesi observe: “We can see how the importance of the nation-state gets obscured as diasporic youth, through cultural hybridisation of youth culture and ethnic ties initiate subcultures and offer resistance to mainstream cultural forms.” Both the articles just discussed also note the shading of the “national” into the “transnational” on the social networking sites they discuss, and “transnationalism”—in the sense of many different nations and their diasporas being united through a common interest or cause—is also a focus of Pikner’s article on “collective actions” in Europe (notably, “EuroMayDay” and “My Estonia”) and Harb’s highly topical account of the role of both broadcast media (principally, Al-Jazeera) and social media in the revolutions and uprisings currently sweeping through the Arab world (spring 2011). On this point, it should be noted that Harb identifies this as the moment when Facebook’s erstwhile predominantly social function was displaced by a manifestly political one. From this we must conclude that both transnationalism and social media sites can be put to very different ends: while young people in relatively privileged democratic countries might embrace transnationalism as an expression of their desire to “rise above” national politics, the youth of the Arab world have engaged it as a means of generating solidarity for nationalist insurgency and liberation. Another instance of “g/local” digital solidarity exceeding national borders is to be found in Johanna Sumiala’s article on the circulatory power of the Internet in the Kauhajoki school shooting which took place Finland in 2008. As well as using the Internet to “stage manage” his rampage, the Kauhajoki shooter (whose name the author chose to withhold for ethical reasons) was subsequently found to have been a member of numerous Web-based “hate groups”, many of them originating in the United States and, as a consequence, may be understood to have committed his crime on behalf of a transnational community: what Sumiala has defined as a “networked community of destruction.” It must also be noted, however, that the school shootings were experienced as a very local tragedy in Finland itself and, although the shooter may have been psychically located in a transnational hyper-reality when he undertook the killings, it is his nation-state that has had to deal with the trauma and shame in the long term. Woodward and Brown & Rutherford, meanwhile, show that it remains the tendency of public broadcast media to uphold the raison d’être of the nation-state at the same time as embracing change. Woodward’s feature article (which reports on the AHRC-sponsored “Tuning In” project which has researched the BBC World Service) shows how the representation of national and diasporic “voices” from around the world, either in opposition to or in dialogue with the BBC’s own reporting, is key to the way in which the Commission has changed and modernised in recent times; however, she is also clear that many of the objectives that defined the service in its early days—such as its commitment to a distinctly “English” brand of education—still remain. Similarly, Brown & Rutherford’s article on the innovative Australian ABC children’s television series, My Place (which has combined traditional broadcasting with online, interactive websites) may be seen to be positively promoting the Australian nation by making visible its commitment to multiculturalism. Both articles nevertheless reveal the extent to which these public service broadcasters have recognised the need to respond to their nations’ changing demographics and, in particular, the fact that “diaspora” is a concept that refers not only to their English and Australian audiences abroad but also to their now manifestly multicultural audiences at home. When it comes to commercial satellite television, however, the relationship between broadcasting and national and global politics is rather harder to pin down. Subramanian exposes a complex interplay of national and global interests through her analysis of the Malayalee “reality television” series, Idea Star Singer. Exported globally to the Indian diaspora, the show is shamelessly exploitative in the way in which it combines residual and emergent ideologies (i.e. nostalgia for a traditional Keralayan way of life vs aspirational “western lifestyles”) in pursuit of its (massive) audience ratings. Further, while the ISS series is ostensibly a g/local phenomenon (the export of Kerala to the rest of the world rather than “India” per se), Subramanian passionately laments all the progressive national initiatives (most notably, the campaign for “women’s rights”) that the show is happy to ignore: an illustration of one of the negative consequences of globalisation predicted by Beck (31) noted at the start of this editorial. Harb, meanwhile, reflects upon a rather different set of political concerns with regards to commercial satellite broadcasting in her account of the role of Al-Jazeera and Al Arabiya in the recent (2011) Arab revolutions. Despite Al-Jazeera’s reputation for “two-sided” news coverage, recent events have exposed its complicity with the Qatari government; further, the uprisings have revealed the speed with which social media—in particular Facebook and Twitter—are replacing broadcast media. It is now possible for “the people” to bypass both governments and news corporations (public and private) in relaying the news. Taken together, then, what our articles would seem to indicate is that, while the power of the nation-state has notionally been transcended via a range of new networking practices, this has yet to undermine its material power in any guaranteed way (witness recent counter-insurgencies in Libya, Bahrain, and Syria).True, the Internet may be used to facilitate transnational “actions” against the nation-state (individual or collective) through a variety of non-violent or violent actions, but nation-states around the world, and especially in Western Europe, are currently wielding immense power over their subjects through aggressive “austerity measures” which have the capacity to severely compromise the freedom and agency of the citizens concerned through widespread unemployment and cuts in social welfare provision. This said, several of our articles provide evidence that Appadurai’s more utopian prognoses are also taking shape. Alongside the troubling possibility that globalisation, and the technologies that support it, is effectively eroding “difference” (be this national or individual), there are the ever-increasing (and widely reported) instances of how digital technology is actively supporting local communities and actions around the world in ways that bypass the state. These range from the relatively modest collective action, “My Estonia”, featured in Pikner’s article, to the ways in which the Libyan diaspora in Manchester have made use of social media to publicise and support public protests in Tripoli (Harb). In other words, there is compelling material evidence that the heterogeneity that Appadurai predicted and hoped for has come to pass through the people’s active participation in (and partial ownership of) media practices. Citizens are now able to “interfere” in the representation of their lives as never before and, through the digital revolution, communicate with one another in ways that circumvent state-controlled broadcasting. We are therefore pleased to present the articles that follow as a lively, interdisciplinary and international “state-of-the-art” commentary on how the ongoing revolution in media and communication is responding to, and bringing into being, the processes and practices of globalisation predicted by Appadurai, Beck, Bauman, and others in the 1990s. The articles also speak to the changing nature of the world’s “diasporas” during this fifteen year time frame (1996-2011) and, we trust, will activate further debate (following Cohen) on the conceptual tensions that now manifestly exist between “virtual” and “material” diasporas and also between the “transnational” diasporas whose objective is to transcend the nation-state altogether and those that deploy social media for specifically local or national/ist ends. Acknowledgements With thanks to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) for their generous funding of the “Moving Manchester” project (2006-10). Special thanks to Dr Kate Horsley (Lancaster University) for her invaluable assistance as ‘Web Editor’ in the production of this special issue (we could not have managed without you!) and also to Gail Ferguson (our copy-editor) for her expertise in the preparation of the final typescript. References Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996. Bauman, Zygmunt. Globalization. Cambridge: Polity, 1998. Beck, Ulrich. What is Globalization? Trans. Patrick Camiller. Cambridge: Polity, 2000 (1997). Bromley, Roger. Narratives for a New Belonging: Diasporic Cultural Fictions. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2000. Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. Pearce, Lynne, ed. Devolving Identities: Feminist Readings in Home and Belonging. London: Ashgate, 2000. Pearce, Lynne. “‘Writing’ and ‘Region’ in the Twenty-First Century: Epistemological Reflections on Regionally Located Art and Literature in the Wake of the Digital Revolution.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 13.1 (2010): 27-41. Robertson, Robert. Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage, 1992. Urry, John. Sociology beyond Societies. London: Routledge, 1999. Williams, Raymond. Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France. Berkeley: U of California P, 1982.

This article reflects upon the process of the making and screening of an interactive short film called Textual @traction, which I wrote and directed. The film is 12 minutes long, 35mm film, and shows how a series of messages sent to a lost mobile phone inadvertently allows two gay men to declare their love for each other. In the form of a puzzle, the film denies sight of the crucial messages sent between the characters, messages which motivate their actions. However, through the simple use of SMS (Short Message System) text technology, the audience can receive each of these messages on their own mobile phones as they watch the film in the cinema. Billed as an interactive event with prior information for audience telephone registration, the film has been screened at cinemas, film festivals, and conferences as well as on broadcast television. To receive the text messages during the film, the phone owner is asked to send a message before the screening to a five-digit number that registers their telephone for the event. If audience members do not have a mobile phone, they must share with another audience member or try to solve the puzzle of the film without messages. Messages are sent to audience members’ mobile/cell phones from a laptop computer by a bulk SMS delivery programme, via an SMS gateway, directly to the appropriate national mobile telephone network provider, guaranteeing split-second accuracy. When appropriate and depending on the location of the screening, audience members can also choose the language of the messages when they register. Textual @traction was nominated for UK BAFTA Interactive Award 2005 and won the Best New Media: Interactive Award at the Celtic Film Festival 2005. It has been shown in a number of international film festivals, including the International Festival of New Film, in Split, Croatia 2004; the International Short Film Festival in Los Angeles 2005(Academy-listed); and the Atlantic Film Festival, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 2005. It had its broadcast premier, and world-first for an interactive film, on S4C (Sianel Pedwar Cymru), the Welsh Language Channel with its Welsh title, ‘Caru T x’, on 25 Jan. 2006. This article addresses the audience’s experience of this interactive event, speculating on the relative audience/user positions inherent in the two technologies (cinema and mobile telephone) and on whether or not their combination can be described as a collaboration. Underpinning this speculation is the assumption that modes of representation and communication construct the subject/user in specific ways and that the Textual @traction interactive event requires of the audience member to occupy both the position of cinema viewer and of phone user alternately during the event if they are to ‘complete’ the fiction. Following on from this assumption, I have set out a number of oppositions: Live/Dead, Social/Individual, Intimate/Anonymous, and Passive/Active, against which the differences between the two technologies and the ways they construct the viewer/user are posited. These polarities also allow exploration of the various aspects of the suspension of disbelief assumed by the viewer of the film and whether the interruption to the flow of images and sounds on the cinema screen by the actions required of the viewer to retrieve and read the telephone messages dismantles that suspension by spoiling the viewer’s identification with the characters, undermining their assumptions governing the world of the film, and shattering its temporal and spatial coherence. As writer and director of the film, my initial intention was not to set out to explore these questions at all. Once the story took shape and I saw the possibility that the only dialogue in the film was that delivered by text message, it was a short step (albeit, initially, a frivolous one!) to investigate the possibility of delivering those messages to the audience during the screening of the film. I dislike reading diegetic written text on the cinema screen, believing it to be a betrayal of cinema’s essential qualities: it is a medium of pictures and sounds, not words. Of course, once it became clear that it was going to be possible to send time-specific messages to the audience members, enabling them to simultaneously read the very same message the character on screen is reading, I soon became intrigued by the potential effect this would have on the audience. Would it ‘deepen’ the process of identification with the characters? None of the characters in the film are aware of each other’s identity when they communicate and thus the narrative unfolds with dramatic irony. Would the audience’s resulting privileged knowledge in relation to the characters be enhanced by the film’s interactive dimension, because the characters are ‘unaware’ that the audience members are reading ‘their messages’? The following explores these questions and is, to a large extent, a product of observation and analysis of the interactive event, post-event, and also includes reflection on comments from audience members that have attended the event. Live/Dead Textual @traction has been constructed according to the principles of classic continuity, with every shot contributing to the narrative chain. At the end of the film, there is closure, both the conventional culmination and the objective of the classic (Hollywood) narrative, the classic continuity approach. Textual @traction, like all forms of cinema—whether classic narrative, avant-garde, multi-screen, or home movie—is a record of past events. In this film we engage with re-animated past events at twenty-four still frames a second, willingly suppressing whatever knowledge and awareness of apparatus and artifice we possess. However, while knowledge of a process of construction and presentation are suppressed, there is no necessity for the viewer to believe that the events on screen are happening as we observe them. We know these events are in the past; rather, it is the knowledge of the active arrangement of these discreet, past events (shots, scenes, sequences…) into a natural flow that we necessarily suppress. This is achievable, of course, by our unconscious operation of a complex system that organises this flow into spatial, temporal, and narrative coherence. ‘Film language’ is the term given to this internalised vocabulary we bring to bear on a film to make sense of what we see and hear—modified in each film, some more than others. It allows us to understand spatial and temporal construction, to accept ellipses, parallel action and so on. It is a very complex system, which in classical continuity is mobilised in the service of the story and rendered invisible, so that a film unfolds as if conforming to natural laws (Bazin; Metz; Monaco). I made the decision at an early stage in the development process for Textual @traction that the film would do precisely this. While I wanted the film to be challenging and ‘experimental’, I believed its potential for breaking new ground resided in the realm of the juxtaposition/collaboration of the two technologies and its impact on the viewer’s engagement with the fictional world of the story. The messages would necessarily be disruptive of a mode of presentation that is sacrosanct (at least in mainstream cinema) and I thought the tighter the narrative chain, the more apparent the effects of this juxtaposition/collaboration would be. Disruption does occur when the viewer receives a message (there are eleven in all during the 12 minutes of the film) and it is at these points that the viewer becomes phone user and the recipient of a ‘live’ communication that is time-specific. Technically, each message is sent from the bulk-messaging programme to all the registered phones at the same time so that their arrival coincides with the arrival of the ‘same message’ in the on-screen character’s phone: audience member and on-screen character then read the same message simultaneously. To achieve this, the start time of the computer programme and the start time of the film projection in the cinema have to coincide exactly. One always presumes that text messages sent to our phones originate with a person, even those that are anonymous (news and sports alerts, etc.). The assumption underlying the use of the messages in Textual @traction is that, since according to the classic narrative cinema-effect we ‘become’ each character in order to understand what motivates their actions (identifying most energetically with the protagonist), receiving the same text messages they are receiving and reading them at the same time as they are is consistent with this process of identification, although stretching it to its limits. Crucial to the achievement of identification within the classic continuity approach is the point-of view shot, and it is this element that the messages ‘substitute’ or, perhaps, ‘literalise’ in the film (Bordwell 29-33; Branigan; Gaut 260-270). Conventionally in a film, when a character looks at something that is significant to the story, the look is followed on screen by the point-of-view shot, which shows the audience what is being seen by that character. In Textual @traction, point-of-view shots are deployed in this conventional manner. Moreover, as the main character in the film is a photographer whom we see taking photographs early in the film, the act of looking and the views he sees are, in fact, clearly foregrounded in a number of shot-reverse shot sequences. However, when we see characters looking at their phones and reading the messages they’ve been sent by other characters in the film, these shots are not followed by point-of-view shots that show the messages they are reading. Instead, the spectators in the cinema ‘enact’ their own point-of-view shot as they look at the same message on their phone screens in their hands. In a ‘literal’ sense, the audience members, at these points, ‘become’ the characters. Thus, in Textual @traction there is a two-fold process that reverses the live/dead polarity of cinema. Firstly, the arrival of the message in the audience-member’s phone transforms the past event on the screen to a live one. The suspension of disbelief in the viewer is heightened in order to accept the impossibility of acquiring the same knowledge the people on screen are acquiring, at the same time. Secondly, the viewer in the cinema, when reading the messages, ‘becomes’ the fictional character, performing a live enactment of the point-of view shot that is missing on screen. In both processes, phone technology bestows its live-ness to the dead world of the film—at least momentarily, until rational thought points out its absurdity. Social/Individual While going to the cinema is a social activity, the apparatus of cinema is organised in such a way as to individuate the cinema experience. The combination of the dimming of the auditorium lights to darkness and the seating arrangement encourages the viewer to suppress the awareness of others. The experience can then become intensely private. While there are physical and aural constraints on the viewer’s behaviour, imposed mainly to guarantee other viewers’ enjoyment (including, ordinarily, the prohibition of mobile phone use!), once seated and still, the viewer feels entitled to respond to the action on the screen in whatever way appropriate: they can smile, shudder, or weep with impunity. Additionally, the optics of the lens (the cinema projector reproducing the camera’s), in conjunction with the design of the auditorium itself, continues the tradition of Renaissance perspective in providing a single vanishing point that guarantees centrality to each viewer in relation to the scene depicted however many viewers there are in the cinema, wherever they are sitting. As far as the apparatus of cinema is concerned, there is no privileged view of the visual field displayed on the screen; each viewer in the auditorium see the same view, wherever they sit, centred and interpolated individually. Text-messaging is one-to-one communication par excellence. It takes speech telephone privacy one step further: even in a situation where both sender and receiver are in public spaces, surrounded by people, two-way communication can be completely private. When every member of the audience in a screening of Textual @traction receives text messages, they receive them at the same time as everyone else, and they assume they are receiving the same message. Emphasised by the cacophony of (individually-chosen) text alerts as each message reaches its destination within split seconds of each other, the simultaneity and the common address transforms what is usually an individual and private mode of communication into a collective, social one. At the same time, the individuating effect of the cinematic apparatus is undermined. Awareness of their counterparts’ presence returns, the light from individual phone screens illuminate the viewers’/phones users’ faces as they retrieve and read their messages and they look around the auditorium to compare their reactions with those of others. In those moments, the social/individual polarity as it relates to the two technologies is reversed: the phone’s from individual to social; cinema, from individuating to collectivising. Intimate/Anonymous While the apparatus of cinema individuates, the address of cinema is anonymous, making no adjustment for the individual (Baudry; Comolli; De Lauretis). Of course, there is specificity in the address of most cinema: the various genre of commercial film, as well as the varieties of independent and avant-garde films, presume certain audiences and address these audiences on the basis of a shared set of assumptions and expectations. These include individual films’ themes, the forms of narrative (or non-narrative), its variety of characters, the pleasures the films afford, and so on. However, cinema is not discursive. It cannot by ‘adjusted’ to suit the individual. The Intimate/Anonymous polarity is one that draws out the difference between a mode of representation, in this case cinema, and a mode of communication, text messaging. The former presents a completed artefact of some kind while the latter is a technology that allows for discursive activity between sender and receiver. Of course, various forms of interactive art are necessarily making this notion of the ‘artefact’ problematic, allowing the individual viewer to organise and re-organise narratives, modify environments, and create unique assemblages of images and sounds, often enabled by sophisticated computer programmes. During such interaction, individuals may create never-to-be repeated experiences brought about by complex, randomised interfaces. Nevertheless, these are examples of interaction with the artefact and while they may be unique, they are also anonymous. If discursive activity between users is achieved in these circumstances then the technology by definition becomes a mode of communication, however mediated by technology or programming. Telephone communication is all about individual address, both in spoken and text language. A text messages is either sent to elicit a response or it is the response. Unless it is an unsolicited, anonymous message, a text message is a specific and personal missive to the individual, its specificity arising from the sender’s knowledge of the receiver. Receiving such text messages during Textual @traction (and because of the sexual tenor of some of the messages, they are especially ‘personal’)—‘sent’ to the audience members ‘unwittingly’ by the individual fictional characters on screen—transforms the address of the film from anonymous to intimate, from general to individual. The intimacy associated with text messaging enhances our identification with the on-screen characters because we are given an insight into their motivations by being (voyeuristically) included what is generally a private discourse. For those who have experienced the Textual @traction interactive event and who have expressed an opinion about it, it does seem that it was this dimension of the experience that was a particular source of pleasure. Passive/Active In mainstream cinema we enter the auditorium and we sit down to face the screen, on which the film appears. While we watch and listen we may eat and drink, shout, weep, and laugh. We can also leave if we disapprove of the film or of the behaviour of others around us. While all these activities (and more) are possible, none will impact on what is happening on the screen, nor, crucially, on the flow of information that constructs our understanding of the characters’ actions and the narrative in general. In this respect, as an audience, we are effectively passive. The receiving of messages during Textual @traction invites the audience to collaborate actively in the final form of the narrative that is the interactive event, completing the fictional world constructed by film and text messages together. The information they receive by text message enhances their understanding of both character motivation and of the narrative in general. Without their activity, the film is a puzzle. Added to the conceptual activity that this involves, there is also the physical activity and the psychological adjustment: when the audience members’ message alert sounds, they have to undertake a number of keystrokes on their keypad in order to bring the message up on the phone screen, then they have to read the message and construe the message’s relevance to the characters on screen, before returning to the cinema-screen element of the event once more. Conclusion There is no doubt that the Textual @traction interactive event strains credulity, or, to put it another way, depends on an enhancement of the suspension of disbelief normally accustomed to by a cinema audience. The notion that on-screen characters are ‘unwittingly’ sending text messages to audience members and that they are reading them ‘at the same time’ is nothing short of absurd. Absurdity and its wilful disregard by the audience, however, is no stranger to cinema, as we know. What I have attempted to do in this paper is to account for the success of the Textual @traction interactive event, despite its absurdity, by identifying three forms of collaboration that it depends on: collaboration with the text in order to complete the fiction, a collaboration between cinema as a mode of representation and messaging as a mode of communication that the audience member enables, and a collaboration between cinema/subject and telephone/subject performed by each audience member. As I have indicated, when these collaborations take place, some of the habitual characteristics of both modes are transformed or modified: text messaging becomes a social rather than a private activity, while the apparatus of cinema transforms from one that individuates to one that collectivises. In addition, the address of cinema, normally anonymous, is bestowed with intimacy by the text messaging, and finally, a normally passive audience is active in their involvement to complete the fiction. References Baudry, Jean-Louis. “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus.” Film Quarterly 28.2 (Winter 1974-5): 39-47. Bazin, André. “The Evolution of the Language of the Cinema.” What Is Cinema? Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: U of California P, 1967. 23-40. Branigan, Edward. “Formal Permutations of the Point-of-View Shot”. Screen 16.3 (1975): 54-64. Bordwell, D., J. Staiger, and K. Thompson. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. London: Routledge, 1985. Comolli, Jean-Louis. “Technique and Ideology: Camera, Perspective, Depth of Field.” Movies and Methods Vol. II. Ed, Bill Nichols. Berkeley: U of California P, 1985. 40-57. De Lauretis, T., and S. Heath. The Cinematic Apparatus. London: Macmillan, 1980. Gaut, Berys. “Identification and Emotion in Narrative Film.” Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures: An Anthology. Ed. Noel Carroll and Jinhee Choi. London: Blackwell, 2006. Metz, Christian. Film Language. Trans. Michael Taylor. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1975 [2004]. Monaco, James. How to Read a Film. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Morris, Ieuan. "Interruption/Interaction/Collaboration: A Critical Appraisal of the Textual @traction Interactive Event." M/C Journal 9.2 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/15-morris.php>. APA Style Morris, I. (May 2006) "Interruption/Interaction/Collaboration: A Critical Appraisal of the Textual @traction Interactive Event," M/C Journal, 9(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/15-morris.php>.

Photograph by Gonzalo Echeverria (2010)“Beyond reasonable doubt” is the standard of proof for criminal cases in a court of law. However, what happens when doubt, reasonable or otherwise, is embedded in the media reporting of criminal cases, even before charges have been laid? This paper will analyse newspaper reports of recent rape cases involving Australian footballers, and identify narrative figures that are used to locate blame solely with the alleged victims, protecting the footballers from blame. I uncover several stock female “characters” which evoke doubt in the women’s claims: the Predatory Woman, who hunts down footballers for sex and is always sexually available to any and all footballers; the Woman Scorned, who makes a false rape complaint out of revenge; and the Gold Digger, who makes a false complaint for money. I will argue that the news media thus effectively provide footballers with a criminal defence, before the cases can even reach court. Rape and Football in Australia The issue of football and rape first came to mass public attention in February 2004, when six players from National Rugby League (NRL) team the Canterbury Bulldogs allegedly raped a woman while at a New South Wales resort. Two weeks later, two players from the St Kilda Australian Football League (AFL) team allegedly raped a woman following their pre-season cup victory. These two football codes are the nation’s most popular, with rugby league dominating the north-eastern states, with the southern, eastern and western the domain of Australian Rules. In neither case were charges laid, and although at least twenty distinct cases have been reported in the Australian media, involving more than fifty-six footballers and officials, only one–NRL star Brett Stewart–has yet been tried. Stewart was acquitted in September 2010. Former AFL footballer Andrew Lovett has also been ordered to stand trial in July 2011 for allegedly raping a woman on Christmas Eve, 2009. Nevertheless, the majority of cases never reach court. In criminal cases, the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) ultimately decides whether to pursue charges through the courts, and, as most cases will be decided by a jury drawn from the general public, the DPP must decide whether the general public would accept the prosecution’s evidence as proof of guilt “beyond reasonable doubt.” This means that if a jury retains any doubt that the accused person is guilty, as long as that doubt is reasonable, they must return a verdict of “not guilty.” Public opinion in high-profile cases is therefore extremely important. If the DPP perceives a high level of public scepticism about a particular case, this indicates that the likelihood of the general public accepting the prosecution’s evidence is low, and they will often decide not to pursue the case. My analysis will show that media reports of the cases, which were published before any decision about laying criminal charges was made, can in fact work to create doubt, taking popular, victim-blaming stories to cast doubt on the complainants’ testimonies. Thus “reasonable doubt,” or a doubt that seems reasonable to many or most readers, is created before the case can even reach court. Predatory Women, Gold Diggers and Women Scorned When debate began in 2004 and explanations were sought for the high numbers of cases, stories abounded in which women have consensual sex with footballers, and then make a false rape complaint. I identify the principal characters of these stories as the Predatory Woman, Gold Digger and Woman Scorned. These stories were particularly prevalent amongst football representatives, blog contributors and talkback radio callers. Some media commentators provided alternative explanations (Magnay, for example), and others were explicitly critical of such stories (Pinkney, Wilson, for example); however, other journalists in fact evoked these same stereotypes. All of these characters have “common currency” (Smart 39), and have been used by defence lawyers in criminal trials for centuries, which means they are likely to be believed. These commentators therefore (indirectly) portray the complainants as liars, and reinforce the pervasive victim-blaming discourses in the wider public. The Predatory Woman The Predatory Woman character can be traced back at least as far as the early nineteenth century, when so-called “fallen” women were frequently “scorned as predatory creatures who lured young men into sin” (Clark 59). In her study of newspaper articles on football and sexual assault, gender theorist Kim Toffoletti identified the “predatory female” as a recurrent figure who is used to portray footballers as victims of “deviant” female sexuality (432-3). Toffoletti argues that the assumption underlying the use of the predatory female is that “incidents of sexual assault can occur when women deviate from the ‘conventions’ of heterosexual relations that expect them to be passive and sexually available, and men to exude sexual virility” (433). However, I argue that commentators’ usage often carries this further, and rather than using the story to claim that a victim of rape “deserved” it, the Predatory Woman actually serves as a replacement for the Raped Woman, therefore implicitly claiming that the complainant was lying. The Predatory Woman is the aggressor in all sexual encounters with footballers, a “sexual predator” (McCabe 31) who is said to “target” players and “hunt in packs” (Lyon 1). In a 2004 interview, one footballer described the phenomenon as “frightening” (McCabe 31), and another in 2009 claimed that footballers are “given temptations,” and “some of them [women] are downright predators” (Cunningham 30). The hunting animal metaphor clearly represents women as sexual aggressors, virtually suggesting that they are committing violent acts–moving in on unsuspecting footballers for the “kill” (sex). Thus portraying a complainant as one who seeks out sex with footballers implies that she victimised the players. As a woman cannot be both sexual aggressor and rape victim, the character of the Predatory Woman replaces that of the Raped Woman, therefore invalidating a complainant’s testimony and creating doubt. The Woman Scorned The Woman Scorned, another popular character in footballer sexual assault narratives, has also been evoked by the defence in criminal rape trials for centuries (Sanday; Benedict 2, 39-40, 83; Larcombe 100, 104-106, 111; Lees 78). The prevalence of footballers’ beliefs in the Woman Scorned story when NRL player Simon Williams commented about the prevalence of group sex/rape incidents involving NRL players on the 2009 Four Corners “Code of Silence” episode: It’s not during the act, it’s the way you treat them after it. Most of them could have been avoided, if they [players] had put them [women] in a cab and said thanks or that sort of thing not just kicked her out and called her a dirty whatever. It’s how you treat them afterwards that can cover a lot of that stuff up. Williams’ implicit claim here is that no woman would make a rape complaint as long as footballers always “said thanks” after sex. He thus implies that “most” of the complaints have been about revenge from women who felt mistreated after consensual sex: Women Scorned. The Gold Digger The Gold Digger is also an established character in both football rape stories and criminal rape trials; Peggy Sanday identifies her in cases dating from the eighteenth century. In rape cases, the Gold Digger can be evoked when a prominent and/or wealthy man–such as a noble in the eighteenth century, or a footballer in the present context–is accused of rape, whether or not the alleged victim seeks or receives a financial settlement. Many football fans evoked the Gold Digger on Internet blog sites, even when there were no observable characteristics corresponding to the Gold Digger in any of the media narratives. One declared: “My mum said she was probably being a slut, then after they ‘did’ her, she decided 2 say summin coz she thought she could get money or summin out of it [sic]” (in Baird 41). The Gold Digger stereotype invalidates a rape complaint, as a woman who alleges rape for financial gain must be lying, and was therefore not raped. Her claims are to be doubted. Narrative Immunity From 2009 onward, although traces of these characters remained, the focus of the debate shifted, from the possibility of sexual assault to players’ alcohol intake and the prevalence of “group sex.” Nina Philadelphoff-Puren identifies implicit claims that the complainants were lying in the statements of football representatives (37, 41-43), which imply that they must be Predatory Women, Women Scorned or Gold Diggers. In order to show clearly how journalists mobilised these characters more directly to evoke doubt, I conducted a search of the “Newsbank” newspaper database, for opinion pieces that sought to explain why the allegations were made, using varying combinations of the search terms “AFL,” “NRL,” “football,” “sexual assault,” “rape,” “rugby,” “sexual violence,” “sex” and “women.” Articles were sought in broadsheet newspapers The Age (Melbourne) and The Sydney Morning Herald, and tabloids The Herald Sun (Melbourne) and Daily Telegraph (Sydney), the most widely read newspapers in the cities where the alleged incidents occurred. The time-frame selected was 27 February 2004 to 1 May 2004, which covered the period from when the Canterbury Bulldogs case was first reported, until debate died down after the announcement that no charges would be laid against St Kilda footballers Steven Milne and Leigh Montagna. Twenty articles were collected for analysis: two from the Daily Telegraph, eight from the Herald Sun, seven from the Age, and three from the Sydney Morning Herald. Of these, half (ten) overtly blamed the alleged victims, with seven of those explicitly evoking Predatory Woman, Woman Scorned and/or Gold Digger stereotypes, and one strongly implying them. Although it might be expected that tabloid newspapers would be much more likely to (re-)produce popular stereotypes than broadsheets, the same numbers were found in each type of newspaper. The “common currency” (Smart 39) these stories have means that they are more likely to be considered credible than other stories. Their use by respected media commentators–particularly broadsheet journalists, whose publications lay claim to an educated readership and more progressive attitudes–is of even greater significance. In this paper, I will analyse three broadsheet articles in detail, in order to illustrate the various strategies used to evoke the stereotyped characters for an educated readership. The articles selected are by writers from very different backgrounds–a former footballer, a feminist and a “life-skills” coach to AFL footballers–and although it might seem that they would provide markedly different perspectives on the issue, I will show that all three evoke stereotypes that cast doubt on the complainants’ claims. The Story of the “Insider” Former AFL footballer Tim Watson’s “AFL Players and the Trouble Zone” was published shortly after the allegations against the St Kilda AFL players were made public in 2004. The article features a number of Predatory Women, who make “victims” of footballers; however, while Watson does not provide direct narrative accounts of the alleged rapes, he instead recounts narratives of other interactions between footballers and women. Predatory Women therefore come to replace Raped Women as characters and invalidate the alleged victims’ claims; as Watson represents these women as the sole agents, full responsibility for these incidents is attributed to women. The bulk of Watson’s article relates two stories unconnected with any (known) sexual assault cases, about AFL teams travelling to the country for training and being harassed by women. Placing the narratives immediately after warnings about “trouble zones,” when the article is clearly responding to the sexual assault allegations, suggests that his narratives explain what “potential trouble” and “trouble zones” are. He therefore implies that his narratives illustrate what “really” happened with the St Kilda (and Canterbury) players. The only instances where players are given grammatical agency in this narrative is when they “mingled with the locals” and “left the function as a group”; all the narrative action is attributed to women. Mingling has no sexual connotation, and “the locals” is a gender neutral term, implying that the players’ only action at the function was to interact with men and women in a non-sexual way. The characters of “a couple of girls” are introduced, and according to Watson these “girls” made it clear to everyone that they were keen to attract the attention of a couple of the players. One girl was so convinced of her intentions that she sidled up to the coach to explain to him what she planned to do later in the night to one of his players. The team left the function as a group and went back to the hotel without the adoring fans. In order to portray the women more clearly as the sole sexual aggressors–Predatory Women–Watson leaves out any events where players actively participate, events which are highly likely to have occurred. For example, in Watson’s narrative there is no two-way flirtation, and the players do not seek out, encourage or even respond in any (positive) way to the female attention they receive, although anecdotal evidence suggests this is extremely unlikely to have happened (Mewett and Toffoletti 170, 172-73). The women are only grammatical agents with intentions–their agency relates to what they plan to do–however, emphasising the fact that the team left as a group suggests that it was only this defensive action which prevented the women from carrying out their intentions and instigating sexual activity. Using “sidled” rather than “went” or “approached” characterises the woman as sly and manipulative, casting her in a negative light and adding to the sense that she was solely responsible. The second story is described as “almost identical” to the first, but Watson takes even greater pains to emphasise the players’ passivity, again portraying them as victims of Predatory Women. Watson attaches only the passive voice to the players: he says that they were “woken in their hotel rooms” and “subject to determined, but unwanted, advances.” The women are entirely absent from these statements. They appear only as shadows presumed responsible for waking the players and making the unwanted advances. This erasure of the female agent only emphasises the players’ passivity in the face of female seduction and general resistance to overwhelming female sexual aggression. As in the first story, the only action attributed to a footballer is defensive: a senior player convincing the women to leave. This reinforces the idea that male footballers are the victims when it comes to casual sexual relations, and casts doubt on any claims of rape. The Story of the “Insider-Outsider” The second article, “When an Elite Footballer Has Sex with a Girl…,” is by “life skills” coach to AFL players Damien Foster, who calls himself “a classic insider-outsider” to football (SBS). As a partial outsider, Foster would therefore presumably have less vested interest in protecting footballers than Watson; however, his narrative also denies the complaints’ credibility, clearly evoking a victim-blaming character: the Woman Scorned. Foster obliquely claims that the St Kilda and Canterbury cases arose simply because women and men view sex differently and therefore “a footballer may land himself in trouble because it just doesn’t occur to him to develop tactful, diplomatic methods of saying goodbye”. He continues, “When the girl [sic] realises the total indifference with which she is being treated after intimacy, bitterness sets in and it lingers. There are many girls in Australia now in this situation.” While Foster does not directly say that the “girls” who made rape complaints against the Bulldogs and St Kilda are Women Scorned, the fact that this story is used to explain why the allegations were made says it for him. According to Foster’s logic, if footballers learnt to say “thanks, love, that was great” after sex, then no rape complaints would ever be made. A “Feminist” Story? Controversial feminist Germaine Greer would seem even more likely to avoid victim-blame than men involved with football clubs, and she does not follow Watson’s portrayal of utterly passive, squeaky-clean footballers, or Foster’s narrative of undiplomatic players. In “Ugly Sex Has Just Got a Lot Louder,” she does acknowledge that some harm may have been done; however, Greer nevertheless portrays the complainants as Predatory Women, Women Scorned and Gold Diggers. Greer elects to tell a “history” of male footballer-female interactions, establishing male athletes’ disrespect for and mistreatment of women as a given. However, she goes on to evoke the Predatory Woman, portraying her as utterly desperate and willing to go to any lengths to have contact with players. Greer laments, good family men have been known to succumb to the groupies’ onslaught, believing that as long as they don’t kiss these desperate creatures, as long as they make no move that could be interpreted as a sign of affection, they haven’t been genuinely unfaithful to their wives and sweethearts. Indeed, the more brutal the treatment of the women they have casual sex with, the less they have to reproach themselves for. Pack rape in such circumstances can come to seem guiltless, a condign punishment for being a stupid slag, even. This explanation of footballers’ behaviour contains several grammatical patterns which represent the players as passive and not responsible for anything that takes place. In the first sentence, the only things these footballers actually do are succumbing and believing, both passive verbs; the rest of the sentence is devoted to what they do not do: “as long as they don’t kiss… as long as they make no move.” Thus it would seem that the players do not actively participate in the sexual activity instigated by these women, that they simply lie back and allow the women to do as they will. That the women are labelled “desperate creatures” who launch an “onslaught” to which footballers “succumb” confirms their sexual aggression. Although the second and third sentences depict violence and rape, these actions are not directly attributed to the players. The brutal treatment of the women the players have casual sex with has no grammatical agent–“the more brutal the treatment of the women they have casual sex with”–dissociating them from the brutality and subtly implying that “someone else” is responsible for it. Similarly, “pack rape” has no agent: no player commits or is involved in it, and it appears to happen independently of them. As Susan Ehrlich demonstrates, this denial of agency is a common tactic for accused rapists to use, in order to deny that they were responsible for their actions (36-61). Thus Greer uses the same grammatical patterns which deflect blame away from footballers, even when the behaviour involved is violent rape. This continual emphasis on the players’ passivity reinforces the portrayal of the women as sexually aggressive Predatory Women. Greer also introduces the figures of the Woman Scorned and Gold Digger. She claims that the only difference between the “old days” and the present scenarios is that now women are “not embarrassed to say that they agreed to sex with one man they’d only just met, or even with two, but they hadn’t agreed to being brutalised, insulted or humiliated, and they want redress.” This paragraph appears almost directly after the one where Greer mentions pack rape and violence, and it may seem therefore that the redress these women seek is for rape. However, since Greer claims that at least some of the women who “want redress” want it because they have been “insulted or humiliated,” rather than raped, this evokes the Woman Scorned. Greer continues by introducing the Gold Digger as a further (and complementary) explanation for these insulted and humiliated women to seek “redress.” Greer writes that women now “also seem quite interested in another factor in sex with footballers – namely, indecent amounts of money.” With this statement, she implies that some women have sex with footballers just so that they can make a rape complaint afterwards and obtain a large payment. She concedes that the women who make allegations against footballers may have been “abused,” but she trivialises them by claiming that they “scream and holler,” portraying them as hysterical. She thus discredits them and casts doubt on their claims. Greer ignores the fact that only one woman has either sought or obtained a financial settlement from footballers for a case of rape, and this woman only applied for it after charges against the players responsible were dropped. Whilst this argument is clearly unfounded, the strength of the Gold Digger story, along with the Woman Scorned and Predatory Woman, is likely to give the impression that the rape complaints made against the footballers were unfounded. Conclusion: The Benefit of the Doubt The fact that a significant number of media commentators employed tactics similar to those defence lawyers use in rape trials suggests that a de facto “trial” took place; one in which stories that discredit the complainants were prominent. These stories were enough to evoke “(un)reasonable doubt” in the women’s claims, and the accused footballers were therefore “acquitted.” That doubt can be evoked so easily in such high-profile cases is particularly problematic as rape cases in general are those least likely to be believed (Jordan 64-83). Further, many victims state that the fear of disbelief is one of the most important factors in deciding not to pursue criminal charges (Warshaw 50). Even if one leaves aside the likelihood that the prevalence of doubt in the media and the “blogosphere” contributed to the DPP’s decision not to pursue charges, the media “acquittal” is likely to have two further effects: it may deter future complainants from coming forward, if they assume that their claims will similarly be doubted; and it contributes to more generalised beliefs that women habitually lie about rape, particularly those who accuse footballers. While of course any accused person must be held innocent until proven guilty, it is equally important to give an alleged victim the benefit of the doubt, and not presume that all rape complainants are liars unless proven otherwise. References “Code of Silence.” Four Corners. ABC, 11 May. 2009. Television. Baird, Julia. “All Together, Boys, for a Weekend Roast.” Sydney Morning Herald 28 February. 2004: 41. Benedict, Jeff. Athletes and Acquaintance Rape. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 1998. Clark, Anna. Women’s Silence, Men’s Violence: Sexual Assault in England 1770-1845. New York: Pandora Press, 1987. Cunningham, Ryan. “A Footballer’s Life: Confusion, Temptation and Guilt by Association.” Sydney Morning Herald 19 Jun. 2009: 30. Ehrlich, Susan. Representing Rape: Language and Sexual Consent. London: Routledge, 2001. Foster, Damien. “When an Elite Footballer Has Sex with a Girl...” Age 23 Mar. 2004: 13. “Foul Play.” Insight. SBS, 16 Apr. 2004. Television. Greer, Germaine. “Ugly Sex Has Just Got a Lot Louder.” Age 23 Mar. 2004: 1, 17. Jordan, Jan. The Word of a Woman?: Police, Rape and Belief. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Larcombe, Wendy. Compelling Engagements: Feminism, Rape Law and Romance Fiction. Sydney: Federation Press, 2005. Lees, Sue. Ruling Passions. Buckingham: Open UP, 1997. Lyon, Karen. “They Love Their Footy, But Can They Keep the Faith?” Age 20 Mar. 2004: 1. Magnay, Jacquelin. “What Dogs Do.” Sydney Morning Herald 28 Feb. 2004: 31 McCabe, Helen. “Perilous Games of Sport and Sex.” Daily Telegraph 1 May. 2004: 31. Mewett, Peter, and Kim Toffoletti. “Rogue Men and Predatory Women: Female Fans’ Perceptions of Australian Footballers’ Sexual Conduct.” International Review for the Sociology of Sport 43.2 (2008): 165-80. Pinkney, Matthew. “Don’t Make Their Excuses.” Herald Sun 22 March. 2004: 18. Philadelphoff-Puren, Nina. “Dereliction: Women, Rape and Football.” Australian Feminist Law Journal 17. (2004): 35-51. Sanday, Peggy Reeves. A Woman Scorned: Acquaintance Rape on Trial. Berkeley: U of California P, 1996. Smart, Carol. Feminism and the Power of Law. London: Routledge, 1989. Toffoletti, Kim. “How Is Gender-Based Violence Covered in the Sporting News? An Account of the Australian Football League Sex Scandal.” Women’s Studies International Forum 30 (2007): 427-38. Warshaw, Robin. I Never Called It Rape: The Ms. Report on Recognizing, Fighting, and Surviving Date and Acquaintance Rape. New York: HarperPerennial, 1994. Watson, Tim. “AFL Players and the Trouble Zone.” Age 18 Mar. 2004: 16. Wilson, Caroline. “All the Dirty Linen Must — and Will — Be Aired.” Age, 21 Mar. 2004: 4.

If you cannot understand my argument, and declare “It’s Greek to me,” you are quoting Shakespeare.Bernard LevinPsoriatic arthritis, in its acute or “generalised” stage, is unbearably painful. Exacerbating the crippling of the joints, the entire surface of the skin is covered with lesions only moderately salved by anti-inflammatory ointment, the application of which is as painful as the ailment it seeks to relieve: NURSE MILLS: I’ll be as gentle as I can.Marlow’s face again fills the screen, intense concentration, comical strain, and a whispered urgency in the voice over—MARLOW: (Voice over) Think of something boring—For Christ’s sake think of something very very boring—Speech a speech by Ted Heath a sentence long sentence from Bernard Levin a quiz by Christopher Booker a—oh think think—! Really boring! A Welsh male-voice choir—Everything in Punch—Oh! Oh! — (Potter 17-18)Marlow’s collation of boring things as a frantic liturgy is an attempt to distract himself from a tumescence that is both unwanted and out of place. Although bed-ridden and in constant pain, he is still sensitive to erogenous stimulation, even when it is incidental. The act of recollection, of garnering lists of things that bore him, distracts him from his immediate situation as he struggles with the mental anguish of the prospect of a humiliating orgasm. Literary lists do many things. They provide richness of detail, assemble and corroborate the materiality of the world of which they are a part and provide insight into the psyche and motivation of the collator. The sheer desperation of Dennis Potter’s Marlow attests to the arbitrariness of the list, the simple requirement that discrete and unrelated items can be assembled in linear order, without any obligation for topical concatenation. In its interrogative form, the list can serve a more urgent and distressing purpose than distraction:GOLDBERG: What do you use for pyjamas?STANLEY: Nothing.GOLDBERG: You verminate the sheet of your birth.MCCANN: What about the Albigensenist heresy?GOLDBERG: Who watered the wicket in Melbourne?MCCANN: What about the blessed Oliver Plunkett?(Pinter 51)The interrogative non sequitur is an established feature of the art of intimidation. It is designed to exert maximum stress in the subject through the use of obscure asides and the endowing of trivial detail with profundity. Harold Pinter’s use of it in The Birthday Party reveals how central it was to his “theatre of menace.” The other tactic, which also draws on the logic of the inventory to be both sequential and discontinuous, is to break the subject’s will through a machine-like barrage of rhetorical questions that leave no time for answers.Pinter learned from Samuel Beckett the pitiless, unforgiving logic of trivial detail pushed to extremes. Think of Molloy’s dilemma of the sucking stones. In order for all sixteen stones that he carries with him to be sucked at least once to assuage his hunger, a reliable system has to be hit upon:Taking a stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, and putting it in my mouth, I replaced it in the right pocket of my greatcoat by a stone from the right pocket of my trousers, which I replaced with a stone from the left pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my greatcoat, which I replaced with the stone that was in my mouth, as soon as I had finished sucking it. Thus there were still four stones in each of my four pockets, but not quite the same stones. And when the desire to suck took hold of me again, I drew again on the right pocket of my greatcoat, certain of not taking the same stone as the last time. And while I sucked it I rearranged the other stones in the way I have just described. And so on. (Beckett, Molloy 69)And so on for six pages. Exhaustive permutation within a finite lexical set is common in Beckett. In the novel Watt the eponymous central character is charged with serving his unseen master’s dinner as well as tidying up afterwards. A simple and bucolic enough task it would seem. But Beckett’s characters are not satisfied with conjecture, the simple assumption that someone must be responsible for Mr. Knott’s dining arrangements. Like Molloy’s solution to the sucking stone problem, all possible scenarios must be considered to explain the conundrum of how and why Watt never saw Knott at mealtime. Twelve possibilities are offered, among them that1. Mr. Knott was responsible for the arrangement, and knew that he was responsible for the arrangement, and knew that such an arrangement existed, and was content.2. Mr. Knott was not responsible for the arrangement, but knew who was responsible for the arrangement, and knew that such an arrangement existed, and was content.(Beckett, Watt 86)This stringent adherence to detail, absurd and exasperating as it is, is the work of fiction, the persistence of a viable, believable thing called Watt who exists as long as his thought is made manifest on a page. All writers face this pernicious prospect of having to confront and satisfy “fiction’s gargantuan appetite for fact, for detail, for documentation” (Kenner 70). A writer’s writer (Philip Marlow) Dennis Potter’s singing detective struggles with the acute consciousness that words eventually will fail him. His struggle to overcome verbal entropy is a spectre that haunts the entire literary imagination, for when the words stop the world stops.Beckett made this struggle the very stuff of his work, declaring famously that all he wanted to do as a writer was to leave “a stain upon the silence” (quoted in Bair 681). His characters deteriorate from recognisable people (Hamm in Endgame, Winnie in Happy Days) to mere ciphers of speech acts (the bodiless head Listener in That Time, Mouth in Not I). During this process they provide us with the vocabulary of entropy, a horror most eloquently expressed at the end of The Unnamable: 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, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it’s done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on. (Beckett, Molloy 418)The importance Beckett accorded to pauses in his writing, from breaks in dialogue to punctuation, stresses the pacing of utterance that is in sync with the rhythm of human breath. This is acutely underlined in Jack MacGowran’s extraordinary gramophone recording of the above passage from The Unnamable. There is exhaustion in his voice, but it is inflected by an urgent push for the next words to forestall the last gasp. And what might appear to be parsimony is in fact the very commerce of writing itself. It is an economy of necessity, when any words will suffice to sustain presence in the face of imminent silence.Hugh Kenner has written eloquently on the relationship between writing and entropy, drawing on field and number theory to demonstrate how the business of fiction is forever in the process of generating variation within a finite set. The “stoic comedian,” as he figures the writer facing the blank page, self-consciously practices their art in the full cognisance that they select “elements from a closed set, and then (arrange) them inside a closed field” (Kenner 94). The nouveau roman (a genre conceived and practiced in Beckett’s lean shadow) is remembered in literary history as a rather austere, po-faced formalism that foregrounded things at the expense of human psychology or social interaction. But it is emblematic of Kenner’s portrait of stoicism as an attitude to writing that confronts the nature of fiction itself, on its own terms, as a practice “which is endlessly arranging things” (13):The bulge of the bank also begins to take effect starting from the fifth row: this row, as a matter of fact, also possesses only twenty-one trees, whereas it should have twenty-two for a true trapezoid and twenty-three for a rectangle (uneven row). (Robbe-Grillet 21)As a matter of fact. The nouveau roman made a fine if myopic art of isolating detail for detail’s sake. However, it shares with both Beckett’s minimalism and Joyce’s maximalism the obligation of fiction to fill its world with stuff (“maximalism” is a term coined by Michel Delville and Andrew Norris in relation to the musical scores of Frank Zappa that opposes the minimalism of John Cage’s work). Kenner asks, in The Stoic Comedians, where do the “thousands on thousands of things come from, that clutter Ulysses?” His answer is simple, from “a convention” and this prosaic response takes us to the heart of the matter with respect to the impact on writing of Isaac Newton’s unforgiving Second Law of Thermodynamics. In the law’s strictest physical sense of the dissipation of heat, of the loss of energy within any closed system that moves, the stipulation of the Second Law predicts that words will, of necessity, stop in any form governed by convention (be it of horror, comedy, tragedy, the Bildungsroman, etc.). Building upon and at the same time refining the early work on motion and mass theorised by Aristotle, Kepler, and Galileo, inter alia, Newton refined both the laws and language of classical mechanics. It was from Wiener’s literary reading of Newton that Kenner segued from the loss of energy within any closed system (entropy) to the running silent out of words within fiction.In the wake of Norbert Wiener’s cybernetic turn in thinking in the 1940s, which was highly influenced by Newton’s Second Law, fiction would never again be considered in the same way (metafiction was a term coined in part to recognise this shift; the nouveau roman another). Far from delivering a reassured and reassuring present-ness, an integrated and ongoing cosmos, fiction is an isometric exercise in the struggle against entropy, of a world in imminent danger of running out of energy, of not-being:“His hand took his hat from the peg over his initialled heavy overcoat…” Four nouns, and the book’s world is heavier by four things. One, the hat, “Plasto’s high grade,” will remain in play to the end. The hand we shall continue to take for granted: it is Bloom’s; it goes with his body, which we are not to stop imagining. The peg and the overcoat will fade. “On the doorstep he felt in his hip pocket for the latchkey. Not there. In the trousers I left off.” Four more things. (Kenner 87)This passage from The Stoic Comedians is a tour de force of the conjuror’s art, slowing down the subliminal process of the illusion for us to see the fragility of fiction’s precarious grip on the verge of silence, heroically “filling four hundred empty pages with combinations of twenty-six different letters” (xiii). Kenner situates Joyce in a comic tradition, preceded by Gustave Flaubert and followed by Beckett, of exhaustive fictive possibility. The stoic, he tells us, “is one who considers, with neither panic nor indifference, that the field of possibilities available to him is large perhaps, or small perhaps, but closed” (he is prompt in reminding us that among novelists, gamblers and ethical theorists, the stoic is also a proponent of the Second Law of Thermodynamics) (xiii). If Joyce is the comedian of the inventory, then it is Flaubert, comedian of the Enlightenment, who is his immediate ancestor. Bouvard and Pécuchet (1881) is an unfinished novel written in the shadow of the Encyclopaedia, an apparatus of the literate mind that sought complete knowledge. But like the Encyclopaedia particularly and the Enlightenment more generally, it is fragmentation that determines its approach to and categorisation of detail as information about the world. Bouvard and Pécuchet ends, appropriately, in a frayed list of details, pronouncements and ephemera.In the face of an unassailable impasse, all that is left Flaubert is the list. For more than thirty years he constructed the Dictionary of Received Ideas in the shadow of the truncated Bouvard and Pécuchet. And in doing so he created for the nineteenth century mind “a handbook for novelists” (Kenner 19), a breakdown of all we know “into little pieces so arranged that they can be found one at a time” (3): ACADEMY, FRENCH: Run it down but try to belong to it if you can.GREEK: Whatever one cannot understand is Greek.KORAN: Book about Mohammed, which is all about women.MACHIAVELLIAN: Word only to be spoken with a shudder.PHILOSOPHY: Always snigger at it.WAGNER: Snigger when you hear his name and joke about the music of the future. (Flaubert, Dictionary 293-330)This is a sample of the exhaustion that issues from the tireless pursuit of categorisation, classification, and the mania for ordered information. The Dictionary manifests the Enlightenment’s insatiable hunger for received ideas, an unwieldy background noise of popular opinion, general knowledge, expertise, and hearsay. In both Bouvard and Pécuchet and the Dictionary, exhaustion was the foundation of a comic art as it was for both Joyce and Beckett after him, for the simple reason that it includes everything and neglects nothing. It is comedy born of overwhelming competence, a sublime impertinence, though not of manners or social etiquette, but rather, with a nod to Oscar Wilde, the impertinence of being definitive (a droll epithet that, not surprisingly, was the title of Kenner’s 1982 Times Literary Supplement review of Richard Ellmann’s revised and augmented biography of Joyce).The inventory, then, is the underlining physio-semiotics of fictional mechanics, an elegiac resistance to the thread of fiction fraying into nothingness. The motif of thermodynamics is no mere literary conceit here. Consider the opening sentence in Borges:Of the many problems which exercised the reckless discernment of Lönnrot, none was so strange—so rigorously strange, shall we say—as the periodic series of bloody events which culminated at the villa of Triste-le-Roy, amid the ceaseless aroma of the eucalypti. (Borges 76)The subordinate clause, as a means of adjectival and adverbial augmentation, implies a potentially infinite sentence through the sheer force of grammatical convention, a machine-like resistance to running out of puff:Under the notable influence of Chesterton (contriver and embellisher of elegant mysteries) and the palace counsellor Leibniz (inventor of the pre-established harmony), in my idle afternoons I have imagined this story plot which I shall perhaps write someday and which already justifies me somehow. (72)In “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” a single adjective charmed with emphasis will do to imply an unseen network:The visible work left by this novelist is easily and briefly enumerated. (Borges 36)The annotation of this network is the inexorable issue of the inflection: “I have said that Menard’s work can be easily enumerated. Having examined with care his personal files, I find that they contain the following items.” (37) This is a sample selection from nineteen entries:a) A Symbolist sonnet which appeared twice (with variants) in the review La conque (issues of March and October 1899).o) A transposition into alexandrines of Paul Valéry’s Le cimitière marin (N.R.F., January 1928).p) An invective against Paul Valéry, in the Papers for the Suppression of Reality of Jacques Reboul. (37-38)Lists, when we encounter them in Jorge Luis Borges, are always contextual, supplying necessary detail to expand upon character and situation. And they are always intertextual, anchoring this specific fictional world to others (imaginary, real, fabulatory or yet to come). The collation and annotation of the literary works of an imagined author (Pierre Menard) of an invented author (Edmond Teste) of an actual author (Paul Valéry) creates a recursive, yet generative, feedback loop of reference and literary progeny. As long as one of these authors continues to write, or write of the work of at least one of the others, a persistent fictional present tense is ensured.Consider Hillel Schwartz’s use of the list in his Making Noise (2011). It not only lists what can and is inevitably heard, in this instance the European 1700s, but what it, or local aural colour, is heard over:Earthy: criers of artichokes, asparagus, baskets, beans, beer, bells, biscuits, brooms, buttermilk, candles, six-pence-a-pound fair cherries, chickens, clothesline, cockles, combs, coal, crabs, cucumbers, death lists, door mats, eels, fresh eggs, firewood, flowers, garlic, hake, herring, ink, ivy, jokebooks, lace, lanterns, lemons, lettuce, mackeral, matches […]. (Schwartz 143)The extended list and the catalogue, when encountered as formalist set pieces in fiction or, as in Schwartz’s case, non-fiction, are the expansive equivalent of le mot juste, the self-conscious, painstaking selection of the right word, the specific detail. Of Ulysses, Kenner observes that it was perfectly natural that it “should have attracted the attention of a group of scholars who wanted practice in compiling a word-index to some extensive piece of prose (Miles Hanley, Word Index to Ulysses, 1937). More than any other work of fiction, it suggests by its texture, often by the very look of its pages, that it has been painstakingly assembled out of single words…” (31-32). In a book already crammed with detail, with persistent reference to itself, to other texts, other media, such formalist set pieces as the following from the oneiric “Circe” episode self-consciously perform for our scrutiny fiction’s insatiable hunger for more words, for invention, the Latin root of which also gives us the word inventory:The van of the procession appears headed by John Howard Parnell, city marshal, in a chessboard tabard, the Athlone Poursuivant and Ulster King of Arms. They are followed by the Right Honourable Joseph Hutchinson, lord mayor Dublin, the lord mayor of Cork, their worships the mayors of Limerick, Galway, Sligo and Waterford, twentyeight Irish representative peers, sirdars, grandees and maharajahs bearing the cloth of estate, the Dublin Metropolitan Fire Brigade, the chapter of the saints of finance in their plutocratic order of precedence, the bishop of Down and Connor, His Eminence Michael cardinal Logue archbishop of Armagh, primate of all Ireland, His Grace, the most reverend Dr William Alexander, archbishop of Armagh, primate of all Ireland, the chief rabbi, the Presbyterian moderator, the heads of the Baptist, Anabaptist, Methodist and Moravian chapels and the honorary secretary of the society of friends. (Joyce, Ulysses 602-604)Such examples demonstrate how Joycean inventories break from narrative as architectonic, stand-alone assemblages of information. They are Rabelaisian irruptions, like Philip Marlow’s lesions, that erupt in swollen bas-relief. The exaggerated, at times hysterical, quality of such lists, perform the hallucinatory work of displacement and condensation (the Homeric parallel here is the transformation of Odysseus’s men into swine by the witch Circe). Freudian, not to mention Stindberg-ian dream-work brings together and juxtaposes images and details that only make sense as non-sense (realistic but not real), such as the extraordinary explosive gathering of civic, commercial, political, chivalric representatives of Dublin in this foreshortened excerpt of Bloom’s regal campaign for his “new Bloomusalem” (606).The text’s formidable echolalia, whereby motifs recur and recapitulate into leitmotifs, ensures that the act of reading Ulysses is always cross-referential, suggesting the persistence of a conjured world that is always already still coming into being through reading. And it is of course this forestalling of Newton’s Second Law that Joyce brazenly conducts, in both the textual and physical sense, in Finnegans Wake. The Wake is an impossible book in that it infinitely sustains the circulation of words within a closed system, creating a weird feedback loop of cyclical return. It is a text that can run indefinitely through the force of its own momentum without coming to a conclusion. In a text in which the author’s alter ego is described in terms of the technology of inscription (Shem the Penman) and his craft as being a “punsil shapner,” (Joyce, Finnegans 98) Norbert Wiener’s descriptive example of feedback as the forestalling of entropy in the conscious act of picking up a pencil is apt: One we have determined this, our motion proceeds in such a way that we may say roughly that the amount by which the pencil is not yet picked up is decreased at each stage. (Wiener 7) The Wake overcomes the book’s, and indeed writing’s, struggle with entropy through the constant return of energy into its closed system as a cycle of endless return. Its generative algorithm can be represented thus: “… a long the riverrun …” (628-3). The Wake’s sense of unending confounds and contradicts, in advance, Frank Kermode’s averring to Newton’s Second Law in his insistence that the progression of all narrative fiction is defined in terms of the “sense of an ending,” the expectation of a conclusion, whereby the termination of words makes “possible a satisfying consonance with the origins and with the middle” (Kermode 17). It is the realisation of the novel imagined by Silas Flannery, the fictitious author in Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller, an incipit that “maintains for its whole duration the potentiality of the beginning” (Calvino 140). Finnegans Wake is unique in terms of the history of the novel (if that is indeed what it is) in that it is never read, but (as Joseph Frank observed of Joyce generally) “can only be re-read” (Frank 19). With Wiener’s allegory of feedback no doubt in mind, Jacques Derrida’s cybernetic account of the act of reading Joyce comes, like a form of echolalia, on the heels of Calvino’s incipit, his perpetual sustaining of the beginning: you stay on the edge of reading Joyce—for me this has been going on for twenty-five or thirty years—and the endless plunge throws you back onto the river-bank, on the brink of another possible immersion, ad infinitum … In any case, I have the feeling that I haven’t yet begun to read Joyce, and this “not having begun to read” is sometimes the most singular and active relationship I have with his work. (Derrida 148) Derrida wonders if this process of ongoing immersion in the text is typical of all works of literature and not just the Wake. The question is rhetorical and resonates into silence. And it is silence, ultimately, that hovers as a mute herald of the end when words will simply run out.Post(script)It is in the nature of all writing that it is read in the absence of its author. Perhaps the most typical form of writing, then, is the suicide note. In an extraordinary essay, “Goodbye, Cruel Words,” Mark Dery wonders why it has been “so neglected as a literary genre” and promptly sets about reviewing its decisive characteristics. Curiously, the list features amongst its many forms: I’m done with lifeI’m no goodI’m dead. (Dery 262)And references to lists of types of suicide notes are among Dery’s own notes to the essay. With its implicit generic capacity to intransitively add more detail, the list becomes in the light of the terminal letter a condition of writing itself. The irony of this is not lost on Dery as he ponders the impotent stoicism of the scribbler setting about the mordant task of writing for the last time. Writing at the last gasp, as Dery portrays it, is a form of dogged, radical will. But his concluding remarks are reflective of his melancholy attitude to this most desperate act of writing at degree zero: “The awful truth (unthinkable to a writer) is that eloquent suicide notes are rarer than rare because suicide is the moment when language fails—fails to hoist us out of the pit, fails even to express the unbearable weight” (264) of someone on the precipice of the very last word they will ever think, let alone write. Ihab Hassan (1967) and George Steiner (1967), it would seem, were latecomers as proselytisers of the language of silence. But there is a queer, uncanny optimism at work at the terminal moment of writing when, contra Dery, words prevail on the verge of “endless, silent night.” (264) Perhaps when Newton’s Second Law no longer has carriage over mortal life, words take on a weird half-life of their own. Writing, after Socrates, does indeed circulate indiscriminately among its readers. There is a dark irony associated with last words. When life ceases, words continue to have the final say as long as they are read, and in so doing they sustain an unlikely, and in their own way, stoical sense of unending.ReferencesBair, Deirdre. Samuel Beckett: A Biography. London: Jonathan Cape, 1978.Beckett, Samuel. Molloy Malone Dies. The Unnamable. London: John Calder, 1973.---. Watt. London: John Calder, 1976.Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths. Selected Stories & Other Writings. Ed. Donald A. Yates & James E. Irby. New York: New Directions, 1964.Calvino, Italo. If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller. Trans. William Weaver, London: Picador, 1981.Delville, Michael, and Andrew Norris. “Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and the Secret History of Maximalism.” Ed. Louis Armand. Contemporary Poetics: Redefining the Boundaries of Contemporary Poetics, in Theory & Practice, for the Twenty-First Century. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2007. 126-49.Derrida, Jacques. “Two Words for Joyce.” Post-Structuralist Joyce. Essays from the French. Ed. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984. 145-59.Dery, Mark. I Must Not think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2012.Frank, Joseph, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature.” Sewanee Review, 53, 1945: 221-40, 433-56, 643-53.Flaubert, Gustave. Bouvard and Pécuchet. Trans. A. J. KrailSheimer. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.Flaubert, Gustave. Dictionary of Received Ideas. Trans. A. J. KrailSheimer. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.Hassan, Ihab. The Literature of Silence: Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett. New York: Knopf, 1967.Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. London: Faber and Faber, 1975.---. Ulysses. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992.Kenner, Hugh. The Stoic Comedians. Berkeley: U of California P, 1974.Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Narrative Fiction. New York: Oxford U P, 1966.‪Levin, Bernard. Enthusiasms. London: Jonathan Cape, 1983.MacGowran, Jack. MacGowran Speaking Beckett. Claddagh Records, 1966.Pinter, Harold. The Birthday Party. London: Methuen, 1968.Potter, Dennis. The Singing Detective. London, Faber and Faber, 1987.Robbe-Grillet, Alain. Jealousy. Trans. Richard Howard. London: John Calder, 1965.Schwartz, Hillel. Making Noise. From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond. New York: Zone Books, 2011.Steiner, George. Language and Silence: New York: Atheneum, 1967.Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics, Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965.

IntroductionThe Internet (especially in the so-called Web 2.0 phase), digital media and file-sharing networks have thrust copyright law under public scrutiny, provoking discourses questioning what is fair in the digital age. Accessible hardware and software has led to prosumerism – creativity blending media consumption with media production to create new works that are freely disseminated online via popular video-sharing Web sites such as YouTube or genre specific music sites like GYBO (“Get Your Bootleg On”) amongst many others. The term “prosumer” is older than the Web, and the conceptual convergence of producer and consumer roles is certainly not new, for “at electric speeds the consumer becomes producer as the public becomes participant role player” (McLuhan 4). Similarly, Toffler’s “Third Wave” challenges “old power relationships” and promises to “heal the historic breach between producer and consumer, giving rise to the ‘prosumer’ economics” (27). Prosumption blurs the traditionally separate consumer and producer creating a new creative era of mass customisation of artefacts culled from the (copyrighted) media landscape (Tapscott 62-3). Simultaneously, corporate interests dependent upon the protections provided by copyright law lobby for augmented rights and actively defend their intellectual property through law suits, takedown notices and technological reinforcement. Despite a lack demonstrable economic harm in many cases, the propertarian approach is winning and frequently leading to absurd results (Collins).The balance between private and public interests in creative works is facilitated by the doctrine of fair use (as codified in the United States Copyright Act 1976, section 107). The majority of copyright laws contain “fair” exceptions to claims of infringement, but fair use is characterised by a flexible, open-ended approach that allows the law to flex with the times. Until recently the defence was unique to the U.S., but on 2 January Israel amended its copyright laws to include a fair use defence. (For an overview of the new Israeli fair use exception, see Efroni.) Despite its flexibility, fair use has been systematically eroded by ever encroaching copyrights. This paper argues that copyright enforcement has spun out of control and the raison d’être of the law has shifted from being “an engine of free expression” (Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enterprises 471 U.S. 539, 558 (1985)) towards a “legal regime for intellectual property that increasingly looks like the law of real property, or more properly an idealized construct of that law, one in which courts seeks out and punish virtually any use of an intellectual property right by another” (Lemley 1032). Although the copyright landscape appears bleak, two recent cases suggest that fair use has not fallen by the wayside and may well recover. This paper situates fair use as an essential legal and cultural mechanism for optimising creative expression.A Brief History of CopyrightThe law of copyright extends back to eighteenth century England when the Statute of Anne (1710) was enacted. Whilst the length of this paper precludes an in depth analysis of the law and its export to the U.S., it is important to stress the goals of copyright. “Copyright in the American tradition was not meant to be a “property right” as the public generally understands property. It was originally a narrow federal policy that granted a limited trade monopoly in exchange for universal use and access” (Vaidhyanathan 11). Copyright was designed as a right limited in scope and duration to ensure that culturally important creative works were not the victims of monopolies and were free (as later mandated in the U.S. Constitution) “to promote the progress.” During the 18th century English copyright discourse Lord Camden warned against propertarian approaches lest “all our learning will be locked up in the hands of the Tonsons and the Lintons of the age, who will set what price upon it their avarice chooses to demand, till the public become as much their slaves, as their own hackney compilers are” (Donaldson v. Becket 17 Cobbett Parliamentary History, col. 1000). Camden’s sentiments found favour in subsequent years with members of the North American judiciary reiterating that copyright was a limited right in the interests of society—the law’s primary beneficiary (see for example, Wheaton v. Peters 33 US 591 [1834]; Fox Film Corporation v. Doyal 286 US 123 [1932]; US v. Paramount Pictures 334 US 131 [1948]; Mazer v. Stein 347 US 201, 219 [1954]; Twentieth Century Music Corp. v. Aitken 422 U.S. 151 [1975]; Aronson v. Quick Point Pencil Co. 440 US 257 [1979]; Dowling v. United States 473 US 207 [1985]; Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enterprises 471 U.S. 539 [1985]; Luther R. Campbell a.k.a. Luke Skyywalker, et al. v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc. 510 U.S 569 [1994]). Putting the “Fair” in Fair UseIn Folsom v. Marsh 9 F. Cas. 342 (C.C.D. Mass. 1841) (No. 4,901) Justice Storey formulated the modern shape of fair use from a wealth of case law extending back to 1740 and across the Atlantic. Over the course of one hundred years the English judiciary developed a relatively cohesive set of principles governing the use of a first author’s work by a subsequent author without consent. Storey’s synthesis of these principles proved so comprehensive that later English courts would look to his decision for guidance (Scott v. Stanford L.R. 3 Eq. 718, 722 (1867)). Patry explains fair use as integral to the social utility of copyright to “encourage. . . learned men to compose and write useful books” by allowing a second author to use, under certain circumstances, a portion of a prior author’s work, where the second author would himself produce a work promoting the goals of copyright (Patry 4-5).Fair use is a safety valve on copyright law to prevent oppressive monopolies, but some scholars suggest that fair use is less a defence and more a right that subordinates copyrights. Lange and Lange Anderson argue that the doctrine is not fundamentally about copyright or a system of property, but is rather concerned with the recognition of the public domain and its preservation from the ever encroaching advances of copyright (2001). Fair use should not be understood as subordinate to the exclusive rights of copyright owners. Rather, as Lange and Lange Anderson claim, the doctrine should stand in the superior position: the complete spectrum of ownership through copyright can only be determined pursuant to a consideration of what is required by fair use (Lange and Lange Anderson 19). The language of section 107 suggests that fair use is not subordinate to the bundle of rights enjoyed by copyright ownership: “Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work . . . is not an infringement of copyright” (Copyright Act 1976, s.107). Fair use is not merely about the marketplace for copyright works; it is concerned with what Weinreb refers to as “a community’s established practices and understandings” (1151-2). This argument boldly suggests that judicial application of fair use has consistently erred through subordinating the doctrine to copyright and considering simply the effect of the appropriation on the market place for the original work.The emphasis on economic factors has led courts to sympathise with copyright owners leading to a propertarian or Blackstonian approach to copyright (Collins; Travis) propagating the myth that any use of copyrighted materials must be licensed. Law and media reports alike are potted with examples. For example, in Bridgeport Music, Inc., et al v. Dimension Films et al 383 F. 3d 400 (6th Cir. 2004) a Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals held that the transformative use of a three-note guitar sample infringed copyrights and that musicians must obtain licence from copyright owners for every appropriated audio fragment regardless of duration or recognisability. Similarly, in 2006 Christopher Knight self-produced a one-minute television advertisement to support his campaign to be elected to the board of education for Rockingham County, North Carolina. As a fan of Star Wars, Knight used a makeshift Death Star and lightsaber in his clip, capitalising on the imagery of the Jedi Knight opposing the oppressive regime of the Empire to protect the people. According to an interview in The Register the advertisement was well received by local audiences prompting Knight to upload it to his YouTube channel. Several months later, Knight’s clip appeared on Web Junk 2.0, a cable show broadcast by VH1, a channel owned by media conglomerate Viacom. Although his permission was not sought, Knight was pleased with the exposure, after all “how often does a local school board ad wind up on VH1?” (Metz). Uploading the segment of Web Junk 2.0 featuring the advertisement to YouTube, however, led Viacom to quickly issue a take-down notice citing copyright infringement. Knight expressed his confusion at the apparent unfairness of the situation: “Viacom says that I can’t use my clip showing my commercial, claiming copy infringement? As we say in the South, that’s ass-backwards” (Metz).The current state of copyright law is, as Patry says, “depressing”:We are well past the healthy dose stage and into the serious illness stage ... things are getting worse, not better. Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works. Instead, its principal functions now are to preserve existing failed business models, to suppress new business models and technologies, and to obtain, if possible, enormous windfall profits from activity that not only causes no harm, but which is beneficial to copyright owners. Like Humpty-Dumpty, the copyright law we used to know can never be put back together.The erosion of fair use by encroaching private interests represented by copyrights has led to strong critiques leveled at the judiciary and legislators by Lessig, McLeod and Vaidhyanathan. “Free culture” proponents warn that an overly strict copyright regime unbalanced by an equally prevalent fair use doctrine is dangerous to creativity, innovation, culture and democracy. After all, “few, if any, things ... are strictly original throughout. Every book in literature, science and art, borrows, and must necessarily borrow, and use much which was well known and used before. No man creates a new language for himself, at least if he be a wise man, in writing a book. He contents himself with the use of language already known and used and understood by others” (Emerson v. Davis, 8 F. Cas. 615, 619 (No. 4,436) (CCD Mass. 1845), qted in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose, 62 U.S.L.W. at 4171 (1994)). The rise of the Web 2.0 phase with its emphasis on end-user created content has led to an unrelenting wave of creativity, and much of it incorporates or “mashes up” copyright material. As Negativland observes, free appropriation is “inevitable when a population bombarded with electronic media meets the hardware [and software] that encourages them to capture it” and creatively express themselves through appropriated media forms (251). The current state of copyright and fair use is bleak, but not beyond recovery. Two recent cases suggest a resurgence of the ideology underpinning the doctrine of fair use and the role played by copyright.Let’s Go CrazyIn “Let’s Go Crazy #1” on YouTube, Holden Lenz (then eighteen months old) is caught bopping to a barely recognizable recording of Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy” in his mother’s Pennsylvanian kitchen. The twenty-nine second long video was viewed a mere twenty-eight times by family and friends before Stephanie Lenz received an email from YouTube informing her of its compliance with a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) take-down notice issued by Universal, copyright owners of Prince’s recording (McDonald). Lenz has since filed a counterclaim against Universal and YouTube has reinstated the video. Ironically, the media exposure surrounding Lenz’s situation has led to the video being viewed 633,560 times at the time of writing. Comments associated with the video indicate a less than reverential opinion of Prince and Universal and support the fairness of using the song. On 8 Aug. 2008 a Californian District Court denied Universal’s motion to dismiss Lenz’s counterclaim. The question at the centre of the court judgment was whether copyright owners should consider “the fair use doctrine in formulating a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.” The court ultimately found in favour of Lenz and also reaffirmed the position of fair use in relation to copyright. Universal rested its argument on two key points. First, that copyright owners cannot be expected to consider fair use prior to issuing takedown notices because fair use is a defence, invoked after the act rather than a use authorized by the copyright owner or the law. Second, because the DMCA does not mention fair use, then there should be no requirement to consider it, or at the very least, it should not be considered until it is raised in legal defence.In rejecting both arguments the court accepted Lenz’s argument that fair use is an authorised use of copyrighted materials because the doctrine of fair use is embedded into the Copyright Act 1976. The court substantiated the point by emphasising the language of section 107. Although fair use is absent from the DMCA, the court reiterated that it is part of the Copyright Act and that “notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A” a fair use “is not an infringement of copyright” (s.107, Copyright Act 1976). Overzealous rights holders frequently abuse the DMCA as a means to quash all use of copyrighted materials without considering fair use. This decision reaffirms that fair use “should not be considered a bizarre, occasionally tolerated departure from the grand conception of the copyright design” but something that it is integral to the constitution of copyright law and essential in ensuring that copyright’s goals can be fulfilled (Leval 1100). Unlicensed musical sampling has never fared well in the courtroom. Three decades of rejection and admonishment by judges culminated in Bridgeport Music, Inc., et al v. Dimension Films et al 383 F. 3d 400 (6th Cir. 2004): “Get a license or do not sample. We do not see this stifling creativity in any significant way” was the ruling on an action brought against an unlicensed use of a three-note guitar sample under section 114, an audio piracy provision. The Bridgeport decision sounded a death knell for unlicensed sampling, ensuring that only artists with sufficient capital to pay the piper could legitimately be creative with the wealth of recorded music available. The cost of licensing samples can often outweigh the creative merit of the act itself as discussed by McLeod (86) and Beaujon (25). In August 2008 the Supreme Court of New York heard EMI v. Premise Media in which EMI sought an injunction against an unlicensed fifteen second excerpt of John Lennon’s “Imagine” featured in Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, a controversial documentary canvassing alleged chilling of intelligent design proponents in academic circles. (The family of John Lennon and EMI had previously failed to persuade a Manhattan federal court in a similar action.) The court upheld Premise Media’s arguments for fair use and rejected the Bridgeport approach on which EMI had rested its entire complaint. Justice Lowe criticised the Bridgeport court for its failure to examine the legislative intent of section 114 suggesting that courts should look to the black letter of the law rather than blindly accept propertarian arguments. This decision is of particular importance because it establishes that fair use applies to unlicensed use of sound recordings and re-establishes de minimis use.ConclusionThis paper was partly inspired by the final entry on eminent copyright scholar William Patry’s personal copyright law blog (1 Aug. 2008). A copyright lawyer for over 25 years, Patry articulated his belief that copyright law has swung too far away from its initial objectives and that balance could never be restored. The two cases presented in this paper demonstrate that fair use – and therefore balance – can be recovered in copyright. The federal Supreme Court and lower courts have stressed that copyright was intended to promote creativity and have upheld the fair doctrine, but in order for the balance to exist in copyright law, cases must come before the courts; copyright myth must be challenged. As McLeod states, “the real-world problems occur when institutions that actually have the resources to defend themselves against unwarranted or frivolous lawsuits choose to take the safe route, thus eroding fair use”(146-7). ReferencesBeaujon, Andrew. “It’s Not the Beat, It’s the Mocean.” CMJ New Music Monthly. April 1999.Collins, Steve. “Good Copy, Bad Copy: Covers, Sampling and Copyright.” M/C Journal 8.3 (2005). 26 Aug. 2008 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0507/02-collins.php›.———. “‘Property Talk’ and the Revival of Blackstonian Copyright.” M/C Journal 9.4 (2006). 26 Aug. 2008 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0609/5-collins.php›.Donaldson v. Becket 17 Cobbett Parliamentary History, col. 953.Efroni, Zohar. “Israel’s Fair Use.” The Center for Internet and Society (2008). 26 Aug. 2008 ‹http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/node/5670›.Lange, David, and Jennifer Lange Anderson. “Copyright, Fair Use and Transformative Critical Appropriation.” Conference on the Public Domain, Duke Law School. 2001. 26 Aug. 2008 ‹http://www.law.duke.edu/pd/papers/langeand.pdf›.Lemley, Mark. “Property, Intellectual Property, and Free Riding.” Texas Law Review 83 (2005): 1031.Lessig, Lawrence. The Future of Ideas. New York: Random House, 2001.———. Free Culture. New York: Penguin, 2004.Leval, Pierre. “Toward a Fair Use Standard.” Harvard Law Review 103 (1990): 1105.McDonald, Heather. “Holden Lenz, 18 Months, versus Prince and Universal Music Group.” About.com: Music Careers 2007. 26 Aug. 2008 ‹http://musicians.about.com/b/2007/10/27/holden-lenz-18-months-versus-prince-and-universal-music-group.htm›.McLeod, Kembrew. “How Copyright Law Changed Hip Hop: An interview with Public Enemy’s Chuck D and Hank Shocklee.” Stay Free 2002. 26 Aug. 2008 ‹http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/archives/20/public_enemy.html›.———. Freedom of Expression: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity. United States: Doubleday, 2005.McLuhan, Marshall, and Barrington Nevitt. Take Today: The Executive as Dropout. Ontario: Longman Canada, 1972.Metz, Cade. “Viacom Slaps YouTuber for Behaving like Viacom.” The Register 2007. 26 Aug. 2008 ‹http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/30/viacom_slaps_pol/›.Negativland, ed. Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2. Concord: Seeland, 1995.Patry, William. The Fair Use Privilege in Copyright Law. Washington DC: Bureau of National Affairs, 1985.———. “End of the Blog.” The Patry Copyright Blog. 1 Aug. 2008. 27 Aug. 2008 ‹http://williampatry.blogspot.com/2008/08/end-of-blog.html›.Tapscott, Don. The Digital Economy: Promise and Peril in the Age of Networked Intelligence. New York: McGraw Hill, 1996.Toffler, Alvin. The Third Wave. London, Glasgow, Sydney, Auckland. Toronto, Johannesburg: William Collins, 1980.Travis, Hannibal. “Pirates of the Information Infrastructure: Blackstonian Copyright and the First Amendment.” Berkeley Technology Law Journal, Vol. 15 (2000), No. 777.Vaidhyanathan, Siva. Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity. New York; London: New York UP, 2003.

The computer game is perhaps the fastest growing and most quickly evolving cultural leisure technology in the western world. Invented as a form just under 40 years ago with the creation of Space War at MIT, computer and video games collectively account for hundreds of billions of dollars in sales across the world. And yet critical analysis of this cultural form is still in its infancy. Perhaps the sheer speed of the development of games may account for this. Thirty years ago, strategy games were screens of text instructions and a prompt where you could type a weather forecast. Today pretty much all games are flawlessly shaded and rendered polygons. The technology of film has barely changed at all in the same period. In any case, the critical study of games began in the eighties. The focus initially was on the psychology of the gamer. Most game players were children and teenagers during this period, and the focussing of their leisure time on this new and strange computer technology became a source of extreme moral panic for educators, parents and researchers alike. Later, research into the cultures of gaming would become more nuanced, and begin to detail the semiotics and narrative structures of games. It is in that kind of frame that this article is positioned. I want to look closely at a particular strategy game series, The Settlers. Firstly, however, a description of the strategy game genre. Strategy games put the player into a simulated inhabited environment and give the player almost total control over that environment and its simulated inhabitants. The strategy game has many genres, including the simulation game and the god game, but the sub-genre I will focus on in this paper is the real-time strategy game. The game requires the player to develop a functioning economy, geared around the production of weapons and armies, which are sent out to combat neighbouring tribes or armies. Real-time games typically give greater tactical control of the armies to the player, and slightly less detailed economic control. The aim is basically to amass as much gold or whatever as possible to buy as many troops as possible. However, the game I am about to discuss is, in addition to being a simple game of war, a very interesting simulation of economic and logistical constraints. The Settlers is series of fantasy computer strategy games developed by the German game design firm Blue Byte. The three extant Settlers games can be considered an evolution of game design rather than a continuing narrative, so, given the time constraints, for the purposes of this paper I will address only one game in the series, the most recently released title, The Settlers 3. The Settlers 3 tells the story of three expansionist empires, the Romans, the Egyptians, and the Asians, who have been thrust onto an uninhabited continent by the gods of their peoples to determine who is the fittest to survive. In other words, the game is founded from the beginning on a socio-Darwinian premise. In each level of the game, the settlers of each tribe must, under their player's direction, build an efficient and well maintained colony with a fully operating economy in order to achieve a set objective, which is usually to wipe out the opposing tribes by building up a large army, though it may be also to amass a predetermined level of a particular resource. Each level begins with about twenty settlers, a small guard hut to define the limits of the borders and a barely adequate supply of wooden planks, stone slabs and tools with which to begin to construct the economy. The player chooses building types from a menu and places them on the screen. Immediately the appropriate number of settlers walk across the landscape, leaving visible tracks in their wake, to pick up tools and supplies in order to construct the building. Typically, the player will order the construction of a woodcutter's hut, a sawmill, a stone cutter and a forester to ensure the steady flow of the basic construction materials to the rest of the colony. From this point more guard huts and towers are constructed to expand into new territory, and farms are built to feed the miners. Once constructed, the mine produce coal, gold and ore, which is sent down to the smelters to make iron bars (to make swords and tools) and gold bars (to pay the troops). Luxuries such as beer and wine are produced as a sacrifice to the gods. This results in rewards such as magical spells and promotion of the soldiers. Occasionally, incursions of enemy troops must be dealt with -- if they take a guard tower in battle, the borders, represented by lines of coloured flags, shrink, leading to the collapse and destruction of any building outside the boundaries. Finally, sufficient swords, bows and spears are produced, the soldiers are promoted, and they set off to pillage and destroy their neighbours' territory. If the previously mentioned enemy incursions were frequent enough, the final conflict where the player's warriors brutally annihilate the enemy is tremendously satisfying. The problematics of that particular game construct are left as an exercise for the audience. When territory is taken, the villages of the enemy go up in smoke and their resources are left lying on the ground, for the settlers to pick up and use for the benefit of the player. One of the things that make the game so fascinating to play is the complexity of the simulation. It must be said right away that the game employs many abstractions to make it playable and not utterly boring. For instance, only the miners out of all the settlers actually need food, and the mechanism by which new settlers are actually created is a bit vague (you construct a building called a "residence", and when it's completed, new setters simply troop out. And there only seem to be male settlers, unless you play the Amazons). Nonetheless, the game still quite explicitly details things most games of its type gloss right over. Unlike most games, pulling out all the stops in production just leads to bottlenecks where the transportation infrastructure can't get the goods to their destinations. Production levels have to be carefully monitored and throttled back where necessary to ensure the smooth flow of resources from A to B, C and D. Resources themselves -- coal lumps, gold bricks, fish, loaves of bread, swords --are modelled individually: you can actually track the process whereby an individual sheaf of wheat is harvested, picked up by a settler, carried off to the mill, turned into flour, sent to the bakery, made into a loaf of bread, and delivered to the coal miner for consumption. With its attention to the gritty detail of getting stuff from one place to the next, The Settlers is one of the very few truly logistically precise strategy games. Before I begin the analysis proper, I want to introduce some key terms that I'll be using a bit idiosyncratically in this paper. I'll be talking about gameplay quite a bit. Gameplay is a bit of a sliding signifier in the discourse of gaming theory -- loosely speaking it's that indefinable something that gets a player heated up about a game and keeps them playing for days on end. But here I want to be more precise. I'll offer a strategic definition. Gameplay is a way of quantifying the operations of a kind of economy of desire that operates between the player and the game itself. This economy has, as its constitutive elements, such factors as attention span, pleasure, ratio of novelty to repetition. These elements are in constant circulation in a game and the resulting economy is responsible for a good deal of the dynamism of the experience: in other words, the gameplay. What I want to focus on in this paper is what comes from the precise moment where two, quite central impulses of gameplay are in perfect balance, just before the first surrenders its grasp and the second takes over. The first impulse of play consists of two elements -- the visual presentation of the game, i.e. the pretty pictures that draw you in, and the narrative pretext of the story, the thing that gives what you are doing some kind of sense. It is on these two elements that classical ideological analysis of gameplay is typically founded. For instance, the archetypal platform game where all the female characters are helpless maidens who only exist as a way of getting the masculine protagonist into the action. The second impulse of gameplay is what might be called the "process", the somewhat under-theorised state where the visual trappings of the game and the motivating story line have slipped into the background, leaving only the sense of seamless integration of the player into the game's cybernetic feedback loop. The visual presentation and narrative pretext of The Settlers draws the player into a familiar fantasy of pre-modern existence. Presented to the player is a beautifully rendered virgin wilderness, filled with rolling hills, magnificent mountain ranges and vast forests, resounding with the sounds of the stream and brook, and the rustling of the wildlife. Into this wilderness the player must project an empire. That empire will consist of an elaborately detailed network (and I use the term deliberately) of cottage industries, labourers, paths, commodities, resources, defensive structures and places of worship. Real-world economic activities are consummately simulated as complex flows of information. The simulation is always fascinating to watch. Each node in this network, be it a fisherman's hut, a bakery, or a smelter, is exquisitely rendered, and full of picturesque, yet highly functional, animation. For instance, the process of a fisherman leaving his hut, going to a stream, setting his line, and catching a fish is visually expressive and lively, but it also is a specific bottleneck in the production process -- it takes a finite time, during which the carrier settlers stand around waiting for produce to deliver. This, then, is the game's crucial dialectic. What is depicted is a visually sumptuous, idyllic existence, but on closer inspection is a model of constant, uninterrupted, backbreaking labour. There are not even demarcations of day and night in the game -- life is perpetually midday and the working day will last forever. To put it less simply, perhaps, the game purposefully reifies the human social condition as being a reflexively structured mechanism of economic production under the guise of an ideologically idyllic pastoral paradise. It positions the player as not merely complicit in this mechanism but the fundamental point of determination within it. The balancing moment then is the point where the player begins to ignore or take for granted the visual lushness of the game's graphics and to focus instead on the underlying system, to internalise the lessons of the game -- the particular ideological and discursive assumptions about how economic and political systems successfully operate -- and to apply these lessons to the correct playing of the game, almost like a transition between REM dream-state sleep and deep sleep. And the analogy to sleep is not entirely specious -- critics and players alike have noted the way time stops when you play a game, with whole nights and days seemingly swallowed up in seconds of game time. The type of focus I am describing is not an interpretative one -- players are not expected to gain new insights of meaning from the act of playing at this new level of intensity, instead they are simply to blend their thoughts, actions and reactions with the dynamic processes of the game system. In a sense, a computer game is less a textual form than it is a kind of tool: in the same way proficient word processor users becomes so fluent in the operations of their software that the trappings -- toolbars, menus, mouse -- become secondary to the smooth continuous process of churning out words. Such a relationship does not exactly inspire thoughtful contemplation about the repressive qualities of Microsoft's hegemonic domination of office software, and the similar relationship with the computer game makes any kind of reflexivity about the gameplay's cultural referents seem simply counterproductive. It's an interesting dilemma for the theorist of gaming -- the point at which the underlying structure comes most clearly into focus during the state of play/analysis is also the moment when one is most resistant to the need to draw the wider connections. In this paper, I've tried to take a suggestive approach, to point out some of the ways that ideological assumptions about culture and production can be actualised in a simulated environment. And hopefully, I've also pointed out some of the pitfalls in a purely ideological analysis of games. Games are never just about the ideology. A nuanced analysis from a cultural studies point of view must also take into account the quite complex ways games not only articulate certain ideologies but they also complicate them. Beyond that, analysis must take into account the ways that games go beyond the paradigm of textuality and begin to take on the aspect of being whole systems of symbolic manipulation and transmission. It is only at this point that any kind of comprehensive and theoretically precise engagement with games as cultural texts and processes can be seriously begun. References Crawford, Chris. The Art of Computer Game Design. Berkeley, California: Osborne / McGraw-Hill, 1984. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: HarperCollins, 1990. Fleming, Dan. Powerplay: Toys as Popular Culture. Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 1996. Freidman, Ted. "Making Sense of Software: Computer Games and Interactive Textuality." CyberSociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community. Ed. Steven G. Jones. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1995. 73-89. Virilio, Paul. War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. Trans. Patrick Camiller. London and New York: Verso, 1989. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Nick Caldwell. "Settler Stories: Representational Ideologies in Computer Strategy Gaming." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.5 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/settlers.php>. Chicago style: Nick Caldwell, "Settler Stories: Representational Ideologies in Computer Strategy Gaming," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 5 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/settlers.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Nick Caldwell. (2000) Settler Stories: Representational Ideologies in Computer Strategy Gaming. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(5). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/settlers.php> ([your date of access]).

Halfway through the 2006 memoir comic Fun Home, the reader encounters a photograph that the book’s author, Alison Bechdel, found in a box of family snapshots shortly after her father’s death. The picture—“literally the core of the book, the centrefold” (Bechdel qtd. in Chute “Interview” 1006)—of Alison’s teenaged babysitter, Roy, erotically reclining on a bed in only his underwear, is the most tangible and direct evidence of her father’s sexual affairs with teenage boys, more confronting than his own earlier confession. Through this image, and a rich archive of familial texts, Bechdel chronicles her father’s thwarted desires and ambitions, probable suicide, and her own sexual and artistic coming of age.Bruce Bechdel, a married school teacher and part-time funeral director, was also an avid amateur historical restorer and connoisseur of modernist literature. Shortly after Alison came out to her parents at nineteen, Bruce was hit by a truck in what his daughter believes was an act of suicide. In Fun Home, Bechdel reads her family history suspiciously, plumbing family snapshots, letters, and favoured novels, interpreting against the grain, to trace her queer genealogy. Ultimately, she inverts this suspicious and interrogative reading, using the evidence she has gathered in order to read her father’s sexuality positively and embrace her queer and artistic inheritance from him. In The New York Times Magazine, in 2004, Charles McGrath made the suggestion that comics were “the new literary form” (24). Although comics have not yet reached widespread mainstream acceptance as a medium of merit, the burgeoning field of comics scholarship over the last fifteen years, the 2007 adaptation of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis into a feature film, and the addition of comics to the Best American series all testify to the widening popularity and status of the form. Memoir comics have established themselves, as Hillary Chute notes, as “the dominant mode of contemporary work” (Graphic 17). Many of these autobiographical works, including Fun Home, recount traumatic histories, employing the medium’s unique capacity to evoke the fractured and repetitive experience of the traumatised through panel structure and use of images. Comics articulate “what wasn’t permitted to be said or imagined, defying the ordinary processes of thought” (Said qtd. in Whitlock 967). The hand-drawn nature of comics emphasises the subjectivity of perception and memory, making it a particularly powerful medium for personal histories. The clear mediation of a history by the artist’s hand complicates truth claims. Comics open up avenues for both suspicious and restorative readings because their form suggests that history is always constructed and therefore not able to be confirmed as “ultimately truthful,” but also that there is no ultimate truth to be unveiled. No narrative is unmediated; a timeline is not more “pure” than a fleshed out narrative text. All narratives exclude information in order to craft a comprehensible series of events. Bechdel’s role as a suspicious reader of her father and of her own history resonates through her role as a historian and her interrogation of the ethical concerns of referential writing.Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity critiques the hermeneutics of suspicion from a queer theory perspective, instead advocating reparative reading as a critical strategy. The hermeneutics of suspicion describes “the well-oiled machine of ideology critique” that has become the primary mode of critical reading over the last thirty or so years, suspiciously interpreting texts to uncover their hidden ideological biases (Felski, Uses 1). Reparative reading, on the other hand, moves away from this paranoid mode, instead valuing pleasure and “positive affects like joy and excitement” (Vincent). Sedgwick does not wholly reject suspicious reading, suggesting that it “represent[s] a way, among other ways, of seeking, finding, and organizing knowledge. Paranoia knows some things well and others poorly” (Touching 129). Felski, paraphrasing Ricoeur, notes that the hermeneutics of suspicion “adopts an adversarial sensibility to probe for concealed, repressed, or disavowed meanings” (“Suspicious” 216). In this fashion, Bechdel employs suspicious strategies to reveal her father’s hidden desires and transgressions that were obscured in the standard version of her family narrative, but ultimately moves away from such techniques to joyfully embrace her inheritance from him. Sedgwick notes that paranoid readings may only reveal that which is already known:While there is plenty of hidden violence that requires exposure there is also, and increasingly, an ethos where forms of violence that are hypervisible from the start may be offered as an exemplary spectacle rather than remain to be unveiled as a scandalous secret. (Touching 139)This is contrary to suspicious reading’s assumption that violence is culturally shunned, hidden, and in need of “unveiling” in contemporary Western culture. It would be too obvious for Bechdel to condemn her father: gay men have been unfairly misrepresented in the American popular imagination for decades, if not longer. Through her reparative reading of him, she rejects this single-minded reduction of people to one negative type. She accepts both her father’s weaknesses and her debts to him. A reading which only sought to publicise Bruce’s homosexual affairs would lack the great depth that Bechdel finds in the slippage between her father’s identity and her own.Bechdel’s embrace of Bruce’s failings as a father, a husband, and an artist, her revisioning of his death as a positive, creative act full of agency, and her characterisation of him as a supportive forerunner, “there to catch [Alison] as [she] leapt,” (Bechdel 232) moves his story away from archetypal narratives of homosexual tragedy. Bechdel’s memoir ends with (and enacts through its virtuoso execution) her own success, and the support of those who came before her. This move mirrors Joseph Litvak’s suggestion that “the importance of ‘mistakes’ in queer reading and writing […] has a lot to do with loosening the traumatic, inevitable-seeming connection between mistakes and humiliation […] Doesn’t reading queer mean learning, among other things, that mistakes can be good rather than bad surprises?” (Sedgwick Touching 146–7).Fun Home is saturated with intertextual references and archival materials that attempt to piece together the memoir’s fractured and hidden histories. The construction of this personal history works by including familial and historical records to register the trauma of the Bechdels’ personal tragedy. The archival texts are meticulously hand-drawn, their time-worn and ragged physicality maintained to emphasise the referentiality of these documents. Bechdel’s use of realistically drawn family photographs, complete with photo corners, suggests a family photograph album, although rather than establishing a censored and idealistic narrative, as most family albums do, the photographs are read and reproduced for their suppressed and destabilising content. Bechdel describes them as “particularly mythic” (Chute “Interview” 1009), and she plunders this symbolic richness to rewrite her family history. The archival documents function as primary texts, which stand in opposition to the deadly secrecy of her childhood home: they are concrete and evidentiary. Bechdel reads her father’s letters and photographs (and their gothic revival house) for sexual and artistic evidence, “read[ing] the text against the grain in order to draw out what it refuses to own up to” (Felski “Suspicious” 23). She interprets his letters’ baroque lyrical flourishes as indications both of his semi-repressed homosexuality and of the artistic sensibility that she would inherit and refine.Suspicion of the entire historical project marks the memoir. Philippe Lejeune describes the “Autobiographical Pact” as “a contract of identity that is sealed by the proper name” of the author (19). Bechdel does not challenge this pact fundamentally—the authoritative narrative voice of her book structures it to be read as historically truthful—but she does challenge and complicate the apparent simplicity of this referential model. Bechdel’s discussion of the referential failings of her childhood diary making—“the troubled gap between word and meaning”—casts a suspicious eye over the rest of the memoir’s historical project (Bechdel 143). She asks how language can adequately articulate experience or refer to the external world in an environment defined by secrets and silence. At the time of her childhood, it cannot—the claim to full disclosure that the memoir ultimately makes is predicated on distance and time. Bechdel simultaneously makes a claim for the historical veracity of her narrative and destabilises our assumptions around the idea of factual and retrospective truth:When I was ten, I was obsessed with making sure my diary entries bore no false witness. But as I aged, hard facts gave way to vagaries of emotion and opinion. False humility, overwrought penmanship, and self-disgust began to cloud my testimony […] until […] the truth is barely perceptible behind a hedge of qualifiers, encryption, and stray punctuation. (Bechdel 169)That which is “unrepresentable” is simultaneously represented and denied. The comics medium itself, with its simultaneous graphic and textual representation, suggests the unreliability of any one means of representation. Of Bechdel’s diaries, Jared Gardner notes, “what develops over the course of her diary […] is an increasing sense that text and image are each alone inadequate to the task, and that some merger of the two is required to tell the story of the truth, and the truth of the story” (“Archives” 3).As the boyishly dressed Alison urges her father, applying scare-quoted “bronzer,” to hurry up, Bechdel narrates, “my father began to seem morally suspect to me long before I knew that he actually had a dark secret” (16). Alison is presented as her father’s binary opposite, “butch to his nelly. Utilitarian to his aesthete,” (15) and, as a teenager, frames his love of art and extravagance as debauched. This clear distinction soon becomes blurred, as Alison and Bruce’s similarities begin to overwhelm their differences. The huge drawn hand shown holding the photograph of Roy, in the memoir’s “centrefold,” more than twice life-size, reproduces the reader’s hand holding the book. We are placed in Bechdel’s, and by extension her father’s, role, as the illicit and transgressive voyeurs of the erotic spectacle of Roy’s body, and as the possessors and consumers of hidden, troubling texts. At this point, Bechdel begins to take her queer reading of this family archive and use it to establish a strong connection between her initially unsympathetic father and herself. Despite his neglect of his children, and his self-involvement, Bechdel claims him as her spiritual and creative father, as well as her biological one. This reparative embrace moves Bruce from the role of criticised outsider in Alison’s world to one of queer predecessor. Bechdel figures herself and her father as doubled aesthetic and erotic observers and appreciators. Ann Cvetkovich suggests that “mimicking her father as witness to the image, Alison is brought closer to him only at the risk of replicating his illicit sexual desires” (118). For Alison, consuming her father’s texts connects her with him in a positive yet troubling way: “My father’s end was my beginning. Or more precisely, […] the end of his lie coincided with the beginning of my truth” (Bechdel 116–17). The final panel of the same chapter depicts Alison’s hands holding drawn photos of herself at twenty-one and Bruce at twenty-two. The snapshots overlap, and Bechdel lists the similarities between the photographs, concluding, “it’s about as close as a translation can get” (120). Through the “vast network of transversals” (102) that is their life together, Alison and Bruce are, paradoxically, twinned “inversions of one another” (98). Sedgwick suggests that “inversion models […] locate gay people—whether biologically or culturally—at the threshold between genders” (Epistemology 88). Bechdel’s focus on Proust’s “antiquated clinical term” both neatly fits her thematic expression of Alison and Bruce’s relationship as doubles (“Not only were we inverts. We were inversions of one another”) and situates them in a space of possibility and liminality (97-98).Bechdel rejects a wholly suspicious approach by maintaining and embracing the aporia in her and her father’s story, an essential element of memory. According to Chute, Fun Home shows “that the form of comics crucially retains the insolvable gaps of family history” (Graphic 175). Rejecting suspicion involves embracing ambiguity and unresolvability. It concedes that there is no one authentic truth to be neatly revealed and resolved. Fun Home’s “spatial and semantic gaps […] express a critical unknowability or undecidability” (Chute Graphic 182). Bechdel allows the gaps in her narrative to remain, refusing to “pretend to know” Bruce’s “erotic truth” (230), an act to which suspicious reading is diametrically opposed. Suspicious reading wishes to close all gaps, to articulate silences and literalise mysteries, and Bechdel’s narrative progressively moves away from this mode. The medium of comics uses words and images together, simultaneously separate and united. Similarly, Alison and Bruce are presented as opposites: butch/sissy, artist/dilettante. Yet the memoir’s conclusion presents Alison and Bruce in a loving, reciprocal relationship. The final page of the book has two frames: one of Bruce’s perspective in the moment before his death, and one showing him contentedly playing with a young Alison in a swimming pool—death contrasted with life. The gaps in the narrative are not closed but embraced. Bechdel’s “tricky reverse narration” (232) suggests a complex mode of reading that allows both Bechdel and the reader to perceive Bruce as a positive forebear. Comics as a medium pay particular visual attention to absence and silence. The gutter, the space between panels, functions in a way that is not quite paralleled by silence in speech and music, and spaces and line breaks in text—after all, there are still blank spaces between words and elements of the image within the comics panel. The gutter is the space where closure occurs, allowing readers to infer causality and often the passing of time (McCloud 5). The gutters in this book echo the many gaps in knowledge and presence that mark the narrative. Fun Home is impelled by absence on a practical level: the absence of the dead parent, the absence of a past that was unspoken of and yet informed every element of Alison’s childhood.Bechdel’s hyper-literate narration steers the reader through the memoir and acknowledges its own aporia. Fun Home “does not seek to preserve the past as it was, as its archival obsession might suggest, but rather to circulate ideas about the past with gaps fully intact” (Chute Graphic 180). Bechdel, while making her own interpretation of her father’s death clear, does not insist on her reading. While Bruce attempted to restore his home into a perfect, hermetically sealed simulacrum of nineteenth-century domestic glamour, Bechdel creates a postmodern text that slips easily between a multiplicity of time periods, opening up the absences, failures, and humiliations of her story. Chute argues:Bruce Bechdel wants the past to be whole; Alison Bechdel makes it free-floating […] She animates the past in a book that is […] a counterarchitecture to the stifling, shame-filled house in which she grew up: she animates and releases its histories, circulating them and giving them life even when they devolve on death. (Graphic 216)Bechdel employs a literary process of detection in the revelation of both of their sexualities. Her archive is constructed like an evidence file; through layered tableaux of letters, novels and photographs, we see how Bruce’s obsessive love of avant-garde literature functions as an emblem of his hidden desire; Alison discovers her sexuality through the memoirs of Colette and the seminal gay pride manifestos of the late 1970s. Watson suggests that the “panels, gutters, and page, as bounded and delimited visual space, allow texturing of the two-dimensional image through collage, counterpoint, the superimposition of multiple media, and self-referential gestures […] Bechdel's rich exploitation of visual possibilities places Fun Home at an autobiographical interface where disparate modes of self-inscription intersect and comment upon one another” (32).Alison’s role as a literary and literal detective of concealed sexualities and of texts is particularly evident in the scene when she realises that she is gay. Wearing a plaid trench coat with the collar turned up like a private eye, she stands in the campus bookshop reading a copy of Word is Out, with a shadowy figure in the background (one whose silhouette resembles her father’s teenaged lover, Roy), and a speech bubble with a single exclamation mark articulating her realisation. While “the classic detective novel […] depends on […] a double plot, telling the story of a crime via the story of its investigation” (Felski “Suspicious” 225), Fun Home tells the story of Alison’s coming out and genesis as an artist through the story of her father’s brief life and thwarted desires. On the memoir’s final page, revisioning the artifactual photograph that begins her final chapter, Bechdel reclaims her father from what a cool reading of the historical record (adultery with adolescents, verbally abusive, emotionally distant) might encourage readers to superficially assume. Cvetkovich articulates the way Fun Home uses:Ordinary experience as an opening onto revisionist histories that avoid the emotional simplifications that can sometimes accompany representations of even the most unassimilable historical traumas […] Bechdel refuses easy distinctions between heroes and perpetrators, but doing so via a figure who represents a highly stigmatised sexuality is a bold move. (125)Rejecting paranoid strategies, Bechdel is less interested in classification and condemnation of her father than she is in her own tangled relation to him. She adopts a reparative strategy by focusing on the strands of joy and identification in her history with her father, rather than simply making a paranoid attack on his character.She occludes the negative possibilities and connotations of her father’s story to end on a largely positive note: “But in the tricky reverse narration that impels our entwined stories, he was there to catch me when I leapt” (232). In the final moment of her text Bechdel moves away from the memoir’s earlier destabilising actions, which forced the reader to regard Bruce with suspicion, as the keeper of destructive secrets and as a menacing presence in the Bechdels’ family life. The final image is of complete trust and support. His death is rendered not as chaotic and violent as it historically was, but calm, controlled, beneficent. Bechdel has commented, “I think it’s part of my father’s brilliance, the fact that his death was so ambiguous […] The idea that he could pull that off. That it was his last great wheeze. I want to believe that he went out triumphantly” (qtd. in Burkeman). The revisioning of Bruce’s death as a suicide and the reverse narration which establishes the accomplished artist and writer Bechdel’s creative and literary debt to him function as a redemption.Bechdel queers her suspicious reading of her family history in order to reparatively reclaim her father’s historical and personal connection with herself. The narrative testifies to Bruce’s failings as a father and husband, and confesses to Alison’s own complicity in her father’s transgressive desires and artistic interest, and to her inability to represent the past authoritatively and with complete accuracy. Bechdel both engages in and ultimately rejects a suspicious interpretation of her family and personal history. As Gardner notes, “only by allowing the past to bleed into history, fact to bleed into fiction, image into text, might we begin to allow our own pain to bleed into the other, and more urgently, the pain of the other to bleed into ourselves” (“Autobiography’s” 23). Suspicion itself is queered in the reparative revisioning of Bruce’s life and death, and in the “tricky reverse narration” (232) of the künstlerroman’s joyful conclusion.ReferencesBechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. New York: Mariner Books, 2007. Burkeman, Oliver. “A life stripped bare.” The Guardian 16 Oct. 2006: G2 16.Cvetkovich, Ann. “Drawing the Archive in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 36.1/2 (2008): 111–29. Chute, Hillary L. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia UP, 2010. ---. “Interview with Alison Bechdel.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (2006): 1004–13. Felski, Rita. Uses of Literature. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2008.---. “Suspicious Minds.” Poetics Today 32:3 (2011): 215–34. Gardner, Jared. “Archives, Collectors, and the New Media Work of Comics.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (2006): 787–806. ---. “Autobiography’s Biography 1972-2007.” Biography 31.1 (2008): 1–26. Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: HarperPerennial, 1994. McGrath, Charles. “Not Funnies.” New York Times Magazine 11 Jul. 2004: 24–56. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. ---. Touching Feeling. Durham : Duke University Press, 2003. Vincent, J. Keith. “Affect and Reparative Reading.” Honoring Eve. Ed. J. Keith Vincent. Affect and Reparative Reading. Boston University College of Arts and Sciences. October 31 2009. 25 May 2011. ‹http://www.bu.edu/honoringeve/panels/affect-and-reparative-reading/?›.Watson, Julia. “Autographic disclosures and genealogies of desire in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” Biography 31.1 (2008): 27–59. Whitlock, Gillian. “Autographics: The Seeing “I” of the Comics.” Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (2006): 965–79.

Iain Sinclair is a writer who is synonymous with a city. Sinclair’s sustained literary engagement with London from the mid 1960s has produced a singular account of place in that city (Bond; Baker; Seale “Iain Sinclair”). Sinclair is a leading figure in a resurgent and rebranded psychogeographic literature of the 1990s (Coverley) where on-foot wandering through the city brings forth narrative. Sinclair’s wandering, materialised as walking, is central to the claim of intimacy with the city that underpins his authority as a London writer. Furthermore, embodied encounters with the urban landscape through the experience of “getting lost” in urban environments are key to his literary methodology. Through works such as Lights Out for the Territory (2007), Sinclair has been repeatedly cast as a key chronicler of London, a city focused with capitalist determination on the future while redolent, even weighted, with a past that, as Sinclair says himself, is there for the wanderer to uncover (Dirda).In this essay, we examine how Sinclair’s wandering makes place in London. We are interested not only in Sinclair’s wandering as a spatial or cultural “intervention” in the city, as it is frequently positioned in critiques of his writing (Wolfreys). We are also interested in how Sinclair’s literary methodology of wandering undertakes its own work of placemaking in material ways that are often obscured because of how his work is positioned within particular traditions of wandering, including those of psychogeography and the flâneur. It is our contention that Sinclair’s wandering has an ambivalent relationship with place in London. It belongs to the tradition of the wanderer as a radical outsider with an alternative practice and perspective on place, but also contributes to contemporary placemaking in a global, neo-liberal London.Wandering as Literary MethodologyIain Sinclair’s writing about London is considered both “visionary” and “documentary” in its ambitions and has been praised as “giving voice to lost, erased, or forgotten histories or memories” (Baker 63). Sinclair is the “raging prophet” (Kerr) for a transforming and disappearing city. This perspective is promulgated by Sinclair himself, who in interviews refers to his practice as “bearing witness” to the erasures of particular place cultures, communities, and their histories that a rapidly gentrifying city entails (Sinclair quoted in O’Connell). The critical reception of Sinclair’s perambulation mostly follows Michel de Certeau’s observation that walking is a kind of reading/writing practice that “makes the invisible legible” (Baker 28). Sinclair’s wandering, and the encounters it mobilises, are a form of storytelling, which bring into proximity complex and forgotten narratives of place.Sinclair may “dive in” to the city, yet his work writing and rewriting urban space is usually positioned as representational. London is a text, “a system of signs […], the material city becoming the (non-material) map” (Baker 29). Sinclair’s wandering is understood as writing about urban transformation in London, rather than participating in it through making place. The materiality of Sinclair’s wandering in the city—his walking, excavating, encountering—may be acknowledged, but it is effectively dematerialised by the critical focus on his self-conscious literary treatment of place in London. Simon Perril has called Sinclair a “modernist magpie” (312), both because his mode of intertextuality borrows from Modernist experiments in form, style, and allusion, and because the sources of many of his intertexts are Modernist writers. Sinclair mines a rich seam of literature, Modernist and otherwise, that is produced in and about London, as well as genealogies of other legendary London wanderers. The inventory includes: “the rich midden of London’s sub-cultural fiction, terse proletarian narratives of lives on the criminous margin” (Sinclair Lights Out, 312) in the writing of Alexander Baron and Emanuel Litvinoff; the small magazine poetry of the twentieth century British Poetry Revival; and the forgotten suburban writings of David Gascoyne, “a natural psychogeographer, tracking the heat spores of Rimbaud, from the British Museum to Wapping and Limehouse” (Atkins and Sinclair 146). Sinclair’s intertextual “loiterature” (Chambers), his wayward, aleatory wandering through London’s archives, is one of two interconnected types of wandering in Sinclair’s literary methodology. The other is walking through the city. In a 2017 interview, Sinclair argued that the two were necessarily interconnected in writing about place in London:The idea of writing theoretical books about London burgeoned as a genre. At the same time, the coffee table, touristy books about London emerged—the kinds of books that can be written on Google, rather than books that are written by people of the abyss. I’m interested in someone who arrives and takes this journey into the night side of London in the tradition of Mayhew or Dickens, who goes out there and is constantly wandering and finding and having collisions and bringing back stories and shaping a narrative. There are other people who are doing things in a similar way, perhaps with a more journalistic approach, finding people and interviewing them and taking their stories. But many books about London are very conceptual and just done by doing research sitting at a laptop. I don’t think this challenges the city. It’s making a parallel city of the imagination, of literature. (Sinclair quoted in O'Connell)For Sinclair, then, walking is as much a literary methodology as reading, archival research, or intertextuality is.Wandering as Urban InterventionPerhaps one of Sinclair’s most infamous walks is recorded in London Orbital (2003), where he wandered the 127 miles of London’s M25 ring road. London Orbital is Sinclair’s monumental jeremiad against the realpolitik of late twentieth-century neo-liberalism and the politicised spatialisation and striation of London by successive national and local governments. The closed loop of the M25 motorway recommends itself to governmental bodies as a regulated form that functions as “a prophylactic, […] a tourniquet” (1) controlling the flow (with)in and (with)out of London. Travellers’ movements are impeded when the landscape is cut up by the motorway. Walking becomes a marginalised activity it its wake, and the surveillance and distrust to which Sinclair is subject realises the concerns foreshadowed by Walter Benjamin regarding the wanderings of the flâneur. In the Arcades Project, Benjamin quoted a 1936 newspaper article, pessimistically titled “Le dernier flâneur” [The last flâneur]:A man who goes for a walk ought not to have to concern himself with any hazards he may run into, or with the regulations of a city. […] But he cannot do this today without taking a hundred precautions, without asking the advice of the police department, without mixing with a dazed and breathless herd, for whom the way is marked out in advance by bits of shining metal. If he tries to collect the whimsical thoughts that may have come to mind, very possibly occasioned by sights on the street, he is deafened by car horns, [and] stupefied by loud talkers […]. (Jaloux, quoted in Benjamin 435)Susan Buck-Morss remarks that flâneurs are an endangered species in the contemporary city: “like tigers, or pre-industrial tribes, [they] are cordoned off on reservations, preserved within the artificially created environments of pedestrian streets, parks, and underground passages” (344). To wander from these enclosures, or from delineated paths, is to invite suspicion as the following unexceptional anecdote from London Orbital illustrates:NO PUBLIC RITE [sic] OF WAY. Footpaths, breaking towards the forest, have been closed off. You are obliged to stick to the Lee Navigation, the contaminated ash conglomerate of the Grey Way. Enfield has been laid out in grids; long straight roads, railways, fortified blocks. […] In a canalside pub, they deny all knowledge of the old trace. Who walks? “There used to be a road,” they admit. It’s been swallowed up in this new development, Enfield Island Village. […] The hard hat mercenaries of Fairview New Homes […] are suspicious of our cameras. Hands cover faces. Earth-movers rumble straight at us. A call for instruction muttered into their lapels: “Strangers. Travellers.” (69-70)There is an excess to wandering, leading to incontinent ideas, extreme verbiage, compulsive digression, excessive quotation. De Certeau in his study of the correlation between navigating urban and textual space speaks of “the unlimited diversity” of the walk, highlighting its improvised nature, and the infinite possibilities it proposes. Footsteps are equated with thoughts, multiplying unchecked: “They are myriad, but do not compose a series. […] Their swarming mass is an innumerable collection of singularities” (97). Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the erratic trajectories, digression, and diversion of Sinclair’s wanderings are aligned with a tradition of the flâneur as homo ludens (Huizinga) or practitioner of the Situationist derive, as theorised by Guy Debord:The dérive entails playful-constructive behaviour and awareness of psychogeographical effects, which completely distinguishes it from the classical notions of the journey or the stroll. In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. The element of chance is less determinant than one might think: from the dérive point of view, cities have a psychogeographical relief, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones. (“Theory of the dérive” 50)Like Charles Baudelaire’s painter of modern life, Sinclair is happily susceptible to distraction. The opening essay of Lights Out is a journey through London with the ostensible purpose of diligently researching and reporting on the language he detects on his travels. However, the map for the walk is only ever half-hearted, and Sinclair admits to “hoping for some accident to bring about a final revision” (5). Sinclair’s walks welcome the random and when he finds the detour to disfigure his route, he is content: “Already the purity of the [walk] has been despoiled. Good” (8). Wandering’s Double Agent: Sinclair’s Placemaking in LondonMuch has been made of the flâneur as he appears in Sinclair’s work (Seale “Eye-Swiping”). Nevertheless, Sinclair echoes Walter Benjamin in declaring the flâneur, as previously stereotyped, to be impossible in the contemporary city. The fugeur is one détournement (Debord “Détournement”) of the flâneur that Sinclair proposes. In London Orbital, Sinclair repeatedly refers to his wandering as a fugue. A fugue is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as a “flight from or loss of the awareness of one’s identity, sometimes involving wandering away from home, and often occurring as a reaction to shock or emotional stress.” As Sinclair explains:I found the term fugueur more attractive than the now overworked flâneur. Fugueur had the smack of a swear word […]. Fugueur was the right job description for our walk, our once-a-month episodes of transient mental illness. Madness as a voyage. […] The fugue is both drift and fracture. (London Orbital, 146)Herbert Marcuse observed that to refuse to comply with capitalist behaviour is to be designated irrational, and thus relegate oneself to the periphery of society (9). The neo-liberal city’s enforcement of particular spatial and temporal modalities that align with the logic of purpose, order, and productivity is antagonistic to wandering. The fugue state, then, can rupture the restrictive logic of capitalism’s signifying chains through regaining forcibly expurgated ideas and memories. The walk around the M25 has an unreason to it: the perversity of wandering a thoroughfare designed for cars. In another, oft-quoted passage from Lights Out, Sinclair proposes another avatar of the flâneur:The concept of “strolling”, aimless urban wandering […] had been superseded. We had moved into the age of the stalker; journeys made with intent—sharp-eyed and unsponsored. The stalker was our role model: purposed hiking, not dawdling, nor browsing. No time for the savouring of reflections in shop windows, admiration for Art Nouveau ironwork, attractive matchboxes rescued from the gutter. This was walking with a thesis. With a prey. […] The stalker is a stroller who sweats, a stroller who knows where he is going, but not why or how. (75)Not only has the flâneur evolved into something far more exacting and purposeful, but as we want to illuminate, the flâneur’s wandering has evolved into something more material than transforming urban experience and encounter into art or literature as Baudelaire described. In a recent interview, Sinclair stated: The walker exists in a long tradition, and, for me, it’s really vital to simply be out there every day—not only because it feels good, but because in doing it you contribute to the microclimate of the city. As you withdraw energy from the city, you are also giving energy back. People are noticing you. You’re doing something, you’re there, the species around you absorb your presence into it, and you become part of this animate entity called the city. (Sinclair quoted in O'Connell)Sinclair’s acknowledgement that he is acting upon the city through his wandering is also an acknowledgement of a material, grounded interplay between what Jonathan Raban has called the “soft” and the “hard” city: “The city as we might imagine it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate in maps and statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture” (quoted in Manley 6). Readers and critics may gravitate to the soft city of Sinclair, but as Donald puts it, “The challenge is to draw the connections between place, archive, and imagination, not only by tracing those links in literary representations of London, but also by observing and describing the social, cultural, and subjective functions of London literature and London imagery” (in Manley, 262).Sinclair’s most recent longform book, The Last London (2017), is bracketed at both beginning and end with the words from the diarist of the Great Fire of 1666, John Evelyn: “London was, but is no more.” Sinclair’s evocation of the disaster that razed seventeenth-century London is a declaration that twenty-first century London, too, has been destroyed. This time by an unsavoury crew of gentrifiers, property developers, politicians, hyper-affluent transplants, and the creative classes. Writers are a sub-category of this latter group. Ambivalence and complicity are always there for Sinclair. On the one hand, his wanderings have attributed cultural value to previously overlooked aspects of London by the very virtue of writing about them. On the other hand, Sinclair argues that the value of these parts of the city hinges on their neglect by the dominant culture, which, of course, is no longer possible when his writing illuminates them. Certainly, wandering the city excavating the secret histories of cities has acquired an elevated cultural currency since Sinclair started writing. In making the East End “so gothically juicy”, Sinclair inaugurated a stream of new imaginings from “young acolyte psychogeographers” (McKay). Moreover, McKay points out that “Sinclair once wryly noted that anywhere he ‘nominated’ soon became an estate agent vision of luxury lifestyle”.Iain Sinclair’s London wanderings, then, call for a recognition that is more-than-literary. They are what we have referred to elsewhere as “worldly texts” (Potter and Seale, forthcoming), texts that have more-than-literary effects and instead are materially entangled in generating transformative conditions of place. Our understanding sits alongside the insights of literary geography, especially Sheila Hones’s concept of the text as a “spatial event”. In this reckoning, texts are spatio-temporal happenings that are neither singular nor have one clear “moment” of emergence. Rather, texts come into being across time and space, and in this sense can be understood as assemblages that include geographical locations, material contexts, and networks of production and reception. Literary effects are materially, collaboratively, and spatially generated in the world and have “territorial consequences”, as Jon Anderson puts it (127). Sinclair’s writings, we contend, can be seen as materialising versions of place that operate outside the assemblage of “literary” production and realise spatial and socio-economic consequence.Sinclair’s work does more than mimetically reproduce a “lost” London, or angrily write against the grain of neo-liberal gentrification. It is, in a sense, a geographic constituent that cannot be disaggregated from the contemporary dynamics of the privileges and exclusions of city. This speaks to the author’s ambivalence about his role as a central figure in London writing. For example, it has been noted that Sinclair is “aware of the charge that he’s been responsible as anyone for the fetishization of London’s decrepitude, contributing to an aesthetic of urban decay that is now ubiquitous” (Day). Walking the East End in what he has claimed to be his “last” London book (2017), Sinclair is horrified by the prevalence of what he calls “poverty chic” at the erstwhile Spitalfields Market: a boutique called “Urban Decay” is selling high-end lipsticks with an optional eye makeover. Next door is the “Brokedown Palace […] offering expensive Patagonia sweaters and pretty colourful rucksacks.” Ironically, the aesthetics of decline and ruin that Sinclair has actively brought to public notice over the last thirty years are contributing to this urban renewal. It could also be argued that Sinclair’s wandering is guilty of “the violence of spokesmanship”, which sublimates the voices of others (Weston 274), and is surely no longer the voice of the wanderer as marginalised outsider. When textual actors become networked with place, there can be extra-textual consequences, such as Sinclair’s implication in the making of place in a globalised and gentrified London. It shifts understanding of Sinclair’s wandering from representational and hermeneutic interpretation towards materialism: from what wandering means to what wandering does. From this perspective, Sinclair’s wandering and writing does not end with the covers of his books. The multiple ontologies of Sinclair’s worldly texts expand and proliferate through the plurality of composing relations, which, in turn, produce continuous and diverse iterations in an actor-network with place in London. Sinclair’s wanderings produce an ongoing archive of the urban that continues to iteratively make place, through multiple texts and narrative engagements, including novels, non-fiction accounts, journalism, interviews, intermedia collaborations, and assembling with the texts of others—from the many other London authors to whom Sinclair refers, to the tour guides who lead Time Out walking tours of “Sinclair’s London”. Place in contemporary London therefore assembles across and through an actor-network in which Sinclair’s wandering participates. Ultimately, Sinclair’s wandering and placemaking affirm Manley’s statement that “the urban environment in which (and in response to which) so much of English literature has been written has itself been constructed in many respects by its representation in that literature—by the ideas, images, and styles created by writers who have experienced or inhabited it” (2).ReferencesAnderson, Jon. “Towards an Assemblage Approach to Literary Geography.” Literary Geographies 1.2 (2015): 120–137.Atkins, Marc and Iain Sinclair. Liquid City. London: Reaktion, 1999.Baker, Brian. Iain Sinclair. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007.Baudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. Trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne. London and New York: Phaidon, 1995.Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Ed. Rolf Tiedmann. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2002.Bond, Robert. Iain Sinclair. Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2005.Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989.Chambers, Russ. Loiterature. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.Coverley, Merlin. Psychogeography. Harpenden: Pocket Essentials, 2005.Day, Jon. “The Last London by Iain Sinclair Review—an Elegy for a City Now Lost.” The Guardian 27 Sep. 2017. 7 July 2017 <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/27/last-london-iain-sinclair-review>.Debord, Guy. “Theory of the Dérive.” Situationist International Anthology. Trans. and ed. Ken Knabb. Berkeley, Calif.: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981.———. “Détournement as Negation and Prelude.” Situationist International Anthology. Trans. and ed. Ken Knabb. Berkeley, Calif.: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981.De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.Dirda, Michael. “Modern Life, as Seen by a Writer without a Smart Phone.” The Washington Post 17 Jan. 2018. 4 July 2018 <https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/modern-life-as-seen-by-an-artist-without-a-phone/2018/01/17/6d0b779c-fb07-11e7-8f66-2df0b94bb98a_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.9333f36c6212>.Hones, Sheila. “Text as It Happens: Literary Geography.” Geography Compass 2.5 (2008): 301–1307.Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955.Kerr, Joe. “The Habit of Hackney: Joe Kerr on Iain Sinclair.” Architects’ Journal 11 Mar. 2009. 8 July 2017 <https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/home/the-habit-of-hackney-joe-kerr-on-iain-sinclair/1995066.article>.Manley, Lawrence, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. London and New York: Routledge, 2002.McKay, Sinclair. “Is It Time for All Lovers of London to Pack up?” The Spectator 2 Sep. 2017. 6 July 2018 <https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/09/is-it-time-for-all-lovers-of-london-to-pack-up/>.O’Connell, Teresa. “Iain Sinclair: Walking Is a Democracy.” Guernica 16 Nov. 2017. 7 July 2018 <https://www.guernicamag.com/iain-sinclair-walking-democracy/>.Perril, Simon. “A Cartography of Absence: The Work of Iain Sinclair.” Comparative Criticism 19 (1997): 309–339.Potter, Emily, and Kirsten Seale. “The Worldly Text and the Production of More-than-Literary Place: Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip and Melbourne’s ‘Inner North’”. Cultural Geographies (forthcoming 2019).Seale, Kirsten. “‘Eye-Swiping’ London: Iain Sinclair, Photography and the Flâneur.” Literary London 3.2 (2005).———. “Iain Sinclair’s Archive.” Sydney Review of Books. 10 Sep. 2018. 12 July 2019 <https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/sinclair-last-london/>.Sinclair, Iain. Dining on Stones, or, The Middle Ground. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2004.———. Lights Out for the Territory. London: Granta, 1997.———. London Orbital. London: Penguin, 2003.———. The Last London: True Fictions from an Unreal City. London: Oneworld Publications, 2017.Weston, Daniel. “‘Against the Grand Project’: Iain Sinclair’s Local London.” Contemporary Literature 56.2 (2015): 255–280. Wolfreys, Julian. Writing London: Materiality, Memory, Spectrality Volume 2. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

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

IntroductionMusicians and critics regard Australian jazz as vibrant and creative (Shand; Chessher; Rechniewski). From its tentative beginnings in the early twentieth century (Whiteoak), jazz has become a major aspect of Australia’s music and performance. Due to the large distances separating cities and towns, its development has been influenced by geographical isolation (Nikolsky; Chessher; Clare; Johnson; Stevens; McGuiness). While major cities have been the central hubs, it is increasingly acknowledged that regional centres also provide avenues for jazz performance (Curtis).This article discusses findings relating to transient musical populations shaped by geographical conditions, venue issues that are peculiar to the Northern region, and finally the challenges of cultural and parochial mindsets that North Queensland jazz musicians encounter in performance.Cairns and MackayCairns and Mackay are regional centres on the coast of Queensland, Australia. Cairns – population 156,901 in 2016 (ABS) – is a world famous tourist destination situated on the doorstep of the Great Barrier Reef (Thorp). Mackay – population 114,969 in 2016 (ABS) – is a lesser-known community with an economy largely underpinned by the sugar cane and coal mining industries (Rolfe et al. 138). Both communities lie North of the capital city Brisbane – Mackay in the heart of Central Queensland, and Cairns as the unofficial capital of Far North Queensland. Mackay and Cairns were selected for this study, not on representational grounds, but because they provide an opportunity to learn through case studies. Stake notes that “potential for learning is a different and sometimes superior criterion to representativeness,” adding, “that may mean taking the one most accessible or the one we can spend the most time with (451).”Musically, both regional centres have a number of venues that promote live music, however, only Cairns has a dedicated jazz club, the Cairns Jazz Club (CJC). Each has a community convention centre that brings high-calibre touring musicians to the region, including jazz musicians.Mackay is home to the Central Queensland Conservatorium of Music (CQCM) a part of the Central Queensland University that has offered conservatoire-style degree programs in jazz, contemporary music and theatre for over twenty-five years. Cairns does not have any providers of tertiary jazz qualifications.MethodologySemi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with twenty-two significant individuals associated with the jazz communities in Mackay and Cairns over a twelve-month period from 2015 to 2016. Twelve of the interviewees were living in Cairns at the time, and ten were living in Mackay. The selection of interviewees was influenced by personal knowledge of key individuals, historical records located at the CQCM, and from a study by (Mitchell), who identified important figures in the Cairns jazz scene. The study participants included members of professional jazz ensembles, dedicated jazz audience members and jazz educators. None of the participants who were interviewed relied solely on the performance of jazz as their main occupation. All of the musicians combined teaching duties with music-making in several genres including rock, jazz, Latin and funk, as well as work in the recording and producing of recorded music. Combining the performance of jazz and commercial musical styles is a common and often crucial part of being a musician in a regional centre due to the low demand for any one specific genre (Luckman et al. 630). The interview data that was gathered during the study’s data collection phase was analysed for themes using the grounded theory research method (Charmaz). The following sections will discuss three areas of findings relating to some of the unique North Queensland influences that have impacted the development and sustainability of the two regional jazz communities.Transient Musical PopulationsThe prospect of living in North Queensland is an alluring proposition for many people. According to the participants in this study, the combination of work and a tropical lifestyle attracts people from all over the country to Cairns and Mackay, but this influx is matched by a high population turnover. Many musicians who move into the region soon move away again. High population turnover is a characteristic of several Northern regional centres such as the city of Darwin (Luckman, Gibson and Lea 12). The high growth and high population turnover in Cairns, in particular, was one of the highest in the country between 2006 and 2011 (ABS). The study participants in both regions believed that the transient nature of the local population is detrimental to the development and sustainability of the jazz communities. One participant described the situation in Cairns this way: “The tropics sort of lure them up there, tease them with all of the beauty and nature, and then spit them out when they realise it’s not what they imagined (interviewee 1, 24 Aug. 2016).” Looking more broadly to other coastal regional areas of Australia, there is evidence of the counter-urban flow of professionals and artists seeking out a region’s “natural and cultural environment” (Gibson 339). On the far North coast of New South Wales, Gibson examined how the climate, natural surroundings and cultural charms attracted city dwellers to that region (337). Similarly, most of the participants in this study mentioned lifestyle choices such as raising a family and living in the tropics as reasons to move to Cairns or Mackay. The prospect of working in the tourism and hospitality industry was found to be another common reason for musicians to move to Cairns in particular. In contrast to some studies (Salazar; Conradson and Latham) where it was found that the middle- to upper-classes formed the majority of lifestyle migrants, the migrating musicians identified by this study were mostly low-income earners seeking a combination of music work and other types of employment outside the music industry. There have been studies that have explored and critically reviewed the theoretical frameworks behind lifestyle migration (Benson and Osbaldiston) including the examination of issues and the motivation to ‘lifestyle migrate’. What is interesting in this current study is the focus of discussion on the post-migration effects. Study participants believe that most of the musicians who move into their region leave soon afterwards because of their disillusionment with the local music industry. Despite the lure of musical jobs through the tourism and hospitality industry, local musicians in Cairns tend to believe there is less work than imagined. Pub rock duos and DJs have taken most of the performance opportunities, which makes it hard for new musicians to compete.The study also reveals that Cairns jazz musicians consider it more difficult to find and collaborate with quality newcomers. This may be attributed to the smaller jazz communities’ demand for players of specific instruments. One participant explained, “There’s another bass player that just moved here, but he only plays by ear, so when people want to play charts and new songs, he can’t do it so it's hard finding the right guys up here at times (interviewee 2, 23 Aug. 2016).” Cairns and Mackay participants agreed that the difficulty of finding and retaining quality musicians in the region impacted on the ability of certain groups to be sustainable. One participant added, “It’s such a small pool of musicians, at the moment, I've got a new project ready to go and I've got two percussionists, but I need a bass player, but there is no bass player that I'm willing to work with (interviewee 3, 24 Aug. 2016).” The same participant has been fortunate over the years, performing with a different local group whose members have permanently stayed in the Cairns region, however, forging new musical pathways and new groups seemed challenging due to the lack of musical skills in some of the potential musicians.In Mackay, the study revealed a smaller influx of new musicians to the region, and study participants experienced the same difficulties forming groups and retaining members as their Cairns counterparts. One participant, who found it difficult to run a Big Band as well as a smaller jazz ensemble because of the transient population, claimed that many local musicians were lured to metropolitan centres for university or work.Study participants in both Northern centres appeared to have developed a tolerance and adaptability for their regional challenges. While this article does not aim to suggest a solution to the issues they described, one interesting finding that emerged in both Cairns and Mackay was the musicians’ ability to minimise some of the effects of the transient population. Some musicians found that it was more manageable to sustain a band by forming smaller groups such as duos, trios and quartets. An example was observed in Mackay, where one participant’s Big Band was a standard seventeen-piece group. The loss of players was a constant source of anxiety for the performers. Changing to a smaller ensemble produced a sense of sustainability that satisfied the group. In Cairns, one participant found that if the core musicians in the group (bass, drums and vocals) were permanent local residents, they could manage to use musicians passing through the region, which had minimal impact on the running of the group. For example, the Latin band will have different horn players sit in from time to time. When those performers leave, the impact on the group is minimal because the rhythm section is comprised of long-term Cairns residents.Venue Conditions Heat UpAt the Cape York Hotel in Cairns, musicians and audience members claimed that it was uncomfortable to perform or attend Sunday afternoon jazz gigs during the Cairns summer due to the high temperatures and non air-conditioned venues. This impact of the physical environment on the service process in a venue was first modelled and coined the ‘Servicescape’ by Bitner (57). The framework, which includes physical dimensions like temperature, noise, space/function and signage, has also been further investigated in other literature (Minor et al.; Kubacki; Turley and Fugate). This model is relevant to this study because it clearly affects the musician’s ability to perform music in the Northern climate and attract audiences. One of the regular musicians at the Cape York Hotel commented: So you’re thinking, ‘Well, I’m starting to create something here, people are starting to show up’, but then you see it just dwindling away and then you get two or three weeks of hideously hot weather, and then like last Sunday, by the time I went on in the first set, my shirt was sticking to me like tissue paper… I set up a gig, a three-hour gig with my trio, and if it’s air conditioned you’re likely to get people but if it’s like the Cape York, which is not air conditioned, and you’re out in the beer garden with a tin roof over the top with big fans, it’s hideous‘. (Interviewee 4, 24 Aug. 2016)The availability of venues that offer live jazz is limited in both regions. The issue was twofold: firstly, the limited availability of a larger venue to cater for the ensembles was deemed problematic; and secondly, the venue manager needed to pay for the services of the club, which contributed to its running costs. In Cairns, the Cape York Hotel has provided the local CJC with an outdoor beer garden as a venue for their regular Sunday performances since 2015. The president of the CJC commented on the struggle for the club to find a suitable venue for their musicians and patrons. The club has had residencies in multiple venues over the last thirty years with varying success. It appears that the club has had to endure these conditions in order to provide their musicians and audiences an outlet for jazz performance. This dedication to their art form and sense of resilience appears to be a regular theme for these Northern jazz musicians.Minor et al. (7) recommended that live music organisers needed to consider offering different physical environments for different events (7). For example, a venue that caters for a swing band might include a dance floor for potential dancers or if a venue catered for a sit down jazz show, the venue might like to choose the best acoustic environment to best support the sound of the ensemble. The research showed that customers have different reasons for attending events, and in relation to the Cape York Hotel, the majority of the customers were the CJC members who simply wanted to enjoy their jazz club performances in an air conditioned environment with optimal acoustics as the priority. Although not ideal, the majority of the CJC members still attended during the summer months and endured the high temperatures due to a lack of venue suitability.Parochial MindsetsOne of the challenging issues faced by many of the participants in both regions was the perceived cultural divide between jazz aficionados and general patrons at many venues. While larger centres in Australia have enjoyed an international reputation as creative hubs for jazz such as Melbourne and Sydney (Shand), the majority of participants in this study believed that a significant portion of the general public is quite parochial in their views on various musical styles including jazz. Coined the ‘bogan factor’, one participant explained, “I call it the bogan factor. Do you think that's an academic term? It is now” (interviewee 5, 17 Feb. 2016). They also commented on dominant cultural choices of residents in these regions: “It's North Queensland, it's a sport orientated, 4WD dominated place. Culturally they are the main things that people are attracted to” (interviewee 5, 17 Feb. 2016). These cultural preferences appear to affect the performance opportunities for the participants in Cairns and Mackay.Waitt and Gibson explored how the Wollongong region was chosen as an area for investigation to see if city size mattered for creativity and creativity-led regeneration (1224). With the ‘Creative Class’ framework in mind (Florida), the researchers found that Wollongong’s primarily blue-collar industrial identity was a complex mixture of cultural pursuits including the arts, sport and working class ideals (Waitt and Gibson 1241). This finding is consistent with the comments of study participants from Cairns and Mackay who believed that the identities of their regions were strongly influenced by sport and industries like mining and farming. One Mackay participant added, “I think our culture, in itself, would need to change to turn more people to jazz. I can’t see that happening. That’s Australia. You’re fighting against 200 years of sport” (interviewee 6, 12 Feb. 2016). Performing in Mackay or Cairns in venues that attract various demographics can make it difficult for musicians playing jazz. A Cairns participant added, “As Ingrid James once told me, ‘It's North Queensland, you’ve got an audience of tradesman, they don't get it’. It's silly to think it's going to ever change” (interviewee 7, 26 Aug. 2016). One Mackay participant believed that the lack of appreciation for jazz in regional areas was largely due to a lack of exposure to the art form. Most people grow up listening to other styles of music in their households.Another participant made the point that regardless of the region’s cultural and leisure-time preferences, if a jazz band is playing in a football club, you must expect it to be unpopular. Many of the research participants emphasised that playing in a suitable venue is paramount for developing a consistent and attentive audience. Choosing a venue that values and promotes the style of jazz music that the musicians are performing could help to attract more jazz fans and therefore build a sustainable jazz community.Refreshingly, this study revealed that musicians in both regions showed considerable resilience in dealing with the issue of parochial mindsets, and they have implemented methods to help educate their audiences. The audience plays a significant part in the development and future of a jazz community (Becker; Martin). For the Central Queensland Conservatorium of Music in Mackay, part of the ethos of the institution is to provide music performance and educational opportunities to the region. One of the lecturers who made a significant contribution to the design of the ensemble program had a clear vision to combine jazz and popular music styles in order to connect with a regional audience. He explained, “The popular music strand of the jazz program and what we called the commercial ensembles was very much birthed out of that concept of creating a connection with the community and making us more accessible in the shortest amount of time, which then enabled us to expose people to jazz” (interviewee 8, 20 Mar. 2016).In a similar vein, several Cairns musicians commented on how they engaged with their audiences through education. Some musicians attempted to converse with the patrons on the comparative elements of jazz and non-jazz styles, which helped to instil some appreciation in patrons with little jazz knowledge. One participant cited that although not all patrons were interested in an education at a pub, some became regular attendees and showed greater appreciation for the different jazz styles. These findings align with other studies (Radbourne and Arthurs; Kubacki; Kubacki et al.), who found that audiences tend to return to arts organizations or events more regularly if they feel connected to the experience (Kubacki et al. 409).ConclusionThe Cairns and Mackay jazz musicians who were interviewed in this study revealed some innovative approaches for sustaining their art form in North Queensland. The participants discussed creative solutions for minimising the influence of a transient musician population as well as overcoming some of the parochial mindsets in the community through education. The North Queensland summer months proved to be a struggle for musicians and audience members alike in Cairns in particular, but resilience and commitment to the music and the social network of jazz performers seemed to override this obstacle. Although this article presents just a subset of the findings from a study of the development and sustainability of the jazz communities in Mackay and Cairns, it opens the way for further investigation into the unique issues faced. Deeper understanding of these issues could contribute to the ongoing development and sustainability of jazz communities in regional Australia.ReferencesAustralian Bureau of Statistics. "Mackay (Statistical Area 2), Cairns (R) (Statistical Local Area), Census 2016." Canberra: Australian Bureau of Statistics.———. "Perspectives on Regional Australia: Population Growth and Turnover in Local Government Areas (Lgas), 2006-2011." Canberra: Australian Bureau of Statistics.Becker, H. Art Worlds. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982.Benson, Michaela, and Nick Osbaldiston. "Toward a Critical Sociology of Lifestyle Migration: Reconceptualizing Migration and the Search for a Better Way of Life." The Sociological Review 64.3 (2016): 407-23.Bitner, Mary Jo. "Servicescapes: The Impact of Physical Surroundings on Customers and Employees." The Journal of Marketing (1992): 57-71. Charmaz, K. Constructing Grounded Theory. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage, 2014. Chessher, A. "Australian Jazz Musician-Educators: An Exploration of Experts' Approaches to Teaching Jazz." Sydney: University of Sydney, 2009. Clare, J. Bodgie Dada and the Cult of Cool: Jazz in Australia since the 1940s. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1995. Conradson, David, and Alan Latham. "Transnational Urbanism: Attending to Everyday Practices and Mobilities." Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 31.2 (2005): 227-33. Curtis, Rebecca Anne. "Australia's Capital of Jazz? The (Re)creation of Place, Music and Community at the Wangaratta Jazz Festival." Australian Geographer 41.1 (2010): 101-16. Florida, Richard. The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. Melbourne, Victoria: Pluto Press Australia, 2003. Gibson, Chris. "Migration, Music and Social Relations on the NSW Far North Coast." Transformations 2 (2002): 1-15. ———. "Rural Transformation and Cultural Industries: Popular Music on the New South Wales Far North Coast." Australian Geographical Studies 40.3 (2002): 337-56. Johnson, Bruce. The Inaudible Music: Jazz, Gender and Australian Modernity. Strawberry Hills, NSW: Currency Press, 2000. Kubacki, Krzysztof. "Jazz Musicians: Creating Service Experience in Live Performance." International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management 20.4 (2008): 401- 13. ———, et al. "Comparing Nightclub Customers’ Preferences in Existing and Emerging Markets." International Journal of Hospitality Management 26.4 (2007): 957-73. Luckman, S., et al. "Life in a Northern (Australian) Town: Darwin's Mercurial Music Scene." Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 22.5 (2008): 623-37. ———, Chris Gibson, and Tess Lea. "Mosquitoes in the Mix: How Transferable Is Creative City Thinking?" Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 30.1 (2009): 70-85. Martin, Peter J. "The Jazz Community as an Art World: A Sociological Perspective." Jazz Research Journal 2.1 (2005): 5-13. McGuiness, Lucian. "A Case for Ethnographic Enquiry in Australian Jazz." Sydney: University of Sydney, 2010.Minor, Michael S., et al. "Rock On! An Elementary Model of Customer Satisfaction with Musical Performances." Journal of Services Marketing 18.1 (2004): 7-18. Mitchell, A. "Jazz on the Far North Queensland Resort Circuit: A Musician's Perspective." Proceedings of the History & Future of Jazz in the Asia-Pacific Region. Eds. P. Hayward and G. Hodges. Vol. 1. Hamilton Island, Australia: Central Queensland Conservatorium of Music, 2004. Nikolsky, T. "The Development of the Australian Jazz Real Book." Melbourne: RMIT University, 2012. Radbourne, Jennifer, and Andy Arthurs. "Adapting Musicology for Commercial Outcomes." 9th International Conference on Arts and Cultural Management (AIMAC 2007), 2007.Rechniewski, Peter. The Permanent Underground: Australian Contemporary Jazz in the New Millennium. Platform Papers 16. Redfern, NSW: Currency House, 2008. Rolfe, John, et al. "Lessons from the Social and Economic Impacts of the Mining Boom in the Bowen Basin 2004-2006." Australasian Journal of Regional Studies 13.2 (2007): 134-53. Salazar, Noel B. "Migrating Imaginaries of a Better Life … until Paradise Finds You." Understanding Lifestyle Migration. Springer, 2014. 119-38. Shand, J. Jazz: The Australian Accent. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2009.Stake, Robert E. "Qualitative Case Studies." The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research. Eds. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln. 3rd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005. 443-66. Stevens, Timothy. "The Red Onion Jazz Band at the 1963 Australian Jazz Convention." Musicology Australia 24.1 (2001): 35-61. Thorp, Justine. "Tourism in Cairns: Image and Product." Journal of Australian Studies 31.91 (2007): 107-13. Turley, L., and D. Fugate. "The Multidimensional Nature of Service Facilities." Journal of Services Marketing 6.3 (1992): 37-45. Waitt, G., and C. Gibson. "Creative Small Cities: Rethinking the Creative Economy in Place." Urban Studies 46.5-6 (2009): 1223-46. Whiteoak, J. "'Jazzing’ and Australia's First Jazz Band." Popular Music 13.3 (1994): 279-95.

IntroductionIn this article, I set out to accomplish two tasks. The first is to map coffee and cafés in Mainland China in different historical periods. The second is to focus on coffee and cafés in the socio-cultural milieu of contemporary China in order to understand the symbolic value of the emerging coffee/café-scape. Cafés, rather than coffee, are at the centre of this current trend in contemporary Chinese cities. With instant coffee dominating as a drink, the Chinese have developed a cultural and social demand for cafés, but have not yet developed coffee palates. Historical Coffee Map In 1901, coffee was served in a restaurant in the city of Tianjin. This restaurant, named Kiessling, was run by a German chef, a former solider who came to China with the eight-nation alliance. At that time, coffee was reserved mostly for foreign politicians and military officials as well as wealthy businessmen—very few ordinary Chinese drank it. (For more history of Kiessling, including pictures and videos, see Kiessling). Another group of coffee consumers were from the cultural elites—the young revolutionary intellectuals and writers with overseas experience. It was almost a fashion among the literary elite to spend time in cafés. However, this was negatively judged as “Western” and “bourgeois.” For example, in 1932, Lu Xun, one of the most important twentieth century Chinese writers, commented on the café fashion during 1920s (133-36), and listed the reasons why he would not visit one. He did not drink coffee because it was “foreigners’ food”, and he was too busy writing for the kind of leisure enjoyed in cafés. Moreover, he did not, he wrote, have the nerve to go to a café, and particularly not the Revolutionary Café that was popular among cultural celebrities at that time. He claimed that the “paradise” of the café was for genius, and for handsome revolutionary writers (who he described as having red lips and white teeth, whereas his teeth were yellow). His final complaint was that even if he went to the Revolutionary Café, he would hesitate going in (Lu Xun 133-36). From Lu Xun’s list, we can recognise his nationalism and resistance to what were identified as Western foods and lifestyles. It is easy to also feel his dissatisfaction with those dilettante revolutionary intellectuals who spent time in cafés, talking and enjoying Western food, rather than working. In contrast to Lu Xun’s resistance to coffee and café culture, another well-known writer, Zhang Ailing, frequented cafés when she lived in Shanghai from the 1920s to 1950s. She wrote about the smell of cakes and bread sold in Kiessling’s branch store located right next to her parents’ house (Yuyue). Born into a wealthy family, exposed to Western culture and food at a very young age, Zhang Ailing liked to spend her social and writing time in cafés, ordering her favourite cakes, hot chocolate, and coffee. When she left Shanghai and immigrated to the USA, coffee was an important part of her writing life: the smell and taste reminding her of old friends and Shanghai (Chunzi). However, during Zhang’s time, it was still a privileged and elite practice to patronise a café when these were located in foreign settlements with foreign chefs, and served mainly foreigners, wealthy businessmen, and cultural celebrities. After 1949, when the Chinese Communist Party established the People’s Republic of China, until the late 1970s, there were no coffee shops in Mainland China. It was only when Deng Xiaoping suggested neo-liberalism as a so-called “reform-and-open-up” economic policy that foreign commerce and products were again seen in China. In 1988, ten years after the implementation of Deng Xiaoping’s policy, the Nestlé coffee company made the first inroads into the mainland market, featuring homegrown coffee beans in Yunnan province (China Beverage News; Dong; ITC). Nestlé’s bottled instant coffee found its way into the Chinese market, avoiding a direct challenge to the tea culture. Nestlé packaged its coffee to resemble health food products and marketed it as a holiday gift suitable for friends and relatives. As a symbol of modernity and “the West”, coffee-as-gift meshed with the traditional Chinese cultural custom that values gift giving. It also satisfied a collective desire for foreign products (and contact with foreign cultures) during the economic reform era. Even today, with its competitively low price, instant coffee dominates coffee consumption at home, in the workplace, and on Chinese airlines. While Nestlé aimed their product at native Chinese consumers, the multinational companies who later entered China’s coffee market, such as Sara Lee, mainly targeted international hotels such as IHG, Marriott, and Hyatt. The multinationals also favoured coffee shops like Kommune in Shanghai that offered more sophisticated kinds of coffee to foreign consumers and China’s upper class (Byers). If Nestlé introduced coffee to ordinary Chinese families, it was Starbucks who introduced the coffee-based “third space” to urban life in contemporary China on a signficant scale. Differing from the cafés before 1949, Starbucks stores are accessible to ordinary Chinese citizens. The first in Mainland China opened in Beijing’s China World Trade Center in January 1999, targeting mainly white-collar workers and foreigners. Starbucks coffee shops provide a space for informal business meetings, chatting with friends, and relaxing and, with its 500th store opened in 2011, dominate the field in China. Starbucks are located mainly in the central business districts and airports, and the company plans to have 1,500 sites by 2015 (Starbucks). Despite this massive presence, Starbucks constitutes only part of the café-scape in contemporary Chinese cities. There are two other kinds of cafés. One type is usually located in universities or residential areas and is frequented mainly by students or locals working in cultural professions. A representative of this kind is Sculpting in Time Café. In November 1997, two years before the opening of the first Starbucks in Beijing, two newlywed college graduates opened the first small Sculpting in Time Café near Beijing University’s East Gate. This has been expanded into a chain, and boasts 18 branches on the Mainland. (For more about its history, see Sculpting in Time Café). Interestingly, both Starbucks and Sculpting in Time Café acquired their names from literature, Starbucks from Moby Dick, and Sculpting in Time from the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s film diary of the same name. For Chinese students of literature and the arts, drinking coffee is less about acquiring more energy to accomplish their work, and more about entering a sensual world, where the aroma of coffee mixes with the sounds from the coffee machine and music, as well as the lighting of the space. More importantly, cafés with this ambience become, in themselves, cultural sites associated with literature, films, and music. Owners of this kind of café are often lovers of foreign literatures, films, and cultures, and their cafés host various cultural events, including forums, book clubs, movie screenings, and music clubs. Generally speaking, coffee served in this kind of café is simpler than in the kind discussed below. This third type of café includes those located in tourist and entertainment sites such as art districts, bar areas, and historical sites, and which are frequented by foreign and native tourists, artists and other cultural workers. If Starbucks cultivates a fast-paced business/professional atmosphere, and Sculpting in Time Cafés an artsy and literary atmosphere, this third kind of café is more like an upscale “bar” with trained baristas serving complicated coffees and emphasising their flavour. These coffee shops are more expensive than the other kinds, with an average price three times that of Starbucks. Currently, cafés of this type are found only in “first-tier” cities and usually located in art districts and tourist areas—such as Beijing’s 798 Art District and Nanluo Guxiang, Shanghai’s Tai Kang Road (a.k.a. “the art street”), and Hangzhou’s Westlake area. While Nestlé and Starbucks use coffee beans grown in Yunnan provinces, these “art cafés” are more inclined to use imported coffee beans from suppliers like Sara Lee. Coffee and Cafés in Contemporary China After just ten years, there are hundreds of cafés in Chinese cities. Why has there been such a demand for coffee or, more accurately, cafés, in such a short period of time? The first reason is the lack of “third space” environments in Mainland China. Before cafés appeared in the late 1990s, stores like KFC (which opened its first store in 1987) and McDonald’s (with its first store opened in 1990) filled this role for urban residents, providing locations where customers could experience Western food, meet friends, work, or read. In fact, KFC and McDonald’s were once very popular with college students looking for a place to study. Both stores had relatively clean food environments and good lighting. They also had air conditioning in the summer and heating in the winter, which are not provided in most Chinese university dormitories. However, since neither chain was set up to be a café and customers occupying seats for long periods while ordering minimal amounts of food or drink affected profits, staff members began to indirectly ask customers to leave after dining. At the same time, as more people were able to afford to eat at KFC and McDonald’s, their fast foods were also becoming more and more popular, especially among young people. As a consequence, both types of chain restaurant were becoming noisy and crowded and, thus, no longer ideal for reading, studying, or meeting with friends. Although tea has been a traditional drink in Chinese culture, traditional teahouses were expensive places more suitable for business meetings or for the cultural or intellectual elite. Since almost every family owns a tea set and can readily purchase tea, friends and family would usually make and consume tea at home. In recent years, however, new kinds of teahouses have emerged, similar in style to cafés, targeting the younger generation with more affordable prices and a wider range of choices, so the lack of a “third space” does not fully explain the café boom. Another factor affecting the popularity of cafés has been the development and uptake of Internet technology, including the increasing use of laptops and wireless Internet in recent years. The Internet has been available in China since the late 1990s, while computers and then laptops entered ordinary Chinese homes in the early twenty-first century. The IT industry has created not only a new field of research and production, but has also fostered new professions and demands. Particularly, in recent years in Mainland China, a new socially acceptable profession—freelancing in such areas as graphic design, photography, writing, film, music, and the fashion industry—has emerged. Most freelancers’ work is computer- and Internet-based. Cafés provide suitable working space, with wireless service, and the bonus of coffee that is, first of all, somatically stimulating. In addition, the emergence of the creative and cultural industries (which are supported by the Chinese government) has created work for these freelancers and, arguably, an increasing demand for café-based third spaces where such people can meet, talk and work. Furthermore, the flourishing of cafés in first-tier cities is part of the “aesthetic economy” (Lloyd 24) that caters to the making and selling of lifestyle experience. Alongside foreign restaurants, bars, galleries, and design firms, cafés contribute to city branding, and link a city to the global urban network. Cafés, like restaurants, galleries and bars, provide a space for the flow of global commodities, as well as for the human flow of tourists, travelling artists, freelancers, and cultural specialists. Finally, cafés provide a type of service that contributes to friendly owner/waiter-customer relations. During the planned-economy era, most stores and hotels in China were State-owned, staff salaries were not related to individual performance, and indifferent (and even unfriendly) service was common. During the economic reform era, privately owned stores and shops began to replace State-owned ones. At the same time, a large number of people from the countryside flowed into the cities seeking opportunities. Most had little if any professional training and so could only find work in factories or in the service industry. However, most café employees are urban, with better educational backgrounds, and many were already familiar with coffee culture. In addition, café owners, particularly those of places like Sculpting in Time Cafe, often invest in creating a positive, community atmosphere, learning about their customers and sharing personal experiences with their regular clients. This leads to my next point—the generation of the 1980s’ need for a social community. Cafés’ Symbolic Value—Community A demand for a sense of community among the generation of the 1980s is a unique socio-cultural phenomenon in China, which paradoxically co-exists with their desire for individualism. Mao Zedong started the “One Child Policy” in 1979 to slow the rapid population growth in China, and the generations born under this policy are often called “the lonely generations,” with both parents working full-time. At the same time, they are “the generation of me,” labelled as spoiled, self-centred, and obsessed with consumption (de Kloet; Liu; Rofel; Wang). The individuals of this generation, now aged in their 20s and 30s, constitute the primary consumers of coffee in China. Whereas individualism is an important value to them, a sense of community is also desirable in order to compensate for their lack of siblings. Furthermore, the 1980s’ generation has also benefitted from the university expansion policy implemented in 1999. Since then, China has witnessed a surge of university students and graduates who not only received scientific and other course-based knowledge, but also had a better chance to be exposed to foreign cultures through their books, music, and movies. With this interesting tension between individualism and collectivism, the atmosphere provided by cafés has fostered a series of curious temporary communities built on cultural and culinary taste. Interestingly, it has become an aspiration of many young college students and graduates to open a community-space style café in a city. One of the best examples is the new Henduoren’s (Many People’s) Café. This was a project initiated by Wen Erniu, a recent college graduate who wanted to open a café in Beijing but did not have sufficient funds to do so. She posted a message on the Internet, asking people to invest a minimum of US$316 to open a café with her. With 78 investors, the café opened in September 2011 in Beijing (see pictures of Henduoren’s Café). In an interview with the China Daily, Wen Erniu stated that, “To open a cafe was a dream of mine, but I could not afford it […] We thought opening a cafe might be many people’s dream […] and we could get together via the Internet to make it come true” (quoted in Liu 2011). Conclusion: Café Culture and (Instant) Coffee in China There is a Chinese saying that, if you hate someone—just persuade him or her to open a coffee shop. Since cafés provide spaces where one can spend a relatively long time for little financial outlay, owners have to increase prices to cover their expenses. This can result in fewer customers. In retaliation, cafés—particularly those with cultural and literary ambience—host cultural events to attract people, and/or they offer food and wine along with coffee. The high prices, however, remain. In fact, the average price of coffee in China is often higher than in Europe and North America. For example, a medium Starbucks’ caffè latte in China averaged around US$4.40 in 2010, according to the price list of a Starbucks outlet in Shanghai—and the prices has recently increased again (Xinhua 2012). This partially explains why instant coffee is still so popular in China. A bag of instant Nestlé coffee cost only some US$0.25 in a Beijing supermarket in 2010, and requires only hot water, which is accessible free almost everywhere in China, in any restaurant, office building, or household. As an habitual, addictive treat, however, coffee has not yet become a customary, let alone necessary, drink for most Chinese. Moreover, while many, especially those of the older generations, could discern the quality and varieties of tea, very few can judge the quality of the coffee served in cafés. As a result, few Mainland Chinese coffee consumers have a purely somatic demand for coffee—craving its smell or taste—and the highly sweetened and creamed instant coffee offered by companies like Nestlé or Maxwell has largely shaped the current Chinese palate for coffee. Ben Highmore has proposed that “food spaces (shops, restaurants and so on) can be seen, for some social agents, as a potential space where new ‘not-me’ worlds are encountered” (396) He continues to expand that “how these potential spaces are negotiated—the various affective registers of experience (joy, aggression, fear)—reflect the multicultural shapes of a culture (its racism, its openness, its acceptance of difference)” (396). Cafés in contemporary China provide spaces where one encounters and constructs new “not-me” worlds, and more importantly, new “with-me” worlds. While café-going communicates an appreciation and desire for new lifestyles and new selves, it can be hoped that in the near future, coffee will also be appreciated for its smell, taste, and other benefits. Of course, it is also necessary that future Chinese coffee consumers also recognise the rich and complex cultural, political, and social issues behind the coffee economy in the era of globalisation. References Byers, Paul [former Managing Director, Sara Lee’s Asia Pacific]. Pers. comm. Apr. 2012. China Beverage News. “Nestlé Acquires 70% Stake in Chinese Mineral Water Producer.” (2010). 31 Mar. 2012 ‹http://chinabevnews.wordpress.com/2010/02/21/nestle-acquires-70-stake-in-chinese-mineral-water-producer›. Chunzi. 张爱玲地图[The Map of Eileen Chang]. 汉语大词典出版 [Hanyu Dacidian Chubanshe], 2003. de Kloet, Jeroen. China with a Cut: Globalization, Urban Youth and Popular Music. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2010. Dong, Jonathan. “A Caffeinated Timeline: Developing Yunnan’s Coffee Cultivation.” China Brief (2011): 24-26. Highmore, Ben. “Alimentary Agents: Food, Cultural Theory and Multiculturalism.” Journal of Intercultural Studies, 29.4 (2008): 381-98. ITC (International Trade Center). The Coffee Sector in China: An Overview of Production, Trade And Consumption, 2010. Liu, Kang. Globalization and Cultural Trends in China. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004. Liu, Zhihu. “From Virtual to Reality.” China Daily (Dec. 2011) 31 Mar. 2012 ‹http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/life/2011-12/26/content_14326490.htm›. Lloyd, Richard. Neobohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City. London: Routledge, 2006. Lu, Xun. “Geming Kafei Guan [Revolutionary Café]”. San Xian Ji. Taibei Shi: Feng Yun Shi Dai Chu Ban Gong Si: Fa Xing Suo Xue Wen Hua Gong Si, Mingguo 78 (1989): 133-36. Rofel, Lisa. Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2007: 1-30. “Starbucks Celebrates Its 500th Store Opening in Mainland China.” Starbucks Newsroom (Oct. 2011) 31 Mar. 2012. ‹http://news.starbucks.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=580›. Wang, Jing. High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Deng’s China. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: U of California P, 1996. 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As I round the corner from Church Street onto Vesey, I am abruptly met with the façade of St. Paul’s Chapel and by the sudden memory of two things, both of which have not yet happened. I think about how, in a couple of decades, the area surrounding me will be burnt to the ground. I also recall how, just after the turn of the twenty-first century, the area will again crumble onto itself. It is 1759, and I—via my avatar—am wandering through downtown New York City in the videogame space of Assassin’s Creed: Rogue (AC:R). These spatial and temporal memories stem from the fact that I have previously (that is, earlier in my life) played an AC game set in New York City during the War for Independence (later in history), wherein the city’s lower west side burns at the hands of the British. Years before that (in my biographical timeline, though much later in history) I watched from twenty-something blocks north of here as flames erupted from the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Complicating the situation further, Michel de Certeau strolls with me in spirit, pondering observations he will make from almost this exact location (though roughly 1,100 feet higher up) 220 years from now, around the time I am being born. Perhaps the oddest aspect of this convoluted and temporally layered experience is the fact that I am not actually at the corner of Church and Vesey in 1759 at all, but rather on a couch, in Virginia, now. This particular type of sudden arrival at a space is only possible when it is not planned. Prior to the moment described above, I had finished a “mission” in the game that involved my coming to the city, so I decided I would just walk around a bit in the newly discovered digital New York of 1759. I wanted to take it in. I wanted to wander. Truly Being-in-a-place means attending to the interconnected Being-ness and Being-with-ness of all of the things that make up that place (Heidegger; Haraway). Conversely, to travel to or through a place entails a type of focused directionality toward a place that you are not currently Being in. Wandering, however, demands eschewing both, neither driven by an incessant goal, nor stuck in place by introspective ruminations. Instead, wandering is perhaps best described as a sort of mobile openness. A wanderer is not quite Benjamin’s flâneur, characterised by an “idle yet assertive negotiation of the street” (Coates 28), but also, I would argue, not quite de Certeau’s “Wandersmünner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it” (de Certeau 93). Wandering requires a concerted effort at non-intentionality. That description may seem to fold in on itself, to be sure, but as the spaces around us are increasingly “canalized” (Rabinow and Foucault) and designed with specific trajectories and narratives in mind, inaction leads to the unconscious enacting of an externally derived intention; whereas any attempt to subvert that design is itself a wholly intentional act. This is why wandering is so difficult. It requires shedding layers. It takes practice, like meditation.In what follows, I will explore the possibility of revelatory moments enabled by the shedding of these layers of intention through my own experience in digital space (maybe the most designed and canalized spaces we inhabit). I come to recognise, as I disavow the designed narrative of game space, that it takes on other meanings, becomes another space. I find myself Being-there in a way that transcends the digital as we understand it, experiencing space that reaches into the past and future, into memory and fiction. Indeed, wandering is liminal, betwixt fixed points, spaces, and times, and the text you are reading will wander in this fashion—between the digital and the physical, between memory and experience, and among multiple pasts and the present—to arrive at a multilayered subjective sense of space, a palimpsest of placemaking.Before charging fully into digital time travel, however, we must attend to the business of context. In this case, this means addressing why I am talking about videogame space in Certaudian terms. Beginning as early as 1995, videogame theorists have employed de Certeau’s notion of “spatial stories” in their assertions that games allow players to construct the game’s narrative by travelling through and “colonizing” the space (Fuller and Jenkins). Most of the scholarship involving de Certeau and videogames, however, has been relegated to the concepts of “map/tour” in looking at digital embodiment within game space as experiential representatives of the place/space binary. Maps verbalise spatial experience in place terms, such as “it’s at the corner of this and that street”, whereas tours express the same in terms of movement through space, as in “turn right at the red house”. Videogames complicate this because “mapping is combined with touring when moving through the game-space” (Lammes).In Games as Inhabited Spaces, Bernadette Flynn moves beyond the map/tour dichotomy to argue that spatial theories can approach videogaming in a way no other viewpoint can, because neither narrative nor mechanics of play can speak to the “space” of a game. Thus, Flynn’s work is “focused on completely reconceiving gameplay as fundamentally configured with spatial practice” (59) through de Certeau’s concepts of “strategic” and “tactical” spatial use. Flynn explains:The ability to forge personal directions from a closed simulation links to de Certeau’s notion of tactics, where users can create their own trajectories from the formal organizations of space. For de Certeau, tactics are related to how people individualise trajectories of movement to create meaning and transformations of space. Strategies on the other hand, are more akin to the game designer’s particular matrix of formal structures, arrangements of time and space which operate to control and constrain gameplay. (59)Flynn takes much of her reading of de Certeau from Lev Manovich, who argues that a game designer “uses strategies to impose a particular matrix of space, time, experience, and meaning on his viewers; they, in turn, use ‘tactics’ to create their own trajectories […] within this matrix” (267). Manovich believes de Certeau’s theories offer a salient model for thinking about “the ways in which computer users navigate through computer spaces they did not design” (267). In Flynn’s and Manovich’s estimation, simply moving through digital space is a tactic, a subversion of its strategic and linear design.The views of game space as tactical have historically (and paradoxically) treated the subject of videogames from a strategic perspective, as a configurable space to be “navigated through”, as a way of attaining a certain goal. Dan Golding takes up this problem, distancing our engagement from the design and calling for a de Certeaudian treatment of videogame space “from below”, where “the spatial diegesis of the videogame is affordance based and constituted by the skills of the player”, including those accrued outside the game space (Golding 118). Similarly, Darshana Jayemanne adds a temporal element with the idea that these spatial constructions are happening alongside a “complexity” and “proliferation of temporal schemes” (Jayemanne 1, 4; see also Nikolchina). Building from Golding and Jayemanne, I illustrate here a space wherein the player, not the game, is at the fulcrum of both spatial and temporal complexity, by adding the notion that—along with skill and experience—players bring space and time with them into the game.Viewed with the above understanding of strategies, tactics, skill, and temporality, the act of wandering in a videogame seems inherently subversive: on one hand, by undergoing a destination-less exploration of game space, I am rejecting the game’s spatial narrative trajectory; on the other, I am eschewing both skill accrual and temporal insistence to attempt a sense of pure Being-in-the-game. Such rebellious freedom, however, is part of the design of this particular game space. AC:R is a “sand box” game, which means it involves a large environment that can be traversed in a non-linear fashion, allowing, supposedly, for more freedom and exploration. Indeed, much of the gameplay involves slowly making more space available for investigation in an outward—rather than unidirectional—course. A player opens up these new spaces by “synchronising a viewpoint”, which can only be done by climbing to the top of specific landmarks. One of the fundamental elements of the AC franchise is an acrobatic, free-running, parkour style of engagement with a player’s surroundings, “where practitioners weave through urban environments, hopping over barricades, debris, and other obstacles” (Laviolette 242), climbing walls and traversing rooftops in a way unthinkable (and probably illegal) in our everyday lives. People scaling buildings in major metropolitan areas outside of videogame space tend to get arrested, if they survive the climb. Possibly, these renegade climbers are seeking what de Certeau describes as the “voluptuous pleasure […] of ‘seeing the whole,’ of looking down on, totalizing the most immoderate of human texts” (92)—what he experienced, looking down from the top of the World Trade Center in the late 1970s.***On digital ground level, back in 1759, I look up to the top of St. Paul’s bell tower and crave that pleasure, so I climb. As I make my way up, Non-Player Characters (NPCs)—the townspeople and trader avatars who make up the interactive human scenery of the game—shout things such as “You’ll hurt yourself” and “I say! What on earth is he doing?” This is the game’s way of convincing me that I am enacting agency and writing my own spatial story. I seem to be deploying “tricky and stubborn procedures that elude discipline without being outside the field in which it is exercised” (de Certeau 96), when I am actually following the program the way I am supposed to. If I were not meant to climb the tower, I simply would not be able to. The fact that game developers go to the extent of recording dialogue to shout at me when I do this proves that they expect my transgression. This is part of the game’s “semi-social system”: a collection of in-game social norms that—to an extent—reflect the cultural understandings of outside non-digital society (Atkinson and Willis). These norms are enforced through social pressures and expectations in the game such that “these relative imperatives and influences, appearing to present players with ‘unlimited’ choices, [frame] them within the parameters of synthetic worlds whose social structure and assumptions are distinctly skewed in particular ways” (408). By using these semi-social systems, games communicate to players that performing a particular act is seen as wrong or scandalous by the in-game society (and therefore subversive), even when the action is necessary for the continuation of the spatial story.When I reach the top of the bell tower, I am able to “synchronise the viewpoint”—that is, unlock the map of this area of the city. Previously, I did not have access to an overhead view of the area, but now that I have indulged in de Certeau’s pleasure of “seeing the whole”, I can see not only the tactical view from the street, but also the strategic bird’s-eye view from above. From the top, looking out over the city—now The City, a conceivable whole rather than a collection of streets—it is difficult to picture the neighbourhood engulfed in flames. The stair-step Dutch-inspired rooflines still recall the very recent change from New Amsterdam to New York, but in thirty years’ time, they will all be torched and rebuilt, replaced with colonial Tudor boxes. I imagine myself as an eighteenth-century de Certeau, surveying pre-ruination New York City. I wonder how his thoughts would have changed if his viewpoint were coloured with knowledge of the future. Standing atop the very symbol of global power and wealth—a duo-lith that would exist for less than three decades—would his pleasure have been less “voluptuous”? While de Certeau considers the viewer from above like Icarus, whose “elevation transfigures him into a voyeur” (92), I identify more with Daedalus, preoccupied with impending disaster. I swan-dive from the tower into a hay cart, returning to the bustle of the street below.As I wander amongst the people of digital 1759 New York, the game continuously makes phatic advances at me. I bump into others on the street and they drop boxes they are carrying, or stumble to the side. Partial overheard conversations going on between townspeople—“… what with all these new taxes …”, “… but we’ve got a fine regiment here …”—both underscore the historical context of the game and imply that this is a world that exists even when I am not there. These characters and their conversations are as much a part of the strategic makeup of the city as the buildings are. They are the text, not the writers nor the readers. I am the only writer of this text, but I am merely transcribing a pre-programmed narrative. So, I am not an author, but rather a stenographer. For this short moment, though, I am allowed by the game to believe that I am making the choice not to transcribe; there are missions to complete, and I am ignoring them. I am taking in the city, forgetting—just as the design intends—that I am the only one here, the only person in the entire world, indeed, the person for whom this world exists.While wandering, I also experience conflicts and mergers between what Maurice Halbwachs has called historical, autobiographical, and collective memory types: respectively, these are memories created according to historical record, through one’s own life experience, and by the way a society tends to culturally frame and recall “important” events. De Certeau describes a memorable place as a “palimpsest, [where] subjectivity is already linked to the absence that structures it as existence” (109). Wandering through AC:R’s virtual representation of 1759 downtown New York, I am experiencing this palimpsest in multiple layers, activating my Halbwachsian memories and influencing one another in the creation of my subjectivity. This is the “absence” de Certeau speaks of. My visions of Revolutionary New York ablaze tug at me from beneath a veneer of peaceful Dutch architecture: two warring historical memory constructs. Simultaneously, this old world is painted on top of my autobiographical memories as a New Yorker for thirteen years, loudly ordering corned beef with Russian dressing at the deli that will be on this corner. Somewhere sandwiched between these layers hides a portrait of September 11th, 2001, painted either by collective memory or autobiographical memory, or, more likely, a collage of both. A plane entering a building. Fire. Seen by my eyes, and then re-seen countless times through the same televised imagery that the rest of the world outside our small downtown village saw it. Which images are from media, and which from memory?Above, as if presiding over the scene, Michel de Certeau hangs in the air at the collision site, suspended a 1000 feet above the North Pool of the 9/11 Memorial, rapt in “voluptuous pleasure”. And below, amid the colonists in their tricorns and waistcoats, people in grey ash-covered suits—ambulatory statues; golems—slowly and silently march ever uptown-wards. Dutch and Tudor town homes stretch skyward and transform into art-deco and glass monoliths. These multiform strata, like so many superimposed transparent maps, ground me in the idea of New York, creating the “fragmentary and inward-turning histories” (de Certeau 108) that give place to my subjectivity, allowing me to Be-there—even though, technically, I am not.My conscious decision to ignore the game’s narrative and wander has made this moment possible. While I understand that this is entirely part of the intended gameplay, I also know that the design cannot possibly account for the particular way in which I experience the space. And this is the fundamental point I am asserting here: that—along with the strategies and temporal complexities of the design and the tactics and skills of those on the ground—we bring into digital space our own temporal and experiential constructions that allow us to Be-in-the-game in ways not anticipated by its strategic design. Non-digital virtuality—in the tangled forms of autobiographical, historic, and collective memory—reaches into digital space, transforming the experience. Further, this changed game-experience becomes a part of my autobiographical “prosthetic memory” that I carry with me (Landsberg). When I visit New York in the future, and I inevitably find myself abruptly met with the façade of St Paul’s Chapel as I round the corner of Church Street and Vesey, I will be brought back to this moment. Will I continue to wander, or will I—if just for a second—entertain the urge to climb?***After the recent near destruction by fire of Notre-Dame, a different game in the AC franchise was offered as a free download, because it is set in revolutionary Paris and includes a very detailed and interactive version of the cathedral. Perhaps right now, on sundry couches in various geographical locations, people are wandering there: strolling along the Siene, re-experiencing time they once spent there; overhearing tense conversations about regime change along the Champs-Élysées that sound disturbingly familiar; or scaling the bell tower of the Notre-Dame Cathedral itself—site of revolution, desecration, destruction, and future rebuilding—to reach the pleasure of seeing the strategic whole at the top. And maybe, while they are up there, they will glance south-southwest to the 15th arrondissement, where de Certeau lies, enjoying some voluptuous Icarian viewpoint as-yet unimagined.ReferencesAtkinson, Rowland, and Paul Willis. “Transparent Cities: Re‐Shaping the Urban Experience through Interactive Video Game Simulation.” City 13.4 (2009): 403–417. DOI: 10.1080/13604810903298458.Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Ed. Rolf Tiedmann. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2002. Coates, Jamie. “Key Figure of Mobility: The Flâneur.” Social Anthropology 25.1 (2017): 28–41. DOI: 10.1111/1469-8676.12381.De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.Flynn, Bernadette. “Games as Inhabited Spaces.” Media International Australia, Incorporating Culture and Policy 110 (2004): 52–61. 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IntroductionCoffee, as a stimulant, and the spaces in which it is has been consumed, have long played a vital role in fostering communication, creativity, and sociality. This article explores the interrelationship of café space, communication, creativity, and materialism. In developing these themes, this article is structured in two parts. The first looks back to the coffee houses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to give a historical context to the contemporary role of the café as a key site of creativity through its facilitation of social interaction, communication and information exchange. The second explores the continuation of the link between cafés, communication and creativity, through an instance from the mid-twentieth century where this process becomes individualised and is tied more intrinsically to the material surroundings of the café itself. From this, we argue that in order to understand the connection between café space and creativity, it is valuable to consider the rich polymorphic material and aesthetic composition of cafés. The Social Life of Coffee: London’s Coffee Houses While the social consumption of coffee has a long history, here we restrict our focus to a discussion of the London coffee houses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was during the seventeenth century that the vogue of these coffee houses reached its zenith when they operated as a vibrant site of mercantile activity, as well as cultural and political exchange (Cowan; Lillywhite; Ellis). Many of these coffee houses were situated close to the places where politicians, merchants, and other significant people congregated and did business, near government buildings such as Parliament, as well as courts, ports and other travel route hubs (Lillywhite 17). A great deal of information was shared within these spaces and, as a result, the coffee house became a key venue for communication, especially the reading and distribution of print and scribal publications (Cowan 85). At this time, “no coffee house worth its name” would be without a ready selection of newspapers for its patrons (Cowan 173). By working to twenty-four hour diurnal cycles and heightening the sense of repetition and regularity, coffee houses also played a crucial role in routinising news as a form of daily consumption alongside other forms of habitual consumption (including that of coffee drinking). In Cowan’s words, “restoration coffee houses soon became known as places ‘dasht with diurnals and books of news’” (172). Among these was the short-lived but nonetheless infamous social gossip publication, The Tatler (1709-10), which was strongly associated with the London coffee houses and, despite its short publication life, offers great insight into the social life and scandals of the time. The coffee house became, in short, “the primary social space in which ‘news’ was both produced and consumed” (Cowan 172). The proprietors of coffee houses were quick to exploit this situation by dealing in “news mongering” and developing their own news publications to supplement their incomes (172). They sometimes printed news, commentary and gossip that other publishers were not willing to print. However, as their reputation as news providers grew, so did the pressure on coffee houses to meet the high cost of continually acquiring or producing journals (Cowan 173; Ellis 185-206). In addition to the provision of news, coffee houses were vital sites for other forms of communication. For example, coffee houses were key venues where “one might deposit and receive one’s mail” (Cowan 175), and the Penny Post used coffeehouses as vital pick-up and delivery centres (Lillywhite 17). As Cowan explains, “Many correspondents [including Jonathan Swift] used a coffeehouse as a convenient place to write their letters as well as to send them” (176). This service was apparently provided gratis for regular patrons, but coffee house owners were less happy to provide this for their more infrequent customers (Cowan 176). London’s coffee houses functioned, in short, as notable sites of sociality that bundled together drinking coffee with news provision and postal and other services to attract customers (Cowan; Ellis). Key to the success of the London coffee house of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the figure of the virtuoso habitué (Cowan 105)—an urbane individual of the middle or upper classes who was skilled in social intercourse, skills that were honed through participation in the highly ritualised and refined forms of interpersonal communication, such as visiting the stately homes of that time. In contrast to such private visits, the coffee house provided a less formalised and more spontaneous space of sociality, but where established social skills were distinctly advantageous. A striking example of the figure of the virtuoso habitué is the philosopher, architect and scientist Robert Hooke (1635-1703). Hooke, by all accounts, used the opportunities provided by his regular visits to coffee houses “to draw on the knowledge of a wide variety of individuals, from servants and skilled laborers to aristocrats, as well as to share and display novel scientific instruments” (Cowan 105) in order to explore and develop his virtuoso interests. The coffee house also served Hooke as a place to debate philosophy with cliques of “like-minded virtuosi” and thus formed the “premier locale” through which he could “fulfil his own view of himself as a virtuoso, as a man of business, [and] as a man at the centre of intellectual life in the city” (Cowan 105-06). For Hooke, the coffee house was a space for serious work, and he was known to complain when “little philosophical work” was accomplished (105-06). Sociality operates in this example as a form of creative performance, demonstrating individual skill, and is tied to other forms of creative output. Patronage of a coffee house involved hearing and passing on gossip as news, but also entailed skill in philosophical debate and other intellectual pursuits. It should also be noted that the complex role of the coffee house as a locus of communication, sociality, and creativity was repeated elsewhere. During the 1600s in Egypt (and elsewhere in the Middle East), for example, coffee houses served as sites of intensive literary activity as well as the locations for discussions of art, sciences and literature, not to mention also of gambling and drug use (Hattox 101). While the popularity of coffee houses had declined in London by the 1800s, café culture was flowering elsewhere in mainland Europe. In the late 1870s in Paris, Edgar Degas and Edward Manet documented the rich café life of the city in their drawings and paintings (Ellis 216). Meanwhile, in Vienna, “the kaffeehaus offered another evocative model of urban and artistic modernity” (Ellis 217; see also Bollerey 44-81). Serving wine and dinners as well as coffee and pastries, the kaffeehaus was, like cafés elsewhere in Europe, a mecca for writers, artists and intellectuals. The Café Royal in London survived into the twentieth century, mainly through the patronage of European expatriates and local intellectuals such as Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, T. S. Elliot, and Henri Bergson (Ellis 220). This pattern of patronage within specific and more isolated cafés was repeated in famous gatherings of literary identities elsewhere in Europe throughout the twentieth century. From this historical perspective, a picture emerges of how the social functions of the coffee house and its successors, the espresso bar and modern café, have shifted over the course of their histories (Bollerey 44-81). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the coffee house was an important location for vibrant social interaction and the consumption and distribution of various forms of communication such as gossip, news, and letters. However, in the years of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the café was more commonly a site for more restricted social interaction between discrete groups. Studies of cafés and creativity during this era focus on cafés as “factories of literature, inciters to art, and breeding places for new ideas” (Fitch, The Grand 18). Central in these accounts are bohemian artists, their associated social circles, and their preferred cafés de bohème (for detailed discussion, see Wilson; Fitch, Paris Café; Brooker; Grafe and Bollerey 4-41). As much of this literature on café culture details, by the early twentieth century, cafés emerge as places that enable individuals to carve out a space for sociality and creativity which was not possible elsewhere in the modern metropolis. Writing on the modern metropolis, Simmel suggests that the concentration of people and things in cities “stimulate[s] the nervous system of the individual” to such an extent that it prompts a kind of self-preservation that he terms a “blasé attitude” (415). This is a form of “reserve”, he writes, which “grants to the individual a [certain] kind and an amount of personal freedom” that was hitherto unknown (416). Cafés arguably form a key site in feeding this dynamic insofar as they facilitate self-protectionism—Fitch’s “pool of privacy” (The Grand 22)—and, at the same time, produce a sense of individual freedom in Simmel’s sense of the term. That is to say, from the early-to-mid twentieth century, cafés have become complex settings in terms of the relationships they enable or constrain between living in public, privacy, intimacy, and cultural practice. (See Haine for a detailed discussion of how this plays out in relation to working class engagement with Paris cafés, and Wilson as well as White on other cultural contexts, such as Japan.) Threaded throughout this history is a clear celebration of the individual artist as a kind of virtuoso habitué of the contemporary café. Café Jama Michalika The following historical moment, drawn from a powerful point in the mid-twentieth century, illustrates this last stage in the evolution of the relationship between café space, communication, and creativity. This particular historical moment concerns the renowned Polish composer and conductor Krzysztof Penderecki, who is most well-known for his avant-garde piece Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (1960), his Polymorphia (1961), and St Luke Passion (1963-66), all of which entailed new compositional and notation techniques. Poland, along with other European countries devastated by the Second World War, underwent significant rebuilding after the war, also investing heavily in the arts, musical education, new concert halls, and conservatoria (Monastra). In the immediate post-war period, Poland and Polish culture was under the strong ideological influence exerted by the Soviet Union. However, as Thomas notes, within a year of Stalin’s death in 1953, “there were flickering signs of moderation in Polish culture” (83). With respect to musical creativity, a key turning point was the Warsaw Autumn Music Festival of 1956. “The driving force” behind the first festival (which was to become an annual event), was Polish “composers’ overwhelming sense of cultural isolation and their wish to break the provincial nature of Polish music” at that time (Thomas 85). Penderecki was one of a younger generation of composers who participated in, and benefited from, these early festivals, making his first appearance in 1959 with his composition Strophes, and successive appearances with Dimensions of Time and Silence in 1960, and Threnody in 1961 (Thomas 90). Penderecki married in the 1950s and had a child in 1955. This, in combination with the fact that his wife was a pianist and needed to practice daily, restricted Penderecki’s ability to work in their small Krakow apartment. Nor could he find space at the music school which was free from the intrusion of the sound of other instruments. Instead, he frequented the café Jama Michalika off the central square of Krakow, where he worked most days between nine in the morning and noon, when he would leave as a pianist began to play. Penderecki states that because of the small space of the café table, he had to “invent [a] special kind of notation which allowed me to write the piece which was for 52 instruments, like Threnody, on one small piece of paper” (Krzysztof Penderecki, 2000). In this, Penderecki created a completely new set of notation symbols, which assisted him in graphically representing tone clustering (Robinson 6) while, in his score for Polymorphia, he implemented “novel graphic notation, comparable with medical temperature charts, or oscillograms” (Schwinger 29) to represent in the most compact way possible the dense layering of sounds and vocal elements that is developed in this particular piece. This historical account is valuable because it contributes to discussions on individual creativity that both depends on, and occurs within, the material space of the café. This relationship is explored in Walter Benjamin’s essay “Polyclinic”, where he develops an extended analogy between the writer and the café and the surgeon and his instruments. As Cohen summarises, “Benjamin constructs the field of writerly operation both in medical terms and as a space dear to Parisian intellectuals, as an operating table that is also the marble-topped table of a café” (179). At this time, the space of the café itself thus becomes a vital site for individual cultural production, putting the artist in touch with the social life of the city, as many accounts of writers and artists in the cafés of Paris, Prague, Vienna, and elsewhere in Europe attest. “The attraction of the café for the writer”, Fitch argues, “is that seeming tension between the intimate circle of privacy in a comfortable room, on the one hand, and the flow of (perhaps usable) information all around on the other” (The Grand 11). Penderecki talks about searching for a sound while composing in café Jama Michalika and, hearing the noise of a passing tram, subsequently incorporated it into his famous composition, Threnody (Krzysztof Penderecki, 2000). There is an indirect connection here with the attractions of the seventeenth century coffee houses in London, where news writers drew much of their gossip and news from the talk within the coffee houses. However, the shift is to a more isolated, individualistic habitué. Nonetheless, the aesthetic composition of the café space remains essential to the creative productivity described by Penderecki. A concept that can be used to describe this method of composition is contained within one of Penderecki’s best-known pieces, Polymorphia (1961). The term “polymorphia” refers not to the form of the music itself (which is actually quite conventionally structured) but rather to the multiple blending of sounds. Schwinger defines polymorphia as “many formedness […] which applies not […] to the form of the piece, but to the broadly deployed scale of sound, [the] exchange and simultaneous penetration of sound and noise, the contrast and interflow of soft and hard sounds” (131). This description also reflects the rich material context of the café space as Penderecki describes its role in shaping (both enabling and constraining) his creative output. Creativity, Technology, Materialism The materiality of the café—including the table itself for Penderecki—is crucial in understanding the relationship between the forms of creative output and the material conditions of the spaces that enable them. In Penderecki’s case, to understand the origins of the score and even his innovative forms of musical notation as artefacts of communication, we need to understand the material conditions under which they were created. As a fixture of twentieth and twenty-first century urban environments, the café mediates the private within the public in a way that offers the contemporary virtuoso habitué a rich, polymorphic sensory experience. In a discussion of the indivisibility of sensation and its resistance to language, writer Anna Gibbs describes these rich experiential qualities: sitting by the window in a café watching the busy streetscape with the warmth of the morning sun on my back, I smell the delicious aroma of coffee and simultaneously feel its warmth in my mouth, taste it, and can tell the choice of bean as I listen idly to the chatter in the café around me and all these things blend into my experience of “being in the café” (201). Gibbs’s point is that the world of the café is highly synaesthetic and infused with sensual interconnections. The din of the café with its white noise of conversation and overlaying sounds of often carefully chosen music illustrates the extension of taste beyond the flavour of the coffee on the palate. In this way, the café space provides the infrastructure for a type of creative output that, in Gibbs’s case, facilitates her explanation of expression and affect. The individualised virtuoso habitué, as characterised by Penderecki’s work within café Jama Michalika, simply describes one (celebrated) form of the material conditions of communication and creativity. An essential factor in creative cultural output is contained in the ways in which material conditions such as these come to be organised. As Elizabeth Grosz expresses it: Art is the regulation and organisation of its materials—paint, canvas, concrete, steel, marble, words, sounds, bodily movements, indeed any materials—according to self-imposed constraints, the creation of forms through which these materials come to generate and intensify sensation and thus directly impact living bodies, organs, nervous systems (4). Materialist and medium-oriented theories of media and communication have emphasised the impact of physical constraints and enablers on the forms produced. McLuhan, for example, famously argued that the typewriter brought writing, speech, and publication into closer association, one effect of which was the tighter regulation of spelling and grammar, a pressure toward precision and uniformity that saw a jump in the sales of dictionaries (279). In the poetry of E. E. Cummings, McLuhan sees the typewriter as enabling a patterned layout of text that functions as “a musical score for choral speech” (278). In the same way, the café in Penderecki’s recollections both constrains his ability to compose freely (a creative activity that normally requires ample flat surface), but also facilitates the invention of a new language for composition, one able to accommodate the small space of the café table. Recent studies that have sought to materialise language and communication point to its physicality and the embodied forms through which communication occurs. As Packer and Crofts Wiley explain, “infrastructure, space, technology, and the body become the focus, a move that situates communication and culture within a physical, corporeal landscape” (3). The confined and often crowded space of the café and its individual tables shape the form of productive output in Penderecki’s case. Targeting these material constraints and enablers in her discussion of art, creativity and territoriality, Grosz describes the “architectural force of framing” as liberating “the qualities of objects or events that come to constitute the substance, the matter, of the art-work” (11). More broadly, the design features of the café, the form and layout of the tables and the space made available for individual habitation, the din of the social encounters, and even the stimulating influences on the body of the coffee served there, can be seen to act as enablers of communication and creativity. Conclusion The historical examples examined above indicate a material link between cafés and communication. They also suggest a relationship between materialism and creativity, as well as the roots of the romantic association—or mythos—of cafés as a key source of cultural life as they offer a “shared place of composition” and an “environment for creative work” (Fitch, The Grand 11). We have detailed one example pertaining to European coffee consumption, cafés and creativity. While we believe Penderecki’s case is valuable in terms of what it can tell us about forms of communication and creativity, clearly other cultural and historical contexts may reveal additional insights—as may be found in the cases of Middle Eastern cafés (Hattox) or the North American diner (Hurley), and in contemporary developments such as the café as a source of free WiFi and the commodification associated with global coffee chains. Penderecki’s example, we suggest, also sheds light on a longer history of creativity and cultural production that intersects with contemporary work practices in city spaces as well as conceptualisations of the individual’s place within complex urban spaces. References Benjamin, Walter. “Polyclinic” in “One-Way Street.” One-Way Street and Other Writings. Trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter. London: Verso, 1998: 88-9. Bollerey, Franziska. “Setting the Stage for Modernity: The Cosmos of the Coffee House.” Cafés and Bars: The Architecture of Public Display. Eds. Christoph Grafe and Franziska Bollerey. New York: Routledge, 2007. 44-81. Brooker, Peter. Bohemia in London: The Social Scene of Early Modernism. Houndmills, Hamps.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Cohen, Margaret. Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995. Cowan, Brian. The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse. New Haven: Yale UP, 2005. Ellis, Markman. The Coffee House: A Cultural History. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2004. Fitch, Noël Riley. Paris Café: The Sélect Crowd. Brooklyn: Soft Skull Press, 2007. -----. The Grand Literary Cafés of Europe. London: New Holland Publishers (UK), 2006. Gibbs, Anna. “After Affect: Sympathy, Synchrony, and Mimetic Communication.” The Affect Theory Reader. Eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Siegworth. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. 186-205. Grafe, Christoph, and Franziska Bollerey. “Introduction: Cafés and Bars—Places for Sociability.” Cafés and Bars: The Architecture of Public Display. Eds. Christoph Grafe and Franziska Bollerey. New York: Routledge, 2007. 4-41. Grosz, Elizabeth. Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. New York: Columbia UP, 2008. Haine, W. Scott. The World of the Paris Café. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Hattox, Ralph S. Coffee and Coffeehouses: The Origins of a Social Beverage in the Medieval Near East. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1985. Hurley, Andrew. Diners, Bowling Alleys and Trailer Parks: Chasing the American Dream in the Postwar Consumer Culture. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Krzysztof Penderecki. Dir. Andreas Missler-Morell. Spektrum TV production and Telewizja Polska S.A. Oddzial W Krakowie for RM Associates and ZDF in cooperation with ARTE, 2000. Lillywhite, Bryant. London Coffee Houses: A Reference Book of Coffee Houses of the Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Centuries. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1963. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Abacus, 1974. Monastra, Peggy. “Krzysztof Penderecki’s Polymorphia and Fluorescence.” Moldenhauer Archives, [US] Library of Congress. 12 Jan. 2012 ‹http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/moldenhauer/2428143.pdf› Packer, Jeremy, and Stephen B. Crofts Wiley. “Introduction: The Materiality of Communication.” Communication Matters: Materialist Approaches to Media, Mobility and Networks. New York, Routledge, 2012. 3-16. Robinson, R. Krzysztof Penderecki: A Guide to His Works. Princeton, NJ: Prestige Publications, 1983. Schwinger, Wolfram. Krzysztof Penderecki: His Life and Work. Encounters, Biography and Musical Commentary. London: Schott, 1979. Simmel, Georg. The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Ed. and trans. Kurt H. Wolff. Glencoe, IL: The Free P, 1960. Thomas, Adrian. Polish Music since Szymanowski. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. White, Merry I. Coffee Life in Japan. Berkeley: U of California P, 2012. Wilson, Elizabeth. “The Bohemianization of Mass Culture.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 2.1 (1999): 11-32.

In The Practice of Everyday Life, Walking in the City, Michel de Certeau celebrates the glorious sublimity of an Icarian moment as his gaze from the 110th floor of the World Trade Centre soars over Manhattan. Having taken such a voluptuous pleasure (92) in the view myself, and watched the twin towers collapse into rubble on my television screen last September, as I re-visit the aerial site through de Certeau, his words resonate strongly with the oneiric force of memory, myth and the wonder of urban possibility. For while theorising, does de Certeau not write his own story of the city as dream, as imaginative longing, consuming and producing an urban 'text' (93) as he reads from on high? Participating in the logic of one of the city's opportunities, a tourist attraction, his analytic practice is a creative expression of his own subjective experience. Theoretically, the story begins in the labyrinth of the cityscape, where the urban text is humanised by its mobile, unpredictable practitioners whose everyday operations style, invent and generate ways of being and becoming. What de Certeau offers us is something quite beautiful and noble, almost consolatory, in the idea of an artful, other spatiality that slips, undetected, into the banal routine of daily existence. To explore how lived space (96) is authorised by its heroic practitioners, made other, as it is inscribed into and outside the historic, social and economic realities or strategies of the urban environment, I resort to fiction, where the certain strangeness (93) of the everyday surfaces to be read. Colum McCann's novel, This Side of Brightness, takes us down below de Certeau's down below to the subterranean spaces of the New York City subway tunnels where the central character, Treefrog, estranged from his family, makes his home: his dark nest, high in the tunnel (McCann 2). Treefrog's escape into this murky, cavernous netherworld is a disappearing act for this is where no ordinary practitioners of the city live 'down below,' [down] below the thresholds at which [an everyday] visibility begins. (de Certeau 93) Seeking refuge, this is where the city's resident asylum seekers migrate, claiming exile as a right. To be outcast is an autonomous and pragmatic spatial tactic, a self-imposed, self-composed state of being as other. Here, survival is a process of resistance, an illegal occupation. Errant and devious, the lifestyle choice these urban consumers make violates the civil ordinances of the city. Venturing topside, Treefrog repels, offends and embarrasses the ordinary practitioners of the city travelling on the subway (96, 240) and in the reading room at the public library (93). The disgust and fear aroused by his stench and squalid appearance make no allowance for pity or pride. In these aboveground collective social spaces his unhygienic, undomesticated presence is not proper; it signals defiance in its fetid, imposing refusal to be controlled or to disappear. Treefrog is an anonymous manifestation of the cityscape. Disguised by long hair, a beard, ragged clothes, filth and dirt (242), his real identity is undetectable: Clarence Nathan Walker is invisible. Seemingly primitive, this sight is decidedly modern in its ubiquitous depiction of the contemporary urban indigent. A place of wounded spirits, Treefrog's 'mole' neighbourhood confesses the shame of an overwhelming suffering born of the streets. Papa Love's grief is monumentalised in the surreal gargantuan murals and portraits of the dead he paints on the walls of the tunnel. Crack addicts, Angela and Elijah, get high, wasted, underground. A symbolic toilet seat hangs wreath-like on Faraday's front door; as a doorbell (128). Dean, the Trash Man, collects the discarded remains of an urban consumer society and installs them in his 'front yard' as an assemblage of ready-made materials and found objects. Textually, his 'work' orchestrates a cacophony of human ruin and putrescence: the mounds of human faeces and the torn magazines and the empty containers and the hypodermic needles with blobs of blood at their tips like poppies erupting in a field...the broken bottles and rat droppings and a baby carriage and smashed TV and squashed cans and discarded cardboard boxes and shattered jars and orange peels and crack vials and a single teddy bear with both its eyes missing, its belly nibbled into by rats. (56) In this community, housing isolates, shelters and incarcerates, each inhabitant has their own cubicle, concrete bunker, solitary cell (56). In contrast to this depressed existential vista, before his incarnation as Treefrog, Clarence Nathan knows the sublime erotic charge of towering over New York City, expressed by de Certeau. Working construction on the city's skyscrapers, he seeks ascension, going, willfully, higher than any walking man in Manhattan....Beneath him, Manhattan becomes a blur of moving yellow taxis and dark silhouettes. There is something in this rising akin to desire, the gentle rock from side to side, the cooling breeze, the knowledge that he is the one who will pierce the virginity of space where the steel hits the sky....The elevator clangs and stops. Clarence Nathan finishes his coffee, tosses the paper cup and walks across the metal decking towards two ladders which jut up in the air. For a joke the men call this area the POST: The Place of Shrivelled Testicles. No ordinary man will go further. The nimblest Clarence Nathan and Cricket...climb three ladders to the very top of the building, where columns of steel reach up into the air. (195-6) Unaffected by vertigo and impervious to the danger, there is a seeming nonchalance, a banality, to Clarence Nathan's activity as he finishes his coffee, tosses the paper cup and gets to work; this is a practice of everyday life for him. And yet this productive activity, governed by city council planning and approval, contains a liberatory ruse, an 'anthropological,' poetic and mythic experience of space, (93) as proposed by de Certeau. High above, he performs a transcendent manoeuvre, a magic trick, creating and constructing space out of thin air, nothing. Icarian, Clarence Nathan's desire seems not for scopic pleasure but for the pure visceral elation of being unrestrained, unprotected, autonomous, above and beyond the rest of the world. At such a height Clarence Nathan does not speculate or even think he forgets where he is, that his 'body even exists.' (177) Surpassing rational comprehension and linguistic expression, his elevation articulates an unadulterated liberation, an erotics of feeling and an ecstasy of being: [s]ometimes, for a joke, Clarence Nathan takes out his harmonica at the top of the column and blows into it using just one hand. The wind carries most of the tune away, but occasionally the notes filter down to the ironworkers below. The notes sound billowy and strained, and for this the men sometimes call him Treefrog, a name he doesn't much care for. (198) From this pivotal point, high on the extreme vertical axis of the cityscape, Clarence Nathan has much further to fall when he loses his balance mentally, descending into an abyss of human despair. Being down is not deep enough. Going underground, Clarence Nathan reclaims this haunted, burrowed space of the city as a legacy bequeathed to him by his grandfather, one of the sandhogs who dug the tunnels of the New York subway, and reinvents himself as Treefrog. An appropriate moniker for this uncivilised, otherworldly realm, [a]ll darkness and dampness and danger, (7) sometimes it is the only name he can remember (29). Foregrounding memory and myth, McCann's fable weaves the creation story of a family through the interstices of a city's legends and official history, allowing us to read the appropriation, the othering, of the city's spaces by its inhabitants in the practice of their lives as ephemeral markings of artistic activity. Through the incantation of spatial and narrative trajectories, as de Certeau suggests, [a] migrational, or metaphorical, city thus slips into the clear text of the planned and readable city (93). Writing himself into these catacombs, literally, Treefrog embraces his interment, his burial rights, as a return to his primordial home: In his notebook Treefrog writes: Back down under the earth, where you belong. Back down under the earth where you belong....He could make a map of those words, beginning at the B and ending at the g where all beginning begins and ends and they would make the strangest of upground and belowground topographies. (139) So as not to forget the strange topographies of existence, Treefrog inscribes them on the surface of his skin: [h]is chest is scrimshawed with stabwounds and burns and scars. So many mutilations of his body. Hot paper clips, blunt scissors, pliers, cigarettes, matches, blades they have all left their marks. (30) Mapping an abstract expression, intimately, these are the warrior scars of the initiate. Belowground, Clarence Nathan eludes the clinical strategies of his obsessive-compulsive post-traumatic stress disorder; he avoids the nuthouse (228). Here, in retreat, as Treefrog, he is free to create, dream and imagine, unrestrained and unexamined; it is an elegant self-prescribed remedy. For Clarence Nathan, the tunnels are therapeutic and restorative. Ultimately, they enable him to be resurrected back into the light, upground, leaving Treefrog, like a discarded doppelgänger, to the shadows of the tunnels (242-3). An ironic compensation for his mental instability, Clarence Nathan's gift of perfect physical balance, his inheritance, (170) determines his survival underground. Safe and secure with his cave positioned high in the tunnel wall, Treefrog's daily movements are dependent upon the demonstration of an agile bodily grace, a mobility that defies gravity in its series of acrobatic swings and precarious tight-rope walking. Enhancing the danger and difficulty of his daring by performing blindfolded, Treefrog negotiates space intuitively: he walks onto the catwalk with his eyelids shut. The narrow beam requires supreme balance below him is a twenty foot drop to the tunnel. He swings his way down to the second beam ten feet below, crouches, then leaps and drops soundlessly to the gravel, knees bent, heart thumping. He opens his eyes to the darkness. (25) Mimetically Treefrog appropriates this eternal nocturnal realm and makes it his own, a part of himself, he feels the darkness, smells it, belongs to it. (23) As from his subterranean perch Treefrog fills the emptiness with the eerie, improvised strains of his harmonica, the stale, dank, tired air of the tunnels, is filtered through the human body, and used to make something strangely ethereal, beautiful, fresh and new: in the miasmic dark, Treefrog played, transforming the air, giving back to the tunnels their original music (2). Treefrog accepts this other spatiality, carved into and out of the urban environment, as a gift, and his performance reciprocates a generosity that signals hope and healing; '[t]he world, he knows, can still spring its small and wondrous surprises (53). McCann presents the tunnels of New York City as an urban wilderness, a lawless frontier. And yes, Treefrog's community is comprised of "demonic subterraneans madmen, perverts, addicts, criminals, murderers," but challenging Blanche Gelfant's account of the lower states, this reverse spatial direction does not necessarily signify a metaphorical mobilisation of values downward into the unexplored depths of moral disorder (417). Rather, in This Side of Brightness, moral disorder is a condition of ordinary, everyday existence aboveground, where violence, chaos, vulnerability, persecution, terror, inequality, kindness, disregard, compassion, indifference, awe, tragedy, compose, socially, [a] landscape of loving and hating. A palpable viciousness in the air. And yet a tenderness too. Something about this part of the world being so alive that its own heart could burst from the accumulated grief. As if it all might suddenly fulminate under the gravity of living. (185) Figured imaginatively through Treefrog the tunnels become an enchanted otherworldly space, '[a] heaven of hell,' (70) in which darkness, solitude and anonymity have the miraculous power to strengthen and absolve. Amidst the waste and detritus a beauty is brutally, painfully laid bare. For Treefrog, for Clarence Nathan, the tunnels are an emotional and psychological sanctuary and their appropriation is a courageous life-affirming act: it is only underground that...men become men, integrated, whole (37). References de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. Gelfant, Blanche. Residence Underground: Recent Fictions of the Subterranean City. The Sewanee Review. 83 (1975): 406-38. McCann, Colum. This Side of Brightness. London: Phoenix House, 1998. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Williams, Marisa. "Going Underground" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.2 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/underground.php>. Chicago Style Williams, Marisa, "Going Underground" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 2 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/underground.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Williams, Marisa. (2002) Going Underground. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(2). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/underground.php> ([your date of access]).

I. The Fidelity Reflex When Robert Stam entitles one of his recent efforts to theorise adaptation “Beyond Fidelity,” he could be speaking for a wide range of critics (54). Indeed, as the editor of two major adaptation anthologies, he is speaking for them. Stam’s principal objection is the covert moralising of fidelity discourse: “The conventional language of adaptation criticism has often been profoundly moralistic, rich in terms that imply that the cinema has somehow done a disservice to literature. … The standard rhetoric has often deployed an elegiac discourse of loss, lamenting what has been ‘lost’ in the translation from novel to film” (“Introduction”, 3). There are problems with fidelity discourse beyond its implied moralising. For Robert B. Ray and Dudley Andrew, the problem with fidelity is that it makes for boring criticism. “Unquestionably the most frequent and most tiresome discussion of adaptation (and of film and literature relations as well) concerns fidelity and transformation” (31). Part of what makes this discussion tiresome is its unswaying commitment to the historically dubious and logically unnecessary assumption that “the task of adaptation is the reproduction in cinema of something essential about an original text” (Andrew, 31). Linda Hutcheon, similarly bored with fidelity discussions, highlights the same logical flaw: “Of more interest to me is the fact that the morally loaded discourse of fidelity is based on the implied assumption that adapters aim simply to reproduce the adapted text” (7). Hutcheon may be writing 25 years after Andrew, but she still has something to gain by attacking what was, until recently, “the critical orthodoxy in adaptation studies” (7)—what Stam calls “the conventional language” and “the standard rhetoric” (3); what Ray calls (citing Jonathan Culler) “an endless series of twenty-page articles” (47). What she has to gain is the ability to talk about what interests her: “there appears to be little need to engage directly in the constant debate over degrees of proximity to the ‘original’” (7). This is a personal victory, not a disciplinary one (“Of more interest to me;” “I have always had a strong interest in what has come to be called ‘intertextuality’” [xii]). Still, it is a victory, if only on that scale. Andrew, by contrast, hoped his attacks on fidelity discourse would change the discipline. “Let us not use [adaptation] to fight battles over the essence of the media or the inviolability of individual artworks. Let us use it as we use all cultural practices” (37). Reviewing Andrew’s essay in 1984, Christopher Orr was more pessimistic about attempts to change adaptation studies, and blunt about his disciplinary aims: “Given the problematic nature of the discourse of fidelity, one is tempted to call for a moratorium on adaptation studies” (72). And looking back on Andrew and Orr, Ray agreed that harsh measures were necessary for the field, but he more or less blamed Andrew for offering a fillip to fidelity in his call for more sociologically aware studies of adaptation. “I think we more urgently need to know something else” (48). And yet the discipline resists. “All the various manifestations of ‘theory’ over the last decades should logically have changed this negative view of adaptation. … Yet … disparaging opinions on adaptation as a secondary mode—belated and therefore derivative—persist” (Hutcheon, xii-xiii, citing Stam). What I am calling the fidelity reflex, though, is not the persistence of the discourse, but the persistent call for it to end. For adaptation theory to have any chance of success, it must do two things. First, it must account for the persistence of fidelity discourse despite decades of resourceful argument against it. Second, it must account for its own blind spot: What has the campaign against fidelity failed to get at? And given this consistent failure to achieve its goals, why do critics persist in calling for an end to fidelity? II. The Conversation of Judgment How could adaptation studies have resisted such an onslaught—not simply of Hutcheon, Stam, Andrew, Orr, Naremore, Ray, and McFarlane, but also of Irigaray, Kristeva, Foucault, Derrida, Bakhtin, and Barthes? (Hutcheon, 21; Stam, 8-9). Ray’s answer is that the field of film and literature has remained in a “pre-paradigmatic state,” held there by the New Criticism’s “veneration of ‘art’.” (44-5). The “exigencies of the academic market” have given us a mountain of case studies that fail to add up to anything. They are the tribute paid to literature by those who would institutionalise film studies; adaptation studies make film acceptable to literature departments looking to “maintain declining enrollments in the humanities” (47), while “shor[ing] up literature’s crumbling walls” (46). As total an explanation as this is, indeed, as damning as Ray’s indictment of the field may seem, even he finds the origin of the fidelity discourse outside the academy. It lies in our ordinary discussions of adaptations: “Without the benefit of a presiding poetics, film and literature scholars could only persist [there it is again] in asking about individual movies the same unproductive layman’s question (How does the film compare with the book?) getting the same unproductive answer (The book is better)” (44). For Ray, the layman’s question has poisoned academic criticism because it rests on a comparison: “Most of the articles written could have used a variation of the words in the title ‘But Compared to the Original.’” (45). Hence the danger of Andrew’s position for Ray, which offered not freedom from comparison but a typology of relationships. “But Compared to the Original” is the title of an article by William Fadiman from 1965 that attempted to nip fidelity discourse in the bud. Yet as an instance of the fidelity reflex, Fadiman was already late to the game. The locus classicus is George Bluestone’s Novel into Film of 1957. Here, we find those same “unproductive laymen” making “such statements as ‘The film is true to the spirit of the book’; ‘It’s incredible how they butchered the novel’; ‘It cuts out key passages, but it’s still a good film’; ‘Thank God they changed the ending’—these and similar statements are predicated on certain assumptions which blur the mutational process” (Bluestone, 5; Metz, 112). They not only blur the mutational process; these statements make a terrible category error. “Changes are inevitable the moment one abandons the linguistic for the visual medium” (Bluestone, 6). “It is as fruitless to say that film A is better or worse than novel B as it is to pronounce Wright’s Johnson Wax Building better or worse than Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. In the last analysis, each is autonomous” (5-6). Or so Bluestone argues. None of our contemporary critics take such a hard line on medium specificity; for them, the crucial term is “intertextuality”. But whether they are partisans of a modernist medium specificity or a postmodern intertextuality (or intermediality), such critics are all dedicated to the proposition that there can be no hierarchy between textual instances. For the modernists, such rankings are impossible because there is an unbridgeable gap between media; for the postmodernists, because everything exists in a general citational field. Only fidelity discourse seems to require such impossible rankings. As Orr makes clear: “the danger of fidelity criticism, even when it is dealing with the most ‘faithful’ of film adaptations, is that it impoverishes the film’s intertextuality” (72). And if Orr weren’t clear enough, the editors at Wide-Angle chose that passage as a pull quote. Still, like a vampire, fidelity did not die. Let us back up. The joke Ray tells at the expense of his academic critic assumes that while the comparison of film with book has both a technical and an evaluative aspect, nevertheless the surreptitious evaluations of fidelity discourse corrupt even its technical conclusions. Yet it seems odd to claim that fidelity necessarily entails a surreptitious evaluation, even if it has done so in every case. For fidelity to seem a compelling standard, there would necessarily be an antecedent evaluation of the merits of the version the commenter had first encountered. No one would bother to discuss whether a book or film or any other version of a story were faithful unless she already had some allegiance to that story in some form—that would indeed be tiresome. I am saying that fidelity debates provide a way of avoiding questions of quality. Something is faithful or it’s not. At least, whether something is faithful seems an easier question to settle than whether something is better than something very different. Whether and how Cruel Intentions (Roger Kumble, 1999) is faithful to Choderlos de Laclos’ 1782 source novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses is an easier question to settle than whether the Johnson Wax Building is better than Swan Lake. Indeed, a person who shifts the conversation from a discussion of merits to a discussion of matching demonstrates an anxiety about settling questions of art. In that case, what is unsettling about the adaptation is not so much its relative goodness (in most cases, that would be quickly settled) as its ability to make us question a judgment we made of the prior work by providing a more-or-less systematic set of alternatives to and deviations from the prior work. (Here I mean prior, not “source” or “adapted” work. Whether we experience the adapted text or the adaptation first, we form our judgments about it, and those are the judgments that are under pressure.) Questions of matching or mis-matching address the viewer’s ability to recognise the systematicity of the differences between source and adaptation; questions of judgment speak to the perceptiveness of the viewer in recognising both the systematicity of the individual works and the grounds for her own judgments. Such recognitions are hard-won and evanescent; what was true for adaptation theorists is true for the laymen. III. Induction, Authority, and the Case Study If we see fidelity discourse as an avoidance of judgment, then, the repeated critical injunction against fidelity because it is surreptitiously judgmental is not an antidote to, but a reiteration of, the fundamental move. We may substitute something new for fidelity—sociology, medium specificity, textual openness—but we may not have improved our position. Indeed, one of the least attractive aspects of the campaign against fidelity is an unwillingness to see at all such “layman’s questions” as efforts to take the aesthetic seriously. If Ray shares Bluestone’s desire to end the conversation of judgment, what is more striking about his piece is that it represents an uncharacteristic step backward from Bluestone’s argument on the same issue. Leading into his dialogue excerpts, Bluestone notes that quantitative analyses of films based on books, or of books sold upon the release of a film “tell us nothing about the mutational process, let alone how to judge it” (5). One might say about Bluestone’s interlocutors that they tell us something, although not much, about the mutational process, and something else, although again not much, about how to judge it. They may be mere laymen, but they exist on a continuum with Bluestone’s own work. What distinguishes Bluestone is twofold: a closer attention to the “mutational process,” and a restriction of our judgment to comparisons within a single medium (5). For Ray, again, the problem with comparisons is not that they are inattentive but that they import precisely the evaluative stance Bluestone is attempting to rule out through a belief in medium specificity. Still, both are wary of the ordinary conversation about adaptations because it is improperly judgmental. For them, the passage from technical comparison to evaluative comparison is a slippery one. Better to hold off any consideration of merit, either through the wall of the medium or the archaeology of knowledge. Yet neither Ray nor Bluestone nor any of the other adaptation theorists has recognised the role fidelity discourse plays in the layman’s discussion, a role that is less the surreptitious evaluation of an adaptation than an attempt at an objective justification of the prior evaluation. When Orr offers a backhanded defense of a limited kind of fidelity criticism—“Fidelity to the letter, in contrast to fidelity to the spirit, can after all be verified” (74)—this is an extension, not a repudiation, of the layman’s discourse. Part of the reason that the evaluation of the worth of a work of art or the success of a story is difficult lies in the search for grounds of comparison. What exactly would make this a better book? A better film? A better game? A better story? And part of the reason that adaptation studies, or laymen’s discussions about the relative merits of two versions of a story, are useful is that multiple versions of the same story make it possible to examine aesthetic alternatives. (What would work better?) Adaptations put the options on the table; they suggest particular alternatives, and (despite Ray’s despair) over time they may provide cumulative support for notions of adaptive success and failure at various levels of generality. Adaptation studies efficiently model the need for induction. If comparisons are the first steps toward theorisation, fidelity discussions are the stalking horses for questions of authority, questions that might be (and are) answered sociologically or anthropologically or economically. Why is the first Harry Potter movie too faithful? Because Rowling successfully negotiated with Warner Bros. to get script approval (Pendreigh). In this frame, fidelity questions should be all the things Ray fears they are not: cumulative, heuristic, and, although he does not put it this way, worth the effort of professionalisation. IV. Fidelity without Borders If fidelity studies are the products of a New Critical “paradigm”, they are an important transformation of it. Where the New Critic might demonstrate the systematicity of a particular work of art, the adaptation critic would displace that systematicity to the relationships between works. No wonder that the attribution of fidelity to an adaptation has suggested to everyone since Bluestone that the next move in the argument should be a turn to the modes through which the system imposes itself—what Bluestone calls “the mutational process,” what Andrew calls “sociology.” Pragmatic questions of mode, process, or sociology frequently appear as pacifications of skeptical questions of knowledge and being. This debate is no exception. One skeptic here is Ray, who initially asks “Why had the cinema committed itself almost exclusively to storytelling?” and then rephrases thus, “Why was commercial filmmaking so eager to make feature-length fictional narrative seem the inherent definition of the cinema?” (42). The latter question is modal, but not in the same way the Harry Potter question was. It displaces its concern from the mode of adaptation to the discourse about that mode, and by doing so it makes the question a more pressing one, one that likely has a particular, historical answer. Ray’s answer is that commercial filmmaking turned to realistic storytelling to appeal to a middle-class audience, to hide its operations, and to solidify its self-regulating industrial oligopoly (45). Here, the denigration of the middle-class audience takes the place of the injunction against fidelity discourse. In this view, middle-class moralists are the perfect complement to an industry always looking for a way to reduce its risks and to find stories that are pre-sold. Yet that image of the industry is both partial and underthought. It is partial because the adapted film does not simply hope to find the same audience its source first located—it wants many more and must expect many others. And it is underthought because when a film turns to literature as a way of guaranteeing an audience, it solicits an audience that is in a unique position to judge it. That audience might find the film worse, better, or somehow irrelevant, but those opinions respond to the film’s openness to judgment in the first place. To be sure, realistic or studio-based cinema might have solicited comparisons only with other films (or with reality, or with the possibilities of film), but that is not, it seems, what occurred. Instead, the cinema in its most commercial forms opened itself up to judgment relative to the novel and the theater. It was a desperately bold move that paid off with startling rapidity. Kamilla Elliott spends the great majority of Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate in an argument that might liberate the discipline from skepticisim. How can adaptation be impossible and pervasive (134)? As an answer, she finds a productive “tension” in criticism between adherence to the theory that the content of a story cannot be separated from its form (hence cannot be carried from novel to film) and heretical arguments that show how it is that content peels off and finds new forms (134). The “heresies” are modes of adaptation that Hutcheon, Stam, and other postmodernist critics would recognise (ventriloquist, de(re)composing, genetic, etc.). Indeed, for Elliott, these heresies that are “so marginalised in the novel and film debate are central to its dynamics” (183). The move “away from categorical models” toward “critical rhetoric and aesthetic practices” (244) and her attempt to write “beyond fidelity” are both seemingly conventional. But for Elliott, the fidelity debate is misguided not because fidelity asks the impossible but because at bottom critics of fidelity seek to purge cinema of its literariness. Her refusal to do that positions her more firmly outside fidelity discourse than any other adaptation theorist. Instead of a rivalry between novel and film, she suggests we imagine literature and cinema to be “reciprocal looking glasses” (209-12). Such an analogy would “ensure … an endless series of inversions and reversals” (212). Fidelity may be gone, but its “endless” parade of case studies remains, yet not because the skeptical question went unasked. “Is adaptation possible?” may be pacified as we turn to practice, but when it comes time to determine exactly which analogies are fruitful because they are endless and which “have a pernicious tendency to invert and twist endlessly” “further clarification” (Elliott, 244) and “further study” (Elliott, 183) will always be needed. If laymen have persisted in judging adaptations and in raising fidelity questions when those judgments slip away, critics have persisted in their attempts to silence that conversation of judgment. Yet once criticism is freed from fidelity discourse’s judgmental “bad conscience,” it can only offer more of itself, endlessly. Questions of practice, authority, and generality float away from their original and insistent occasions. And when our conversation turns to judgments of adaptations, we will no longer have the criticism we most need, one that could let us know when we have reached the end of someone’s persuadability so we might stop trying. References Andrew, Dudley. “Adaptation.” Naremore 28-37. Bazin, André. “Adaptation, or the Cinema as Digest.” Naremore 19-27. ———. “In Defense of Mixed Cinema.” What Is Cinema? Sel. and trans. Hugh Gray. Vol. 2. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. 53-75. Bluestone, George. Novels into Film. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957. Fadiman, William. “But Compared to the Original.” Films and Filming 11.5 (1965): 21-3. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2006. McFarlane, Brian. Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Naremore, James. Film Adaptation. Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2000. Orr, Christopher. “The Discourse on Adaptation.” Wide Angle 6.2 (1984): 72-6. Pendreigh, Brian. “Hogwarts ’n’ All.” Iofilm 9 Nov. 2001. 9 Mar. 2007 http://www.iofilm.co.uk/feats/filmmaking/harry_potter.shtml>. Ray, Robert. “The Field of Literature and Film.” Naremore 38-53. Stam, Robert. “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation.” Naremore 54-78. ———. “Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation.” Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Adaptation. Ed. Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo. New York: Blackwell, 2005. 1-52. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Connor, J.D. "The Persistence of Fidelity: Adaptation Theory Today." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/15-connor.php>. APA Style Connor, J. (May 2007) "The Persistence of Fidelity: Adaptation Theory Today," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/15-connor.php>.

In recent years, the US television landscape has been flooded with reboots, remakes, and revivals of “classic” nineties television series, such as Full/er House (1987-1995, 2016-present), Will & Grace (1998-2006, 2017-present), Roseanne (1988-1977, 2018), and Charmed (1998-2006, 2018-present). The term “reboot” is often used as a catchall for different kinds of revivals and remakes. “Remakes” are derivations or reimaginings of known properties with new characters, cast, and stories (Loock; Lavigne). “Revivals” bring back an existing property in the form of a continuation with the same cast and/or setting. “Revivals” and “remakes” both seek to capitalise on nostalgia for a specific notion of the past and access the (presumed) existing audience of the earlier series (Mittell; Rebecca Williams; Johnson).Reboots operate around two key pleasures. First, there is the pleasure of revisiting and/or reimagining characters that are “known” to audiences. Whether continuations or remakes, reboots are invested in the audience’s desire to see familiar characters. Second, there is the desire to “fix” and/or recuperate an earlier series. Some reboots, such as the Charmed remake attempt to recuperate the whiteness of the original series, whereas others such as Gilmore Girls: A Life in the Year (2017) set out to fix the ending of the original series by giving audiences a new “official” conclusion.The Roseanne reboot is invested in both these pleasures. It reunites the original cast for a short-lived, but impactful nine-episode tenth season. There is pleasure in seeing Roseanne (Roseanne Barr), Dan (John Goodman), Jackie (Laurie Metcalf), Becky (Lecy Goranson [seasons one to six, ten], Sarah Chalke [seasons six to nine]), Darlene (Sara Gilbert), and DJ (Michael Fishman) back in the Conner house with the same well-worn couch and afghan. The (attempted) recuperation is of author-star Barr, whose recent politics are in stark contrast to the working-class second-wave feminist politics of her nineties’ persona. This article is particularly interested in the second pleasure, because both the original series and the reboot situate the voice of Barr as central to the series’ narrative and politics.Despite achieving the highest ratings of any US sitcom in the past three years (O’Connell), on 29 May 2018, ABC announced that it was cancelling the Roseanne reboot. This decision came about in the wake of a racist tweet, where Barr compared a black woman (high-ranking Obama aide Valerie Jarrett) to an ape. Barr’s tweet and the cancellation of Roseanne, highlight the limits of nostalgia and Roseanne/Barr’s particular brand of white feminism. While whiteness and a lack of racial awareness are (and always have been) at the centre of Barr’s performance of feminism, the political landscape has shifted since the 1990s, with the rise of third and fourth-wave feminisms and intersectional activism. As such in the contemporary landscape, there is the expectation that white feminist figures take on and endorse anti-racist stances.This article argues that the reboot’s attempt to capitalise on nineties nostalgia exposes the limits of Roseanne/Barr’s feminism, as well as the limits of nostalgia. The feminist legacy of nineties-era Roseanne cannot and does not recuperate Barr’s star-persona. Also, the reboot and its subsequent cancellation highlight how the feminism of the series is embodied by Barr and her whiteness. This article will situate Roseanne and Barr within a feminist tradition on US television, before exploring how the reboot operates and circulates differently to the original series.From Roseanne (1988-1997) to Roseanne (2018)In its original form, Roseanne holds the distinction of being one of the most highly discussed and canonised feminist-leaning television series of all time, alongside The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-1977), Cagney and Lacey (1981-1988), and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2004). Roseanne also enabled and informed many popular feminist-leaning contemporary series, including Girls (2012-2017), Mom (2013-present), Better Things (2016-present), and Dietland (2018). Although it may seem anachronistic today, Roseanne and Barr helped define what it means to be a feminist and speak feminist politics on US television.Roseanne depicts the lives of the Conner family, headed by parents Roseanne and Dan. They live in the fictional blue-collar town of Lanford, Illinois with their three children Becky, Darlene, and DJ. Both Roseanne and Dan experience precarious employment and embark on numerous (mostly failed) business ventures throughout the series’ run. The reboot catches up with the Conner family in 2018, after Roseanne has experienced a health scare and single mom Darlene has moved into her parents’ house with her two children Harris (Emma Kenney) and Mark (Ames McNamara). In the new season, Roseanne and Dan’s children are experiencing similar working conditions to their parents in the 1990s. Becky works at a Mexican restaurant and is eager to act as surrogate mother to earn $50,000, Darlene is recently unemployed and looking for work, and DJ has just returned from military service.A stated objective of reviving Roseanne was to address the contentious US political landscape after the election of President Donald J. Trump (VanDerWerff). Barr is a vocal supporter of President Trump, as is her character in the reboot. The election plays a key role in the new season’s premise. The first episode of season 10 establishes that the titular Roseanne has not spoken to her sister Jackie (who is a Hillary Clinton supporter) in over a year. In both its nineties and 2018 incarnations, Roseanne makes apparent the extent to which feminist politics are indebted to and spoken through the author-star. The series is based on a character that Barr created and is grounded in her life experience. Barr and her character Roseanne are icons of nineties televisual feminism. While the other members of the Conner family are richly drawn and compelling, Roseanne is the centre of the series. It is her voice and perspective that drives the series and gives it its political resonance. Roseanne’s power in the text is authorised by Barr’s stardom. As Melissa Williams writes: “For nearly a decade, Barr was one of the most powerful women in Hollywood” (180).In the late 1980s and into the 1990s, Roseanne (and Barr) represented a new kind of feminist voice on US television, which at that stage (and still today) was dominated by middle-class women. Unlike Mary Richards (Mary Tyler Moore), Claire Huxtable (Phylicia Rashad), or Murphy Brown (Candice Bergen), Roseanne did not have a stable job and her family’s economic situation was often precarious. Roseanne/Barr adopted and used a feminism of personality popularised on television by Mary Tyler Moore and Lucille Ball. Unlike her foremothers, though, Roseanne/Barr was not slender, feminine, or interested in being likeable to men. Roseanne did not choose to work outside of the home, which marked her as different from many of US television’s other second-wave feminists and/or mothers. As Rachael Horowitz writes: “Roseanne’s feminism was for women who have to work because bills must get paid, who assert their role as head of the house despite the degrading work they often do during the day to pay for their kids’ food and clothes” (9).According to Kathleen Rowe, Barr is part of a long line of “female grotesques” whose defining features are excess and looseness (2-3). Rowe links Barr’s fatness or physical excess with her refusal to shut up and subversive speech. The feminism of Roseanne is contained within and expressed through Barr’s unruly white body (and voice). Barr’s unruliness and her unwillingness to follow the social conventions of politeness and decorum are tied to her (perceived) feminist politics.Understandings of Barr’s stardom, however, have shifted considerably in the years since the publication of Rowe’s analysis. While Barr is still “unruly,” her unruliness is no longer located in her body (which has been transformed to meet more conventional standards of western beauty), but rather in her Twitter presence, which is pro-Israel, pro-Trump, and anti-immigration. As Roxane Gay writes of the reboot: “Whatever charm and intelligence she [Barr] brought to the first nine seasons of her show, a show I very much loved, are absolutely absent in her current persona, particularly as it manifests on Twitter.”Feminist Voice and Stardom on US TVRoseanne performs what Julie D’Acci calls “explicit general feminism,” which is defined by “dialogue and scenes that straightforwardly addressed discrimination against women in both public and private spheres, stories structured around topical feminist causes, and the use of unequivocal feminist language and slogans” (147). However, the feminist politics of Roseanne and Barr are (and never were) straightforward or uncomplicated.Studies of feminism on US television have primarily focused on comedies that feature female television stars who function as advocates for feminism and women’s issues (Spigel; Rabinovitz; D’Acci). Much of the critical discussion of feminist voice in US female-led television identifies the feminist intervention as taking place at the level of performance (Dow; Spigel; Spangler). Comedic series such as I Love Lucy (1951-1957), Murphy Brown (1988-1998, 2018-present), and Grace Under Fire (1993-1998), and dramatic series’, such as Cagney and Lacey and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, privilege the articulation of feminist ideas through performance and character.Roseanne is not a series that derives its comedy from a clash of different perspectives or a series where politics are debated and explored in a nuanced a complex way. Roseanne promotes a distinct singular perspective – that of Roseanne Barr. In seasons one to nine, the character Roseanne is rarely persuaded to think differently about an issue or situation or depicted as “wrong.” The series centres Roseanne’s pain and distress when Becky elopes with Mark (Glenn Quinn), or when Jackie is abused by her boyfriend Fisher (Matt Roth), or when Darlene accidently gets pregnant. Although those storylines are about other characters, Roseanne’s emotions are central. Roseanne/Barr’s perspective (as fictional character and media personality) informs the narrative, sensibility, and tone. Roseanne is not designed to contain multiple perspectives.Roseanne is acutely aware of its place in the history of feminist voice and representations of women on US television. Television is central to the series’ articulation of feminism and feminist voice. In season seven episode “All About Rosey,” the series breaks the fourth wall (as it does many times throughout its run), taking the audience behind the scenes where some of US television’s most well-known (and traditional) mothers are cleaning the Conner’s kitchen. June Cleaver (Barbara Billingsley) from Leave It to Beaver (1957-1963), Joan Nash (Pat Crowley) from Please Don’t Eat the Daisies (1965-1967), Ruth Martin (June Lockhart) from Lassie (1958-1964), Norma Arnold (Alley Mills) from The Wonder Years (1988-1993), and Louise Jefferson (Isabel Sanford) from The Jeffersons (1975-1985) at first sit in judgment of Barr and her character Roseanne, claiming she presents “wrong image” for a TV mother. However, Roseanne/Barr eventually wins over the TV mothers, declaring “the important thing is on my show, I’m the boss and father knows squat” (7.19). It is in contrast to more traditional television mothers that Roseanne/Barr’s feminist voice comes into focus.In the ninth and final season of Roseanne’s initial run, the series (arguably) becomes a parody of its former self. By this point in the series, “Barr was seen as the sole cause of the show’s demise, as a woman who was ‘imploding,’ ‘losing the plot,’ or ‘out of control’” (White 234). White argues that depicting the working-class Conners’ social and economic ascension to upper-class diminishes the distinction between Barr and her character (243). White writes that in the series’ finale, the “line between performer and character is irrevocably blurred; it is unclear whether the voice we are hearing is that of Roseanne Conner or Roseanne Barr” (244). This blurring between Roseanne and Barr becomes particularly contentious in season 10.Rebooting Roseanne: Season 10Season 10 redacts and erases most of the events of season nine, which itself was a fantasy, as revealed in the season nine finale. As such, the reboot is not a simple continuation, because in the season nine finale it is revealed that Dan suffered a fatal heart attack a year earlier. The final monologue (delivered in voice-over by Barr) “reveals” that Roseanne has been writing and editing her experiences into a digestible story. The “Conners winning the lottery” storyline that dominated season nine was imagined by Roseanne as an elaborate coping strategy after Dan’s death. Yet in the season 10 reboot, Dan is revealed to be alive, as is Darlene and David’s (Johnny Galecki) daughter Harris, who was born during the events of season nine.The limits of Roseanne/Barr’s feminism within the contemporary political landscape come into focus around issues of race. This is partly because the incident that incited ABC to cancel the reboot of Roseanne was racially motivated, and partly because Roseanne/Barr’s feminism has always relied on whiteness. Between 1997 and 2018, Barr’s unruliness has become less associated with empowering working-class women and more with railing against minorities and immigrants. In redacting and erasing the events of season nine, the reboot attempts to step back the conflation between Roseanne and Barr with little success.In the first episode of season 10, “Twenty Years to Life”, Roseanne is positioned as the loud-mouthed victim of circumstance and systemic inequality – similar to her nineties-persona. Yet in 2018, Roseanne mocks same things that nineties’ Roseanne took seriously, including collective action, community building, and labour conditions. Roseanne claims: “It is not my fault that I just happen to be a charismatic person that’s right about everything” (10.01). Here, the series attempts to make light of a now-outdated understanding of Barr’s persona, but it comes off as tone-deaf and lacking self-awareness.Roseanne has bigoted tendencies in both the 1990s and in 2018, but the political resonance of those tendencies and their relationships to feminisms and nostalgia differs greatly from the original series to the reboot. This is best illustrated by comparing season seven episode “White Men Can’t Kiss” and season 10 episode “Go Cubs.” In the former, Roseanne is appalled that she may have raised a racist son and insists DJ must kiss his black classmate Geena (Rae’Ven Larrymore Kelly) in the school play. Towards the end of this episode, Geena’s father comes by the restaurant where Roseanne and Jackie are closing up. When the tall black man knocks on the locked door, Roseanne refuses to let him inside. She appears visibly afraid. Once Roseanne knows he is Geena’s father, she lets him in and he confronts her about her racist attitude. Roseanne (and the audience) is forced to sit in the discomfort of having her bigotry exposed. While there are no material consequences for Roseanne or DJ’s racism, within the context of the less intersectional 1990s, this interaction does not call into question Roseanne or Barr’s feminist credentials.In season 10, Roseanne tackles similar issues around race, ignorance, and bigotry, but it plays out very differently. In the reboot’s seventh episode, Roseanne suspects her Muslim refugee neighbours Fatima (Anne Bedian) and Samir (Alain Washnevky) are terrorists. Although Roseanne is proven wrong, she is not forced to reckon with her bigotry. Instead, she is positioned as a “hero” later in the episode, when she berates a supermarket cashier for her racist treatment of Fatima. Given what audiences know about Barr’s off-screen politics, this does not counteract the impression of racism, but compounds it. It also highlights the whiteness of the politics embodied by Roseanne/Barr both on-screen and off. Although these are two very different racial configurations (anti-blackness and Islamophobia), these episodes underline the shifting reception and resonance of the feminism Roseanne/Barr embodies.ConclusionIn June 2018, shortly after the cancellation of the Roseanne reboot, ABC announced that it was developing a spin-off without Barr called The Conners (2018-present). In the spin-off Roseanne is dead and her family is dealing with life after Roseanne/Roseanne (Crucchiola). Here, Roseanne suffers the same fate as Dan in season nine (she dies off-screen), but now it is Barr who is fictionally buried. While The Conners attempts to rewrite the story of the Conner family by rejecting Barr’s racist views and removing her financial and creative stake in their stories, Barr cannot be erased or redacted from Roseanne or the story of the Conner family, because it is her story.The reboot and its cancellation illuminate how Barr and Roseanne’s feminist voice has not evolved past its white second-wave roots. The feminism of Roseanne is embodied by Barr in all her unruliness and whiteness. Roseanne/Barr/Roseanne has not taken on the third and fourth-wave critiques of second-wave feminisms, which emphasise the limits of white feminisms. The failure of the Roseanne reboot reveals that the pleasure and nostalgia of seeing the Conner family back together is not enough. Ultimately, Roseanne is without intersectionality, and thus cannot (and should not) be recognised as feminist in the contemporary political landscape.ReferencesBetter Things. Cr. Pamela Adlon and Louis C.K. FX, 2016 to present.Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Cr. Joss Whedon. Mutant Enemy Productions, 1997-2004.Cagney and Lacey. Cr. Barbara Avedon and Barbara Corday. Orion Television, 1981-1988.Charmed. Cr. Constance M. Burge. Spelling Television, 1998-2006.Charmed. Cr. Jessica O’Toole, Amy Rardin, and Jennie Snyder Urman. CBS Television, 2018 to present.Conners, The. Cr. Bruce Helford and Matt Williams. Werner Entertainment, 2018 to present.Crucchiola, Jordan. “Roseanne Might Have Just Spoiled Her Own Death in The Conners.” Vulture, 17 Sep. 2018. <https://www.vulture.com/2018/09/roseanne-may-have-just-spoiled-her-own-death-in-the-conners.html>.D’Acci, Julie. Defining Women: Television and the Case of Cagney and Lacey. Chapel Hill, NC: U of North Carolina P, 1994.Dietland. Cr. Marti Noxon. Skydance Television, 2018.Dow, Bonnie J. Prime-Time Feminism: Television, Media Culture, and the Women’s Movement since 1970. Philadelphia, PA: U of Pennsylvania P, 1996.Full House. Cr. 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augmentvb [ɔːgˈmɛnt]1. to make or become greater in number, amount, strength, etc.; increase2. Music: to increase (a major or perfect interval) by a semitone (Collins English Dictionary 107) Almost everything associated with Robert Johnson has been subject to some form of augmentation. His talent as a musician and songwriter has been embroidered by myth-making. Johnson’s few remaining artefacts—his photographic images, his grave site, other physical records of his existence—have attained the status of reliquary. Even the integrity of his forty-two surviving recordings is now challenged by audiophiles who posit they were musically and sonically augmented by speeding up—increasing the tempo and pitch. This article documents the promulgation of myth in the life and music of Robert Johnson. His disputed photographic images are cited as archetypal contested artefacts, augmented both by false claims and genuine new discoveries—some of which suggest Johnson’s cultural magnetism is so compelling that even items only tenuously connected to his work draw significant attention. Current challenges to the musical integrity of Johnson’s original recordings, that they were “augmented” in order to raise the tempo, are presented as exemplars of our on-going fascination with his life and work. Part literature review, part investigative history, it uses the phenomenon of augmentation as a prism to shed new light on this enigmatic figure. Johnson’s obscurity during his lifetime, and for twenty-three years after his demise in 1938, offered little indication of his future status as a musical legend: “As far as the evolution of black music goes, Robert Johnson was an extremely minor figure, and very little that happened in the decades following his death would have been affected if he had never played a note” (Wald, Escaping xv). Such anonymity allowed those who first wrote about his music to embrace and propagate the myths that grew around this troubled character and his apparently “supernatural” genius. Johnson’s first press notice, from a pseudonymous John Hammond writing in The New Masses in 1937, spoke of a mysterious character from “deepest Mississippi” who “makes Leadbelly sound like an accomplished poseur” (Prial 111). The following year Hammond eulogised the singer in profoundly romantic terms: “It still knocks me over when I think of how lucky it is that a talent like his ever found its way to phonograph records […] Johnson died last week at precisely the moment when Vocalion scouts finally reached him and told him that he was booked to appear at Carnegie Hall” (19). The visceral awe experienced by subsequent generations of Johnson aficionados seems inspired by the remarkable capacity of his recordings to transcend space and time, reaching far beyond their immediate intended audience. “Johnson’s music changed the way the world looked to me,” wrote Greil Marcus, “I could listen to nothing else for months.” The music’s impact originates, at least in part, from the ambiguity of its origins: “I have the feeling, at times, that the reason Johnson has remained so elusive is that no one has been willing to take him at his word” (27-8). Three decades later Bob Dylan expressed similar sentiments over seven detailed pages of Chronicles: From the first note the vibrations from the loudspeaker made my hair stand up … it felt like a ghost had come into the room, a fearsome apparition …When he sings about icicles hanging on a tree it gives me the chills, or about milk turning blue … it made me nauseous and I wondered how he did that … It’s hard to imagine sharecroppers or plantation field hands at hop joints, relating to songs like these. You have to wonder if Johnson was playing for an audience that only he could see, one off in the future. (282-4) Such ready invocation of the supernatural bears witness to the profundity and resilience of the “lost bluesman” as a romantic trope. Barry Lee Pearson and Bill McCulloch have produced a painstaking genealogy of such a-historical misrepresentation. Early contributors include Rudi Blesch, Samuel B Charters, Frank Driggs’ liner notes for Johnson’s King of the Delta Blues Singers collection, and critic Pete Welding’s prolific 1960s output. Even comparatively recent researchers who ostensibly sought to demystify the legend couldn’t help but embellish the narrative. “It is undeniable that Johnson was fascinated with and probably obsessed by supernatural imagery,” asserted Robert Palmer (127). For Peter Guralnick his best songs articulate “the debt that must be paid for art and the Faustian bargain that Johnson sees at its core” (43). Contemporary scholarship from Pearson and McCulloch, James Banninghof, Charles Ford, and Elijah Wald has scrutinised Johnson’s life and work on a more evidential basis. This process has been likened to assembling a complicated jigsaw where half the pieces are missing: The Mississippi Delta has been practically turned upside down in the search for records of Robert Johnson. So far only marriage application signatures, two photos, a death certificate, a disputed death note, a few scattered school documents and conflicting oral histories of the man exist. Nothing more. (Graves 47) Such material is scrappy and unreliable. Johnson’s marriage licenses and his school records suggest contradictory dates of birth (Freeland 49). His death certificate mistakes his age—we now know that Johnson inadvertently founded another rock myth, the “27 Club” which includes fellow guitarists Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain (Wolkewitz et al., Segalstad and Hunter)—and incorrectly states he was single when he was twice widowed. A second contemporary research strand focuses on the mythmaking process itself. For Eric Rothenbuhler the appeal of Johnson’s recordings lies in his unique “for-the-record” aesthetic, that foreshadowed playing and song writing standards not widely realised until the 1960s. For Patricia Schroeder Johnson’s legend reveals far more about the story-tellers than it does the source—which over time has become “an empty center around which multiple interpretations, assorted viewpoints, and a variety of discourses swirl” (3). Some accounts of Johnson’s life seem entirely coloured by their authors’ cultural preconceptions. The most enduring myth, Johnson’s “crossroads” encounter with the Devil, is commonly redrawn according to the predilections of those telling the tale. That this story really belongs to bluesman Tommy Johnson has been known for over four decades (Evans 22), yet it was mistakenly attributed to Robert as recently as 1999 in French blues magazine Soul Bag (Pearson and McCulloch 92-3). Such errors are, thankfully, becoming less common. While the movie Crossroads (1986) brazenly appropriated Tommy’s story, the young walking bluesman in Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) faithfully proclaims his authentic identity: “Thanks for the lift, sir. My name's Tommy. Tommy Johnson […] I had to be at that crossroads last midnight. Sell my soul to the devil.” Nevertheless the “supernatural” constituent of Johnson’s legend remains an irresistible framing device. It inspired evocative footage in Peter Meyer’s Can’t You Hear the Wind Howl? The Life and Music of Robert Johnson (1998). Even the liner notes to the definitive Sony Music Robert Johnson: The Centennial Edition celebrate and reclaim his myth: nothing about this musician is more famous than the word-of-mouth accounts of him selling his soul to the devil at a midnight crossroads in exchange for his singular mastery of blues guitar. It has become fashionable to downplay or dismiss this account nowadays, but the most likely source of the tale is Johnson himself, and the best efforts of scholars to present this artist in ordinary, human terms have done little to cut through the mystique and mystery that surround him. Repackaged versions of Johnson’s recordings became available via Amazon.co.uk and Spotify when they fell out of copyright in the United Kingdom. Predictable titles such as Contracted to the Devil, Hellbound, Me and the Devil Blues, and Up Jumped the Devil along with their distinctive “crossroads” artwork continue to demonstrate the durability of this myth [1]. Ironically, Johnson’s recordings were made during an era when one-off exhibited artworks (such as his individual performances of music) first became reproducible products. Walter Benjamin famously described the impact of this development: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art […] the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. (7) Marybeth Hamilton drew on Benjamin in her exploration of white folklorists’ efforts to document authentic pre-modern blues culture. Such individuals sought to preserve the intensity of the uncorrupted and untutored black voice before its authenticity and uniqueness could be tarnished by widespread mechanical reproduction. Two artefacts central to Johnson’s myth, his photographs and his recorded output, will now be considered in that context. In 1973 researcher Stephen LaVere located two pictures in the possession of his half–sister Carrie Thompson. The first, a cheap “dime store” self portrait taken in the equivalent of a modern photo booth, shows Johnson around a year into his life as a walking bluesman. The second, taken in the Hooks Bros. studio in Beale Street, Memphis, portrays a dapper and smiling musician on the eve of his short career as a Vocalion recording artist [2]. Neither was published for over a decade after their “discovery” due to fears of litigation from a competing researcher. A third photograph remains unpublished, still owned by Johnson’s family: The man has short nappy hair; he is slight, one foot is raised, and he is up on his toes as though stretching for height. There is a sharp crease in his pants, and a handkerchief protrudes from his breast pocket […] His eyes are deep-set, reserved, and his expression forms a half-smile, there seems to be a gentleness about him, his fingers are extraordinarily long and delicate, his head is tilted to one side. (Guralnick 67) Recently a fourth portrait appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, in Vanity Fair. Vintage guitar seller Steven Schein discovered a sepia photograph labelled “Old Snapshot Blues Guitar B. B. King???” [sic] while browsing Ebay and purchased it for $2,200. Johnson’s son positively identified the image, and a Houston Police Department forensic artist employed face recognition technology to confirm that “all the features are consistent if not identical” (DiGiacomo 2008). The provenance of this photograph remains disputed, however. Johnson’s guitar appears overly distressed for what would at the time be a new model, while his clothes reflect an inappropriate style for the period (Graves). Another contested “Johnson” image found on four seconds of silent film showed a walking bluesman playing outside a small town cinema in Ruleville, Mississippi. It inspired Bob Dylan to wax lyrical in Chronicles: “You can see that really is Robert Johnson, has to be – couldn’t be anyone else. He’s playing with huge, spiderlike hands and they magically move over the strings of his guitar” (287). However it had already been proved that this figure couldn’t be Johnson, because the background movie poster shows a film released three years after the musician’s death. The temptation to wish such items genuine is clearly a difficult one to overcome: “even things that might have been Robert Johnson now leave an afterglow” (Schroeder 154, my italics). Johnson’s recordings, so carefully preserved by Hammond and other researchers, might offer tangible and inviolate primary source material. Yet these also now face a serious challenge: they run too rapidly by a factor of up to 15 per cent (Gibbens; Wilde). Speeding up music allowed early producers to increase a song’s vibrancy and fit longer takes on to their restricted media. By slowing the recording tempo, master discs provided a “mother” print that would cause all subsequent pressings to play unnaturally quickly when reproduced. Robert Johnson worked for half a decade as a walking blues musician without restrictions on the length of his songs before recording with producer Don Law and engineer Vincent Liebler in San Antonio (1936) and Dallas (1937). Longer compositions were reworked for these sessions, re-arranging and edited out verses (Wald, Escaping). It is also conceivable that they were purposefully, or even accidentally, sped up. (The tempo consistency of machines used in early field recordings across the South has often been questioned, as many played too fast or slow (Morris).) Slowed-down versions of Johnson’s songs from contributors such as Angus Blackthorne and Ron Talley now proliferate on YouTube. The debate has fuelled detailed discussion in online blogs, where some contributors to specialist audio technology forums have attempted to decode a faintly detectable background hum using spectrum analysers. If the frequency of the alternating current that powered Law and Liebler’s machine could be established at 50 or 60 Hz it might provide evidence of possible tempo variation. A peak at 51.4 Hz, one contributor argues, suggests “the recordings are 2.8 per cent fast, about half a semitone” (Blischke). Such “augmentation” has yet to be fully explored in academic literature. Graves describes the discussion as “compelling and intriguing” in his endnotes, concluding “there are many pros and cons to the argument and, indeed, many recordings over the years have been speeded up to make them seem livelier” (124). Wald ("Robert Johnson") provides a compelling and detailed counter-thesis on his website, although he does acknowledge inconsistencies in pitch among alternate master takes of some recordings. No-one who actually saw Robert Johnson perform ever called attention to potential discrepancies between the pitch of his natural and recorded voice. David “Honeyboy” Edwards, Robert Lockwood Jr. and Johnny Shines were all interviewed repeatedly by documentarians and researchers, but none ever raised the issue. Conversely Johnson’s former girlfriend Willie Mae Powell was visibly affected by the familiarity in his voice on hearing his recording of the tune Johnson wrote for her, “Love in Vain”, in Chris Hunt’s The Search for Robert Johnson (1991). Clues might also lie in the natural tonality of Johnson’s instrument. Delta bluesmen who shared Johnson’s repertoire and played slide guitar in his style commonly used a tuning of open G (D-G-D-G-B-G). Colloquially known as “Spanish” (Gordon 2002, 38-42) it offers a natural home key of G major for slide guitar. We might therefore expect Johnson’s recordings to revolve around the tonic (G) or its dominant (D) -however almost all of his songs are a full tone higher, in the key of A or its dominant E. (The only exceptions are “They’re Red Hot” and “From Four Till Late” in C, and “Love in Vain” in G.) A pitch increase such as this might be consistent with an increase in the speed of these recordings. Although an alternative explanation might be that Johnson tuned his strings particularly tightly, which would benefit his slide playing but also make fingering notes and chords less comfortable. Yet another is that he used a capo to raise the key of his instrument and was capable of performing difficult lead parts in relatively high fret positions on the neck of an acoustic guitar. This is accepted by Scott Ainslie and Dave Whitehill in their authoritative volume of transcriptions At the Crossroads (11). The photo booth self portrait of Johnson also clearly shows a capo at the second fret—which would indeed raise open G to open A (in concert pitch). The most persuasive reasoning against speed tampering runs parallel to the argument laid out earlier in this piece, previous iterations of the Johnson myth have superimposed their own circumstances and ignored the context and reality of the protagonist’s lived experience. As Wald argues, our assumptions of what we think Johnson ought to sound like have little bearing on what he actually sounded like. It is a compelling point. When Son House, Skip James, Bukka White, and other surviving bluesmen were “rediscovered” during the 1960s urban folk revival of North America and Europe they were old men with deep and resonant voices. Johnson’s falsetto vocalisations do not, therefore, accord with the commonly accepted sound of an authentic blues artist. Yet Johnson was in his mid-twenties in 1936 and 1937; a young man heavily influenced by the success of other high pitched male blues singers of his era. people argue that what is better about the sound is that the slower, lower Johnson sounds more like Son House. Now, House was a major influence on Johnson, but by the time Johnson recorded he was not trying to sound like House—an older player who had been unsuccessful on records—but rather like Leroy Carr, Casey Bill Weldon, Kokomo Arnold, Lonnie Johnson, and Peetie Wheatstraw, who were the big blues recording stars in the mid–1930s, and whose vocal styles he imitated on most of his records. (For example, the ooh-well-well falsetto yodel he often used was imitated from Wheatstraw and Weldon.) These singers tended to have higher, smoother voices than House—exactly the sound that Johnson seems to have been going for, and that the House fans dislike. So their whole argument is based on the fact that they prefer the older Delta sound to the mainstream popular blues sound of the 1930s—or, to put it differently, that their tastes are different from Johnson’s own tastes at the moment he was recording. (Wald, "Robert Johnson") Few media can capture an audible moment entirely accurately, and the idea of engineering a faithful reproduction of an original performance is also only one element of the rationale for any recording. Commercial engineers often aim to represent the emotion of a musical moment, rather than its totality. John and Alan Lomax may have worked as documentarians, preserving sound as faithfully as possible for the benefit of future generations on behalf of the Library of Congress. Law and Liebler, however, were producing exciting and profitable commercial products for a financial gain. Paradoxically, then, whatever the “real” Robert Johnson sounded like (deeper voice, no mesmeric falsetto, not such an extraordinarily adept guitar player, never met the Devil … and so on) the mythical figure who “sold his soul at the crossroads” and shipped millions of albums after his death may, on that basis, be equally as authentic as the original. Schroeder draws on Mikhail Bakhtin to comment on such vacant yet hotly contested spaces around the Johnson myth. For Bakhtin, literary texts are ascribed new meanings by consecutive generations as they absorb and respond to them. Every age re–accentuates in its own way the works of its most immediate past. The historical life of classic works is in fact the uninterrupted process of their social and ideological re–accentuation [of] ever newer aspects of meaning; their semantic content literally continues to grow, to further create out of itself. (421) In this respect Johnson’s legend is a “classic work”, entirely removed from its historical life, a free floating form re-contextualised and reinterpreted by successive generations in order to make sense of their own cultural predilections (Schroeder 57). As Graves observes, “since Robert Johnson’s death there has seemed to be a mathematical equation of sorts at play: the less truth we have, the more myth we get” (113). The threads connecting his real and mythical identity seem so comprehensively intertwined that only the most assiduous scholars are capable of disentanglement. Johnson’s life and work seem destined to remain augmented and contested for as long as people want to play guitar, and others want to listen to them. Notes[1] Actually the dominant theme of Johnson’s songs is not “the supernatural” it is his inveterate womanising. Almost all Johnson’s lyrics employ creative metaphors to depict troubled relationships. Some even include vivid images of domestic abuse. In “Stop Breakin’ Down Blues” a woman threatens him with a gun. In “32–20 Blues” he discusses the most effective calibre of weapon to shoot his partner and “cut her half in two.” In “Me and the Devil Blues” Johnson promises “to beat my woman until I get satisfied”. However in The Lady and Mrs Johnson five-time W. C. Handy award winner Rory Block re-wrote these words to befit her own cultural agenda, inverting the original sentiment as: “I got to love my baby ‘til I get satisfied”.[2] The Gibson L-1 guitar featured in Johnson’s Hooks Bros. portrait briefly became another contested artefact when it appeared in the catalogue of a New York State memorabilia dealership in 2006 with an asking price of $6,000,000. The Australian owner had apparently purchased the instrument forty years earlier under the impression it was bona fide, although photographic comparison technology showed that it couldn’t be genuine and the item was withdrawn. “Had it been real, I would have been able to sell it several times over,” Gary Zimet from MIT Memorabilia told me in an interview for Guitarist Magazine at the time, “a unique item like that will only ever increase in value” (Stewart 2010). References Ainslie, Scott, and Dave Whitehall. Robert Johnson: At the Crossroads – The Authoritative Guitar Transcriptions. Milwaukee: Hal Leonard Publishing, 1992. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982. Banks, Russell. “The Devil and Robert Johnson – Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings.” The New Republic 204.17 (1991): 27-30. Banninghof, James. “Some Ramblings on Robert Johnson’s Mind: Critical Analysis and Aesthetic in Delta Blues.” American Music 15/2 (1997): 137-158. Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. London: Penguin, 2008. Blackthorne, Angus. “Robert Johnson Slowed Down.” YouTube.com 2011. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/user/ANGUSBLACKTHORN?feature=watch›. Blesh, Rudi. Shining Trumpets: A History of Jazz. New York: Knopf, 1946. Blischke, Michael. “Slowing Down Robert Johnson.” The Straight Dope 2008. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=461601›. Block, Rory. The Lady and Mrs Johnson. Rykodisc 10872, 2006. Charters, Samuel. The Country Blues. New York: De Capo Press, 1959. Collins UK. Collins English Dictionary. Glasgow: Harper Collins Publishers, 2010. DiGiacomo, Frank. “A Disputed Robert Johnson Photo Gets the C.S.I. Treatment.” Vanity Fair 2008. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2008/10/a-disputed-robert-johnson-photo-gets-the-csi-treatment›. DiGiacomo, Frank. “Portrait of a Phantom: Searching for Robert Johnson.” Vanity Fair 2008. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2008/11/johnson200811›. Dylan, Bob. Chronicles Vol 1. London: Simon & Schuster, 2005. Evans, David. Tommy Johnson. London: November Books, 1971. Ford, Charles. “Robert Johnson’s Rhythms.” Popular Music 17.1 (1998): 71-93. Freeland, Tom. “Robert Johnson: Some Witnesses to a Short Life.” Living Blues 150 (2000): 43-49. Gibbens, John. “Steady Rollin’ Man: A Revolutionary Critique of Robert Johnson.” Touched 2004. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.touched.co.uk/press/rjnote.html›. Gioia, Ted. Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionised American Music. London: W. W. Norton & Co, 2008. Gioia, Ted. "Robert Johnson: A Century, and Beyond." Robert Johnson: The Centennial Collection. Sony Music 88697859072, 2011. Gordon, Robert. Can’t Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters. London: Pimlico Books, 2002. Graves, Tom. Crossroads: The Life and Afterlife of Blues Legend Robert Johnson. Spokane: Demers Books, 2008. Guralnick, Peter. Searching for Robert Johnson: The Life and Legend of the "King of the Delta Blues Singers". London: Plume, 1998. Hamilton, Marybeth. In Search of the Blues: Black Voices, White Visions. London: Jonathan Cape, 2007. Hammond, John. From Spirituals to Swing (Dedicated to Bessie Smith). New York: The New Masses, 1938. Johnson, Robert. “Hellbound.” Amazon.co.uk 2011. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hellbound/dp/B0063S8Y4C/ref=sr_1_cc_2?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1376605065&sr=1-2-catcorr&keywords=robert+johnson+hellbound›. ———. “Contracted to the Devil.” Amazon.co.uk 2002. 1 Aug. 2013. ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Contracted-The-Devil-Robert-Johnson/dp/B00006F1L4/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1376830351&sr=1-1-catcorr&keywords=Contracted+to+The+Devil›. ———. King of the Delta Blues Singers. Columbia Records CL1654, 1961. ———. “Me and the Devil Blues.” Amazon.co.uk 2003. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Me-Devil-Blues-Robert-Johnson/dp/B00008SH7O/ref=sr_1_16?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1376604807&sr=1-16&keywords=robert+johnson›. ———. “The High Price of Soul.” Amazon.co.uk 2007. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/High-Price-Soul-Robert-Johnson/dp/B000LC582C/ref=sr_1_39?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1376604863&sr=1-39&keywords=robert+johnson›. ———. “Up Jumped the Devil.” Amazon.co.uk 2005. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Up-Jumped-Devil-Robert-Johnson/dp/B000B57SL8/ref=sr_1_2?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1376829917&sr=1-2&keywords=Up+Jumped+The+Devil›. Marcus, Greil. Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music. London: Plume, 1997. Morris, Christopher. “Phonograph Blues: Robert Johnson Mastered at Wrong Speed?” Variety 2010. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.varietysoundcheck.com/2010/05/phonograph-blues-robert-johnson-mastered-at-wrong-speed.html›. Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou? DVD. Universal Pictures, 2000. Palmer, Robert. Deep Blues: A Musical and Cultural History from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago’s South Side to the World. London: Penguin Books, 1981. Pearson, Barry Lee, and Bill McCulloch. Robert Johnson: Lost and Found. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Prial, Dunstan. The Producer: John Hammond and the Soul of American Music. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. Rothenbuhler, Eric W. “For–the–Record Aesthetics and Robert Johnson’s Blues Style as a Product of Recorded Culture.” Popular Music 26.1 (2007): 65-81. Rothenbuhler, Eric W. “Myth and Collective Memory in the Case of Robert Johnson.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 24.3 (2007): 189-205. Schroeder, Patricia. Robert Johnson, Mythmaking and Contemporary American Culture (Music in American Life). Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Segalstad, Eric, and Josh Hunter. The 27s: The Greatest Myth of Rock and Roll. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2009. Stewart, Jon. “Rock Climbing: Jon Stewart Concludes His Investigation of the Myths behind Robert Johnson.” Guitarist Magazine 327 (2010): 34. The Search for Robert Johnson. DVD. Sony Pictures, 1991. Talley, Ron. “Robert Johnson, 'Sweet Home Chicago', as It REALLY Sounded...” YouTube.com 2012. 1 Aug. 2013. ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCHod3_yEWQ›. Wald, Elijah. Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues. London: HarperCollins, 2005. ———. The Robert Johnson Speed Recording Controversy. Elijah Wald — Writer, Musician 2012. 1 Aug. 2013. ‹http://www.elijahwald.com/johnsonspeed.html›. Wilde, John . “Robert Johnson Revelation Tells Us to Put the Brakes on the Blues: We've Been Listening to the Immortal 'King of the Delta Blues' at the Wrong Speed, But Now We Can Hear Him as He Intended.” The Guardian 2010. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2010/may/27/robert-johnson-blues›. Wolkewitz, M., A. Allignol, N. Graves, and A.G. Barnett. “Is 27 Really a Dangerous Age for Famous Musicians? Retrospective Cohort Study.” British Medical Journal 343 (2011): d7799. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.bmj.com/content/343/bmj.d7799›.

Introduction: Conceptualizing DisabilityThe two most prominent models for understanding disability are the medical model and the social model (“Disability”). The medical model locates disability in the person and emphasises the possibility of a cure, reinforcing the idea that disability is the fault of the disabled person, their body, their genes, and/or their upbringing. The social model, formulated as a response to the medical model, presents disability as a failure of the surrounding environment to accommodate differently abled bodies and minds. Closely linked to identity politics, the social model argues that disability is not a defect to be fixed but a source of human experience and identity, and that to disregard the needs of people with disability is to discriminate against them by being “ableist.”Both models have limitations. On the one hand, simply being a person with disability or having any other minority identity/-ies does not by itself lead to exclusion and discrimination (Nocella 18); an element of social valuation must be present that goes beyond a mere numbers game. On the other hand, merely focusing on the social aspect neglects “the realities of sickness, suffering, and pain” that many people with disability experience (Mollow 196) and that cannot be substantially alleviated by any degree of social change. The body is irreducible to discourse and representation (Siebers 749). Disability exists only at the confluence of differently abled minds and bodies and unaccommodating social and physical environs. How a body “fits” (my word) its environment is the focus of the “ecosomatic paradigm” (Cella 574-75); one example is how the drastically different environment of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) reorients the coordinates of ability and impairment (Cella 582–84). I want to examine a novel that, conversely, features a change not in environment but in body.Alien LegsTim Farnsworth, the protagonist of Joshua Ferris’s second novel, The Unnamed (2010), is a high-powered New York lawyer who develops a condition that causes him to walk spontaneously without control over direction or duration. Tim suffers four periods of “walking,” during which his body could without warning stand up and walk at any time up to the point of exhaustion; each period grows increasingly longer with more frequent walks, until the fourth one ends in Tim’s death. As his wife, Jane, understands it, these forced excursions are “a hijacking of some obscure order of the body, the frightened soul inside the runaway train of mindless matter” (24). The direction is not random, for his legs follow roads and traffic lights. When Tim is exhausted, his legs abruptly stop, ceding control back to his conscious will, whence Tim usually calls Jane and then sleeps like a baby wherever he stops. She picks him up at all hours of the day and night.Contemporary critics note shades of Beckett in both the premise and title of the novel (“Young”; Adams), connections confirmed by Ferris (“Involuntary”); Ron Charles mentions the Poe story “The Man of the Crowd” (1845), but it seems only the compulsion to walk is similar. Ferris says he “was interested in writing about disease” (“Involuntary”), and disability is at the core of the novel; Tim more than once thinks bitterly to himself that the smug person without disability in front of him will one day fall ill and die, alluding to the universality of disability. His condition is detrimental to his work and life, and Stuart Murray explores how this reveals the ableist assumptions behind the idea of “productivity” in a post-industrial economy. In one humorous episode, Tim arrives unexpectedly (but volitionally) at a courtroom and has just finished requesting permission to join the proceedings when his legs take him out of the courtroom again; he barely has time to shout over his shoulder, “on second thought, Your Honor” (Ferris Unnamed 103). However, Murray does not discuss what is unique about Tim’s disability: it revolves around walking, the paradigmatic act of ability in popular culture, as connoted in the phrase “to stand up and walk.” This makes it difficult to understand Tim’s predicament solely in terms of either the medical or social model. He is able-bodied—in fact, we might say he is “over-able”—leading one doctor to label his condition “benign idiopathic perambulation” (41; my emphasis); yet the lack of agency in his walking precludes it from becoming a “pedestrian speech act” (de Certeau 98), walking that imbues space with semiotic value. It is difficult to imagine what changes society could make to neutralize Tim’s disability.The novel explores both avenues. At first, Tim adheres to the medical model protocol of seeking a diagnosis to facilitate treatment. He goes to every and any (pseudo)expert in search of “the One Guy” who can diagnose and, possibly, cure him (53), but none can; a paper in The New England Journal of Medicine documents psychiatrists and neurologists, finding nothing, kicking the can between them, “from the mind to body back to the mind” (101). Tim is driven to seek a diagnosis because, under the medical model, a diagnosis facilitates understanding, by others and by oneself. As the Farnsworths experience many times, it is surpassingly difficult to explain to others that one has a disease with no diagnosis or even name. Without a name, the disease may as well not exist, and even their daughter, Becka, doubts Tim at first. Only Jane is able to empathize with him based on her own experience of menopause, incomprehensible to men, gesturing towards the influence of sex on medical hermeneutics (Mollow 188–92). As the last hope of a diagnosis comes up empty, Tim shifts his mentality, attempting to understand his condition through an idiosyncratic idiom: experiencing “brain fog”, feeling “mentally unsticky”, and having “jangly” nerves, “hyperslogged” muscles, a “floaty” left side, and “bunched up” breathing—these, to him, are “the most precise descriptions” of his physical and mental state (126). “Name” something, “revealing nature’s mystery”, and one can “triumph over it”, he thinks at one point (212). But he is never able to eschew the drive toward understanding via naming, and his “deep metaphysical ache” (Burn 45) takes the form of a lament at misfortune, a genre traceable to the Book of Job.Short of crafting a life for Tim in which his family, friends, and work are meaningfully present yet detached enough in scheduling and physical space to accommodate his needs, the social model is insufficient to make sense of, let alone neutralize, his disability. Nonetheless, there are certain aspects of his experience that can be improved with social adjustments. Tim often ends his walks by sleeping wherever he stops, and he would benefit from sensitivity training for police officers and other authority figures; out of all the authority figures who he encounters, only one shows consideration for his safety, comfort, and mental well-being prior to addressing the illegality of his behaviour. And making the general public more aware of “modes of not knowing, unknowing, and failing to know”, in the words of Jack Halberstam (qtd. in McRuer and Johnson 152), would alleviate the plight not just of Tim but of all sufferers of undiagnosed diseases and people with (rare forms of) disability.After Tim leaves home and starts walking cross-country, he has to learn to deal with his disability without any support system. The solution he hits upon illustrates the ecosomatic paradigm: he buys camping gear and treats his walking as an endless hike. Neither “curing” his body nor asking accommodation of society, Tim’s tools mediate a fit between body and environs, and it more or less works. For Tim the involuntary nomad, “everywhere was a wilderness” (Ferris Unnamed 247).The Otherness of the BodyProblems arise when Tim tries to fight his legs. After despairing of a diagnosis, he internalises the struggle against the “somatic noncompliance” of his body (Mollow 197) and refers to it as “the other” (207). One through-line of the novel is a (failed) attempt to overcome cartesian duality (Reiffenrath). Tim divides his experiences along cartesian lines and actively tries to enhance while short-circuiting the body. He recites case law and tries to take up birdwatching to maintain his mind, but his body constantly stymies him, drawing his attention to its own needs. He keeps himself ill-clothed and -fed and spurns needed medical attention, only to find—on the brink of death—that his body has brought him to a hospital, and that he stops walking until he is cured and discharged. Tim’s early impression that his body has “a mind of its own” (44), a situation comparable to the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886; Ludwigs 123–24), is borne out when it starts to silently speak to him, monosyllabically at first (“Food!” (207)), then progressing to simple sentences (“Leg is hurting” (213)) and sarcasm (“Deficiency of copper causes anemia, just so you know” (216)) before arriving at full-blown taunting:The other was the interrogator and he the muttering subject […].Q: Are you aware that you can be made to forget words, if certain neurons are suppressed from firing?A: Certain what?Q: And that by suppressing the firing of others, you can be made to forget what words mean entirely? Like the word Jane, for instance.A: Which?Q: And do you know that if I do this—[inaudible]A: Oof!Q: —you will flatline? And if I do this—[inaudible]A: Aaa, aaa…Q: —you will cease flatlining? (223–24; emphases and interpolations in original except for bracketed ellipsis)His Jobean lament turns literal, with his mind on God’s side and his body, “the other”, on the Devil’s in a battle for his eternal soul (Burn 46). Ironically, this “God talk” (Ferris Unnamed 248) finally gets Tim diagnosed with schizophrenia, and he receives medication that silences his body, if not stilling his legs. But when he is not medicated, his body can dominate his mind with multiple-page monologues.Not long after Tim’s mind and body reach a truce thanks to the camping gear and medication, Tim receives word on the west coast that Jane, in New York, has terminal cancer; he resolves to fight his end-of-walk “narcoleptic episodes” (12) to return to her—on foot. His body is not pleased, and it slowly falls apart as Tim fights it eastward cross-country. By the time he is hospitalized “ten miles as the crow flies from his final destination”, his ailments include “conjunctivitis”, “leg cramps”, “myositis”, “kidney failure”, “chafing and blisters”, “shingles”, “back pain”, “bug bites, ticks, fleas and lice”, “sun blisters”, “heatstroke and dehydration”, “rhabdomyolysis”, “excess [blood] potassium”, “splintering [leg] bones”, “burning tongue”, “[ballooning] heels”, “osteal complications”, “acute respiratory distress syndrome”, “excess fluid [in] his peritoneal cavity”, “brain swelling”, and a coma (278–80)—not including the fingers and toes lost to frostbite during an earlier period of walking. Nevertheless, he recovers and reunites with Jane, maintaining a holding pattern by returning to Jane’s hospital bedside after each walk.Jane recovers; the urgency having dissipated, Tim goes back on the road, confident that “he had proven long ago that there was no circumstance under which he could not walk if he put his mind to it” (303). A victory for mind over body? Not quite. The ending, Tim’s death scene, planned by Ferris from the beginning (Ferris “Tracking”), manages to grant victory to both mind and body without uniting them: his mind keeps working after physical death, but its last thought is of a “delicious […] cup of water” (310). Mind and body are two, but indivisible.Cartesian duality has relevance for other significant characters. The chain-smoking Detective Roy, assigned the case Tim is defending, later appears with oxygen tank in tow due to emphysema, yet he cannot quit smoking. What might have been a mere shortcut for characterization here carries physical consequences: the oxygen tank limits Roy’s movement and, one supposes, his investigative ability. After Jane recovers, Tim visits Frank Novovian, the security guard at his old law firm, and finds he has “gone fat [...] His retiring slouch behind the security post said there was no going back”; recognising Tim, Frank “lifted an inch off [his] chair, righting his jellied form, which immediately settled back into place” (297; my emphases). Frank’s physical state reflects the state of his career: settled. The mind-body antagonism is even more stark among Tim’s lawyer colleagues. Lev Wittig cannot become sexually aroused unless there is a “rare and extremely venomous snak[e]” in the room with no lights (145)—in direct contrast to his being a corporate tax specialist and the “dullest person you will ever meet” (141). And Mike Kronish famously once billed a twenty-seven-hour workday by crossing multiple time zones, but his apparent victory of mind over matter is undercut by his other notable achievement, being such a workaholic that his grown kids call him “Uncle Daddy” (148).Jane offers a more vexed case. While serving as Tim’s primary caretaker, she dreads the prospect of sacrificing the rest of her life for him. The pressures of the consciously maintaining her wedding vows directly affects her body. Besides succumbing to and recovering from alcoholism, she is twice tempted by the sexuality of other men; the second time, Tim calls her at the moment of truth to tell her the walking has returned, but instead of offering to pick him up, she says to him, “Come home” (195). As she later admits, asking him to do the impossible is a form of abandonment, and though causality is merely implied, Tim decides a day later not to return. Cartesian duality is similarly blurred in Jane’s fight against cancer. Prior to developing cancer, it is the pretence for Tim’s frequent office absences; she develops cancer; she fights it into remission not by relying on the clinical trial she undergoes, but because Tim’s impossible return inspires her; its remission removes the sense of urgency keeping Tim around, and he leaves; and he later learns that she dies from its recurrence. In multiple senses, Jane’s physical challenges are inextricable from her marriage commitment. Tim’s peripatetic condition affects both of them in homologous ways, gesturing towards the importance of disability studies for understanding the experience both of people with disability and of their caretakers.Becka copes with cartesian duality in the form of her obesity, and the way she does so sets an example for Tim. She gains weight during adolescence, around the time Tim starts walking uncontrollably, and despite her efforts she never loses weight. At first moody and depressed, she later channels her emotions into music, eventually going on tour. After one of her concerts, she tells Tim she has accepted her body, calling it “my one go-around,” freeing her from having to “hate yourself till the bitter end” (262) to instead enjoy her life and music. The idea of acceptance stays with Tim; whereas in previous episodes of walking he ignored the outside world—another example of reconceptualizing walking in the mode of disability—he pays attention to his surroundings on his journey back to New York, which is filled with descriptions of various geographical, meteorological, biological, and sociological phenomena, all while his body slowly breaks down. By the time he leaves home forever, he has acquired the habit of constant observation and the ability to enjoy things moment by moment. “Beauty, surprisingly, was everywhere” (279), he thinks. Invoking the figure of the flâneur, which Ferris had in mind when writing the novel (Ferris “Involuntary”), Peter Ferry argues that “becoming a 21st century incarnation of the flâneur gives Tim a greater sense of selfhood, a belief in the significance of his own existence within the increasingly chaotic and disorientating urban environment” (59). I concur, with two caveats: the chaotic and disorienting environment is not merely urban; and, contrary to Ferry’s claim that this regained selfhood is in contrast to “disintegrating” “conventional understandings of masculinity” (57), it instead incorporates Tim’s new identity as a person with disability.Conclusion: The Experience of DisabilityMore than specific insights into living with disability, the most important contribution of The Unnamed to disability studies is its exploration of the pure experience of disability. Ferris says, “I wanted to strip down this character to the very barest essentials and see what happens when sickness can’t go away and it can’t be answered by all [sic] of the medical technology that the country has at its disposal” (“Tracking”); by making Tim a wealthy lawyer with a caring family—removing common complicating socioeconomic factors of disability—and giving him an unprecedented impairment—removing all medical support and social services—Ferris depicts disability per se, illuminating the importance of disability studies for all people with(out) disability. After undergoing variegated experiences of pure disability, Tim “maintained a sound mind until the end. He was vigilant about periodic checkups and disciplined with his medication. He took care of himself as best he could, eating well however possible, sleeping when his body required it, […] and he persevered in this manner of living until his death” (Ferris Unnamed 306). This is an ideal relation to maintain between mind, body, and environment, irrespective of (dis)ability.ReferencesAdams, Tim. “The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris.” Fiction. Observer, 21 Feb. 2010: n. pag. 19 Sep. 2018 <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/feb/21/the-unnamed-joshua-ferris>.Burn, Stephen J. “Mapping the Syndrome Novel.” Diseases and Disorders in Contemporary Fiction: The Syndrome Syndrome. Eds. T.J. Lustig and James Peacock. New York: Routledge, 2013. 35-52.Cella, Matthew J.C. “The Ecosomatic Paradigm in Literature: Merging Disability Studies and Ecocriticism.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 20.3 (2013): 574–96.De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. 1980. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984.Charles, Ron. “Book World Review of Joshua Ferris’s ‘The Unnamed.’” Books. Washington Post 20 Jan. 2010: n. pag. 19 Sep. 2018 <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/19/AR2010011903945.html>.“Disability.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia 17 Sep. 2018. 19 Sep. 2018 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disability>.Ferris, Joshua. “Involuntary Walking; the Joshua Ferris Interview.” ReadRollShow. Created by David Weich. Sheepscot Creative, 2010. Vimeo, 9 Mar. 2010. 18 Sep. 2018 <https://www.vimeo.com/10026925>. [My transcript.]———. “Tracking a Man’s Life, in Endless Footsteps.” Interview by Melissa Block. All Things Considered, NPR, 15 Feb. 2010. 18 Sep. 2018 <https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=123650332>.———. The Unnamed: A Novel. New York: Little, Brown, 2010.Ferry, Peter. “Reading Manhattan, Reading Masculinity: Reintroducing the Flâneur with E.B. White’s Here Is New York and Joshua Ferris’ The Unnamed.” Culture, Society & Masculinities 3.1 (2011): 49–61.Ludwigs, Marina. “Walking as a Metaphor for Narrativity.” Studia Neophilologica 87.1 (Suppl. 1) (2015): 116–28.McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Vintage, 2006.McRuer, Robert, and Merri Lisa Johnson. “Proliferating Cripistemologies: A Virtual Roundtable.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 8.2 (2014): 149–69.Mollow, Anna. “Criphystemologies: What Disability Theory Needs to Know about Hysteria.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 8.2 (2014): 185–201.Murray, Stuart. “Reading Disability in a Time of Posthuman Work: Speed and Embodiment in Joshua Ferris’ The Unnamed and Michael Faber’s Under the Skin.” Disability Studies Quarterly 37.4 (2017). 20 May 2018 <http://dsq–sds.org/article/view/6104/4823/>.Nocella, Anthony J., II. “Defining Eco–Ability: Social Justice and the Intersectionality of Disability, Nonhuman Animals, and Ecology.” Earth, Animal, and Disability Liberation: The Rise of the Eco–Ability Movement. Eds. Anthony J. Nocella II, Judy K.C. Bentley, and Janet M. Duncan. New York: Peter Lang, 2012. 3–21.Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Man of the Crowd.” 1845. PoeStories.com. 18 Sep. 2018 <https://poestories.com/read/manofthecrowd>.Reiffenrath, Tanja. “Mind over Matter? Joshua Ferris’s The Unnamed as Counternarrative.” [sic] – a journal of literature, culture and literary translation 5.1 (2014). 20 May 2018 <https://www.sic–journal.org/ArticleView.aspx?aid=305/>.Siebers, Tobin. “Disability in Theory: From Social Constructionism to the New Realism of the Body.” American Literary History 13.4 (2001): 737–54.“The Young and the Restless.” Review of The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris. Books and Arts. Economist, 28 Jan. 2010: n. pag. 19 Sep. 2018 <https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2010/01/28/the-young-and-the-restless>.

For seven months in 1999/2000, six-year old Cuban Elián González was embroiled in a family feud plotted along rival national and ideological lines, and relayed televisually as soap opera across the planet. In Miami, apparitions of the Virgin Mary were reported after Elián’s arrival; adherents of Afro-Cuban santería similarly regarded Elián as divinely touched. In Cuba, Elián’s “kidnapping” briefly reinvigorated a torpid revolutionary project. He was hailed by Fidel Castro as the symbolic descendant of José Martí and Che Guevara, and of the patriotic rigour they embodied. Cubans massed to demand his return. In the U.S.A., Elián’s case was arbitrated at every level of the juridical system. The “Save Elián” campaign generated widespread debate about godless versus godly family values, the contours of the American Dream, and consumerist excess. By the end of 2000 Elián had generated the second largest volume of TV news coverage to that date in U.S. history, surpassed only by the O. J. Simpson case (Fasulo). After Fidel Castro, and perhaps the geriatric music ensemble manufactured by Ry Cooder, the Buena Vista Social Club, Elián became the most famous Cuban of our era. Elián also emerged as the unlikeliest of popular-cultural icons, the focus and subject of cyber-sites, books, films, talk-back radio programs, art exhibits, murals, statues, documentaries, a South Park episode, poetry, songs, t-shirts, posters, newspaper editorials in dozens of languages, demonstrations, speeches, political cartoons, letters, legal writs, U.S. Congress records, opinion polls, prayers, and, on both sides of the Florida Strait, museums consecrated in his memory. Confronted by Elián’s extraordinary renown and historical impact, John Carlos Rowe suggests that the Elián story confirms the need for a post-national and transdisciplinary American Studies, one whose practitioners “will have to be attentive to the strange intersections of politics, law, mass media, popular folklore, literary rhetoric, history, and economics that allow such events to be understood.” (204). I share Rowe’s reading of Elián’s story and the clear challenges it presents to analysis of “America,” to which I would add “Cuba” as well. But Elián’s story is also significant for the ways it challenges critical understandings of fame and its construction. No longer, to paraphrase Leo Braudy (566), definable as an accidental hostage of the mass-mediated eye, Elián’s fame has no certain relation to the child at its discursive centre. Elián’s story is not about an individuated, conscious, performing, desiring, and ambivalently rewarded ego. Elián was never what P. David Marshall calls “part of the public sphere, essentially an actor or, … a player” in it (19). The living/breathing Elián is absent from what I call the virtualizing drives that famously reproduced him. As a result of this virtualization, while one Elián now attends school in Cuba, many other Eliáns continue to populate myriad popular-cultural texts and to proliferate away from the states that tried to contain him. According to Jerry Everard, “States are above all cultural artefacts” that emerge, virtually, “as information produced by and through practices of signification,” as bits, bites, networks, and flows (7). All of us, he claims, reside in “virtual states,” in “legal fictions” based on the elusive and contested capacity to generate national identities in an imaginary bounded space (152). Cuba, the origin of Elián, is a virtual case in point. To augment Nicole Stenger’s definition of cyberspace, Cuba, like “Cyberspace, is like Oz — it is, we get there, but it has no location” (53). As a no-place, Cuba emerges in signifying terms as an illusion with the potential to produce and host Cubanness, as well as rival ideals of nation that can be accessed intact, at will, and ready for ideological deployment. Crude dichotomies of antagonism — Cuba/U.S.A., home/exile, democracy/communism, freedom/tyranny, North/South, godlessness/blessedness, consumption/want — characterize the hegemonic struggle over the Cuban nowhere. Split and splintered, hypersensitive and labyrinthine, guarded and hysterical, and always active elsewhere, the Cuban cultural artefact — an “atmospheric depression in history” (Stenger 56) — very much conforms to the logics that guide the appeal, and danger, of cyberspace. Cuba occupies an inexhaustible “ontological time … that can be reintegrated at any time” (Stenger 55), but it is always haunted by the prospect of ontological stalling and proliferation. The cyber-like struggle over reintegration, of course, evokes the Elián González affair, which began on 25 November 1999, when five-year old Elián set foot on U.S. soil, and ended on 28 June 2000, when Elián, age six, returned to Cuba with his father. Elián left one Cuba and found himself in another Cuba, in the U.S.A., each national claimant asserting virtuously that its other was a no-place and therefore illegitimate. For many exiles, Elián’s arrival in Miami confirmed that Castro’s Cuba is on the point of collapse and hence on the virtual verge of reintegration into the democratic fold as determined by the true upholders of the nation, the exile community. It was also argued that Elián’s biological father could never be the boy’s true father because he was a mere emasculated puppet of Castro himself. The Cuban state, then, had forfeited its claims to generate and host Cubanness. Succoured by this logic, the “Save Elián” campaign began, with organizations like the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) bankrolling protests, leaflet and poster production, and official “Elián” websites, providing financial assistance to and arranging employment for some of Elián’s Miami relatives, lobbying the U.S. Congress and the Florida legislature, and contributing funds to the legal challenges on behalf of Elián at state and federal levels. (Founded in 1981, the CANF is the largest and most powerful Cuban exile organization, and one that regards itself as the virtual government-in-waiting. CANF emerged with the backing of the Reagan administration and the C.I.A. as a “private sector initiative” to support U.S. efforts against its long-time ideological adversary across the Florida Strait [Arboleya 224-5].) While the “Save Elián” campaign failed, the result of a Cuban American misreading of public opinion and overestimation of the community’s lobbying power with the Clinton administration, the struggle continues in cyberspace. CANF.net.org registers its central role in this intense period with silence; but many of the “Save Elián” websites constructed after November 1999 continue to function as sad memento moris of Elián’s shipwreck in U.S. virtual space. (The CANF website does provide links to articles and opinion pieces about Elián from the U.S. media, but its own editorializing on the Elián affair has disappeared. Two keys to this silence were the election of George W. Bush, and the events of 11 Sep. 2001, which have enabled a revision of the Elián saga as a mere temporary setback on the Cuban-exile historical horizon. Indeed, since 9/11, the CANF website has altered the terms of its campaign against Castro, posting photos of Castro with Arab leaders and implicating him in a world-wide web of terrorism. Elián’s return to Cuba may thus be viewed retrospectively as an act that galvanized Cuban-exile support for the Republican Party and their disdain for the Democratic rival, and this support became pivotal in the Republican electoral victory in Florida and in the U.S.A. as a whole.) For many months after Elián’s return to Cuba, the official Liberty for Elián site, established in April 2000, was urging visitors to make a donation, volunteer for the Save Elián taskforce, send email petitions, and “invite a friend to help Elián.” (Since I last accessed “Liberty for Elián” in March 2004 it has become a gambling site.) Another site, Elian’s Home Page, still implores visitors to pray for Elián. Some of the links no longer function, and imperatives to “Click here” lead to that dead zone called “URL not found on this server.” A similar stalling of the exile aspirations invested in Elián is evident on most remaining Elián websites, official and unofficial, the latter including The Sad Saga of Elian Gonzalez, which exhorts “Cuban Exiles! Now You Can Save Elián!” In these sites, a U.S. resident Elián lives on as an archival curiosity, a sign of pathos, and a reminder of what was, for a time, a Cuban-exile PR disaster. If such cybersites confirm the shipwrecked coordinates of Elián’s fame, the “Save Elián” campaign also provided a focus for unrestrained criticism of the Cuban exile community’s imbrication in U.S. foreign policy initiatives and its embrace of American Dream logics. Within weeks of Elián’s arrival in Florida, cyberspace was hosting myriad Eliáns on sites unbeholden to Cuban-U.S. antagonisms, thus consolidating Elián’s function as a disputed icon of virtualized celebrity and focus for parody. A sense of this carnivalesque proliferation can be gained from the many doctored versions of the now iconic photograph of Elián’s seizure by the INS. Still posted, the jpegs and flashes — Elián and Michael Jackson, Elián and Homer Simpson, Elián and Darth Vader, among others (these and other doctored versions are archived on Hypercenter.com) — confirm the extraordinary domestication of Elián in local pop-cultural terms that also resonate as parodies of U.S. consumerist and voyeuristic excess. Indeed, the parodic responses to Elián’s fame set the virtual tone in cyberspace where ostensibly serious sites can themselves be approached as send ups. One example is Lois Rodden’s Astrodatabank, which, since early 2000, has asked visitors to assist in interpreting Elián’s astrological chart in order to confirm whether or not he will remain in the U.S.A. To this end the site provides Elián’s astro-biography and birth chart — a Sagittarius with a Virgo moon, Elián’s planetary alignments form a bucket — and conveys such information as “To the people of Little Havana [Miami], Elian has achieved mystical status as a ‘miracle child.’” (An aside: Elián and I share the same birthday.) Elián’s virtual reputation for divinely sanctioned “blessedness” within a Cuban exile-meets-American Dream typology provided Tom Tomorrow with the target in his 31 January 2000, cartoon, This Modern World, on Salon.com. Here, six-year old Arkansas resident Allen Consalis loses his mother on the New York subway. His relatives decide to take care of him since “New York has much more to offer him than Arkansas! I mean get real!” A custody battle ensues in which Allan’s heavily Arkansas-accented father requires translation, and the case inspires heated debate: “can we really condemn him to a life in Arkansas?” The cartoon ends with the relatives tempting Allan with the delights offered by the Disney Store, a sign of Elián’s contested insertion into an American Dreamscape that not only promises an endless supply of consumer goods but provides a purportedly safe venue for the alternative Cuban nation. The illusory virtuality of that nation also animates a futuristic scenario, written in Spanish by Camilo Hernández, and circulated via email in May 2000. In this text, Elián sparks a corporate battle between Firestone and Goodyear to claim credit for his inner-tubed survival. Cuban Americans regard Elián as the Messiah come to lead them to the promised land. His ability to walk on water is scientifically tested: he sinks and has to be rescued again. In the ensuing custody battle, Cuban state-run demonstrations allow mothers of lesbians and of children who fail maths to have their say on Elián. Andrew Lloyd Weber wins awards for “Elián the Musical,” and for the film version, Madonna plays the role of the dolphin that saved Elián. Laws are enacted to punish people who mispronounce “Elián” but these do not help Elián’s family. All legal avenues exhausted, the entire exile community moves to Canada, and then to North Dakota where a full-scale replica of Cuba has been built. Visa problems spark another migration; the exiles are welcomed by Israel, thus inspiring a new Intifada that impels their return to the U.S.A. Things settle down by 2014, when Elián, his wife and daughter celebrate his 21st birthday as guests of the Kennedys. The text ends in 2062, when the great-great-grandson of Ry Cooder encounters an elderly Elián in Wyoming, thus providing Elián with his second fifteen minutes of fame. Hernández’s text confirms the impatience with which the Cuban-exile community was regarded by other U.S. Latino sectors, and exemplifies the loss of control over Elián experienced by both sides in the righteous Cuban “moral crusade” to save or repatriate Elián (Fernández xv). (Many Chicanos, for example, were angered at Cuban-exile arguments that Elián should remain in the U.S.A. when, in 1999 alone, 8,000 Mexican children were repatriated to Mexico (Ramos 126), statistical confirmation of the favored status that Cubans enjoy, and Mexicans do not, vis-à-vis U.S. immigration policy. Tom Tomorrow’s cartoon and Camilo Hernández’s email text are part of what I call the “What-if?” sub-genre of Elián representations. Another example is “If Elián Gonzalez was Jewish,” archived on Lori’s Mishmash Humor page, in which Eliat Ginsburg is rescued after floating on a giant matzoh in the Florida Strait, and his Florida relatives fight to prevent his return to Israel, where “he had no freedom, no rights, no tennis lessons”.) Nonetheless, that “moral crusade” has continued in the Cuban state. During the custody battle, Elián was virtualized into a hero of national sovereignty, an embodied fix for a revolutionary project in strain due to the U.S. embargo, the collapse of Soviet socialism, and the symbolic threat posed by the virtual Cuban nation-in-waiting in Florida. Indeed, for the Castro regime, the exile wing of the national family is virtual precisely because it conveniently overlooks two facts: the continued survival of the Cuban state itself; and the exile community’s forty-plus-year slide into permanent U.S. residency as one migrant sector among many. Such rhetoric has not faded since Elián’s return. On December 5, 2003, Castro visited Cárdenas for Elián’s tenth birthday celebration and a quick tour of the Museo a la batalla de ideas (Museum for the Battle of Ideas), the museum dedicated to Elián’s “victory” over U.S. imperialism and opened by Castro on July 14, 2001. At Elián’s school Castro gave a speech in which he recalled the struggle to save “that little boy, whose absence caused everyone, and the whole people of Cuba, so much sorrow and such determination to struggle.” The conflation of Cuban state rhetoric and an Elián mnemonic in Cárdenas is repeated in Havana’s “Plaza de Elián,” or more formally Tribuna Anti-imperialista José Martí, where a statue of José Martí, the nineteenth-century Cuban nationalist, holds Elián in his arms while pointing to Florida. Meanwhile, in Little Havana, Miami, a sun-faded set of photographs and hand-painted signs, which insist God will save Elián yet, hang along the front fence of the house — now also a museum and site of pilgrimage — where Elián once lived in a state of siege. While Elián’s centrality in a struggle between virtuality and virtue continues on both sides of the Florida Strait, the Cuban nowhere could not contain Elián. During his U.S. sojourn many commentators noted that his travails were relayed in serial fashion to an international audience that also claimed intimate knowledge of the boy. Coming after the O.J. Simpson saga and the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, the Elián story confirmed journalist Rick Kushman’s identification of a ceaseless, restless U.S. media attention shift from one story to the next, generating an “übercoverage” that engulfs the country “in mini-hysteria” (Calvert 107). But In Elián’s case, the voyeuristic media-machine attained unprecedented intensity because it met and worked with the virtualities of the Cuban nowhere, part of it in the U.S.A. Thus, a transnational surfeit of Elián-narrative options was guaranteed for participants, audiences and commentators alike, wherever they resided. In Cuba, Elián was hailed as the child-hero of the Revolution. In Miami he was a savior sent by God, the proof supplied by the dolphins that saved him from sharks, and the Virgins who appeared in Little Havana after his arrival (De La Torre 3-5). Along the U.S.A.-Mexico border in 2000, Elián’s name was given to hundreds of Mexican babies whose parents thought the gesture would guarantee their sons a U.S. future. Day by day, Elián’s story was propelled across the globe by melodramatic plot devices familiar to viewers of soap opera: doubtful paternities; familial crimes; identity secrets and their revelation; conflicts of good over evil; the reuniting of long-lost relatives; and the operations of chance and its attendant “hand of Destiny, arcane and vaguely supernatural, transcending probability of doubt” (Welsh 22). Those devices were also favored by the amateur author, whose narratives confirm that the delirious parameters of cyberspace are easily matched in the worldly text. In Michael John’s self-published “history,” Betrayal of Elian Gonzalez, Elián is cast as the victim of a conspiracy traceable back to the hydra-headed monster of Castro-Clinton and the world media: “Elian’s case was MANIPULATED to achieve THEIR OVER-ALL AGENDA. Only time will bear that out” (143). His book is now out of print, and the last time I looked (August 2004) one copy was being offered on Amazon.com for US$186.30 (original price, $9.95). Guyana-born, Canadian-resident Frank Senauth’s eccentric novel, A Cry for Help: The Fantastic Adventures of Elian Gonzalez, joins his other ventures into vanity publishing: To Save the Titanic from Disaster I and II; To Save Flight 608 From Disaster; A Wish to Die – A Will to Live; A Time to Live, A Time to Die; and A Day of Terror: The Sagas of 11th September, 2001. In A Cry for Help, Rachel, a white witch and student of writing, travels back in time in order to save Elián’s mother and her fellow travelers from drowning in the Florida Strait. As Senauth says, “I was only able to write this dramatic story because of my gift for seeing things as they really are and sharing my mystic imagination with you the public” (25). As such texts confirm, Elián González is an aberrant addition to the traditional U.S.-sponsored celebrity roll-call. He had no ontological capacity to take advantage of, intervene in, comment on, or be known outside, the parallel narrative universe into which he was cast and remade. He was cast adrift as a mere proper name that impelled numerous authors to supply the boy with the biography he purportedly lacked. Resident of an “atmospheric depression in history” (Stenger 56), Elián was battled over by virtualized national rivals, mass-mediated, and laid bare for endless signification. Even before his return to Cuba, one commentator noted that Elián had been consumed, denied corporeality, and condemned to “live out his life in hyper-space” (Buzachero). That space includes the infamous episode of South Park from May 2000, in which Kenny, simulating Elián, is killed off as per the show’s episodic protocols. Symptomatic of Elián’s narrative dispersal, the Kenny-Elián simulation keeps on living and dying whenever the episode is re-broadcast on TV sets across the world. Appropriated and relocated to strange and estranging narrative terrain, one Elián now lives out his multiple existences in the Cuban-U.S. “atmosphere in history,” and the Elián icon continues to proliferate virtually anywhere. References Arboleya, Jesús. The Cuban Counter-Revolution. Trans. Rafael Betancourt. Research in International Studies, Latin America Series no. 33. Athens, OH: Ohio Center for International Studies, 2000. Braudy, Leo. The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986. Buzachero, Chris. “Elian Gonzalez in Hyper-Space.” Ctheory.net 24 May 2000. 19 Aug. 2004: http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=222>. Calvert, Clay. Voyeur Nation: Media, Privacy, and Peering in Modern Culture. Boulder: Westview, 2000. Castro, Fidel. “Speech Given by Fidel Castro, at the Ceremony Marking the Birthday of Elian Gonzalez and the Fourth Anniversary of the Battle of Ideas, Held at ‘Marcello Salado’ Primary School in Cardenas, Matanzas on December 5, 2003.” 15 Aug. 2004 http://www.revolutionarycommunist.org.uk/fidel_castro3.htm>. Cuban American National Foundation. Official Website. 2004. 20 Aug. 2004 http://www.canf.org/2004/principal-ingles.htm>. De La Torre, Miguel A. La Lucha For Cuba: Religion and Politics on the Streets of Miami. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003. “Elian Jokes.” Hypercenter.com 2000. 19 Aug. 2004 http://www.hypercenter.com/jokes/elian/index.shtml>. “Elian’s Home Page.” 2000. 19 Aug. 2004 http://elian.8k.com>. Everard, Jerry. Virtual States: The Internet and the Boundaries of the Nation-State. London and New York, Routledge, 2000. Fernández, Damián J. Cuba and the Politics of Passion. Austin: U of Texas P, 2000. Hernández, Camilo. “Cronología de Elián.” E-mail. 2000. Received 6 May 2000. “If Elian Gonzalez Was Jewish.” Lori’s Mishmash Humor Page. 2000. 10 Aug. 2004 http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/6174/jokes/if-elian-was-jewish.htm>. John, Michael. Betrayal of Elian Gonzalez. MaxGo, 2000. “Liberty for Elián.” Official Save Elián Website 2000. June 2003 http://www.libertyforelian.org>. Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1997. Ramos, Jorge. La otra cara de América: Historias de los inmigrantes latinoamericanos que están cambiando a Estados Unidos. México, DF: Grijalbo, 2000. Rodden, Lois. “Elian Gonzalez.” Astrodatabank 2000. 20 Aug. 2004 http://www.astrodatabank.com/NM/GonzalezElian.htm>. Rowe, John Carlos. 2002. The New American Studies. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 2002. “The Sad Saga of Elian Gonzalez.” July 2004. 19 Aug. 2004 http://www.revlu.com/Elian.html>. Senauth, Frank. A Cry for Help: The Fantastic Adventures of Elian Gonzalez. Victoria, Canada: Trafford, 2000. Stenger, Nicole. “Mind Is a Leaking Rainbow.” Cyberspace: First Steps. Ed. Michael Benedikt. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1991. 49-58. Welsh, Alexander. George Eliot and Blackmail. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1985. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Allatson, Paul. "The Virtualization of Elián González." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/16-allatson.php>. APA Style Allatson, P. (Nov. 2004) "The Virtualization of Elián González," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/16-allatson.php>.

Connecting I’ve moved house on the weekend, closer to the centre of an Australian capital city. I had recently signed up for broadband, with a major Australian Internet company (my first contact, cf. Turner). Now I am the proud owner of a larger modem than I have ever owned: a white cable modem. I gaze out into our new street: two thick black cables cosseted in silver wire. I am relieved. My new home is located in one of those streets, double-cabled by Telstra and Optus in the data-rush of the mid-1990s. Otherwise, I’d be moth-balling the cable modem, and the thrill of my data percolating down coaxial cable. And it would be off to the computer supermarket to buy an ASDL modem, then to pick a provider, to squeeze some twenty-first century connectivity out of old copper (the phone network our grandparents and great-grandparents built). If I still lived in the country, or the outskirts of the city, or anywhere else more than four kilometres from the phone exchange, and somewhere that cable pay TV will never reach, it would be a dish for me — satellite. Our digital lives are premised upon infrastructure, the networks through which we shape what we do, fashion the meanings of our customs and practices, and exchange signs with others. Infrastructure is not simply the material or the technical (Lamberton), but it is the dense, fibrous knotting together of social visions, cultural resources, individual desires, and connections. No more can one easily discern between ‘society’ and ‘technology’, ‘carriage’ and ‘content’, ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’, or ‘infrastructure’ and ‘applications’ (or ‘services’ or ‘content’). To understand telecommunications in action, or the vectors of fibre, we need to consider the long and heterogeneous list of links among different human and non-human actors — the long networks, to take Bruno Latour’s evocative concept, that confect our broadband networks (Latour). The co-ordinates of our infrastructure still build on a century-long history of telecommunications networks, on the nineteenth-century centrality of telegraphy preceding this, and on the histories of the public and private so inscribed. Yet we are in the midst of a long, slow dismantling of the posts-telegraph-telephone (PTT) model of the monopoly carrier for each nation that dominated the twentieth century, with its deep colonial foundations. Instead our New World Information and Communication Order is not the decolonising UNESCO vision of the late 1970s and early 1980s (MacBride, Maitland). Rather it is the neoliberal, free trade, market access model, its symbol the 1984 US judicial decision to require the break-up of AT&T and the UK legislation in the same year that underpinned the Thatcherite twin move to privatize British Telecom and introduce telecommunications competition. Between 1984 and 1999, 110 telecommunications companies were privatized, and the ‘acquisition of privatized PTOs [public telecommunications operators] by European and American operators does follow colonial lines’ (Winseck 396; see also Mody, Bauer & Straubhaar). The competitive market has now been uneasily installed as the paradigm for convergent communications networks, not least with the World Trade Organisation’s 1994 General Agreement on Trade in Services and Annex on Telecommunications. As the citizen is recast as consumer and customer (Goggin, ‘Citizens and Beyond’), we rethink our cultural and political axioms as well as the axes that orient our understandings in this area. Information might travel close to the speed of light, and we might fantasise about optical fibre to the home (or pillow), but our terrain, our band where the struggle lies today, is narrower than we wish. Begging for broadband, it seems, is a long way from warchalking for WiFi. Policy Circuits The dreary everyday business of getting connected plugs the individual netizen into a tangled mess of policy circuits, as much as tricky network negotiations. Broadband in mid-2003 in Australia is a curious chimera, welded together from a patchwork of technologies, old and newer communications industries, emerging economies and patterns of use. Broadband conjures up grander visions, however, of communication and cultural cornucopia. Broadband is high-speed, high-bandwidth, ‘always-on’, networked communications. People can send and receive video, engage in multimedia exchanges of all sorts, make the most of online education, realise the vision of home-based work and trading, have access to telemedicine, and entertainment. Broadband really entered the lexicon with the mass takeup of the Internet in the early to mid-1990s, and with the debates about something called the ‘information superhighway’. The rise of the Internet, the deregulation of telecommunications, and the involuted convergence of communications and media technologies saw broadband positioned at the centre of policy debates nearly a decade ago. In 1993-1994, Australia had its Broadband Services Expert Group (BSEG), established by the then Labor government. The BSEG was charged with inquiring into ‘issues relating to the delivery of broadband services to homes, schools and businesses’. Stung by criticisms of elite composition (a narrow membership, with only one woman among its twelve members, and no consumer or citizen group representation), the BSEG was prompted into wider public discussion and consultation (Goggin & Newell). The then Bureau of Transport and Communications Economics (BTCE), since transmogrified into the Communications Research Unit of the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts (DCITA), conducted its large-scale Communications Futures Project (BTCE and Luck). The BSEG Final report posed the question starkly: As a society we have choices to make. If we ignore the opportunities we run the risk of being left behind as other countries introduce new services and make themselves more competitive: we will become consumers of other countries’ content, culture and technologies rather than our own. Or we could adopt new technologies at any cost…This report puts forward a different approach, one based on developing a new, user-oriented strategy for communications. The emphasis will be on communication among people... (BSEG v) The BSEG proposed a ‘National Strategy for New Communications Networks’ based on three aspects: education and community access, industry development, and the role of government (BSEG x). Ironically, while the nation, or at least its policy elites, pondered the weighty question of broadband, Australia’s two largest telcos were doing it. The commercial decision of Telstra/Foxtel and Optus Vision, and their various television partners, was to nail their colours (black) to the mast, or rather telegraph pole, and to lay cable in the major capital cities. In fact, they duplicated the infrastructure in cities such as Sydney and Melbourne, then deciding it would not be profitable to cable up even regional centres, let alone small country towns or settlements. As Terry Flew and Christina Spurgeon observe: This wasteful duplication contrasted with many other parts of the country that would never have access to this infrastructure, or to the social and economic benefits that it was perceived to deliver. (Flew & Spurgeon 72) The implications of this decision for Australia’s telecommunications and television were profound, but there was little, if any, public input into this. Then Minister Michael Lee was very proud of his anti-siphoning list of programs, such as national sporting events, that would remain on free-to-air television rather than screen on pay, but was unwilling, or unable, to develop policy on broadband and pay TV cable infrastructure (on the ironies of Australia’s television history, see Given’s masterly account). During this period also, it may be remembered, Australia’s Internet was being passed into private hands, with the tendering out of AARNET (see Spurgeon for discussion). No such national strategy on broadband really emerged in the intervening years, nor has the market provided integrated, accessible broadband services. In 1997, landmark telecommunications legislation was enacted that provided a comprehensive framework for competition in telecommunications, as well as consolidating and extending consumer protection, universal service, customer service standards, and other reforms (CLC). Carrier and reseller competition had commenced in 1991, and the 1997 legislation gave it further impetus. Effective competition is now well established in long distance telephone markets, and in mobiles. Rivalrous competition exists in the market for local-call services, though viable alternatives to Telstra’s dominance are still few (Fels). Broadband too is an area where there is symbolic rivalry rather than effective competition. This is most visible in advertised ADSL offerings in large cities, yet most of the infrastructure for these services is comprised by Telstra’s copper, fixed-line network. Facilities-based duopoly competition exists principally where Telstra/Foxtel and Optus cable networks have been laid, though there are quite a number of ventures underway by regional telcos, power companies, and, most substantial perhaps, the ACT government’s TransACT broadband network. Policymakers and industry have been greatly concerned about what they see as slow takeup of broadband, compared to other countries, and by barriers to broadband competition and access to ‘bottleneck’ facilities (such as Telstra or Optus’s networks) by potential competitors. The government has alternated between trying to talk up broadband benefits and rates of take up and recognising the real difficulties Australia faces as a large country with a relative small and dispersed population. In March 2003, Minister Alston directed the ACCC to implement new monitoring and reporting arrangements on competition in the broadband industry. A key site for discussion of these matters has been the competition policy institution, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, and its various inquiries, reports, and considerations (consult ACCC’s telecommunications homepage at http://www.accc.gov.au/telco/fs-telecom.htm). Another key site has been the Productivity Commission (http://www.pc.gov.au), while a third is the National Office on the Information Economy (NOIE - http://www.noie.gov.au/projects/access/access/broadband1.htm). Others have questioned whether even the most perfectly competitive market in broadband will actually provide access to citizens and consumers. A great deal of work on this issue has been undertaken by DCITA, NOIE, the regulators, and industry bodies, not to mention consumer and public interest groups. Since 1997, there have been a number of governmental inquiries undertaken or in progress concerning the takeup of broadband and networked new media (for example, a House of Representatives Wireless Broadband Inquiry), as well as important inquiries into the still most strategically important of Australia’s companies in this area, Telstra. Much of this effort on an ersatz broadband policy has been piecemeal and fragmented. There are fundamental difficulties with the large size of the Australian continent and its harsh terrain, the small size of the Australian market, the number of providers, and the dominant position effectively still held by Telstra, as well as Singtel Optus (Optus’s previous overseas investors included Cable & Wireless and Bell South), and the larger telecommunications and Internet companies (such as Ozemail). Many consumers living in metropolitan Australia still face real difficulties in realising the slogan ‘bandwidth for all’, but the situation in parts of rural Australia is far worse. Satellite ‘broadband’ solutions are available, through Telstra Countrywide or other providers, but these offer limited two-way interactivity. Data can be received at reasonable speeds (though at far lower data rates than how ‘broadband’ used to be defined), but can only be sent at far slower rates (Goggin, Rural Communities Online). The cultural implications of these digital constraints may well be considerable. Computer gamers, for instance, are frustrated by slow return paths. In this light, the final report of the January 2003 Broadband Advisory Group (BAG) is very timely. The BAG report opens with a broadband rhapsody: Broadband communications technologies can deliver substantial economic and social benefits to Australia…As well as producing productivity gains in traditional and new industries, advanced connectivity can enrich community life, particularly in rural and regional areas. It provides the basis for integration of remote communities into national economic, cultural and social life. (BAG 1, 7) Its prescriptions include: Australia will be a world leader in the availability and effective use of broadband...and to capture the economic and social benefits of broadband connectivity...Broadband should be available to all Australians at fair and reasonable prices…Market arrangements should be pro-competitive and encourage investment...The Government should adopt a National Broadband Strategy (BAG 1) And, like its predecessor nine years earlier, the BAG report does make reference to a national broadband strategy aiming to maximise “choice in work and recreation activities available to all Australians independent of location, background, age or interests” (17). However, the idea of a national broadband strategy is not something the BAG really comes to grips with. The final report is keen on encouraging broadband adoption, but not explicit on how barriers to broadband can be addressed. Perhaps this is not surprising given that the membership of the BAG, dominated by representatives of large corporations and senior bureaucrats was even less representative than its BSEG predecessor. Some months after the BAG report, the Federal government did declare a broadband strategy. It did so, intriguingly enough, under the rubric of its response to the Regional Telecommunications Inquiry report (Estens), the second inquiry responsible for reassuring citizens nervous about the full-privatisation of Telstra (the first inquiry being Besley). The government’s grand $142.8 million National Broadband Strategy focusses on the ‘broadband needs of regional Australians, in partnership with all levels of government’ (Alston, ‘National Broadband Strategy’). Among other things, the government claims that the Strategy will result in “improved outcomes in terms of services and prices for regional broadband access; [and] the development of national broadband infrastructure assets.” (Alston, ‘National Broadband Strategy’) At the same time, the government announced an overall response to the Estens Inquiry, with specific safeguards for Telstra’s role in regional communications — a preliminary to the full Telstra sale (Alston, ‘Future Proofing’). Less publicised was the government’s further initiative in indigenous telecommunications, complementing its Telecommunications Action Plan for Remote Indigenous Communities (DCITA). Indigenous people, it can be argued, were never really contemplated as citizens with the ken of the universal service policy taken to underpin the twentieth-century government monopoly PTT project. In Australia during the deregulatory and re-regulatory 1990s, there was a great reluctance on the part of Labor and Coalition Federal governments, Telstra and other industry participants, even to research issues of access to and use of telecommunications by indigenous communicators. Telstra, and to a lesser extent Optus (who had purchased AUSSAT as part of their licence arrangements), shrouded the issue of indigenous communications in mystery that policymakers were very reluctant to uncover, let alone systematically address. Then regulator, the Australian Telecommunications Authority (AUSTEL), had raised grave concerns about indigenous telecommunications access in its 1991 Rural Communications inquiry. However, there was no government consideration of, nor research upon, these issues until Alston commissioned a study in 2001 — the basis for the TAPRIC strategy (DCITA). The elision of indigenous telecommunications from mainstream industry and government policy is all the more puzzling, if one considers the extraordinarily varied and significant experiments by indigenous Australians in telecommunications and Internet (not least in the early work of the Tanami community, made famous in media and cultural studies by the writings of anthropologist Eric Michaels). While the government’s mid-2003 moves on a ‘National Broadband Strategy’ attend to some details of the broadband predicament, they fall well short of an integrated framework that grasps the shortcomings of the neoliberal communications model. The funding offered is a token amount. The view from the seat of government is a glance from the rear-view mirror: taking a snapshot of rural communications in the years 2000-2002 and projecting this tableau into a safety-net ‘future proofing’ for the inevitable turning away of a fully-privately-owned Telstra from its previously universal, ‘carrier of last resort’ responsibilities. In this aetiolated, residualist policy gaze, citizens remain constructed as consumers in a very narrow sense in this incremental, quietist version of state securing of market arrangements. What is missing is any more expansive notion of citizens, their varied needs, expectations, uses, and cultural imaginings of ‘always on’ broadband networks. Hybrid Networks “Most people on earth will eventually have access to networks that are all switched, interactive, and broadband”, wrote Frances Cairncross in 1998. ‘Eventually’ is a very appropriate word to describe the parlous state of broadband technology implementation. Broadband is in a slow state of evolution and invention. The story of broadband so far underscores the predicament for Australian access to bandwidth, when we lack any comprehensive, integrated, effective, and fair policy in communications and information technology. We have only begun to experiment with broadband technologies and understand their evolving uses, cultural forms, and the sense in which they rework us as subjects. Our communications networks are not superhighways, to invoke an enduring artefact from an older technology. Nor any longer are they a single ‘public’ switched telecommunications network, like those presided over by the post-telegraph-telephone monopolies of old. Like roads themselves, or the nascent postal system of the sixteenth century, broadband is a patchwork quilt. The ‘fibre’ of our communications networks is hybrid. To be sure, powerful corporations dominate, like the Tassis or Taxis who served as postmasters to the Habsburg emperors (Briggs & Burke 25). Activating broadband today provides a perspective on the path dependency of technology history, and how we can open up new threads of a communications fabric. Our options for transforming our multitudinous networked lives emerge as much from everyday tactics and strategies as they do from grander schemes and unifying policies. We may care to reflect on the waning potential for nation-building technology, in the wake of globalisation. We no longer gather our imagined community around a Community Telephone Plan as it was called in 1960 (Barr, Moyal, and PMG). Yet we do require national and international strategies to get and stay connected (Barr), ideas and funding that concretely address the wider dimensions of access and use. We do need to debate the respective roles of Telstra, the state, community initiatives, and industry competition in fair telecommunications futures. Networks have global reach and require global and national integration. Here vision, co-ordination, and resources are urgently required for our commonweal and moral fibre. To feel the width of the band we desire, we need to plug into and activate the policy circuits. Thanks to Grayson Cooke, Patrick Lichty, Ned Rossiter, John Pace, and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments. Works Cited Alston, Richard. ‘ “Future Proofing” Regional Communications.’ Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, Canberra, 2003. 17 July 2003 <http://www.dcita.gov.au/Article/0,,0_1-2_3-4_115485,00.php> —. ‘A National Broadband Strategy.’ Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, Canberra, 2003. 17 July 2003 <http://www.dcita.gov.au/Article/0,,0_1-2_3-4_115486,00.php>. Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC). Broadband Services Report March 2003. Canberra: ACCC, 2003. 17 July 2003 <http://www.accc.gov.au/telco/fs-telecom.htm>. —. Emerging Market Structures in the Communications Sector. Canberra: ACCC, 2003. 15 July 2003 <http://www.accc.gov.au/pubs/publications/utilities/telecommu... ...nications/Emerg_mar_struc.doc>. Barr, Trevor. new media.com: The Changing Face of Australia’s Media and Telecommunications. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2000. Besley, Tim (Telecommunications Service Inquiry). Connecting Australia: Telecommunications Service Inquiry. Canberra: Department of Information, Communications and the Arts, 2000. 17 July 2003 <http://www.telinquiry.gov.au/final_report.php>. Briggs, Asa, and Burke, Peter. A Social History of the Internet: From Gutenberg to the Internet. Cambridge: Polity, 2002. Broadband Advisory Group. Australia’s Broadband Connectivity: The Broadband Advisory Group’s Report to Government. Melbourne: National Office on the Information Economy, 2003. 15 July 2003 <http://www.noie.gov.au/publications/NOIE/BAG/report/index.htm>. Broadband Services Expert Group. Networking Australia’s Future: Final Report. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service (AGPS), 1994. Bureau of Transport and Communications Economics (BTCE). Communications Futures Final Project. Canberra: AGPS, 1994. Cairncross, Frances. The Death of Distance: How the Communications Revolution Will Change Our Lives. London: Orion Business Books, 1997. Communications Law Centre (CLC). Australian Telecommunications Regulation: The Communications Law Centre Guide. 2nd edition. Sydney: Communications Law Centre, University of NSW, 2001. Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts (DCITA). Telecommunications Action Plan for Remote Indigenous Communities: Report on the Strategic Study for Improving Telecommunications in Remote Indigenous Communities. Canberra: DCITA, 2002. Estens, D. Connecting Regional Australia: The Report of the Regional Telecommunications Inquiry. Canberra: DCITA, 2002. <http://www.telinquiry.gov.au/rti-report.php>, accessed 17 July 2003. Fels, Alan. ‘Competition in Telecommunications’, speech to Australian Telecommunications Users Group 19th Annual Conference. 6 March, 2003, Sydney. <http://www.accc.gov.au/speeches/2003/Fels_ATUG_6March03.doc>, accessed 15 July 2003. Flew, Terry, and Spurgeon, Christina. ‘Television After Broadcasting’. In The Australian TV Book. Ed. Graeme Turner and Stuart Cunningham. Allen & Unwin, Sydney. 69-85. 2000. Given, Jock. Turning Off the Television. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2003. Goggin, Gerard. ‘Citizens and Beyond: Universal service in the Twilight of the Nation-State.’ In All Connected?: Universal Service in Telecommunications, ed. Bruce Langtry. Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press, 1998. 49-77 —. Rural Communities Online: Networking to link Consumers to Providers. Melbourne: Telstra Consumer Consultative Council, 2003. Goggin, Gerard, and Newell, Christopher. Digital Disability: The Social Construction of Disability in New Media. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. 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Many Voices, One World: Towards a New More Just and More Efficient World Information and Communication Order. Paris: Kegan Page, London. UNESCO, 1980. Maitland Commission (Independent Commission on Worldwide Telecommunications Development). The Missing Link. Geneva: International Telecommunications Union, 1985. Michaels, Eric. Bad Aboriginal Art: Tradition, Media, and Technological Horizons. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994. Mody, Bella, Bauer, Johannes M., and Straubhaar, Joseph D., eds. Telecommunications Politics: Ownership and Control of the Information Highway in Developing Countries. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1995. Moyal, Ann. Clear Across Australia: A History of Telecommunications. Melbourne: Thomas Nelson, 1984. Post-Master General’s Department (PMG). Community Telephone Plan for Australia. Melbourne: PMG, 1960. Productivity Commission (PC). Telecommunications Competition Regulation: Inquiry Report. Report No. 16. Melbourne: Productivity Commission, 2001. <http://www.pc.gov.au/inquiry/telecommunications/finalreport/>, accessed 17 July 2003. Spurgeon, Christina. ‘National Culture, Communications and the Information Economy.’ Media International Australia 87 (1998): 23-34. Turner, Graeme. ‘First Contact: coming to terms with the cable guy.’ UTS Review 3 (1997): 109-21. Winseck, Dwayne. ‘Wired Cities and Transnational Communications: New Forms of Governance for Telecommunications and the New Media’. In The Handbook of New Media: Social Shaping and Consequences of ICTs, ed. Leah A. Lievrouw and Sonia Livingstone. London: Sage, 2002. 393-409. World Trade Organisation. General Agreement on Trade in Services: Annex on Telecommunications. Geneva: World Trade Organisation, 1994. 17 July 2003 <http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/serv_e/12-tel_e.htm>. —. Fourth protocol to the General Agreement on Trade in Services. 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MLA Style Goggin, Gerard. "Broadband" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0308/02-featurebroadband.php>. APA Style Goggin, G. (2003, Aug 26). Broadband. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0308/02-featurebroadband.php>

Introduction Burning Man (BM) is a festival of art and music that materialises for one week each year in the Nevada desert. It is considered by many to be the world’s largest countercultural event. But what is BM, really? With record attendance of 69,613 in 2013 (Griffith) (the original event in 1986 had twenty), and recent event themes that have engaged with mainstream political themes such as “Green Man” (2007) and “American Dream” (2008), can BM still be considered countercultural? Was it ever? In the first part of this article, we define counterculture as a subculture that originates in the hippie movement of 1960s America and the rejection of “mainstream” values associated with post-WWII industrial culture, that aligns itself with environmentalism and ecological consciousness, and that is distinctly anti-consumer (Roszak, Making). Second, we identify BM as an art and music festival that transcends the event to travel with its desert denizens out into the “real world.” In this way, it is also a festival that has countercultural connections. Third, though BM bears some resemblance to counterculture, given that it is founded upon “Radical Self-Reliance”, BM is actually anything but countercultural because it interlocks with the current socioeconomic zeitgeist of neoliberalism, and that reflects a “new individualism” (Elliot & Lemert). BM’s ambition to be a commercial-free zone runs aground against its entanglement with market relations, and BM is also arguably a consumer space. Finally, neoliberal ideology and “new individualism” are encoded in the space of BM at the level of the spectacle (Debord). The Uchronian’s structure from BM 2006 (a cavernous wooden construction nicknamed the “Belgian Waffle”) could be read as one example. However, opportunities for personal transformation and transcendent experience may persist as counterculture moves into a global age. Defining Counterculture To talk about BM as a counterculture, we must first define counterculture. Hebdige provided a useful distinction between subculture and counterculture in an endnote to a discussion of Teds versus Rockers (148). According to Hebdige, what distinguishes counterculture from mere subculture and related styles is its association with a specific era (1967–70), that its adherents tended to hail from educated, middle-class families, and that it is “explicitly political and ideological” and thus more easily “read” by the dominant powers. Finally, it opposes the dominant culture. Counterculture has its roots in “the hippies, the flower children, the yippies” of the 60s. However, perhaps Hebdige’s definition is too narrow; it is more of an instance of counterculture than a definition. A more general definition of counterculture might be a subculture that rejects “mainstream” values, and examples of this have existed throughout time. For example, we might include the 19th century Romantics with their rejection of the Enlightenment and distrust of capitalism (Roszak 1972), or the Beat generation and post-War America (Miller). Perhaps counterculture even requires one to be a criminal: the prominent Beat writer William S. Burroughs shot guns and heroin, was a homosexual, and accidentally shot and killed his wife in a drug haze (Severo). All of these are examples of subcultures that rejected or opposed the mainstream values of the time. But it was Roszak (Making) who originally defined counterculture as the hippie movement of 1960s era college-aged middle-class American youth who revolted against the values and society inherited not only from their parents, but from the “military-industrial complex” itself, which “quite simply was the American political system” (3). Indeed, the 1960s counterculture—what the term “counterculture” has more generally come to mean—was perhaps the most radical expression of humanity ever in its ontological overthrow of industrial culture and all that it implied (and also, Roszak speculates, in so much that it may have been an experiment gone wrong on the part of the American establishment): The Communist and Socialist Left had always been as committed to industrialism as their capitalist foes, never questioning it as an inevitable historical stage. From this viewpoint, all that needed to be debated was the ownership and control of the system. But here was a dissenting movement that yearned for an entirely different quality of life. It was not simply calling the political superstructure into question; with precocious ecological insight, it was challenging the culture of industrial cities on which that superstructure stood. And more troubling still, there were those among the dissenters who questioned the very sanity of that culture. These psychic disaffiliates took off in search of altered states of consciousness that might generate altered states of society. (8) For the purposes of this paper, then, counterculture refers specifically to those cultures that find their roots in the hippie movement of the late 1960s. I embrace both Roszak’s and Hebdige’s definitions of counterculture because they define it as a unique reaction of post-WWII American youth against industrial culture and a rejection of the accompanying values of home, marriage and career. Instead, counterculture embraced ecological awareness, rejected consumption, and even directed itself toward mystical altered states. In the case of the espoused ecological consciousness, that blossomed into the contemporary (increasingly mainstream) environmental movement toward “green” energy. In the case of counterculture, the specific instance really is the definition in this case because the response of postwar youth was so strong and idiosyncratic, and there is overlap between counterculture and the BM community. So what is Burning Man? Defining Burning Man According to the event’s website: Burning Man is an annual event and a thriving year-round culture. The event takes place the week leading up to and including Labor Day, in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. The Burning Man organization […] creates the infrastructure of Black Rock City, wherein attendees (or “participants”) dedicate themselves to the spirit of community, art, self-expression, and self-reliance. They depart one week later, leaving no trace […] Outside the event, Burning Man’s vibrant year-round culture is growing through the non-profit Burning Man Project, including worldwide Regional Groups and associated non-profits who embody Burning Man’s ethos out in the world. (“What is Burning Man?”) I interpret BM as a massive art festival and party that materialises in the desert once a year to produce one of the largest cities in Nevada, but one with increasingly global reach in which the participants feel compelled to carry the ethos forward into their everyday lives. It is also an event with an increasing number of “regional burns” (Taylor) that have emerged as offshoots of the original. Creator Larry Harvey originally conceived of burning the effigy of a man on San Francisco’s Baker Beach in 1986 in honor of the solstice (“Burning Man Timeline”). Twenty people attended the first BM. That figure rapidly rose to 800 by 1990 when for legal reasons it became necessary to relocate to the remote Black Rock desert in Nevada, the largest expanse of flat land in the United States. In the early 90s, when BM had newly relocated and attendees numbered in the low thousands, it was not uncommon for participants to mix drugs, booze, speeding cars and firearms (Bonin) (reminiscent of the outlaw associations of counterculture). As the Internet became popular in the mid-1990s word spread quickly, leading to a surge in the population. By the early 2000s attendance regularly numbered in the tens of thousands and BM had become a global phenomenon. In 2014 the festival turned 28, but it had already been a corporation for nearly two decades before transitioning to a non-profit (“Burning Man Transitions”). Burning Man as Countercultural Event BM has connections to the counterculture, though the organisation is quick to dispel these connections as myths (“Media Myths”). For example, in response to the notion that BM is a “90s Woodstock”, the organisers point out that BM is for all ages and not a concert. Rather, it is a “noncommercial environment” where the participants come to entertain each other, and thus it is “not limited by the conventions of any subculture.” The idea that BM is a “hippie” festival is also a myth, but one with some truth to it: Hippies helped create environmental ethics, founded communes, wore colorful clothing, courted mysticism, and distrusted the modern industrial economy. In some ways, this counterculture bears a resemblance to aspects of Burning Man. Hippie society was also a youth movement that often revolved around drugs, music, and checks from home. Burning Man is about “radical self-reliance”–it is not a youth movement, and it is definitely not a subculture (“Media Myths”). There are some familiar aspects of counterculture here, particularly environmental consciousness, anti-consumer tendencies and mysticism. Yet, looking at the high attendance numbers and the progression of themes in recent years one might speculate that BM is no longer as countercultural as it once was. For instance, psychedelic themes such as “Vault of Heaven” (2004) and “Psyche” (2005) gave way to “The Green Man” (2007) and “American Dream” (2008). Although “Green Man” was an environmental theme it debuted the year after Vice President Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” (2006) brought the issue of climate change to a mainstream audience. Indeed, as a global, leaderless event with a strong participatory ethos in many respects BM followed suit with the business world, particularly given it was a Limited Liability Corporation (LLC) for many years (though it was ahead of the curve): “Capitalism has learned from the counter culture. But this is not news” (Rojek 355). Similarly, just in time for the 2008 U.S. Presidential election the organisational committee decided to juxtapose “the Man” with the American flag. Therefore, there has been an arguable shift toward engagement with mainstream issues and politics in recent years (and away from mysticism). Recent themes are really re-appropriations of mainstream discourses; hence they are “agonistic” readings (Mouffe). Take for example the VoterDrive Bus, an early example of political talk at BM that engaged with mainstream politics. The driver was seven-time BM veteran Corey Mervis (also known as “Misty Mocracy”) (“Jack Rabbit Speaks”). Beginning on 22 July 2004, the VoterDrive Bus wrote the word VOTE in script across the continental United States in the months before the election, stopping in the Black Rock City (BRC) for one week during the BM festival. Four years later the theme “American Dream” would reflect this countercultural re-appropriation of mainstream political themes in the final months leading up to the 2008 Presidential election. In that year, “the Man,” a massive wooden effigy that burns on the last night of the event, stood atop a platform of windows, each inscribed with the flag of a different country. “American Dream” was as politically as it was poetically inspired. Note the agonistic appeal: “This year's art theme is about patriotism—not that kind which freights the nation state with the collective weight of ego, but a patriotism that is based upon a love of country and culture. Leave ideology at home…Ask yourself, instead…What can postmodern America, this stumbling, roused, half-conscious giant, yet give to the world?” (“2008 Art Theme: American Dream”). BM has arguably retained its countercultural authenticity despite engagement with mainstream political themes by virtue of such agonistic appeals to “American Dream”, and to “Green Man” which promoted environmental awareness, and which after all started out in the counterculture. I attended BM twice in 2006 and 2007 with “The Zombie Hotel”, one among a thousand camps in the BRC, Nevada (oddly, there were numerous zombie-themed camps). The last year I attended, the festival seemed to have come of age, and 2007 was the first in its history that BM invited corporate presence in the form of green energy companies (and informational kiosks, courtesy of Google) (Taylor). Midway through the week, as I stumbled through the haphazard common area that was The Zombie Hotel hiding from the infernal heat of the desert sun, two twin fighter jets, their paths intertwining, disturbed the sanctity of the clear, blue afternoon sky followed by a collective roar from the city. One can imagine my dismay at rumours that the fighter jets—which I had initially assumed to be some sort of military reconnaissance—were in fact hired by the BM Organizational Committee to trace the event’s symbol in the sky. Speculation would later abound on Tribe.net (“What was up with the fighter jets?”). What had BM become after all? Figure 1: Misty Mocracy & the VoterDrive Bus. Photo: Erick Leskinen (2004). Reproduced with permission. “Radical Self-Reliance”, Neoliberalism and the “New Individualism” Despite overlap with elements of counterculture, there is something quite normative about BM from the standpoint of ideology, and thus “mainstream” in the sense of favouring values associated with what Roszak calls “industrial society”, namely consumption and capitalist labor relations. To understand this, let us examine “The Ten Principles of BM”. These include: Radical Inclusion, Gifting, Decommodification, Radical Self-Reliance, Radical Self-Expression, Communal Effort, Civic Responsibility, Leaving No Trace, Participation and Immediacy (“Ten Principles of Burning Man”). These categories speak to BM’s strong connection to the counterculture. For example, “Decommodification” is a rejection of consumerism in favour of a culture of giving; “Immediacy” rejects mediation, and “Participation” stresses transformative change. Many of these categories also evoke political agonism, for example “Radical Inclusion” requires that “anyone may be a part of Burning Man”, and “Radical Self-Expression”, which suggests that no one other than the gift-giver can determine the content of the message. Finally, there are categories that also engage with concepts associated with traditional civil society and democracy, such as “Civic Responsibility”, which refers to the “public welfare”, “Participation”, and “Communal Effort.” Though at first it may seem to connect with countercultural values, upon closer inspection “Radical Self-Reliance” aligns BM with the larger socioeconomic zeitgeist under late-capitalism, subverting its message of “Decommodification.” Here is what it says: “Burning Man encourages the individual to discover, exercise and rely on his or her inner resources.” That message is transformative, even mystical, but it aligns well with a neoliberal ideology and uncertain labor relations under late capitalism. Indeed, Elliot and Lemert explore the psychological impact of a “new individualism”, setting the self in opposition to the incoming forces of globalisation. They address the question of how individuals respond to globalisation, perhaps pathologically. Elliot and Lemert clarify the socio-psychological ramifications of economic fragmentation. They envision this as inextricably caught up with the erosion of personal identity and the necessity to please “self-absorbed others” in a multiplicity of incommensurate realities (20, 21). Individuals are not merely atomised socially but fragmented psychologically, while at the macroscopic level privatisation of the economy spawns this colonisation of the personal Lifeworld, as social things move into the realm of individualised dilemmas (42). It is interesting to note how BM’s principles (in particular “Radical Self-Reliance”) evoke this fracturing of identity as identities and realities multiply in the BRC. Furthermore, the spectre of neoliberal labour conditions on “the Playa” kicks down the door for consumer culture’s entrée. Consumer society “technicises” the project of the self as a series of problems having consumer solutions with reference to expert advice (Slater 86), BM provides that solution in the form of a transformative experience through “Participation”, and acolytes of the BM festival can be said to be deeply invested in the “experience economy” (Pine & Gilmore): “We believe that transformative change, whether in the individual or in society, can occur only through the medium of deeply personal participation” (“Ten Principles”). Yet, while BM rejects consumption as part of “Decommodification”, the event has become something of a playground for new technological elites (with a taste for pink fur and glow tape rather than wine and cheese) with some camps charging as much as US $25,000 in fees per person for the week (most charge $300) (Bilton). BM is gentrifying, or as veteran attendee Tyler Hanson put it, “Burning Man is no longer a counterculture revolution. It’s now become a mirror of society” (quoted in Bilton). Neoliberalism and “new individualism” are all around at BM, and a reading of space and spectacle in the Uchronian structure reveals this encoding. Figure 2: “Message Out of the Future by Night” (also known as “the Belgian Waffle). Photo: Laurent Chavanne (2006). Reproduced with permission. “Long Gone Hippies” Republican tax reformist Grover Norquist made his way to BM for the first time this year, joining the tech elites. He subsequently proclaimed that America had a lot to learn from BM: “The story of Burning Man is one of radical self-reliance” (Norquist). As the population of the BRC surges toward seventy thousand, it may be difficult to call BM a countercultural event any longer. Given parallels between the BM ethos and neoliberal market relations and a “new individualism”, it is hard to deny that BM is deeply intertwined with counterposing forces of globalisation. However, if you ask the participants (and Norquist) they will have a different story: After you buy your ticket to Burning Man to help pay for the infrastructure, and after you pay for your own transportation, food and water, and if you optionally decide to pay to join a camp that provides some services THEN you never have to take your wallet out while at Burning Man. Folks share food, massages, alcohol, swimming pools, trampolines, many experiences. The expenses that occur prior to the festival are very reasonable and it is wonderful to walk around free from shopping or purchasing. Pockets are unnecessary. So are clothes. (Alex & Allyson Grey) Consumerism is a means to an end in an environment where the meanings of civic participation and “giving back” to the counterculture take many forms. Moreover, Thornton argued that the varied definitions of what is “mainstream” among subcultures point more to a complex and multifaceted landscape of subculture than to any coherent agreement as to what “mainstream” actually means (101), and so perhaps our entire discussion of the counterculture/mainstream binary is moot. Perhaps there is something yet to be salvaged in the spaces of participation at BM, some agonistic activity to be harnessed. The fluid spaces of the desert are the loci of community action. Jan Kriekels, founder of the Uchronia Community, holds out some hope. The Belgian based art collective hauled 150 kilometres of lumber to the BRC in the summer of 2006 to construct a freestanding, cavernous structure with a floor space of 60 by 30 metres at its center and a height of 15 metres (they promised a reforestation of the equivalent amount of trees) (Figure 1). “Don’t mistake us for long gone hippies in the desert”, wrote Kriekels in Message Out of the Future: Uchronia Community, “we are trying to build a bridge between materialism and spiritualism” (102). The Uchronians announced themselves as not only desert nomads but nomads in time (“U” signifying “nothing” and “chronos” or “time”), their time-traveller personas designed to subvert commodification, their mysterious structure (nicknamed the “Belgian Waffle” by the burners, a painful misnomer in the eyes of the Uchronians) evoking a sense of timelessness. I remember standing within that “cathedral-like” (60) structure and feeling exhilarated and lonely and cold all at once for the chill of the desert at night, and later, much later, away from the Playa in conversations with a friend we recalled Guy Debord’s “Thesis 30”: “The spectator feels at home nowhere, for the spectacle is everywhere.” The message of the Uchronians provokes a comparison with Virilio’s conceptualisations of “world time” and “simultaneity” that emerge from globalisation and digital technologies (13), part of the rise of a “globalitarianism” (15)—“world time (‘live’) takes over from the ancient, immemorial supremacy of the local time of regions” (113). A fragmented sense of time, after all, accompanies unstable labour conditions in the 21st century. Still, I hold out hope for the “resistance” inherent in counterculture as it fosters humanity’s “bothersomely unfulfilled potentialities” (Roszak, Making 16). I wonder in closing if I have damaged the trust of burners in attempting to write about what is a transcendent experience for many. It may be argued that the space of the BRC is not merely a spectacle—rather, it contains the urban “forests of gestures” (de Certeau 102). These are the secret perambulations—physical and mental—at risk of betrayal. References An Inconvenient Truth. Dir. Davis Guggenheim. Perf. Al Gore. Paramount Pictures, 2006. Bilton, Nick. “At Burning Man, the Tech Elite One-Up One Another.” The New York Times: Fashion & Style, 20 Aug. 2014. 10 Oct. 2014 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/21/fashion/at-burning-man-the-tech-elite-one-up-one-another.html› “Burning Man Timeline.” Burningman. 10 Oct. 2014 ‹http://burningman.org/timeline/›. “Burning Man Transitions to Non-Profit Organization.” Burningman 3 Mar. 2014. 10 Oct. 2014 ‹http://blog.burningman.com/2014/03/news/burning-man-transitions-to-non-profit-organization/›. De Bord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone, 1994. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, Calif.: U of California P, 1984. Dust & Illusions: 30 Years of History of Burning Man. Dir. Oliver Bonin. Perf. Jerry James, Larry Harvey, John Law. Imagine, 2009. Elliot, Anthony, and Charles Lemert. The New Individualism. New York: Routledge, 2006. Grey, Alex, and Alyson Grey. “Ticket 4066, Burning Man Study.” Message to the author. 30 Nov. 2007. E-mail. Griffith, Martin. “Burning Man Draws 66,000 People to the Nevada Desert.” The Huffington Post 2 Sep. 2014. 10 Oct. 2014 ‹http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/02/burning-man-2014_n_5751648.html›. Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. New York: Methuen, 1979. “Jack Rabbit Speaks.” JRS 8.32 (2004). 10 Oct. 2014 ‹http://www.burningman.com/blackrockcity_yearround/jrs/vol08/jrs_v08_i32.html›. Kriekels, Jan. Message Out of the Future: Uchronia Community. 2006. 10 Oct. 2014 ‹http://issuu.com/harmenvdw/docs/uchronia-book-low#›. “Media Myths.” Burningman. 6 Nov. 2014 ‹http://www.burningman.com/press/myths.html›. Miller, Timothy. The Hippies and American Values. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1999. Mouffe, Chantal. On the Political. London: Routledge, 2005. Norquist, Grover. “My First Burning Man: Confessions of a Conservative from Washington.” The Guardian 2 Sep. 2014. 10 Oct. 2014 ‹http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/02/my-first-burning-man-grover-norquist›. Pine, B. Joseph, and James H. Gilmore. The Experience Economy. Boston: Harvard Business School P, 1999. Rojek, Chris. "Leaderless Organization, World Historical Events and Their Contradictions: The ‘Burning Man’ City Case.” Cultural Sociology 8.3 (2014): 351–364. Roszak, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture. Oakiland, Calif.: U of California P, 1995 [1968]. Roszak, Theodore. Where the Wasteland Ends. Charlottesville, Va.: U of Virginia P, 1972. Severo, Richard. “William S. Burroughs Dies at 83.” New York Times 3 Aug. 1997. 6 Nov. 2014 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/1997/08/03/nyregion/william-s-burroughs-dies-at-83-member-of-the-beat-generation-wrote-naked-lunch.html›. Slater, Don. Consumer Culture and Modernity. Cambridge, U.K.: Polity, 1997. Taylor, Chris. “Burning Man Grows Up.” CNN: Money. 10 Oct. 2014 ‹http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2007/07/01/100117064›. “Ten Principles of Burning Man.” Burningman. 10 Oct. 2014 ‹http://burningman.org/culture/philosophical-center/10-principles/›. Thornton, Sarah. Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan UP, 1996. Virilio, Paul. The Information Bomb. London: Verso, 2000. “What Was Up with the Fighter Jets?” Tribe 7 Sep. 2007. 10 Oct. 2014 ‹http://bm.tribe.net/thread/84f762e0-2160-4e6e-b5af-1e35ce81a1b7›. “2008 Art Theme: American Dream.” Tribe 3 Sep. 2007. 10 Oct. 2014 ‹http://bm.tribe.net/thread/60b9b69c-001a-401f-b69f-25e9bdef95ce›.

Introduction Cookbooks are an exceptional written record of what is largely an oral tradition. They have been described as “magician’s hats” due to their ability to reveal much more than they seem to contain (Wheaton, “Finding”). The first book printed in Germany was the Guttenberg Bible in 1456 but, by 1490, printing was introduced into almost every European country (Tierney). The spread of literacy between 1500 and 1800, and the rise in silent reading, helped to create a new private sphere into which the individual could retreat, seeking refuge from the community (Chartier). This new technology had its effects in the world of cookery as in so many spheres of culture (Mennell, All Manners). Trubek notes that cookbooks are the texts most often used by culinary historians, since they usually contain all the requisite materials for analysing a cuisine: ingredients, method, technique, and presentation. Printed cookbooks, beginning in the early modern period, provide culinary historians with sources of evidence of the culinary past. Historians have argued that social differences can be expressed by the way and type of food we consume. Cookbooks are now widely accepted as valid socio-cultural and historic documents (Folch, Sherman), and indeed the link between literacy levels and the protestant tradition has been expressed through the study of Danish cookbooks (Gold). From Apicius, Taillevent, La Varenne, and Menon to Bradley, Smith, Raffald, Acton, and Beeton, how can both manuscript and printed cookbooks be analysed as historic documents? What is the difference between a manuscript and a printed cookbook? Barbara Ketchum Wheaton, who has been studying cookbooks for over half a century and is honorary curator of the culinary collection in Harvard’s Schlesinger Library, has developed a methodology to read historic cookbooks using a structured approach. For a number of years she has been giving seminars to scholars from multidisciplinary fields on how to read historic cookbooks. This paper draws on the author’s experiences attending Wheaton’s seminar in Harvard, and on supervising the use of this methodology at both Masters and Doctoral level (Cashman; Mac Con Iomaire, and Cashman). Manuscripts versus Printed Cookbooks A fundamental difference exists between manuscript and printed cookbooks in their relationship with the public and private domain. Manuscript cookbooks are by their very essence intimate, relatively unedited and written with an eye to private circulation. Culinary manuscripts follow the diurnal and annual tasks of the household. They contain recipes for cures and restoratives, recipes for cleansing products for the house and the body, as well as the expected recipes for cooking and preserving all manners of food. Whether manuscript or printed cookbook, the recipes contained within often act as a reminder of how laborious the production of food could be in the pre-industrialised world (White). Printed cookbooks draw oxygen from the very fact of being public. They assume a “literate population with sufficient discretionary income to invest in texts that commodify knowledge” (Folch). This process of commoditisation brings knowledge from the private to the public sphere. There exists a subset of cookbooks that straddle this divide, for example, Mrs. Rundell’s A New System of Domestic Cookery (1806), which brought to the public domain her distillation of a lifetime of domestic experience. Originally intended for her daughters alone, Rundell’s book was reprinted regularly during the nineteenth century with the last edition printed in 1893, when Mrs. Beeton had been enormously popular for over thirty years (Mac Con Iomaire, and Cashman). Barbara Ketchum Wheaton’s Structured Approach Cookbooks can be rewarding, surprising and illuminating when read carefully with due effort in understanding them as cultural artefacts. However, Wheaton notes that: “One may read a single old cookbook and find it immensely entertaining. One may read two and begin to find intriguing similarities and differences. When the third cookbook is read, one’s mind begins to blur, and one begins to sense the need for some sort of method in approaching these documents” (“Finding”). Following decades of studying cookbooks from both sides of the Atlantic and writing a seminal text on the French at table from 1300-1789 (Wheaton, Savouring the Past), this combined experience negotiating cookbooks as historical documents was codified, and a structured approach gradually articulated and shared within a week long seminar format. In studying any cookbook, regardless of era or country of origin, the text is broken down into five different groupings, to wit: ingredients; equipment or facilities; the meal; the book as a whole; and, finally, the worldview. A particular strength of Wheaton’s seminars is the multidisciplinary nature of the approaches of students who attend, which throws the study of cookbooks open to wide ranging techniques. Students with a purely scientific training unearth interesting patterns by developing databases of the frequency of ingredients or techniques, and cross referencing them with other books from similar or different timelines or geographical regions. Patterns are displayed in graphs or charts. Linguists offer their own unique lens to study cookbooks, whereas anthropologists and historians ask what these objects can tell us about how our ancestors lived and drew meaning from life. This process is continuously refined, and each grouping is discussed below. Ingredients The geographic origins of the ingredients are of interest, as is the seasonality and the cost of the foodstuffs within the scope of each cookbook, as well as the sensory quality both separately and combined within different recipes. In the medieval period, the use of spices and large joints of butchers meat and game were symbols of wealth and status. However, when the discovery of sea routes to the New World and to the Far East made spices more available and affordable to the middle classes, the upper classes spurned them. Evidence from culinary manuscripts in Georgian Ireland, for example, suggests that galangal was more easily available in Dublin during the eighteenth century than in the mid-twentieth century. A new aesthetic, articulated by La Varenne in his Le Cuisinier Francois (1651), heralded that food should taste of itself, and so exotic ingredients such as cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger were replaced by the local bouquet garni, and stocks and sauces became the foundations of French haute cuisine (Mac Con Iomaire). Some combinations of flavours and ingredients were based on humoral physiology, a long held belief system based on the writings of Hippocrates and Galen, now discredited by modern scientific understanding. The four humors are blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. It was believed that each of these humors would wax and wane in the body, depending on diet and activity. Galen (131-201 AD) believed that warm food produced yellow bile and that cold food produced phlegm. It is difficult to fathom some combinations of ingredients or the manner of service without comprehending the contemporary context within they were consumeSome ingredients found in Roman cookbooks, such as “garum” or “silphium” are no longer available. It is suggested that the nearest substitute for garum also known as “liquamen”—a fermented fish sauce—would be Naam Plaa, or Thai fish sauce (Grainger). Ingredients such as tea and white bread, moved from the prerogative of the wealthy over time to become the staple of the urban poor. These ingredients, therefore, symbolise radically differing contexts during the seventeenth century than in the early twentieth century. Indeed, there are other ingredients such as hominy (dried maize kernel treated with alkali) or grahams (crackers made from graham flour) found in American cookbooks that require translation to the unacquainted non-American reader. There has been a growing number of food encyclopaedias published in recent years that assist scholars in identifying such commodities (Smith, Katz, Davidson). The Cook’s Workplace, Techniques, and Equipment It is important to be aware of the type of kitchen equipment used, the management of heat and cold within the kitchen, and also the gradual spread of the industrial revolution into the domestic sphere. Visits to historic castles such as Hampton Court Palace where nowadays archaeologists re-enact life below stairs in Tudor times give a glimpse as to how difficult and labour intensive food production was. Meat was spit-roasted in front of huge fires by spit boys. Forcemeats and purees were manually pulped using mortar and pestles. Various technological developments including spit-dogs, and mechanised pulleys, replaced the spit boys, the most up to date being the mechanised rotisserie. The technological advancements of two hundred years can be seen in the Royal Pavilion in Brighton where Marie-Antoinin Carême worked for the Prince Regent in 1816 (Brighton Pavilion), but despite the gleaming copper pans and high ceilings for ventilation, the work was still back breaking. Carême died aged forty-nine, “burnt out by the flame of his genius and the fumes of his ovens” (Ackerman 90). Mennell points out that his fame outlived him, resting on his books: Le Pâtissier Royal Parisien (1815); Le Pâtissier Pittoresque (1815); Le Maître d’Hôtel Français (1822); Le Cuisinier Parisien (1828); and, finally, L’Art de la Cuisine Française au Dix-Neuvième Siècle (1833–5), which was finished posthumously by his student Pluméry (All Manners). Mennell suggests that these books embody the first paradigm of professional French cuisine (in Kuhn’s terminology), pointing out that “no previous work had so comprehensively codified the field nor established its dominance as a point of reference for the whole profession in the way that Carême did” (All Manners 149). The most dramatic technological changes came after the industrial revolution. Although there were built up ovens available in bakeries and in large Norman households, the period of general acceptance of new cooking equipment that enclosed fire (such as the Aga stove) is from c.1860 to 1910, with gas ovens following in c.1910 to the 1920s) and Electricity from c.1930. New food processing techniques dates are as follows: canning (1860s), cooling and freezing (1880s), freeze drying (1950s), and motorised delivery vans with cooking (1920s–1950s) (den Hartog). It must also be noted that the supply of fresh food, and fish particularly, radically improved following the birth, and expansion of, the railways. To understand the context of the cookbook, one needs to be aware of the limits of the technology available to the users of those cookbooks. For many lower to middle class families during the twentieth century, the first cookbook they would possess came with their gas or electrical oven. Meals One can follow cooked dishes from the kitchen to the eating place, observing food presentation, carving, sequencing, and serving of the meal and table etiquette. Meal times and structure changed over time. During the Middle Ages, people usually ate two meals a day: a substantial dinner around noon and a light supper in the evening (Adamson). Some of the most important factors to consider are the manner in which meals were served: either à la française or à la russe. One of the main changes that occurred during the nineteenth century was the slow but gradual transfer from service à la française to service à la russe. From medieval times to the middle of the nineteenth century the structure of a formal meal was not by “courses”—as the term is now understood—but by “services”. Each service could comprise of a choice of dishes—both sweet and savoury—from which each guest could select what appealed to him or her most (Davidson). The philosophy behind this form of service was the forementioned humoral physiology— where each diner chose food based on the four humours of blood, yellow bile, black bile, or phlegm. Also known as le grand couvert, the à la française method made it impossible for the diners to eat anything that was beyond arm’s length (Blake, and Crewe). Smooth service, however, was the key to an effective à la russe dinner since servants controlled the flow of food (Eatwell). The taste and temperature of food took centre stage with the à la russe dinner as each course came in sequence. Many historic cookbooks offer table plans illustrating the suggested arrangement of dishes on a table for the à la française style of service. Many of these dishes might be re-used in later meals, and some dishes such as hashes and rissoles often utilised left over components of previous meals. There is a whole genre of cookbooks informing the middle class cooks how to be frugal and also how to emulate haute cuisine using cheaper or ersatz ingredients. The number dining and the manner in which they dined also changed dramatically over time. From medieval to Tudor times, there might be hundreds dining in large banqueting halls. By the Elizabethan age, a small intimate room where master and family dined alone replaced the old dining hall where master, servants, guests, and travellers had previously dined together (Spencer). Dining tables remained portable until the 1780s when tables with removable leaves were devised. By this time, the bread trencher had been replaced by one made of wood, or plate of pewter or precious metal in wealthier houses. Hosts began providing knives and spoons for their guests by the seventeenth century, with forks also appearing but not fully accepted until the eighteenth century (Mason). These silver utensils were usually marked with the owner’s initials to prevent their theft (Flandrin). Cookbooks as Objects and the World of Publishing A thorough examination of the manuscript or printed cookbook can reveal their physical qualities, including indications of post-publication history, the recipes and other matter in them, as well as the language, organization, and other individual qualities. What can the quality of the paper tell us about the book? Is there a frontispiece? Is the book dedicated to an employer or a patron? Does the author note previous employment history in the introduction? In his Court Cookery, Robert Smith, for example, not only mentions a number of his previous employers, but also outlines that he was eight years working with Patrick Lamb in the Court of King William, before revealing that several dishes published in Lamb’s Royal Cookery (1710) “were never made or practis’d (sic) by him and others are extreme defective and imperfect and made up of dishes unknown to him; and several of them more calculated at the purses than the Gôut of the guests”. Both Lamb and Smith worked for the English monarchy, nobility, and gentry, but produced French cuisine. Not all Britons were enamoured with France, however, with, for example Hannah Glasse asserting “if gentlemen will have French cooks, they must pay for French tricks” (4), and “So much is the blind folly of this age, that they would rather be imposed on by a French Booby, than give encouragement to an good English cook” (ctd. in Trubek 60). Spencer contextualises Glasse’s culinary Francophobia, explaining that whilst she was writing the book, the Jacobite army were only a few days march from London, threatening to cut short the Hanoverian lineage. However, Lehmann points out that whilst Glasse was overtly hostile to French cuisine, she simultaneously plagiarised its receipts. Based on this trickling down of French influences, Mennell argues that “there is really no such thing as a pure-bred English cookery book” (All Manners 98), but that within the assimilation and simplification, a recognisable English style was discernable. Mennell also asserts that Glasse and her fellow women writers had an enormous role in the social history of cooking despite their lack of technical originality (“Plagiarism”). It is also important to consider the place of cookbooks within the history of publishing. Albala provides an overview of the immense outpouring of dietary literature from the printing presses from the 1470s. He divides the Renaissance into three periods: Period I Courtly Dietaries (1470–1530)—targeted at the courtiers with advice to those attending banquets with many courses and lots of wine; Period II The Galenic Revival (1530–1570)—with a deeper appreciation, and sometimes adulation, of Galen, and when scholarship took centre stage over practical use. Finally Period III The Breakdown of Orthodoxy (1570–1650)—when, due to the ambiguities and disagreements within and between authoritative texts, authors were freer to pick the ideas that best suited their own. Nutrition guides were consistent bestsellers, and ranged from small handbooks written in the vernacular for lay audiences, to massive Latin tomes intended for practicing physicians. Albala adds that “anyone with an interest in food appears to have felt qualified to pen his own nutritional guide” (1). Would we have heard about Mrs. Beeton if her husband had not been a publisher? How could a twenty-five year old amass such a wealth of experience in household management? What role has plagiarism played in the history of cookbooks? It is interesting to note that a well worn copy of her book (Beeton) was found in the studio of Francis Bacon and it is suggested that he drew inspiration for a number of his paintings from the colour plates of animal carcasses and butcher’s meat (Dawson). Analysing the post-publication usage of cookbooks is valuable to see the most popular recipes, the annotations left by the owner(s) or user(s), and also if any letters, handwritten recipes, or newspaper clippings are stored within the leaves of the cookbook. The Reader, the Cook, the Eater The physical and inner lives and needs and skills of the individuals who used cookbooks and who ate their meals merit consideration. Books by their nature imply literacy. Who is the book’s audience? Is it the cook or is it the lady of the house who will dictate instructions to the cook? Numeracy and measurement is also important. Where clocks or pocket watches were not widely available, authors such as seventeenth century recipe writer Sir Kenelm Digby would time his cooking by the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. Literacy amongst protestant women to enable them to read the Bible, also enabled them to read cookbooks (Gold). How did the reader or eater’s religion affect the food practices? Were there fast days? Were there substitute foods for fast days? What about special occasions? Do historic cookbooks only tell us about the food of the middle and upper classes? It is widely accepted today that certain cookbook authors appeal to confident cooks, while others appeal to competent cooks, and others still to more cautious cooks (Bilton). This has always been the case, as has the differentiation between the cookbook aimed at the professional cook rather than the amateur. Historically, male cookbook authors such as Patrick Lamb (1650–1709) and Robert Smith targeted the professional cook market and the nobility and gentry, whereas female authors such as Eliza Acton (1799–1859) and Isabella Beeton (1836–1865) often targeted the middle class market that aspired to emulate their superiors’ fashions in food and dining. How about Tavern or Restaurant cooks? When did they start to put pen to paper, and did what they wrote reflect the food they produced in public eateries? Conclusions This paper has offered an overview of Barbara Ketchum Wheaton’s methodology for reading historic cookbooks using a structured approach. It has highlighted some of the questions scholars and researchers might ask when faced with an old cookbook, regardless of era or geographical location. By systematically examining the book under the headings of ingredients; the cook’s workplace, techniques and equipment; the meals; cookbooks as objects and the world of publishing; and reader, cook and eater, the scholar can perform magic and extract much more from the cookbook than seems to be there on first appearance. References Ackerman, Roy. The Chef's Apprentice. London: Headline, 1988. Adamson, Melitta Weiss. Food in Medieval Times. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood P, 2004. Albala, Ken. Eating Right in the Renaissance. Ed. Darra Goldstein. Berkeley: U of California P, 2002. Beeton, Isabella. Beeton's Book of Household Management. London: S. Beeton, 1861. Bilton, Samantha. “The Influence of Cookbooks on Domestic Cooks, 1900-2010.” Petit Propos Culinaires 94 (2011): 30–7. Blake, Anthony, and Quentin Crewe. Great Chefs of France. London: Mitchell Beazley/ Artists House, 1978. Brighton Pavilion. 12 Jun. 2013 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/interactive/2011/sep/09/brighton-pavilion-360-interactive-panoramic›. Cashman, Dorothy. “An Exploratory Study of Irish Cookbooks.” Unpublished Master's Thesis. M.Sc. Dublin: Dublin Institute of Technology, 2009. Chartier, Roger. “The Practical Impact of Writing.” Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. A History of Private Lives: Volume III: Passions of the Renaissance. Ed. Roger Chartier. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap P of Harvard U, 1989. 111-59. Davidson, Alan. The Oxford Companion to Food. New York: Oxford U P, 1999. Dawson, Barbara. “Francis Bacon and the Art of Food.” The Irish Times 6 April 2013. den Hartog, Adel P. “Technological Innovations and Eating out as a Mass Phenomenon in Europe: A Preamble.” Eating out in Europe: Picnics, Gourmet Dining and Snacks since the Late Eighteenth Century. Eds. Mark Jacobs and Peter Scholliers. Oxford: Berg, 2003. 263–80. Eatwell, Ann. “Á La Française to À La Russe, 1680-1930.” Elegant Eating: Four Hundred Years of Dining in Style. Eds. Philippa Glanville and Hilary Young. London: V&A, 2002. 48–52. Flandrin, Jean-Louis. “Distinction through Taste.” Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. A History of Private Lives: Volume III : Passions of the Renaissance. Ed. Roger Chartier. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap P of Harvard U, 1989. 265–307. Folch, Christine. “Fine Dining: Race in Pre-revolution Cuban Cookbooks.” Latin American Research Review 43.2 (2008): 205–23. Glasse, Hannah. The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy; Which Far Exceeds Anything of the Kind Ever Published. 4th Ed. London: The Author, 1745. Gold, Carol. Danish Cookbooks: Domesticity and National Identity, 1616-1901. Seattle: U of Washington P, 2007. Grainger, Sally. Cooking Apicius: Roman Recipes for Today. Totnes, Devon: Prospect, 2006. Hampton Court Palace. “The Tudor Kitchens.” 12 Jun 2013 ‹http://www.hrp.org.uk/HamptonCourtPalace/stories/thetudorkitchens› Katz, Solomon H. Ed. Encyclopedia of Food and Culture (3 Vols). New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2003. Kuhn, T. S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1962. Lamb, Patrick. Royal Cookery:Or. The Complete Court-Cook. London: Abel Roper, 1710. Lehmann, Gilly. “English Cookery Books in the 18th Century.” The Oxford Companion to Food. Ed. Alan Davidson. Oxford: Oxford U P, 1999. 277–9. Mac Con Iomaire, Máirtín. “The Changing Geography and Fortunes of Dublin’s Haute Cuisine Restaurants 1958–2008.” Food, Culture & Society 14.4 (2011): 525–45. Mac Con Iomaire, Máirtín, and Dorothy Cashman. “Irish Culinary Manuscripts and Printed Cookbooks: A Discussion.” Petit Propos Culinaires 94 (2011): 81–101. Mason, Laura. Food Culture in Great Britain. Ed. Ken Albala. Westport CT.: Greenwood P, 2004. Mennell, Stephen. All Manners of Food. 2nd ed. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1996. ---. “Plagiarism and Originality: Diffusionism in the Study of the History of Cookery.” Petits Propos Culinaires 68 (2001): 29–38. Sherman, Sandra. “‘The Whole Art and Mystery of Cooking’: What Cookbooks Taught Readers in the Eighteenth Century.” Eighteenth Century Life 28.1 (2004): 115–35. Smith, Andrew F. Ed. The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink. New York: Oxford U P, 2007. Spencer, Colin. British Food: An Extraordinary Thousand Years of History. London: Grub Street, 2004. Tierney, Mark. Europe and the World 1300-1763. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1970. Trubek, Amy B. Haute Cuisine: How the French Invented the Culinary Profession. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2000. Wheaton, Barbara. “Finding Real Life in Cookbooks: The Adventures of a Culinary Historian”. 2006. Humanities Research Group Working Paper. 9 Sep. 2009 ‹http://www.phaenex.uwindsor.ca/ojs/leddy/index.php/HRG/article/view/22/27›. Wheaton, Barbara Ketcham. Savouring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300-1789. London: Chatto & Windus, 1983. White, Eileen, ed. The English Cookery Book: Historical Essays. Proceedings of the 16th Leeds Symposium on Food History 2001. Devon: Prospect, 2001.

All history of this area and the general talk and all of that is that 1973 was a turning point and the Aquarius Festival is credited with having turned this region around in so many ways, but I think that is a myth ... and I have to honour the truth; and the truth is that old Dicke Donelly came and did a Welcome to Country the night before the festival. (Joseph in Joseph and Hanley)In 1973 the Australian Union of Students (AUS) held the Aquarius Arts and Lifestyle Festival in a small, rural New South Wales town called Nimbin. The festival was seen as the peak expression of Australian counterculture and is attributed to creating the “Rainbow Region”, an area with a concentration of alternative life stylers in Northern NSW (Derrett 28). While the Aquarius Festival is recognised as a founding historical and countercultural event, the unique and important relationships established with Indigenous people at this time are generally less well known. This article investigates claims that the 1973 Aquarius Festival was “the first event in Australian history that sought permission for the use of the land from the Traditional Owners” (Joseph and Hanley). The diverse international, national and local conditions that coalesced at the Aquarius Festival suggest a fertile environment was created for reconciliatory bonds to develop. Often dismissed as a “tree hugging, soap dodging movement,” the counterculture was radically politicised having sprung from the 1960s social revolutions when the world witnessed mass demonstrations that confronted war, racism, sexism and capitalism. Primarily a youth movement, it was characterised by flamboyant dress, music, drugs and mass gatherings with universities forming the epicentre and white, middle class youth leading the charge. As their ideals of changing the world were frustrated by lack of systematic change, many decided to disengage and a migration to rural settings occurred (Jacob; Munro-Clarke; Newton). In the search for alternatives, the counterculture assimilated many spiritual practices, such as Eastern traditions and mysticism, which were previously obscure to the Western world. This practice of spiritual syncretism can be represented as a direct resistance to the hegemony of the dominant Western culture (Stell). As the new counterculture developed, its progression from urban to rural settings was driven by philosophies imbued with a desire to reconnect with and protect the natural world while simultaneously rejecting the dominant conservative order. A recurring feature of this countercultural ‘back to the land’ migration was not only an empathetic awareness of the injustices of colonial past, but also a genuine desire to learn from the Indigenous people of the land. Indigenous people were generally perceived as genuine opposers of Westernisation, inherently spiritual, ecological, tribal and communal, thus encompassing the primary values to which the counterculture was aspiring (Smith). Cultures converged. One, a youth culture rebelling from its parent culture; the other, ancient cultures reeling from the historical conquest by the youths’ own ancestors. Such cultural intersections are rich with complex scenarios and politics. As a result, often naïve, but well-intended relations were established with Native Americans, various South American Indigenous peoples, New Zealand Maori and, as this article demonstrates, the Original People of Australia (Smith; Newton; Barr-Melej; Zolov). The 1960s protest era fostered the formation of groups aiming to address a variety of issues, and at times many supported each other. Jennifer Clarke says it was the Civil Rights movement that provided the first models of dissent by formulating a “method, ideology and language of protest” as African Americans stood up and shouted prior to other movements (2). The issue of racial empowerment was not lost on Australia’s Indigenous population. Clarke writes that during the 1960s, encouraged by events overseas and buoyed by national organisation, Aborigines “slowly embarked on a political awakening, demanded freedom from the trappings of colonialism and responded to the effects of oppression at worst and neglect at best” (4). Activism of the 1960s had the “profoundly productive effect of providing Aborigines with the confidence to assert their racial identity” (159). Many Indigenous youth were compelled by the zeitgeist to address their people’s issues, fulfilling Charlie Perkins’s intentions of inspiring in Indigenous peoples a will to resist (Perkins). Enjoying new freedoms of movement out of missions, due to the 1967 Constitutional change and the practical implementation of the assimilation policy, up to 32,000 Indigenous youth moved to Redfern, Sydney between 1967 and 1972 (Foley, “An Evening With”). Gary Foley reports that a dynamic new Black Power Movement emerged but the important difference between this new younger group and the older Indigenous leaders of the day was the diverse range of contemporary influences. Taking its mantra from the Black Panther movement in America, though having more in common with the equivalent Native American Red Power movement, the Black Power Movement acknowledged many other international struggles for independence as equally inspiring (Foley, “An Evening”). People joined together for grassroots resistance, formed anti-hierarchical collectives and established solidarities between varied groups who previously would have had little to do with each other. The 1973 Aquarius Festival was directly aligned with “back to the land” philosophies. The intention was to provide a place and a reason for gathering to “facilitate exchanges on survival techniques” and to experience “living in harmony with the natural environment.” without being destructive to the land (Dunstan, “A Survival Festival”). Early documents in the archives, however, reveal no apparent interest in Australia’s Indigenous people, referring more to “silken Arabian tents, mediaeval banners, circus, jugglers and clowns, peace pipes, maypole and magic circles” (Dunstan, “A Survival Festival”). Obliterated from the social landscape and minimally referred to in the Australian education system, Indigenous people were “off the radar” to the majority mindset, and the Australian counterculture similarly was slow to appreciate Indigenous culture. Like mainstream Australia, the local counterculture movement largely perceived the “race” issue as something occurring in other countries, igniting the phrase “in your own backyard” which became a catchcry of Indigenous activists (Foley, “Whiteness and Blackness”) With no mention of any Indigenous interest, it seems likely that the decision to engage grew from the emerging climate of Indigenous activism in Australia. Frustrated by student protestors who seemed oblivious to local racial issues, focusing instead on popular international injustices, Indigenous activists accused them of hypocrisy. Aquarius Festival directors, found themselves open to similar accusations when public announcements elicited a range of responses. Once committed to the location of Nimbin, directors Graeme Dunstan and Johnny Allen began a tour of Australian universities to promote the upcoming event. While at the annual conference of AUS in January 1973 at Monash University, Dunstan met Indigenous activist Gary Foley: Gary witnessed the presentation of Johnny Allen and myself at the Aquarius Foundation session and our jubilation that we had agreement from the village residents to not only allow, but also to collaborate in the production of the Festival. After our presentation which won unanimous support, it was Gary who confronted me with the question “have you asked permission from local Aboriginal folk?” This threw me into confusion because we had seen no Aboriginals in Nimbin. (Dunstan, e-mail) Such a challenge came at a time when the historical climate was etched with political activism, not only within the student movement, but more importantly with Indigenous activists’ recent demonstrations, such as the installation in 1972 of the Tent Embassy in Canberra. As representatives of the counterculture movement, which was characterised by its inclinations towards consciousness-raising, AUS organisers were ethically obliged to respond appropriately to the questions about Indigenous permission and involvement in the Aquarius Festival at Nimbin. In addition to this political pressure, organisers in Nimbin began hearing stories of the area being cursed or taboo for women. This most likely originated from the tradition of Nimbin Rocks, a rocky outcrop one kilometre from Nimbin, as a place where only certain men could go. Jennifer Hoff explains that many major rock formations were immensely sacred places and were treated with great caution and respect. Only a few Elders and custodians could visit these places and many such locations were also forbidden for women. Ceremonies were conducted at places like Nimbin Rocks to ensure the wellbeing of all tribespeople. Stories of the Nimbin curse began to spread and most likely captivated a counterculture interested in mysticism. As organisers had hoped that news of the festival would spread on the “lips of the counterculture,” they were alarmed to hear how “fast the bad news of this curse was travelling” (Dunstan, e-mail). A diplomatic issue escalated with further challenges from the Black Power community when organisers discovered that word had spread to Sydney’s Indigenous community in Redfern. Organisers faced a hostile reaction to their alleged cultural insensitivity and were plagued by negative publicity with accusations the AUS were “violating sacred ground” (Janice Newton 62). Faced with such bad press, Dunstan was determined to repair what was becoming a public relations disaster. It seemed once prompted to the path, a sense of moral responsibility prevailed amongst the organisers and they took the unprecedented step of reaching out to Australia’s Indigenous people. Dunstan claimed that an expedition was made to the local Woodenbong mission to consult with Elder, Uncle Lyle Roberts. To connect with local people required crossing the great social divide present in that era of Australia’s history. Amy Nethery described how from the nineteenth century to the 1960s, a “system of reserves, missions and other institutions isolated, confined and controlled Aboriginal people” (9). She explains that the people were incarcerated as a solution to perceived social problems. For Foley, “the widespread genocidal activity of early “settlement” gave way to a policy of containment” (Foley, “Australia and the Holocaust”). Conditions on missions were notoriously bad with alcoholism, extreme poverty, violence, serious health issues and depression common. Of particular concern to mission administrators was the perceived need to keep Indigenous people separate from the non-indigenous population. Dunstan described the mission he visited as having “bad vibes.” He found it difficult to communicate with the elderly man, and was not sure if he understood Dunstan’s quest, as his “responses came as disjointed raves about Jesus and saving grace” (Dunstan, e-mail). Uncle Lyle, he claimed, did not respond affirmatively or negatively to the suggestion that Nimbin was cursed, and so Dunstan left assuming it was not true. Other organisers began to believe the curse and worried that female festival goers might get sick or worse, die. This interpretation reflected, as Vanessa Bible argues, a general Eurocentric misunderstanding of the relationship of Indigenous peoples with the land. Paul Joseph admits they were naïve whites coming into a place with very little understanding, “we didn’t know if we needed a witch doctor or what we needed but we knew we needed something from the Aborigines to lift the spell!”(Joseph and Hanley). Joseph, one of the first “hippies” who moved to the area, had joined forces with AUS organisers. He said, “it just felt right” to get Indigenous involvement and recounted how organisers made another trip to Woodenbong Mission to find Dickee (Richard) Donnelly, a Song Man, who was very happy to be invited. Whether the curse was valid or not it proved to be productive in further instigating respectful action. Perhaps feeling out of their depth, the organisers initiated another strategy to engage with Australian Indigenous people. A call out was sent through the AUS network to diversify the cultural input and it was recommended they engage the services of South African artist, Bauxhau Stone. Timing aligned well as in 1972 Australia had voted in a new Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam. Whitlam brought about significant political changes, many in response to socialist protests that left a buoyancy in the air for the counterculturalist movement. He made prodigious political changes in support of Indigenous people, including creating the Aboriginal Arts Board as part of the Australian Council of the Arts (ACA). As the ACA were already funding activities for the Aquarius Festival, organisers were successful in gaining two additional grants specifically for Indigenous participation (Farnham). As a result We were able to hire […] representatives, a couple of Kalahari bushmen. ‘Cause we were so dumb, we didn’t think we could speak to the black people, you know what I mean, we thought we would be rejected, or whatever, so for us to really reach out, we needed somebody black to go and talk to them, or so we thought, and it was remarkable. This one Bau, a remarkable fellow really, great artist, great character, he went all over Australia. He went to Pitjantjatjara, Yirrkala and we arranged buses and tents when they got here. We had a very large contingent of Aboriginal people come to the Aquarius Festival, thanks to Whitlam. (Joseph in Joseph and Henley) It was under the aegis of these government grants that Bauxhau Stone conducted his work. Stone embodied a nexus of contemporary issues. Acutely aware of the international movement for racial equality and its relevance to Australia, where conditions were “really appalling”, Stone set out to transform Australian race relations by engaging with the alternative arts movement (Stone). While his white Australian contemporaries may have been unaccustomed to dealing with the Indigenous racial issue, Stone was actively engaged and thus well suited to act as a cultural envoy for the Aquarius Festival. He visited several local missions, inviting people to attend and notifying them of ceremonies being conducted by respected Elders. Nimbin was then the site of the Aquarius Lifestyle and Celebration Festival, a two week gathering of alternative cultures, technologies and youth. It innovatively demonstrated its diversity of influences, attracted people from all over the world and was the first time that the general public really witnessed Australia’s counterculture (Derrett 224). As markers of cultural life, counterculture festivals of the 1960s and 1970s were as iconic as the era itself and many around the world drew on the unique Indigenous heritage of their settings in some form or another (Partridge; Perone; Broadley and Jones; Zolov). The social phenomenon of coming together to experience, celebrate and foster a sense of unity was triggered by protests, music and a simple, yet deep desire to reconnect with each other. Festivals provided an environment where the negative social pressures of race, gender, class and mores (such as clothes) were suspended and held the potential “for personal and social transformation” (St John 167). With the expressed intent to “take matters into our own hands” and try to develop alternative, innovative ways of doing things with collective participation, the Aquarius Festival thus became an optimal space for reinvigorating ancient and Indigenous ways (Dunstan, “A Survival Festival”). With philosophies that venerated collectivism, tribalism, connecting with the earth, and the use of ritual, the Indigenous presence at the Aquarius Festival gave attendees the opportunity to experience these values. To connect authentically with Nimbin’s landscape, forming bonds with the Traditional Owners was essential. Participants were very fortunate to have the presence of the last known initiated men of the area, Uncle Lyle Roberts and Uncle Dickee Donnely. These Elders represented the last vestiges of an ancient culture and conducted innovative ceremonies, song, teachings and created a sacred fire for the new youth they encountered in their land. They welcomed the young people and were very happy for their presence, believing it represented a revolutionary shift (Wedd; King; John Roberts; Cecil Roberts). Images 1 and 2: Ceremony and talks conducted at the Aquarius Festival (people unknown). Photographs reproduced by permission of photographer and festival attendee Paul White. The festival thus provided an important platform for the regeneration of cultural and spiritual practices. John Roberts, nephew of Uncle Lyle, recalled being surprised by the reaction of festival participants to his uncle: “He was happy and then he started to sing. And my God … I couldn’t get near him! There was this big ring of hippies around him. They were about twenty deep!” Sharing to an enthusiastic, captive audience had a positive effect and gave the non-indigenous a direct Indigenous encounter (Cecil Roberts; King; Oshlak). Estimates of the number of Indigenous people in attendance vary, with the main organisers suggesting 800 to 1000 and participants suggesting 200 to 400 (Stone; Wedd; Oshlak: Joseph; King; Cecil Roberts). As the Festival lasted over a two week period, many came and left within that time and estimates are at best reliant on memory, engagement and perspectives. With an estimated total attendance at the Festival between 5000 and 10,000, either number of Indigenous attendees is symbolic and a significant symbolic statistic for Indigenous and non-indigenous to be together on mutual ground in Australia in 1973. Images 3-5: Performers from Yirrkala Dance Group, brought to the festival by Stone with funding from the Federal Government. Photographs reproduced by permission of photographer and festival attendee Dr Ian Cameron. For Indigenous people, the event provided an important occasion to reconnect with their own people, to share their culture with enthusiastic recipients, as well as the chance to experience diverse aspects of the counterculture. Though the northern NSW region has a history of diverse cultural migration of Italian and Indian families, the majority of non-indigenous and Indigenous people had limited interaction with cosmopolitan influences (Kijas 20). Thus Nimbin was a conservative region and many Christianised Indigenous people were also conservative in their outlook. The Aquarius Festival changed that as the Indigenous people experienced the wide-ranging cultural elements of the alternative movement. The festival epitomised countercultural tendencies towards flamboyant fashion and hairstyles, architectural design, fantastical art, circus performance, Asian clothes and religious products, vegetarian food and nudity. Exposure to this bohemian culture would have surely led to “mind expansion and consciousness raising,” explicit aims adhered to by the movement (Roszak). Performers and participants from Africa, America and India also gave attending Indigenous Australians the opportunity to interact with non-European cultures. Many people interviewed for this paper indicated that Indigenous people’s reception of this festival experience was joyous. For Australia’s early counterculture, interest in Indigenous Australia was limited and for organisers of the AUS Aquarius Festival, it was not originally on the agenda. The counterculture in the USA and New Zealand had already started to engage with their Indigenous people some years earlier. However due to the Aquarius Festival’s origins in the student movement and its solidarities with the international Indigenous activist movement, they were forced to shift their priorities. The coincidental selection of a significant spiritual location at Nimbin to hold the festival brought up additional challenges and countercultural intrigue with mystical powers and a desire to connect authentically to the land, further prompted action. Essentially, it was the voices of empowered Indigenous activists, like Gary Foley, which in fact triggered the reaching out to Indigenous involvement. While the counterculture organisers were ultimately receptive and did act with unprecedented respect, credit must be given to Indigenous activists. The activist’s role is to trigger action and challenge thinking and in this case, it was ultimately productive. Therefore the Indigenous people were not merely passive recipients of beneficiary goodwill, but active instigators of appropriate cultural exchange. After the 1973 festival many attendees decided to stay in Nimbin to purchase land collectively and a community was born. Relationships established with local Indigenous people developed further. Upon visiting Nimbin now, one will see a vibrant visual display of Indigenous and psychedelic themed art, a central park with an open fire tended by local custodians and other Indigenous community members, an Aboriginal Centre whose rent is paid for by local shopkeepers, and various expressions of a fusion of counterculture and Indigenous art, music and dance. While it appears that reconciliation became the aspiration for mainstream society in the 1990s, Nimbin’s early counterculture history had Indigenous reconciliation at its very foundation. The efforts made by organisers of the 1973 Aquarius Festival stand as one of very few examples in Australian history where non-indigenous Australians have respectfully sought to learn from Indigenous people and to assimilate their cultural practices. It also stands as an example for the world, of reconciliation, based on hippie ideals of peace and love. They encouraged the hippies moving up here, even when they came out for Aquarius, old Uncle Lyle and Richard Donnelly, they came out and they blessed the mob out here, it was like the hairy people had come back, with the Nimbin, cause the Nimbynji is the little hairy people, so the hairy people came back (Jerome). References Barr-Melej, Patrick. “Siloísmo and the Self in Allende’s Chile: Youth, 'Total Revolution,' and the Roots of the Humanist Movement.” Hispanic American Historical Review 86.4 (Nov. 2006): 747-784. Bible, Vanessa. Aquarius Rising: Terania Creek and the Australian Forest Protest Movement. BA (Honours) Thesis. University of New England, Armidale, 2010. Broadley, Colin, and Judith Jones, eds. Nambassa: A New Direction. Auckland: Reed, 1979. Bryant, Gordon M. Parliament of Australia. Minister for Aboriginal Affairs. 1 May 1973. Australian Union of Students. Records of the AUS, 1934-1991. National Library of Australia MS ACC GB 1992.0505. Cameron, Ian. “Aquarius Festival Photographs.” 1973. Clarke, Jennifer. Aborigines and Activism: Race, Aborigines and the Coming of the Sixties to Australia. Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2008. Derrett, Ross. Regional Festivals: Nourishing Community Resilience: The Nature and Role of Cultural Festivals in Northern Rivers NSW Communities. PhD Thesis. Southern Cross University, Lismore, 2008. Dunstan, Graeme. “A Survival Festival May 1973.” 1 Aug. 1972. Pamphlet. MS 6945/1. Nimbin Aquarius Festival Archives. National Library of Australia, Canberra. ---. E-mail to author, 11 July 2012. ---. “The Aquarius Festival.” Aquarius Rainbow Region. n.d. Farnham, Ken. Acting Executive Officer, Aboriginal Council for the Arts. 19 June 1973. Letter. MS ACC GB 1992.0505. Australian Union of Students. Records of the AUS, 1934-1991. National Library of Australia, Canberra. Foley, Gary. “Australia and the Holocaust: A Koori Perspective (1997).” The Koori History Website. n.d. 20 May 2013 ‹http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/essays/essay_8.html›. ---. “Whiteness and Blackness in the Koori Struggle for Self-Determination (1999).” The Koori History Website. n.d. 20 May 2013 ‹http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/essays/essay_9.html›. ---. “Black Power in Redfern 1968-1972 (2001).” The Koori History Website. n.d. 20 May 2013 ‹http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/essays/essay_1.html›. ---. “An Evening with Legendary Aboriginal Activist Gary Foley.” Conference Session. Marxism 2012 “Revolution in the Air”, Melbourne, Mar. 2012. Hoff, Jennifer. Bundjalung Jugun: Bundjalung Country. Lismore: Richmond River Historical Society, 2006. Jacob, Jeffrey. New Pioneers: The Back-to-the-Land Movement and the Search for a Sustainable Future. Pennsylvania: Penn State Press, 1997. Jerome, Burri. Interview. 31 July 2012. Joseph, Paul. Interview. 7 Aug. 2012. Joseph, Paul, and Brendan ‘Mookx’ Hanley. Interview by Rob Willis. 14 Aug. 2010. Audiofile, Session 2 of 3. nla.oh-vn4978025. Rob Willis Folklore Collection. National Library of Australia, Canberra. Kijas, Johanna, Caravans and Communes: Stories of Settling in the Tweed 1970s & 1980s. Murwillumbah: Tweed Shire Council, 2011. King, Vivienne (Aunty Viv). Interview. 1 Aug. 2012. Munro-Clarke, Margaret. Communes of Rural Australia: The Movement Since 1970. Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1986. Nethery, Amy. “Aboriginal Reserves: ‘A Modern-Day Concentration Camp’: Using History to Make Sense of Australian Immigration Detention Centres.” Does History Matter? Making and Debating Citizenship, Immigration and Refugee Policy in Australia and New Zealand. Eds. Klaus Neumann and Gwenda Tavan. Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2009. 4. Newton, Janice. “Aborigines, Tribes and the Counterculture.” Social Analysis 23 (1988): 53-71. Newton, John. The Double Rainbow: James K Baxter, Ngati Hau and the Jerusalem Commune. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2009. Offord, Baden. “Mapping the Rainbow Region: Fields of Belonging and Sites of Confluence.” Transformations 2 (March 2002): 1-5. Oshlak, Al. Interview. 27 Mar. 2013. Partridge, Christopher. “The Spiritual and the Revolutionary: Alternative Spirituality, British Free Festivals, and the Emergence of Rave Culture.” Culture and Religion: An Interdisciplinary Journal 7 (2006): 3-5. Perkins, Charlie. “Charlie Perkins on 1965 Freedom Ride.” Youtube, 13 Oct. 2009. Perone, James E. Woodstock: An Encyclopedia of the Music and Art Fair. Greenwood: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2005. Roberts, John. Interview. 1 Aug. 2012. Roberts, Cecil. Interview. 6 Aug. 2012. Roszak, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition. New York: University of California Press,1969. St John, Graham. “Going Feral: Authentica on the Edge of Australian culture.” The Australian Journal of Anthropology 8 (1997): 167-189. Smith, Sherry. Hippies, Indians and the Fight for Red Power. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Stell, Alex. Dancing in the Hyper-Crucible: The Rite de Passage of the Post-Rave Movement. BA (Honours) Thesis. University of Westminster, London, 2005. Stone, Trevor Bauxhau. Interview. 1 Oct. 2012. Wedd, Leila. Interview. 27 Sep. 2012. White, Paul. “Aquarius Revisited.” 1973. Zolov, Eric. Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

Cultural Studies has tended to prioritise the domain of leisure and consumption over work as an area for meaning making, in many ways defining everyday life in opposition to work. Greg Noble, a cultural researcher who examined work in the context of the early computerisation of Australian universities made the point that "discussions of everyday life often make the mistake of assuming that everyday life equates with home and family life, or leisure" (87). This article argues for the need within Cultural Studies to focus on work and media as a research area of everyday life. With the growth of flexible and creative labour and the widespread uptake of an array of new media technologies used for work, traditional ways to identify and measure the space and time of work have become increasingly flawed, with implications for how we account for work and negotiate its boundaries. New approaches are needed to address the complex media environments and technological practices that are an increasing part of contemporary working life. Cultural Studies can make a significant impact towards this research agenda by offering new ways to analyse the complex interrelations of space, time and technology in everyday work practice. To further this goal, a new material practices account of work termed Officing is introduced, developed through my doctoral research on professionals' daily use of information and communication technology (ICT). This approach builds on the key cultural concepts of "bricolage" and "appropriation" combined with the idea of "articulation work" proposed by Anselm Strauss, to support the analysis of the office workplace as a contingent and provisional arrangement or process. Officing has a number of benefits as a framework for analysing the nature of work in a highly mediated world. Highlighting the labour that goes into stabilising work platforms makes it possible to assess the claims of productivity and improved work-life balance brought about by new mobile media technologies; to identify previously unidentified sources of time pressure, overwork and intensification and ultimately, to contribute to the design of more sustainable work environments. The Turn Away from Work Work held a central position in social and cultural analysis in the first half of the twentieth century but as Strangleman observed, there was a marked shift away from the study of work from the mid 1970s (3.1). Much of the impulse for this shift came from critiques of the over-emphasis on relations of production and the workplace as the main source of meaning and value (5.1). In line with this position, feminist researchers challenged the traditional division of labour into paid and unpaid work, arguing that this division sustained the false perception of domestic work as non-productive (cf. Delphy; Folbre). Accompanying these critiques were significant changes in work itself, as traditional jobs literally began to disappear with the decline of manufacturing in industrialised countries (6.1). With the turn away from work in academia and the changes in the nature of work, attention shifted to the realm of the market and consumption. One of the important contributions of Cultural Studies has been the focus on the role of the consumer in driving social and technological change and processes of identity formation. Yet, it is a major problem that work is largely marginalised in cultural research of everyday life, especially since, in most industrialised nations, we are working in new ways, in rapidly changing conditions and more than ever before. Research shows that in Australia there has been a steady increase in the average hours of paid work and Australians are working harder (cf. Watson, Buchanan, Campbell and Briggs; Edwards and Wajcman). In the 2008 Australian Work and Life Index (AWALI) Skinner and Pocock found around 55 per cent of employees frequently felt rushed or pressed for time and this was associated with long working hours, work overload and an overall poor work–life interaction (8). These trends have coincided with long-term changes in the type and location of work. In Australia, like many other developed countries, information-based occupations have taken over manufacturing jobs and there has been an increase in part-time and casual work (cf. Watson et al.). Many employees now conduct work outside of the traditional workplace, with the ABS reporting that in 2008, 24 per cent of employees worked at least some hours at home. Many social analysts have explained the rise of casual and flexible labour as related to the transition to global capitalism driven by the expansion of networked information processes (cf. Castells; Van Dijk). This shift is not simply that more workers are producing ideas and information but that the previously separated spheres of production and consumption have blurred (cf. Ritzer and Jurgenson). With this, entirely new industries have sprung up, predicated on the often unpaid for creative labour of individuals, including users of media technologies. A growing chorus of writers are now pointing out that a fragmented, polarised and complex picture is emerging of this so-called "new economy", with significant implications for the quality of work (cf. Edwards and Wajcman; Fudge and Owens; Huws). Indeed, some claim that new conditions of insecure and poor quality employment or "precarious work" are fast becoming the norm. Moreover, this longer-term pattern runs parallel to the production of a multitude of new mobile media technologies, first taken up by professionals and then by the mainstream, challenging the notion that activities are bound to any particular place or time. Reinvigorating Work in Social and Cultural Analysis There are moves to reposition social and cultural analysis to respond to these various trends. Work-life balance is an example of a research and policy area that has emerged since the 1990s. The boundary between the household and the outside world has also been subject to scrutiny by cultural researchers, and these critically examine the intersection between work and consumption, gender and care (cf. Nippert-Eng; Sorenson and Lie; Noble and Lupton, "Consuming" and "Mine"; Lally). These responses are examples of a shift away from what Urry has dubbed "structures and stable organisations" to a concern with flows, movements and the blurring of boundaries between life spheres (5). In a similar vein, researchers recently have proposed alternative ways to describe the changing times and places of employment. In their study of UK professionals, Felstead, Jewson and Walters proposed a model of "plural workscapes" to explain a major shift in the spatial organisation of work (23). Mobility theorists Sheller and Urry have called for the need to "develop a more dynamic conceptualisation of the fluidities and mobilities that have increasingly hybridised the public and private" (113). All of this literature has reinforced a growing concern that in the face of new patterns of production and consumption and with the rise of complex media environments, traditional models and measures of space and time are inadequate to account for contemporary work. Analyses that rely on conventional measures of work based on hourly units clearly point to an increase in the volume of work, the speed of work and to the collision (cf. Pocock) of work and life but fall down in accounting for the complex and often contradictory role of technology. Media technologies are "Janus-faced" as Michael Arnold has suggested, referring to the two-faced Roman god to foreground the contradictory effects at the centre of all technologies (232). Wajcman notes this paradox in her research on mobile media and time, pointing out that mobile phones are just as likely to "save" time as to "consume" it (15). It was precisely this problematic of the complex interactions of the space, time and technology of work that was at stake in my research on the daily use of ICT by professional workers. In the context of changes to the location, activity and meaning of work, and with the multiplying array of old and new media technologies used by workers, how can the boundary and scope of work be determined? What are the implications of these shifting grounds for the experience and quality of work? Officing: A Material Practices Account of Office Work In the remaining article I introduce some of the key ideas and principles of a material practices account developed in my PhD, Officing: Professionals' Daily ICT Use and the Changing Space and Time of Work. This research took place between 2006 and 2007 focusing in-depth on the daily technology practices of twenty professional workers in a municipal council in Sydney and a unit of a global telecommunication company taking part in a trial of a new smart phone. Officing builds on efforts to develop a more accurate account of the space and time of work bringing into play the complex and highly mediated environment in which work takes place. It extends more recent practice-based, actor-network and cultural approaches that have, for some time, been moving towards a more co-constitutive and process-oriented approach to media and technology in society. Turning first to "bricolage" from the French bricole meaning something small and handmade, bricolage refers to the ways that individuals and groups borrow from existing cultural forms and meanings to create new uses, meanings and identities. Initially proposed by Levi-Strauss and then taken up by de Certeau, bricolage has been a useful concept within subculture and lifestyle studies to reveal the creative work performed on signs and meaning systems in forming cultural identities (cf. O'Sullivan et al.). Bricolage is also an important concept for understanding how meanings and uses are inscribed into forms in use rather than being read or activated off their design. This is the process of appropriation, through which both the object and the person are mutually shaped and users gain a sense of control and ownership (cf. Noble and Lupton; Lally; Silverstone and Haddon). The concept of bricolage highlights the improvisational qualities of appropriation and its status as work. A bricoleur is thus a person who constructs new meanings and forms by drawing on and assembling a wide range of resources at hand, sourced from multiple spheres of life. One of the problems with how bricolage and appropriation has been applied to date, notwithstanding the priority given to the domestic sphere, is the tendency to grant individuals and collectives too much control to stabilise the meanings and purposes of technologies. This problem is evident in the research drawing on the framework of "domestication" (cf. Silverstone and Haddon). In practice, the sheer volume of technologically-related issues encountered on a daily basis and the accompanying sense of frustration indicates there is no inevitable drift towards stability, nor are problems merely aberrational or trivial. Instead, daily limits to agency and attempts to overcome these are points at which meanings as well as uses are re-articulated and potentially re-invented. This is where "articulation work" comes in. Initially put forward by Anselm Strauss in 1985, articulation work has become an established analytical tool for informing technology design processes in such fields as Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Workplace Studies. In these, articulation work is narrowly defined to refer to the real time activities of cooperative work. It includes dealing with contingencies, keeping technologies and systems working and making adjustments to accommodate for problems (Suchman "Supporting", 407). In combination with naturalistic investigations, this concept has facilitated engagement with the increasingly complex technological and media environments of work. It has been a powerful tool for highlighting practices deemed unimportant but which are nevertheless crucial for getting work done. Articulation work, however, has the potential to be applied in a broader sense to explain the significance of the instability of technologies and the efforts to overcome these as transformative in themselves, part of the ongoing process of appropriation that goes well beyond individual tasks or technologies. With clear correspondences to actor-network theory, this expanded definition provides the basis for a new understanding of the office as a temporary and provisional condition of stability achieved through the daily creative and improvisational activities of workers. The office, then, is dependent on and inextricably bound up in its ongoing articulation and crucially, is not bound to a particular place or time. In the context of the large-scale transformations in work already discussed, this expanded definition of articulation work helps to; firstly, address how work is re-organised and re-rationalised through changes to the material conditions of work; secondly, identify the ongoing articulations that this entails and thirdly; understand the role of these articulations in the construction of the space and time of work. This expanded definition is achieved in the newly developed concept of officing. Officing describes a form of labour directed towards the production of a stable office platform. Significantly, one of the main characteristics of this work is that it often goes undetected by organisations as well as by the workers that perform it. As explained later, its "invisibility" is in part a function of its embodiment but also relates to the boundless nature of officing, taking place both inside and outside the workplace, in or out of work time. Officing is made up of a set of interwoven activities of three main types: connecting, synchronising and configuring. Connecting can be understood as aligning technical and social relations for the performance of work at a set time. Synchronising brings together and coordinates different times and temporal demands, for example, the time of "work" with "life" or the time "out in the field" with time "in the workplace". Configuring prepares the space of work, making a single technology or media environment work to some planned action or existing pattern of activity. To give an example of connecting: in the Citizens' Service Centre of the Council, Danielle's morning rituals involved a series of connections even before her work of advising customers begins: My day: get in, sit down, turn on the computer and then slowly open each software program that I will need to use…turn on the phone, key in my password, turn on the headphones and sit there and wait for the calls! (Humphry Officing, 123) These connections not only set up and initiate the performance of work but also mark Danielle's presence in her office. Through these activities, which in practice overlap and blur, the space and time of the office comes to appear as a somewhat separate and mostly invisible structure or infrastructure. The work that goes into making the office stable takes place around the boundary of work with implications for how this boundary is constituted. These efforts do not cluster around boundaries in any simple sense but become part of the process of boundary making, contributing to the construction of categories such as "work" and "life". So, for example, for staff in the smart phone trial, the phone had become their main source of information and communication. Turning their smart phone off, or losing connectivity had ramifications that cascaded throughout their lifeworld. On the one hand, this lead to the breakdown of the distinction between "work" and "life" and a sense of "ever-presence", requiring constant and vigilant "boundary work" (cf. Nippert-Eng). On the other hand, this same state also enabled workers to respond to demands in their own time and across multiple boundaries, giving workers a sense of flexibility, control and of being "in sync". Connecting, configuring and synchronising are activities performed by bodies, producing an embodied transformation. In the tradition of phenomenology, most notably in the works of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and more recently Ihde, embodiment is used to explain the relationship between subjects and objects. This concept has since been developed to be understood as not residing in the body but as spread through social, material and discursive arrangements (cf. Haraway, "Situated" and Simians; Henke; Suchman, "Figuring"). Tracing efforts towards making the office stable is thus a way of uncovering how the body, as a constitutive part of a larger arrangement or network, is formed through embodiment, how it gains its competencies, social meanings and ultimately, how workers gain a sense of what it means to be a professional. So, in the smart phone trial, staff managed their connections by replying immediately to their voice, text and data messages. This immediacy not only acted as proof of their presence in the office. It also signalled their commitment to their office: their active participation and value to the organisation and their readiness to perform when called on. Importantly, this embodied transformation also helps to explain how officing becomes an example of "invisible work" (cf. Star and Strauss). Acts of connecting, synchronising and configuring become constituted and forgotten in and through bodies, spaces and times. Through their repeated performance these acts become habits, a transparent means through which the environment of work is navigated in the form of skills and techniques, configurations and routines. In conclusion, researching work in contemporary societies means confronting its marginalisation within cultural research and developing ways to comprehend and measure the interaction of space, time and the ever-multiplying array of media technologies. Officing provides a way to do this by shifting to an understanding of the workplace as a contingent product of work itself. The strength of this approach is that it highlights the creative and ongoing work of individuals on their media infrastructures. It also helps to identify and describe work activities that are not neatly contained in a workplace, thus adding to their invisibility. The invisibility of these practices can have significant impacts on workers: magnifying feelings of time pressure and a need to work faster, longer and harder even as discrete technologies are utilised to save time. In this way, officing exposes some of the additional contributions to the changing experience and quality of work as well as to the construction of everyday domains. Officing supports an evaluation of claims of productivity and work-life balance in relation to new media technologies. In the smart phone trial, contrary to an assumed increase in productivity, mobility of work was achieved at the expense of productivity. Making the mobile office stable—getting it up and running, keeping it working in changing environments and meeting expectations of speed and connectivity—took up time, resulting in an overall productivity loss and demanding more "boundary work". In spite of their adaptability and flexibility, staff tended to overwork to counteract this loss. This represented a major shift in the burden of effort in the production of office forms away from the organisation and towards the individual. Finally, though not addressed here in any detail, officing could conceivably have practical uses for designing more sustainable office environments that better support the work process and the balance of work and life. Thus, by accounting more accurately for the resource requirements of work, organisations can reduce the daily effort, space and time taken up by employees on their work environments. In any case, what is clear, is the ongoing need to continue a cultural research agenda on work—to address the connections between transformations in work and the myriad material practices that individuals perform in going about their daily work. References Arnold, Michael. "On the Phenomenology of Technology: The 'Janus-Faces' of Mobile Phones." Information and Organization 13.4 (2003): 231–56. Australian Bureau of Statistics. "6275.0 - Locations of Work, Nov 2008." Australian Bureau of Statistics, 8 May 2009. 20 May 2009 ‹http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/6275.0›. Bauman, Zygmunt. Freedom. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989. Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1996. Chesters, Jennifer, Janeen Baxter, and Mark Western. "Paid and Unpaid Work in Australian Households: Towards an Understanding of the New Gender Division of Labour." Familes through Life - 10th Australian Institute of Families Studies Conference, 9-11th July 2008, Melbourne: AIFS, 2008. Delphy, Christine. Close to Home: A Materialist Analysis of Women's Oppression. Amherst MA: U of Massachusetts, 1984. Edwards, Paul, and Judy Wajcman. The Politics of Working Life. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. Felstead, Alan, Nick Jewson, and Sally Walters. Changing Places of Work. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Folbre, Nancy. "Exploitation Comes Home: A Critique of the Marxian Theory of Family Labor." Cambridge Journal of Economics 6.4 (1982): 317-29. Haraway, Donna. "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective." Feminist Studies 14.3 (1988): 575-99. –––. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London, Free Association Books, 1991. Henke, Christopher. "The Mechanics of Workplace Order: Toward a Sociology of Repair." Berkeley Journal of Sociology 44 (2000): 55-81. Humphry, Justine. Officing: Professionals' Daily ICT Use and the Changing Space and Time of Work. Dissertation, University of Western Sydney. 2010. Lally, Elaine. At Home with Computers. Oxford, New York: Berg, 2002. Nippert-Eng, Christena E. Home and Work: Negotiating Boundaries through Everyday Life. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996. Noble, Greg. "Everyday Work." Interpreting Everyday Culture. Ed. Fran Martin. New York: Hodder Arnold, 2004. 87-102. Noble, Greg, and Deborah Lupton. "Consuming Work: Computers, Subjectivity and Appropriation in the University Workplace." The Sociological Review 46.4 (1998): 803-27. –––. "Mine/Not Mine: Appropriating Personal Computers in the Academic Workplace." Journal of Sociology 38.1 (2002): 5-23. O'Sullivan, Tim, John Hartley, Danny Saunders, Martin Montgomery, and John Fiske. Key Concepts in Communication and Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 1994. Pocock, Barbara. The Work/Life Collision: What Work Is Doing to Australians and What to Do about It. Sydney: The Federation P, 2003. Ritzer, George, and Nathan Jurgenson. "Production, Consumption, Prosumption." Journal of Consumer Culture 10.1 (2010): 13-36. Sheller, Mimi, and John Urry. "Mobile Transformations of 'Public' and 'Private' Life." Theory, Culture & Society 20.3 (2003): 107-25. Silverstone, Roger, and Leslie Haddon. "Design and the Domestication of Information and Communication Technologies: Technical Change and Everyday Life." Communication by Design: The Politics of Information and Communication Technologies. Eds. Roger Silverstone and Robin Mansell. Oxford: U of Oxford P, 1996. 44-74. Skinner, Natalie, and Barbara Pocock. "Work, Life and Workplace Culture: The Australian Work and Life Index (AWALI) 2008." Adelaide: The Centre for Work and Life, Hawke Research Institute, University of South Australia 2008 ‹http://www.unisa.edu.au/hawkeinstitute/cwl/default.asp›.Sorenson, Knut H., and Merete Lie. Making Technology Our Own? Domesticating Technologies into Everyday Life. Oslo: Scandinavian UP, 1996.Star, Susan L. "The Sociology of the Invisible: The Primacy of Work in the Writings of Anselm Strauss." Social Organization and Social Process: Essays in Honor of Anselm Strauss. New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1991. 265-83. Star, Susan L., and Anselm Strauss. "Layers of Silence, Arenas of Voice: The Ecology of Visible and Invisible Work." Computer Supported Cooperative Work 8 (1999): 9-30. Strangleman, Timothy. "Sociological Futures and the Sociology of Work." Sociological Research Online 10.4 (2005). 5 Nov. 2005 ‹http://www.socresonline.org.uk/10/4/strangleman.html›.Strauss, Anselm. "Work and the Division of Labor." The Sociological Quarterly 26 (1985): 1-19. Suchman, Lucy A. "Figuring Personhood in Sciences of the Artificial." Department of Sociology, Lancaster University. 1 Nov. 2004. 18 Jun. 2005 ‹http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/sociology/papers/suchman-figuring-personhood.pdf›–––. "Supporting Articulation Work." Computerization and Controversy: Value Conflicts and Social Choices. Ed. Rob Kling. San Diego: Academic P, 1995. 407-423.Urry, John. Sociology beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century. London: Routledge, 2000. Van Dijk, Jan. The Network Society: Social Aspects of New Media. London: Thousand Oaks, 2006. Wajcman, Judy. "Life in the Fast Lane? Towards a Sociology of Technology and Time." 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If thinking about home necessitates thinking about “place, space, scale, identity and power,” as Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling (2) suggest, then thinking about home themes in popular music makes no less a conceptual demand. Song lyrics and titles most often invoke dominant readings such as intimacy, privacy, nurture, refuge, connectedness and shared belonging, all issues found within Blunt and Dowling’s analysis. The spatial imaginary to which these authors refer takes vivid shape through repertoires of songs dealing with houses and other specific sites, vast and distant homelands, communities or, less tangibly, geographical or cultural settings where particular relationships can be found, supporting Blunt and Dowling’s major claim that home is complex, multi-scalar and multi-layered. Shelley Mallett’s claim that the term home “functions as a repository for complex, inter-related and at times contradictory socio-cultural ideas about people’s relationships with one another…and with places, spaces and things” (84) is borne out heavily by popular music where, for almost every sentiment that the term home evokes, it seems an opposite sentiment is evoked elsewhere: familiarity versus alienation, acceptance versus rejection, love versus loneliness. Making use of conceptual groundwork by Blunt and Dowling and by Mallett and others, the following discussion canvasses a range of meanings that home has had for a variety of songwriters, singers and audiences over the years. Intended as merely partial and exploratory rather than exhaustive, it provides some insights into contrasts, ironies and relationships between home and gender, diaspora and loss. While it cannot cover all the themes, it gives prominence to the major recurring themes and a variety of important contexts that give rise to these home themes. Most prominent among those songs dealing with home has been a nostalgia and yearning, while issues of how women may have viewed the home within which they have often been restricted to a narrowly defined private sphere are almost entirely absent. This serves as a reminder that, while some themes can be conducive to the medium of popular music, others may be significantly less so. Songs may speak directly of experience but not necessarily of all experiences and certainly not of all experiences equally. B. Lee Cooper claims “most popular culture ventures rely upon formula-oriented settings and phrasings to attract interest, to spur mental or emotional involvement” (93). Notions of home have generally proved both formulaic and emotionally-charged. Commonly understood patterns of meaning and other hegemonic references generally operate more successfully than alternative reference points. Those notions with the strongest cultural currency can be conveyed succinctly and denote widely agreed upon meanings. Lyrics can seldom afford to be deeply analytical but generally must be concise and immediately evocative. Despite that, this discussion will point to diverse meanings carried by songs about home. Blunt and Dowling point out that “a house is not necessarily nor automatically a home” (3). The differences are strongly apparent in music, with only a few songs relating to houses compared with homes. When Malvina Reynolds wrote in 1962 of “little boxes, on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky-tacky,” she was certainly referring to houses, not homes, thus making it easier to bypass the relationships which might have vested the inhabitants with more warmth and individuality than their houses, in this song about conformity and homogeneity. The more complex though elusive concept of home, however, is more likely to feature in love songs and to emanate from diasporal songs. Certainly these two genres are not mutually exclusive. Irish songs are particularly noteworthy for adding to the array of music written by, or representational of, those who have been forced away from home by war, poverty, strife or other circumstances. They manifest identities of displacement rather than of placement, as studied by Bronwen Walter, looking back at rather than from within their spatial imaginary. Phil Eva claims that during the 19th Century Irish émigrés sang songs of exile in Manchester’s streets. Since many in England’s industrial towns had been uprooted from their homes, the songs found rapport with street audiences and entered popular culture. For example, the song Killarney, of hazy origins but thought to date back to as early as 1850, tells of Killarney’s lakes and fells, Emerald isles and winding bays; Mountain paths and woodland dells… ...her [nature’s] home is surely there. As well as anthropomorphising nature and giving it a home, the song suggests a specifically geographic sense of home. Galway Bay, written by A. Fahy, does likewise, as do many other Irish songs of exile which link geography with family, kin and sometimes culture to evoke a sense of home. The final verse of Cliffs of Doneen gives a sense of both people and place making up home: Fare thee well to Doneen, fare thee well for a while And to all the kind people I’m leaving behind To the streams and the meadows where late I have been And the high rocky slopes round the cliffs of Doneen. Earlier Irish songs intertwine home with political issues. For example, Tho’ the Last Glimpse of Erin vows to Erin that “In exile thy bosum shall still be my home.” Such exile resulted from a preference of fleeing Ireland rather than bowing to English oppression, which then included a prohibition on Irish having moustaches or certain hairstyles. Thomas Moore is said to have set the words of the song to the air Coulin which itself referred to an Irish woman’s preference for her “Coulin” (a long-haired Irish youth) to the English (Nelson-Burns). Diasporal songs have continued, as has their political edge, as evidenced by global recognition of songs such as Bayan Ko (My Country), written by José Corazon de Jesus in 1929, out of love and concern for the Philippines and sung among Filipinos worldwide. Robin Cohen outlines a set of criteria for diaspora that includes a shared belief in the possibility of return to home, evident in songs such as the 1943 Welsh song A Welcome in the Hillside, in which a Welsh word translating roughly as a yearning to return home, hiraeth, is used: We’ll kiss away each hour of hiraeth When you come home again to Wales. However, the immensely popular I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen, not of Irish origin but written by Thomas Westendorf of Illinois in 1875, suggests that such emotions can have a resonance beyond the diaspora. Anti-colonial sentiments about home can also be expressed by long-time inhabitants, as Harry Belafonte demonstrated in Island in the Sun: This is my island in the sun Where my people have toiled since time begun. Though I may sail on many a sea, Her shores will always be home to me. War brought a deluge of sentimental songs lamenting separation from home and loved ones, just as likely to be parents and siblings as sweethearts. Radios allowed wider audiences and greater popularity for these songs. If separation had brought a longing previously, the added horrors of war presented a stronger contrast between that which the young soldiers were missing and that which they were experiencing. Both the First and Second World Wars gave rise to songs long since sung which originated in such separations, but these also had a strong sense of home as defined by the nationalism that has for over a century given the contours of expectations of soldiers. Focusing on home, these songs seldom speak of the details of war. Rather they are specific about what the singers have left behind and what they hope to return to. Songs of home did not have to be written specifically for the war effort nor for overseas troops. Irving Berlin’s 1942 White Christmas, written for a film, became extremely popular with US troops during WWII, instilling a sense of home that related to familiarities and festivities. Expressing a sense of home could be specific and relate to regions or towns, as did I’m Goin’ Back Again to Yarrawonga, or it could refer to any home, anywhere where there were sons away fighting. Indeed the American Civil War song When Johnny Comes Marching Home, written by Patrick Sarsfield Gilmour, was sung by both Northerners and Southerners, so adaptable was it, with home remarkably unspecified and undescribed. The 1914 British song Keep the Home Fires Burning by Ivor Novello and Lena Ford was among those that evoked a connection between home and the military effort and helped establish a responsibility on those at home to remain optimistic: Keep the Homes fires burning While your hearts are yearning, Though your lads are far away They dream of home, There’s a silver lining Through the dark clouds shining, Turn the dark clouds inside out, Till the boys come Home. No space exists in this song for critique of the reasons for war, nor of a role for women other than that of homemaker and moral guardian. It was women’s duty to ensure men enlisted and home was rendered a private site for emotional enlistment for a presumed public good, though ironically also a point of personal hope where the light of love burned for the enlistees’ safe return. Later songs about home and war challenged these traditional notions. Two serve as examples. One is Pink Floyd’s brief musical piece of the 1970s, Bring the Boys Back Home, whose words of protest against the American war on Viet Nam present home, again, as a site of safety but within a less conservative context. Home becomes implicated in a challenge to the prevailing foreign policy and the interests that influence it, undermining the normal public sphere/private sphere distinction. The other more complex song is Judy Small’s Mothers, Daughters, Wives, from 1982, set against a backdrop of home. Small eloquently describes the dynamics of the domestic space and how women understood their roles in relation to the First and Second World Wars and the Viet Nam War. Reinforcing that “The materialities and imaginaries of home are closely connected” (Blunt and Dowling 188), Small sings of how the gold frames held the photographs that mothers kissed each night And the doorframe held the shocked and silent strangers from the fight. Small provides a rare musical insight into the disjuncture between the men who left the domestic space and those who return to it, and we sense that women may have borne much of the brunt of those awful changes. The idea of domestic bliss is also challenged, though from the returned soldier’s point of view, in Redgum’s 1983 song I Was Only Nineteen, written by group member John Schuman. It touches on the tragedy of young men thrust into war situations and the horrific after-affects for them, which cannot be shrugged off on return to home. The nurturing of home has limits but the privacy associated with the domestic sphere has often concealed the violence and mental anguish that happens away from public view. But by this time most of the songs referring to home were dominated once more by sentimental love, often borne of travel as mobility rose. Journeys help “establish the thresholds and boundaries of home” and can give rise to “an idealized, ideological and ethnocentric view of home” (Mallett 78). Where previously songsters had sung of leaving home in exile or for escape from poverty, lyrics from the 1960s onwards often suggested that work had removed people from loved ones. It could be work on a day-by-day basis, as in A Hard Day’s Night from the 1964 film of the same name, where the Beatles illuminate differences between the public sphere of work and the private sphere to which they return: When I’m home, everything seems to be alright, When I’m home feeling you holding me tight, tight, yeah and reiterated by Paul McCartney in Every Night: And every night that day is through But tonight I just want to stay in And be with you. Lyrics such as these and McCartney’s call to be taken “...home to the Mull of Kintyre,” singled him out for his home-and-hearth messages (Dempsey). But work might involve longer absences and thus more deepfelt loneliness. Simon and Garfunkel’s exemplary Homeward Bound starkly portrays a site of “away-ness”: I’m sittin’ in the railway station, got a ticket for my destination… Mundaneness, monotony and predictability contrast with the home to which the singer’s thoughts are constantly escaping. The routine is familiar but the faces are those of strangers. Home here is, again, not simply a domicile but the warmth of those we know and love. Written at a railway station, Homeward Bound echoes sentiments almost identical to those of (Leaving on a) Jet Plane, written by John Denver at an airport in 1967. Denver also co-wrote (Take Me Home) Country Roads, where, in another example of anthropomorphism as a tool of establishing a strong link, he asks to be taken home to the place I belong West Virginia, mountain momma, Take me home, Country Roads. The theme has recurred in numerous songs since, spawning examples such as Darin and Alquist’s When I Get Home, Chris Daughtry’s Home, Michael Bublé’s Home and Will Smith’s Ain’t No Place Like Home, where, in an opening reminiscent of Homeward Bound, the singer is Sitting in a hotel room A thousand miles away from nowhere Sloped over a chair as I stare… Furniture from home, on the other hand, can be used to evoke contentment and bliss, as demonstrated by George Weiss and Bob Thiele’s song The Home Fire, in which both kin and the objects of home become charged with meaning: All of the folks that I love are there I got a date with my favourite chair Of course, in regard to earlier songs especially, while the traveller associates home with love, security and tenderness, back at home the waiting one may have had feelings more of frustration and oppression. One is desperate to get back home, but for all we know the other may be desperate to get out of home or to develop a life more meaningful than that which was then offered to women. If the lot of homemakers was invisible to national economies (Waring), it seemed equally invisible to mainstream songwriters. This reflects the tradition that “Despite home being generally considered a feminine, nurturing space created by women themselves, they often lack both authority and a space of their own within this realm” (Mallett 75). Few songs have offered the perspective of the one at home awaiting the return of the traveller. One exception is the Seekers’ 1965 A World of Our Own but, written by Tom Springfield, the words trilled by Judith Durham may have been more of a projection of the traveller’s hopes and expectations than a true reflection of the full experiences of housebound women of the day. Certainly, the song reinforces connections between home and intimacy and privacy: Close the door, light the lights. We’re stayin’ home tonight, Far away from the bustle and the bright city lights. Let them all fade away, just leave us alone And we’ll live in a world of our own. This also strongly supports Gaston Bachelard’s claim that one’s house in the sense of a home is one’s “first universe, a real cosmos” (qtd. in Blunt and Dowling 12). But privacy can also be a loneliness when home is not inhabited by loved ones, as in the lyrics of Don Gibson’s 1958 Oh, Lonesome Me, where Everybody’s going out and having fun I’m a fool for staying home and having none. Similar sentiments emerge in Debbie Boone’s You Light up My Life: So many nights I’d sit by my window Waiting for someone to sing me his song. Home in these situations can be just as alienating as the “away” depicted as so unfriendly by Homeward Bound’s strangers’ faces and the “million people” who still leave Michael Bublé feeling alone. Yet there are other songs that depict “away” as a prison made of freedom, insinuating that the lack of a home and consequently of the stable love and commitment presumably found there is a sad situation indeed. This is suggested by the lilting tune, if not by the lyrics themselves, in songs such as Wandrin’ Star from the musical Paint Your Wagon and Ron Miller’s I’ve Never Been to Me, which has both a male and female version with different words, reinforcing gendered experiences. The somewhat conservative lyrics in the female version made it a perfect send-up song in the 1994 film Priscilla: Queen of the Desert. In some songs the absentee is not a traveller but has been in jail. In Tie a Yellow Ribbon round the Ole Oak Tree, an ex-inmate states “I’m comin’ home. I’ve done my time.” Home here is contingent upon the availability and forgivingness of his old girl friend. Another song juxtaposing home with prison is Tom Jones’ The Green, Green Grass of Home in which the singer dreams he is returning to his home, to his parents, girlfriend and, once again, an old oak tree. However, he awakes to find he was dreaming and is about to be executed. His body will be taken home and placed under the oak tree, suggesting some resigned sense of satisfaction that he will, after all, be going home, albeit in different circumstances. Death and home are thus sometimes linked, with home a euphemism for the former, as suggested in many spirituals, with heaven or an afterlife being considered “going home”. The reverse is the case in the haunting Bring Him Home of the musical Les Misérables. With Marius going off to the barricades and the danger involved, Jean Valjean prays for the young man’s safe return and that he might live. Home is connected here with life, safety and ongoing love. In a number of songs about home and absence there is a sense of home being a place where morality is gently enforced, presumably by women who keep men on the straight and narrow, in line with one of the women’s roles of colonial Australia, researched by Anne Summers. These songs imply that when men wander from home, their morals also go astray. Wild Rover bemoans Oh, I’ve been a wild rover for many a year, and I’ve spent all my money on whiskey and beer… There is the resolve in the chorus, however, that home will have a reforming influence. Gene Pitney’s Twenty-Four Hours from Tulsa poses the dangers of distance from a wife’s influence, while displaying opposition to the sentimental yearning of so many other songs: Dearest darlin’, I have to write to say that I won’t be home anymore ‘cause something happened to me while I was drivin’ home And I’m not the same anymore Class as well as gender can be a debated issue in meanings attached to home, as evident in several songs that take a more jaundiced view of home, seeing it as a place from which to escape. The Animals’ powerful We Gotta Get Outta This Place clearly suggests a life of drudgery in a home town or region. Protectively, the lyrics insist “Girl, there’s a better life for me and you” but it has to be elsewhere. This runs against the grain of other British songs addressing poverty or a working class existence as something that comes with its own blessings, all to do with an area identified as home. These traits may be loyalty, familiarity or a refusal to judge and involve identities of placement rather than of displacement in, for instance, Gerry and the Pacemakers’ Ferry Cross the Mersey: People around every corner, they seem to smile and say “We don’t care what your name is, boy. We’ll never send you away.” This bears out Blunt and Dowling’s claim that “people’s senses of themselves are related to and produced through lived and metaphorical experiences of home” (252). It also resonates with some of the region-based identity and solidarity issues explored a short time later by Paul Willis in his study of working class youth in Britain, which help to inform how a sense of home can operate to constrict consciousness, ideas and aspirations. Identity features strongly in other songs about home. Several years after Neil Young recorded his 1970 song Southern Man about racism in the south of the USA, the group Lynyrd Skynyrd, responded with Sweet Home Alabama. While the meaning of its lyrics are still debated, there is no debate about the way in which the song has been embraced, as I recently discovered first-hand in Tennessee. A banjo-and-fiddle band performing the song during a gig virtually brought down the house as the predominantly southern audience clapped, whopped and stamped its feet. The real meanings of home were found not in the lyrics but in the audience’s response. Wally Johnson and Bob Brown’s 1975 Home Among the Gum Trees is a more straightforward ode to home, with lyrics that prescribe a set of non-commodified values. It is about simplicity and the right to embrace a lifestyle that includes companionship, leisure and an enjoyment of and appreciation of nature, all threatened seriously in the three decades since the song’s writing. The second verse in which large shopping complexes – and implicitly the consumerism they encourage – are eschewed (“I’d trade it all tomorrow for a little bush retreat where the kookaburras call”), is a challenge to notions of progress and reflects social movements of the day, The Green Bans Movement, for instance, took a broader and more socially conscientious attitude towards home and community, putting forward alternative sets of values and insisting people should have a say in the social and aesthetic construction of their neighbourhoods as well as the impacts of their labour (Mundey). Ironically, the song has gone on to become the theme song for a TV show about home gardens. With a strong yet more vague notion of home, Peter Allen’s I Still Call Australia Home, was more prone to commodification and has been adopted as a promotional song for Qantas. Nominating only the desire to travel and the love of freedom as Australian values, both politically and socially innocuous within the song’s context, this catchy and uplifting song, when not being used as an advertisement, paradoxically works for a “diaspora” of Australians who are not in exile but have mostly travelled for reasons of pleasure or professional or financial gain. Another paradox arises from the song Home on the Range, dating back to the 19th century at a time when the frontier was still a strong concept in the USA and people were simultaneously leaving homes and reminiscing about home (Mechem). Although it was written in Kansas, the lyrics – again vague and adaptable – were changed by other travellers so that versions such as Colorado Home and My Arizona Home soon abounded. In 1947 Kansas made Home on the Range its state song, despite there being very few buffalo left there, thus highlighting a disjuncture between the modern Kansas and “a home where the buffalo roam” as described in the song. These themes, paradoxes and oppositional understandings of home only scratch the surface of the wide range of claims that are made on home throughout popular music. It has been shown that home is a flexible concept, referring to homelands, regions, communities and private houses. While predominantly used to evoke positive feelings, mostly with traditional views of the relationships that lie within homes, songs also raise challenges to notions of domesticity, the rights of those inhabiting the private sphere and the demarcation between the private and public spheres. Songs about home reflect contexts and challenges of their respective eras and remind us that vigorous discussion takes place about and within homes. The challenges are changing. Where many women once felt restrictively tied to the home – and no doubt many continue to do so – many women and men are now struggling to rediscover spatial boundaries, with production and consumption increasingly impinging upon relationships that have so frequently given the term home its meaning. With evidence that we are working longer hours and that home life, in whatever form, is frequently suffering (Beder, Hochschild), the discussion should continue. In the words of Sam Cooke, Bring it on home to me! References Bacheland, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1994. Beder, Sharon. Selling the Work Ethic: From Puritan Pulpit to Corporate PR. London: Zed Books, 2000. Blunt, Alison, and Robyn Dowling. Home. London: Routledge, 2006. Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. London: UCL Press, 1997. Cooper, B. Lee. “Good Timin’: Searching for Meaning in Clock Songs.” Popular Music and Society 30.1 (Feb. 2007): 93-106. Dempsey, J.M. “McCartney at 60: A Body of Work Celebrating Home and Hearth.” Popular Music and Society 27.1 (Feb. 2004): 27-40. Eva, Phil. “Home Sweet Home? The Culture of ‘Exile’ in Mid-Victorian Popular Song.” Popular Music 16.2 (May 1997): 131-150. Hochschild, Arlie. The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work. New York: Metropolitan/Holt, 1997. Mallett, Sonia. “Understanding Home: A Critical Review of the Literature.” The Sociological Review 52.1 (2004): 62-89. Mechem, Kirke, “The Story of ‘Home on the Range’.” Reprint from the Kansas Historical Quarterly (Nov. 1949). Topeka, Kansas: Kansas State Historical Society. 28 May 2007 http://www.emporia.edu/cgps/tales/nov2003.html>. Mundey, Jack. Green Bans and Beyond. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1981. Nelson-Burns, Lesley. Folk Music of England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and America. 29 May 2007 http://www.contemplator.com/ireland/thoerin.html>. Summers, Anne. Damned Whores and God’s Police: The Colonization of Women in Australia. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975. Walter, Bronwen. Outsiders Inside: Whiteness, Place and Irish Women. London: Routledge, 2001. Waring, Marilyn. Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women Are Worth. Wellington, NZ: Allen & Unwin, 1988. Willis, Paul. Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. New York: Columbia UP, 1977. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Varney, Wendy. "Homeward Bound or Housebound?: Themes of Home in Popular Music." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/16-varney.php>. APA Style Varney, W. (Aug. 2007) "Homeward Bound or Housebound?: Themes of Home in Popular Music," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/16-varney.php>.

Introduction: Artist Villages in Beijing Many of the most renowned sites of Beijing are found in the inner-city districts of Dongcheng and Xicheng: for instance, the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, the Lama Temple, the National Theatre, the Central Opera Academy, the Bell Tower, the Drum Tower, the Imperial College, and the Confucius Temple. However, in the past decade a new attraction has been added to the visitor “must-see” list in Beijing. The 798 Art District originated as an artist village within abandoned factory buildings at Dashanzi, right between the city’s Central Business District and the open outer rural space on Beijing’s north-east. It is arguably the most striking symbol of China’s contemporary art scene. The history of the 798 Art District is by now well known (Keane), so this paper will provide a short summary of its evolution. Of more concern is the relationship between the urban fringe and what Howard Becker has called “art worlds.” By art worlds, Becker refers to the multitude of agents that contribute to a final work of art: for instance, people who provide canvasses, frames, and art supplies; critics and intermediaries; and the people who run exhibition services. To the art-world list in Beijing we need to add government officials and developers. To date there are more than 100 artist communities or villages in Beijing; almost all are located in the city’s outskirts. In particular, a high-powered art centre outside the city of Beijing has recently established a global reputation. Songzhuang is situated in outer Tongzhou District, some 30 kilometres east of Tiananmen Square. The Beijing Municipal Government officially classifies Songzhuang as the Capital Art District (CAD) or “the Songzhuang Original Art Cluster.” The important difference between 798 and Songzhuang is that, whereas the former has become a centre for retail and art galleries, Songzhuang operates as an arts production centre for experimental art, with less focus on commercial art. The destiny of the artistic communities is closely related to urban planning policies that either try to shut them down or protect them. In this paper I will take a close look at three artist villages: Yuanmingyuan, 798, and Songzhuang. In tracing the evolution of the three artist villages, I will shed some light on artists’ lives in city fringes. I argue that these outer districts provide creative industries with a new opportunity for development. This is counter to the conventional wisdom that central urban areas are the ideal locality for creative industries. Accordingly, this argument needs to be qualified: some types of creative work are more suitable to rural and undeveloped areas. The visual art “industry” is one of these. Inner and Outer Worlds Urban historians contend that innovation is more likely to happen in inner urban areas because of intensive interactions between people (Jacobs). City life has been associated with the development of creative industries and economic benefits brought about by the interaction of creative classes. In short, the argument is that cities, or, more specifically, urban areas are primary economic entities (Montgomery) whereas outer suburbs are uncreative and dull (Florida, "Cities"). The conventional wisdom is that talented creative people are attracted to the creative milieu in cities: universities, book shops, cafes, museums, theatres etc. These are both the hard and the soft infrastructure of modern cities. They illustrate diversified built forms, lifestyles and experiences (Lorenzen and Frederiksen; Florida, Rise; Landry; Montgomery; Leadbeater and Oakley). The assumption that inner-city density is the cradle of creative industries has encountered critique. Empirical studies in Australia have shown that creative occupations are found in relatively high densities in urban fringes. The point made in several studies is that suburbia has been neglected by scholars and policy makers and may have potential for future development (Gibson and Brennan-Horley; Commission; Collis, Felton, and Graham). Moreover, some have argued that the practice of constructing inner city enclaves may be leading to homogenized and prescriptive geographies (Collis, Felton, and Graham; Kotkin). As Jane Jacobs has indicated, it is not only density of interactions but diversity that attracts and accommodates economic growth in cities. However, the spatiality of creative industries varies across different sectors. For example, media companies and advertising agencies are more likely to be found in the inner city, whereas most visual artists prefer working in the comparatively quiet and loosely-structured outskirts. Nevertheless, the logic embodied in thinking around the distinctions between “urbanism” and “suburbanism” pays little attention to this issue, although both schools acknowledge the causal relationship between locality and creativity. According to Drake, empirical evidence shows that the function of locality is not only about encouraging interactions between SMEs (small to medium enterprises) within clusters which can generate creativity, but also a catalyst for individual creativity (Drake). Therefore for policy makers in China, the question here is how to plan or prepare a better space to accommodate creative professionals’ needs in different sectors while making the master plan. This question is particularly urgent to the Chinese government, which is undertaking a massive urbanization transition throughout the country. In placing a lens on Beijing, it is important to note the distinctive features of its politics, forms of social structure, and climate. As Zhu has described it, Beijing has spread in a symmetrical structure. The reasons have much to do with ancient history. According to Zhu, the city which was planned in the era of Genghis Khan was constituted by four layers or enclosures, with the emperor at the centre, surrounded by the gentry and other populations distributed outwards according to wealth, status, and occupation. The outer layer accommodated many lower social classes, including itinerant artists, musicians, and merchants. This ”outer city” combined with open rural space. The system of enclosures is carried on in today’s city planning of Beijing. Nowadays Beijing is most commonly described by its ring roads (Mars and Hornsby). However, despite the existing structure, new approaches to urban policy have resulted in a great deal of flux. The emergence of new landscapes such as semi-urbanized villages, rural urban syndicates (chengxiang jiehebu), and villages-within-cities (Mars and Hornsby 290) illustrate this flux. These new types of landscapes, which don’t correspond to the suburban concept that we find in the US or Australia, serve to represent and mediate the urban-rural relationship in China. The outer villages also reflect an old tradition of “recluse” (yin shi), which since the Wei and Jin Dynasties allowed intellectuals to withdraw themselves from the temporal world of the city and live freely in the mountains. The Lost Artistic Utopia: Yuanmingyuan Artist Village Yuanmingyuan, also known as the Ming Dynasty summer palace, is located in Haidian District in the north-west of Beijing. Haidian has transformed from an outer district of Beijing into one of its flourishing urban districts since the mid-1980s. Haidian’s success is largely due to the electronics industry which developed from spin-offs from Peking University, Tsinghua University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences in the 1980s. This led to the rapid emergence of Zhongguancun, sometimes referred to as China’s Silicon Valley. However there is another side of Haidian’s transformation. As the first graduates came out of Chinese Academies of the Arts following the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), creative lifestyles became available. Some people quit jobs at state-owned institutions and chose to go freelance, which was unimaginable in China under the former regime of Mao Zedong. By 1990, the earliest “artist village” emerged around the Yuanmingyuan accommodating artists from around China. The first site was Fuyuanmen village. Artists living and working there proudly called their village “West Village” in China, comparing it to the Greenwich Village in New York. At that time they were labelled as “vagabonds” (mangliu) since they had no family in Beijing, and no stable job or income. Despite financial difficulties, the Yuanmingyuan artist village was a haven for artists. They were able to enjoy a liberating and vigorous environment by being close to the top universities in Beijing[1]. Access to ideas was limited in China at that time so this proximity was a key ingredient. According to an interview by He Lu, the Yuanmingyuan artist village gave artists a sense of belonging which went far beyond geographic identification as a marginal group unwelcomed by conservative urban society. Many issues arose along with the growth of the artist village. The non-traditional lifestyle and look of these artists were deemed abnormal by many of the general public; the way of their expression and behaviour was too extreme to be accepted by the mainstream in what was ultimately a political district; they were a headache for local police who saw them as troublemakers; moreover, their contact with the western world was a sensitive issue for the government at that time. Suddenly, the village was closed by the government in 1993. Although the Yuanmingyuan artist village existed for only a few years, it is of significance in China’s contemporary art history. It is the birth place of the cynical realism movement as well as the genesis of Fang Lijun, Zhang Xiaogang and Yue Mingjun, now among the most successful Chinese contemporary artists in global art market. The Starting Point of Art Industry: 798 and Songzhuang After the Yuanmingyuan artist village was shut down in 1993, artists moved to two locations in the east of Beijing to escape from the government and embrace the free space they longed for. One was 798, an abandoned electronic switching factory in Beijing’s north-east urban fringe area; the other was Songzhuang in Tongzhou District, a further twenty kilometres east. Both of these sites would be included in the first ten official creative clusters by Beijing municipal government in 2006. But instead of simply being substitutes for the Yuanmingyuan artist village, both have developed their own cultures, functioning and influencing artists’ lives in different ways. Songzhuang is located in Tongzhou which is an outer district in Beijing’s east. Songzhuang was initially a rural location; its livelihood was agriculture and industry. Just before the closing down of the Yuanmingyuan village, several artists including Fang Lijun moved to this remote quiet village. Through word of mouth, more artists followed their steps. There are about four thousand registered artists currently living in Songzhuang now; it is already the biggest visual art community in Beijing. An artistic milieu and a local sense of place have grown with the increasing number of artists. The local district government invests in building impressive exhibition spaces and promoting art in order to bring in more tourists, investors and artists. Compared with Songzhuang, 798 enjoys a favourable location along the airport expressway, between the capital airport and the CBD of Beijing. The unused electronics plant was initially rented as classrooms by the China Central Academy of Fine Arts in the 1990s. Then several artists moved their studios and workshops to the area upon eviction from the Yuanmingyuan village. Until 2002 the site was just a space to rent cheap work space, a factor that has stimulated many art districts globally (Zukin). From that time the resident artists began to plan how to establish a contemporary art district in China. Led by Huang Rui, a leading visual artist, the “798 collective” launched arts events and festivals, notably a “rebuilding 798” project of 2003. More galleries, cafés, bars, and restaurants began to set up, culminating in a management takeover by the Chaoyang District government with the Seven Stars Group[2] prior to the Beijing Olympics. The area now provides massive tax revenue to the local and national government. Nonetheless, both 798 and Songzhuang face problems which reflect the conflict between artists’ attachment to fringe areas and the government’s urbanization approach. 798 can hardly be called an artist production village now due to the local government’s determination to exploit cultural tourism. Over 50 percent of enterprises and people working in 798 now identify 798 as a tourism area rather than an art or “creative” cluster (Liu). Heavy commercialization has greatly disappointed many leading artists. The price for renting space has gone beyond the affordability of artists, and many have chosen to leave. In Songzhuang, the story is similar. In addition to rising prices, a legal dispute between artists and local residents regarding land property rights in 2008 drove some artists out of Songzhuang because they didn’t feel it was stable anymore (Smith). The district’s future as a centre of original art runs up against the aspirations of local officials for more tax revenue and tourist dollars. In the Songzhuang Cultural Creative Industries Cluster Design Plan (cited in Yang), which was developed by J.A.O Design International Architects and Planners Limited and sponsored by the Songzhuang local government in 2007, Songzhuang is designed as an “arts capital incorporated with culture, commerce and tourism.” The down side of this aspiration is that more museums, galleries, shopping centres, hotels, and recreation infrastructure will inevitably be developed in order to capitalise on Songzhuang’s global reputation. Concluding Reflections In reflecting on the recent history of artist villages in Beijing, we might conclude that rural locations are not only a cheap place for artists to live but also a space to showcase their works. More importantly, the relation of artists and outlying district has evolved into a symbiotic relationship. They interact and grow together. The existence of artists transforms the locale and the locale in turn reinforces the identity of artists. In Yuanmingyuan the artists appreciated the old “recluse” tradition and therefore sought spiritual liberation after decades of suppression. The outlying location symbolized freedom to them and provided distance from the world of noisy interaction. But isolation of artists from the local community and the associated constant conflict with local villagers deepened estrangement; these events brought about the end of the dream. In contrast, at 798 and Songzhuang, artists not only regarded the place as their worksite but also engaged with the local community. They communicated with local people and co-developed projects to transform the local landscape. Local communities changed; they started to learn about the artistic world while gaining economic benefits in many ways, such as house renting, running small grocery stores, providing art supplies and even modelling. Their participation into the “art worlds” (Becker) contributed to a changing cultural environment, in turn strengthening the brand of these artist villages. In many regards there were positive externalities for both artists and the district, although as I mentioned in relation to Songzhuang, tensions about land use have never completely been resolved. Today, the fine arts in China have gone far beyond the traditional modes of classics, aesthetics, liberation or rebellion. Art is also a business which requires the access to the material world in order to produce incomes and make profits. It appears that many contemporary artists are not part of a movement of rebellion (except several artists, such as Ai Weiwei), adopting the pure spirit of art as their life-time mission, as in the Yuanmingyuan artist village. They still long for recognition, but they are also concerned with success and producing a livelihood. The boundary between inner urban and outer urban areas is not as significant to them as it once was for artists from a former period. While many artists enjoy the quiet and space of the fringe and rural areas to work; they also require urban space to exhibit their works and earn money. This factor explains the recent emergence of Caochangdi and other artist villages in the neighbouring area around the 798. These latest artist villages in the urban fringe still have open and peaceful spaces and can be accessed easily due to convenient transportation. Unfortunately, the coalition of business and government leads to rapid commercialization of place which is not aligned with the basic need of artists, which is not only a free or affordable place but also a space for creativity. As mentioned above, 798 is now so commercialized that it is too crowded and expensive for artists due to the government’s overdevelopment; whereas the government’s original intention was to facilitate the development of 798. Furthermore, although artists are a key stakeholder in the government’s agenda for visual art industry, it is always the government’s call when artists’ attachment to rural space comes into conflict with Beijing government’s urbanization plan. Hence the government decides which artist villages should be sacrificed to give way to urban development and which direction the reserved artist villages or art clusters should be developed. The logic of government policy causes an absolute distinction between cities and outlying districts. And the government’s enthusiasm for “urbanization” leads to urbanized artist villages, such as the 798. A vicious circle is formed: the government continuously attempts to have selected artist villages commercialized and transformed into urbanized or quasi-urbanized area and closes other artist villages. One of the outcomes of this policy is that in the government created creative clusters, many artists do not stay, and move away into rural and outlying areas because they prefer to work in non-urban spaces. To resolve this dilemma, greater attention is required to understand artists needs and ways to combine urban convenience and rural tranquillity into their development plans. This may be a bridge too far, however. Reference Becker, Howard Saul. Art Worlds. 25th anniversary, updated and expanded ed. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2008. Collis, Christy, Emma Felton, and Phil Graham. "Beyond the Inner City: Real and Imagined Places in Creative Place Policy and Practice." The Information Society: An International Journal 26.2 (2010): 104–12. Commission, Outer London. The Mayor's Outer London Commission: Report. London: Great London Authority, 2010. Drake, Graham. "'This Place Gives Me Space': Place and Creativity in the Creative Industries." Geoforum 34.4 (2003): 511–24. Florida, Richard. "Cities and the Creative Class." The Urban Sociology Reader. Eds. Jan Lin and Christopher Mele. London: Routledge, 2005. 290–301. ———. The Rise of the Creative Class. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Gibson, Chris, and Chris Brennan-Horley. "Goodbye Pram City: Beyond Inner/Outer Zone Binaries in Creative City Research." Urban Policy and Research 24.4 (2006): 455–71. Jacobs, Jane. The Economy of Cities. New York: Random House, 1969. Keane, Michael. "The Capital Complex: Beijing's New Creative Clusters." Creative Economies, Creative Cities: Asian-European Perspectives. Ed. Lily Kong and Justin O'Connor. London: Springer, 2009. 77–95. Kotkin, Joel. "The Protean Future of American Cities." New Geographer 7 Mar. 2011. 27 Mar. 2011 ‹http://blogs.forbes.com/joelkotkin/2011/03/07/the-protean-future-of-american-cities/›. Landry, Charles. The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators. London: Earthscan Publications, 2000. Leadbeater, Charles, and Kate Oakley. The Independents: Britain's New Cultural Entrepreneurs. London: Demos, 1999. Liu, Mingliang. "Beijing 798 Art Zone: Field Study and Follow-Up Study in the Context of Market." Chinese National Academy of Arts, 2010. Lorenzen, Mark, and Lars Frederiksen. "Why Do Cultural Industries Cluster? Localization, Urbanization, Products and Projects." Creative Cities, Cultural Clusters and Local Economic Development. Ed. Philip Cooke and Luciana Lazzeretti. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2008. 155-79. Mars, Neville, and Adrian Hornsby. The Chinese Dream: A Society under Construction. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2008. Montgomery, John. The New Wealth of Cities: City Dynamics and the Fifth Wave. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Smith, Karen. "Heart of the Art." Beijing: Portrait of a City. Ed. Alexandra Pearson and Lucy Cavender. Hong Kong: The Middle Kingdom Bookworm, 2008. 106–19. Yang, Wei, ed. Songzhuang Arts 2006. Beijing: Hunan Fine Arts Press, 2007. Zhu, Jianfei. Chinese Spatial Strategies Imperial Beijing, 1420-1911. Routledge Curzon, 2004. Zukin, Sharon. The Cultures of Cities. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995. [1] Most prestigious Chinese universities are located in the Haidian District of Beijing, such as Peking University, Tsinghua University, etc. [2] Seven Star Group is the landholder of the area where 798 is based.

IntroductionFood Studies is a relatively recent area of research enquiry in Australia and Magazine Studies is even newer (Le Masurier and Johinke), with the consequence that Australian culinary magazines are only just beginning to be investigated. Moreover, although many major libraries have not thought such popular magazines worthy of sustained collection (Fox and Sornil), considering these publications is important. As de Certeau argues, it can be of considerable consequence to identify and analyse everyday practices (such as producing and reading popular magazines) that seem so minor and insignificant as to be unworthy of notice, as these practices have the ability to affect our lives. It is important in this case as these publications were part of the post-war gastronomic environment in Australia in which national tastes in domestic cookery became radically internationalised (Santich). To further investigate Australian magazines, as well as suggesting how these cosmopolitan eating habits became more widely embraced, this article will survey the various ways in which the idea of “abroad” is expressed in one Australian culinary serial from the post-war period, Australian Wines & Food Quarterly magazine, which was published from 1956 to 1960. The methodological approach taken is an historically-informed content analysis (Krippendorff) of relevant material from these magazines combined with germane media data (Hodder). All issues in the serial’s print run have been considered.Australian Post-War Culinary PublishingTo date, studies of 1950s writing in Australia have largely focused on literary and popular fiction (Johnson-Wood; Webby) and literary criticism (Bird; Dixon; Lee). There have been far fewer studies of non-fiction writing of any kind, although some serial publications from this time have attracted some attention (Bell; Lindesay; Ross; Sheridan; Warner-Smith; White; White). In line with studies internationally, groundbreaking work in Australian food history has focused on cookbooks, and includes work by Supski, who notes that despite the fact that buying cookbooks was “regarded as a luxury in the 1950s” (87), such publications were an important information source in terms of “developing, consolidating and extending foodmaking knowledge” at that time (85).It is widely believed that changes to Australian foodways were brought about by significant post-war immigration and the recipes and dishes these immigrants shared with neighbours, friends, and work colleagues and more widely afield when they opened cafes and restaurants (Newton; Newton; Manfredi). Although these immigrants did bring new culinary flavours and habits with them, the overarching rhetoric guiding population policy at this time was assimilation, with migrants expected to abandon their culture, language, and habits in favour of the dominant British-influenced ways of living (Postiglione). While migrants often did retain their foodways (Risson), the relationship between such food habits and the increasingly cosmopolitan Australian food culture is much more complex than the dominant cultural narrative would have us believe. It has been pointed out, for example, that while the haute cuisine of countries such as France, Italy, and Germany was much admired in Australia and emulated in expensive dining (Brien and Vincent), migrants’ own preference for their own dishes instead of Anglo-Australian choices, was not understood (Postiglione). Duruz has added how individual diets are eclectic, “multi-layered and hybrid” (377), incorporating foods from both that person’s own background with others available for a range of reasons including availability, cost, taste, and fashion. In such an environment, popular culinary publishing, in terms of cookbooks, specialist magazines, and recipe and other food-related columns in general magazines and newspapers, can be posited to be another element contributing to this change.Australian Wines & Food QuarterlyAustralian Wines & Food Quarterly (AWFQ) is, as yet, a completely unexamined publication, and there appears to be only three complete sets of this magazine held in public collections. It is important to note that, at the time it was launched in the mid-1950s, food writing played a much less significant part in Australian popular publishing than it does today, with far fewer cookbooks released than today, and women’s magazines and the women’s pages of newspapers containing only small recipe sections. In this environment, a new specialist culinary magazine could be seen to be timely, an audacious gamble, or both.All issues of this magazine were produced and printed in, and distributed from, Melbourne, Australia. Although no sales or distribution figures are available, production was obviously a struggle, with only 15 issues published before the magazine folded at the end of 1960. The title of the magazine changed over this time, and issue release dates are erratic, as is the method in which volumes and issues are numbered. Although the number of pages varied from 32 up to 52, and then less once again, across the magazine’s life, the price was steadily reduced, ending up at less than half the original cover price. All issues were produced and edited by Donald Wallace, who also wrote much of the content, with contributions from family members, including his wife, Mollie Wallace, to write, illustrate, and produce photographs for the magazine.When considering the content of the magazine, most is quite familiar in culinary serials today, although AWFQ’s approach was radically innovative in Australia at this time when cookbooks, women’s magazines, and newspaper cookery sections focused on recipes, many of which were of cakes, biscuits, and other sweet baking (Bannerman). AWFQ not only featured many discursive essays and savory meals, it also featured much wine writing and review-style content as well as information about restaurant dining in each issue.Wine-Related ContentWine is certainly the most prominent of the content areas, with most issues of the magazine containing more wine-related content than any other. Moreover, in the early issues, most of the food content is about preparing dishes and/or meals that could be consumed alongside wines, although the proportion of food content increases as the magazine is published. This wine-related content takes a clearly international perspective on this topic. While many articles and advertisements, for example, narrate the long history of Australian wine growing—which goes back to early 19th century—these articles argue that Australia's vineyards and wineries measure up to international, and especially French, examples. In one such example, the author states that: “from the earliest times Australia’s wines have matched up to world standard” (“Wine” 25). This contest can be situated in Australia, where a leading restaurant (Caprice in Sydney) could be seen to not only “match up to” but also, indeed to, “challenge world standards” by serving Australian wines instead of imports (“Sydney” 33). So good, indeed, are Australian wines that when foreigners are surprised by their quality, this becomes newsworthy. This is evidenced in the following excerpt: “Nearly every English businessman who has come out to Australia in the last ten years … has diverted from his main discussion to comment on the high quality of Australian wine” (Seppelt, 3). In a similar nationalist vein, many articles feature overseas experts’ praise of Australian wines. Thus, visiting Italian violinist Giaconda de Vita shows a “keen appreciation of Australian wines” (“Violinist” 30), British actor Robert Speaight finds Grange Hermitage “an ideal wine” (“High Praise” 13), and the Swedish ambassador becomes their advocate (Ludbrook, “Advocate”).This competition could also be located overseas including when Australian wines are served at prestigious overseas events such as a dinner for members of the Overseas Press Club in New York (Australian Wines); sold from Seppelt’s new London cellars (Melbourne), or the equally new Australian Wine Centre in Soho (Australia Will); or, featured in exhibitions and promotions such as the Lausanne Trade Fair (Australia is Guest;“Wines at Lausanne), or the International Wine Fair in Yugoslavia (Australia Wins).Australia’s first Wine Festival was held in Melbourne in 1959 (Seppelt, “Wine Week”), the joint focus of which was the entertainment and instruction of the some 15,000 to 20,000 attendees who were expected. At its centre was a series of free wine tastings aiming to promote Australian wines to the “professional people of the community, as well as the general public and the housewife” (“Melbourne” 8), although admission had to be recommended by a wine retailer. These tastings were intended to build up the prestige of Australian wine when compared to international examples: “It is the high quality of our wines that we are proud of. That is the story to pass on—that Australian wine, at its best, is at least as good as any in the world and better than most” (“Melbourne” 8).There is also a focus on promoting wine drinking as a quotidian habit enjoyed abroad: “We have come a long way in less than twenty years […] An enormous number of husbands and wives look forward to a glass of sherry when the husband arrives home from work and before dinner, and a surprising number of ordinary people drink table wine quite un-selfconsciously” (Seppelt, “Advance” 3). However, despite an acknowledged increase in wine appreciation and drinking, there is also acknowledgement that this there was still some way to go in this aim as, for example, in the statement: “There is no reason why the enjoyment of table wines should not become an Australian custom” (Seppelt, “Advance” 4).The authority of European experts and European habits is drawn upon throughout the publication whether in philosophically-inflected treatises on wine drinking as a core part of civilised behaviour, or practically-focused articles about wine handling and serving (Keown; Seabrook; “Your Own”). Interestingly, a number of Australian experts are also quoted as stressing that these are guidelines, not strict rules: Crosby, for instance, states: “There is no ‘right wine.’ The wine to drink is the one you like, when and how you like it” (19), while the then-manager of Lindemans Wines is similarly reassuring in his guide to entertaining, stating that “strict adherence to the rules is not invariably wise” (Mackay 3). Tingey openly acknowledges that while the international-style of regularly drinking wine had “given more dignity and sophistication to the Australian way of life” (35), it should not be shrouded in snobbery.Food-Related ContentThe magazine’s cookery articles all feature international dishes, and certain foreign foods, recipes, and ways of eating and dining are clearly identified as “gourmet”. Cheese is certainly the most frequently mentioned “gourmet” food in the magazine, and is featured in every issue. These articles can be grouped into the following categories: understanding cheese (how it is made and the different varieties enjoyed internationally), how to consume cheese (in relation to other food and specific wines, and in which particular parts of a meal, again drawing on international practices), and cooking with cheese (mostly in what can be identified as “foreign” recipes).Some of this content is produced by Kraft Foods, a major advertiser in the magazine, and these articles and recipes generally focus on urging people to eat more, and varied international kinds of cheese, beyond the ubiquitous Australian cheddar. In terms of advertorials, both Kraft cheeses (as well as other advertisers) are mentioned by brand in recipes, while the companies are also profiled in adjacent articles. In the fourth issue, for instance, a full-page, infomercial-style advertisement, noting the different varieties of Kraft cheese and how to serve them, is published in the midst of a feature on cooking with various cheeses (“Cooking with Cheese”). This includes recipes for Swiss Cheese fondue and two pasta recipes: spaghetti and spicy tomato sauce, and a so-called Italian spaghetti with anchovies.Kraft’s company history states that in 1950, it was the first business in Australia to manufacture and market rindless cheese. Through these AWFQ advertisements and recipes, Kraft aggressively marketed this innovation, as well as its other new products as they were launched: mayonnaise, cheddar cheese portions, and Cracker Barrel Cheese in 1954; Philadelphia Cream Cheese, the first cream cheese to be produced commercially in Australia, in 1956; and, Coon Cheese in 1957. Not all Kraft products were seen, however, as “gourmet” enough for such a magazine. Kraft’s release of sliced Swiss Cheese in 1957, and processed cheese slices in 1959, for instance, both passed unremarked in either the magazine’s advertorial or recipes.An article by the Australian Dairy Produce Board urging consumers to “Be adventurous with Cheese” presented general consumer information including the “origin, characteristics and mode of serving” cheese accompanied by a recipe for a rich and exotic-sounding “Wine French Dressing with Blue Cheese” (Kennedy 18). This was followed in the next issue by an article discussing both now familiar and not-so familiar European cheese varieties: “Monterey, Tambo, Feta, Carraway, Samsoe, Taffel, Swiss, Edam, Mozzarella, Pecorino-Romano, Red Malling, Cacio Cavallo, Blue-Vein, Roman, Parmigiano, Kasseri, Ricotta and Pepato” (“Australia’s Natural” 23). Recipes for cheese fondues recur through the magazine, sometimes even multiple times in the same issue (see, for instance, “Cooking With Cheese”; “Cooking With Wine”; Pain). In comparison, butter, although used in many AWFQ’s recipes, was such a common local ingredient at this time that it was only granted one article over the entire run of the magazine, and this was largely about the much more unusual European-style unsalted butter (“An Expert”).Other international recipes that were repeated often include those for pasta (always spaghetti) as well as mayonnaise made with olive oil. Recurring sweets and desserts include sorbets and zabaglione from Italy, and flambéd crepes suzettes from France. While tabletop cooking is the epitome of sophistication and described as an international technique, baked Alaska (ice cream nestled on liquor-soaked cake, and baked in a meringue shell), hailing from America, is the most featured recipe in the magazine. Asian-inspired cuisine was rarely represented and even curry—long an Anglo-Australian staple—was mentioned only once in the magazine, in an article reprinted from the South African The National Hotelier, and which included a recipe alongside discussion of blending spices (“Curry”).Coffee was regularly featured in both articles and advertisements as a staple of the international gourmet kitchen (see, for example, Bancroft). Articles on the history, growing, marketing, blending, roasting, purchase, percolating and brewing, and serving of coffee were common during the magazine’s run, and are accompanied with advertisements for Bushell’s, Robert Timms’s and Masterfoods’s coffee ranges. AWFQ believed Australia’s growing coffee consumption was the result of increased participation in quality internationally-influenced dining experiences, whether in restaurants, the “scores of colourful coffee shops opening their doors to a new generation” (“Coffee” 39), or at home (Adams). Tea, traditionally the Australian hot drink of choice, is not mentioned once in the magazine (Brien).International Gourmet InnovationsAlso featured in the magazine are innovations in the Australian food world: new places to eat; new ways to cook, including a series of sometimes quite unusual appliances; and new ways to shop, with a profile of the first American-style supermarkets to open in Australia in this period. These are all seen as overseas innovations, but highly suited to Australia. The laws then controlling the service of alcohol are also much discussed, with many calls to relax the licensing laws which were seen as inhibiting civilised dining and drinking practices. The terms this was often couched in—most commonly in relation to the Olympic Games (held in Melbourne in 1956), but also in relation to tourism in general—are that these restrictive regulations were an embarrassment for Melbourne when considered in relation to international practices (see, for example, Ludbrook, “Present”). This was at a time when the nightly hotel closing time of 6.00 pm (and the performance of the notorious “six o’clock swill” in terms of drinking behaviour) was only repealed in Victoria in 1966 (Luckins).Embracing scientific approaches in the kitchen was largely seen to be an American habit. The promotion of the use of electricity in the kitchen, and the adoption of new electric appliances (Gas and Fuel; Gilbert “Striving”), was described not only as a “revolution that is being wrought in our homes”, but one that allowed increased levels of personal expression and fulfillment, in “increas[ing] the time and resources available to the housewife for the expression of her own personality in the management of her home” (Gilbert, “The Woman’s”). This mirrors the marketing of these modes of cooking and appliances in other media at this time, including in newspapers, radio, and other magazines. This included features on freezing food, however AWFQ introduced an international angle, by suggesting that recipe bases could be pre-prepared, frozen, and then defrosted to use in a range of international cookery (“Fresh”; “How to”; Kelvinator Australia). The then-new marvel of television—another American innovation—is also mentioned in the magazine ("Changing concepts"), although other nationalities are also invoked. The history of the French guild the Confrerie de la Chaine des Roitisseurs in 1248 is, for instance, used to promote an electric spit roaster that was part of a state-of-the-art gas stove (“Always”), and there are also advertisements for such appliances as the Gaggia expresso machine (“Lets”) which draw on both Italian historical antecedence and modern science.Supermarket and other forms of self-service shopping are identified as American-modern, with Australia’s first shopping mall lauded as the epitome of utopian progressiveness in terms of consumer practice. Judged to mark “a new era in Australian retailing” (“Regional” 12), the opening of Chadstone Regional Shopping Centre in suburban Melbourne on 4 October 1960, with its 83 tenants including “giant” supermarket Dickens, and free parking for 2,500 cars, was not only “one of the most up to date in the world” but “big even by American standards” (“Regional” 12, italics added), and was hailed as a step in Australia “catching up” with the United States in terms of mall shopping (“Regional” 12). This shopping centre featured international-styled dining options including Bistro Shiraz, an outdoor terrace restaurant that planned to operate as a bistro-snack bar by day and full-scale restaurant at night, and which was said to offer diners a “Persian flavor” (“Bistro”).ConclusionAustralian Wines & Food Quarterly was the first of a small number of culinary-focused Australian publications in the 1950s and 1960s which assisted in introducing a generation of readers to information about what were then seen as foreign foods and beverages only to be accessed and consumed abroad as well as a range of innovative international ideas regarding cookery and dining. For this reason, it can be posited that the magazine, although modest in the claims it made, marked a revolutionary moment in Australian culinary publishing. As yet, only slight traces can be found of its editor and publisher, Donald Wallace. The influence of AWFQ is, however, clearly evident in the two longer-lived magazines that were launched in the decade after AWFQ folded: Australian Gourmet Magazine and The Epicurean. Although these serials had a wider reach, an analysis of the 15 issues of AWFQ adds to an understanding of how ideas of foods, beverages, and culinary ideas and trends, imported from abroad were presented to an Australian readership in the 1950s, and contributed to how national foodways were beginning to change during that decade.ReferencesAdams, Jillian. “Australia’s American Coffee Culture.” Australian Journal of Popular Culture 2.1 (2012): 23–36.“Always to Roast on a Turning Spit.” The Magazine of Good Living: Australian Wines and Food 4.2 (1960): 17.“An Expert on Butter.” The Magazine of Good Living: The Australian Wine & Food 4.1 (1960): 11.“Australia Is Guest Nation at Lausanne.” The Magazine of Good Living: Australian Wines and Food 4.2 (1960): 18–19.“Australia’s Natural Cheeses.” The Magazine of Good Living: The Australian Wine & Food 4.1 (1960): 23.“Australia Will Be There.” The Magazine of Good Living: Australian Wines and Food 4.2 (1960): 14.“Australian Wines Served at New York Dinner.” Australian Wines & Food Quarterly 1.5 (1958): 16.“Australia Wins Six Gold Medals.” Australian Wines & Food: The Magazine of Good Living 2.11 (1959/1960): 3.Bancroft, P.A. “Let’s Make Some Coffee.” The Magazine of Good Living: The Australian Wine & Food 4.1 (1960): 10. 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IntroductionMusically-inclined people often speak about the soundtrack of their life, with certain songs indelibly linked to a specific moment. When hearing a particular song, it can “easily evoke a whole time and place, distant feelings and emotions, and memories of where we were, and with whom” (Lewis 135). Music has the ability to provide maps to real and imagined spaces, positioning people within a larger social environment where songs “are never just a song, but a connection, a ticket, a pass, an invitation, a node in a complex network” (Kun 3). When someone is lost in the music, they can find themselves transported somewhere else entirely without physically moving. This can be a blessing in some situations, for example, while living in a disaster zone, when almost any other time or place can seem better than the here and now. The city of Christchurch, New Zealand was hit by a succession of damaging earthquakes beginning with a magnitude 7.1 earthquake in the early hours of 4 September 2010. The magnitude 6.3 earthquake of 22 February 2011, although technically an aftershock of the September earthquake, was closer and shallower, with intense ground acceleration that caused much greater damage to the city and its people (“Scientists”). It was this February earthquake that caused the total or partial collapse of many inner city buildings, and claimed the lives of 185 people. Everybody in Christchurch lost someone or something that day: their house or job; family members, friends, or colleagues; the city as they knew it; or their normal way of life. The broken central city was quickly cordoned off behind fences, with the few entry points guarded by local and international police and armed military personnel.In the aftermath of a disaster, circumstances and personal attributes will influence how people react, think and feel about the experience. Surviving a disaster is more than not dying, “survival is to do with quality of life [and] involves progressing from the event and its aftermath, and transforming the experience” (Hodgkinson and Stewart 2). In these times of heightened stress, music can be a catalyst for sharing and expressing emotions, connecting people and communities, and helping them make sense of what has happened (Carr 38; Webb 437). This article looks at some of the ways that popular songs and musical memories helped residents of a broken city remember the past and come to terms with the present.BackgroundExisting songs can take on new significance after a catastrophic event, even without any alteration. Songs such as Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans? and Prayer for New Orleans have been given new emotional layers by those who were displaced or affected by Hurricane Katrina (Cooper 265; Sullivan 15). A thirty year-old song by Randy Newman, Louisiana, 1927, became something of “a contemporary anthem, its chorus – ‘Louisiana, they’re trying to wash us away’ – bearing new relevance” (Blumenfeld 166). Contemporary popular songs have also been re-mixed or revised after catastrophic events, either by the original artist or by others. Elton John’s Candle in the Wind and Beyonce’s Halo have each been revised twice by the artist after tragedy and disaster (Doyle; McAlister), while radio stations in the United States have produced commemorative versions of popular songs to mark tragedies and their anniversaries (Beaumont-Thomas; Cantrell). The use and appreciation of music after disaster is a reminder that popular music is fluid, in that it “refuses to provide a uniform or static text” (Connell and Gibson 3), and can simultaneously carry many different meanings.Music provides a soundtrack to daily life, creating a map of meaning to the world around us, or presenting a reminder of the world as it once was. Tia DeNora explains that when people hear a song that was once heard in, and remains associated with, a particular time and place, it “provides a device for unfolding, for replaying, the temporal structure of that moment, [which] is why, for so many people, the past ‘comes alive’ to its soundtrack” (67). When a community is frequently and collectively casting their minds back to a time before a catastrophic change, a sense of community identity can be seen in the use of, and reaction to, particular songs. Music allows people to “locate themselves in different imaginary geographics at one and the same time” (Cohen 93), creating spaces for people to retreat into, small ‘audiotopias’ that are “built, imagined, and sustained through sound, noise, and music” (Kun 21). The use of musical escape holes is prevalent after disaster, as many once-familiar spaces that have changed beyond recognition or are no longer able to be physically visited, can be easily imagined or remembered through music. There is a particular type of longing expressed by those who are still at home and yet cannot return to the home they knew. Whereas nostalgia is often experienced by people far from home who wish to return or those enjoying memories of a bygone era, people after disaster often encounter a similar nostalgic feeling but with no change in time or place: a loss without leaving. Glenn Albrecht coined the term ‘solastalgia’ to represent “the form of homesickness one experiences when one is still at home” (35). This sense of being unable to find solace in one’s home environment can be brought on by natural disasters such as fire, flood, earthquakes or hurricanes, or by other means like war, mining, climate change or gentrification. Solastalgia is often felt most keenly when people experience the change first-hand and then have to adjust to life in a totally changed environment. This can create “chronic distress of a solastalgic kind [that] would persist well after the acute phase of post-traumatic distress” (Albrecht 36). Just as the visible, physical effects of disaster last for years, so too do the emotional effects, but there have been many examples of how the nostalgia inherent in a shared popular music soundtrack has eased the pain of solastalgia for a community that is hurting.Pop Songs and Nostalgia in ChristchurchIn September 2011, one year after the initial earthquake, the Bank of New Zealand (BNZ) announced a collaboration with Christchurch hip hop artist, Scribe, to remake his smash hit, Not Many, for charity. Back in 2003, Not Many debuted at number five on the New Zealand music charts, where it spent twelve weeks at number one and was crowned ‘Single of the Year’ (Sweetman, On Song 164). The punchy chorus heralded Scribe as a force to be reckoned with, and created a massive imprint on New Zealand popular culture with the line: “How many dudes you know roll like this? Not many, if any” (Scribe, Not Many). Music critic, Simon Sweetman, explains how “the hook line of the chorus [is now] a conversational aside that is practically unavoidable when discussing amounts… The words ‘not many’ are now truck-and-trailered with ‘if any’. If you do not say them, you are thinking them” (On Song 167). The strong links between artist and hometown – and the fact it is an enduringly catchy song – made it ideal for a charity remake. Reworded and reworked as Not Many Cities, the chorus now asks: “How many cities you know roll like this?” to which the answer is, of course, “not many, if any” (Scribe/BNZ, Not Many Cities). The remade song entered the New Zealand music charts at number 36 and the video was widely shared through social media but not all reception was positive. Parts of the video were shot in the city’s Red Zone, the central business district that was cordoned off from public access due to safety concerns. The granting of special access outraged some residents, with letters to the editor and online commentary expressing frustration that celebrities were allowed into the Red Zone to shoot a music video while those directly affected were not allowed in to retrieve essential items from residences and business premises. However, it is not just the Red Zone that features: the video switches between Scribe travelling around the broken inner city on the back of a small truck and lingering shots of carefully selected people, businesses, and groups – all with ties to the BNZ as either clients or beneficiaries of sponsorship. In some ways, Not Many Cities comes across like just another corporate promotional video for the BNZ, albeit with more emotion and a better soundtrack than usual. But what it has bequeathed is a snapshot of the city as it was in that liminal time: a landscape featuring familiar buildings, spaces and places which, although damaged, was still a recognisable version of the city that existed before the earthquakes.Before Scribe burst onto the music scene in the early 2000s, the best-known song about Christchurch was probably Christchurch (in Cashel St. I wait), an early hit from the Exponents (Mitchell 189). Initially known as the Dance Exponents, the group formed in Christchurch in the early 1980s and remained local and national favourites thanks to a string of hits Sweetman refers to as “the question-mark songs,” such as Who Loves Who the Most?, Why Does Love Do This to Me?, and What Ever Happened to Tracey? (Best Songwriter). Despite disbanding in 1999, the group re-formed to be the headline act of ‘Band Together’—a multi-artist, outdoor music event organised for the benefit of Christchurch residents by local musician, Jason Kerrison, formerly of the band OpShop. Attended by over 140,000 people (Anderson, Band Together), this nine-hour event brought joy and distraction to a shaken and stressed populace who, at that point in time (October 2010), probably thought the worst was over.The Exponents took the stage last, and chose Christchurch (in Cashel St. I Wait) as their final number. Every musician involved in the gig joined them on stage and the crowd rose to their feet, singing along with gusto. A local favourite since its release in 1985, the verses may have been a bit of a mumble for some, but the chorus rang out loud and clear across the park: Christchurch, In Cashel Street I wait,Together we will be,Together, together, together, One day, one day, one day,One day, one day, one daaaaaay! (Exponents, “Christchurch (in Cashel St. I Wait)”; lyrics written as sung)At that moment, forming an impromptu community choir of over 100,000 people, the audience was filled with hope and faith that those words would come true. Life would go on and people would gather together in Cashel Street and wait for normality to return, one day. Later the following year, the opening of the Re:Start container mall added an extra layer of poignancy to the song lyrics. Denied access to most of the city’s CBD, that one small part of Cashel Street now populated with colourful shipping containers was almost the only place in central Christchurch where people could wait. There are many music videos that capture the central city of Christchurch as it was in decades past. There are some local classics, like The Bats’ Block of Wood and Claudine; The Shallows’ Suzanne Said; Moana and the Moahunters’ Rebel in Me; and All Fall Down’s Black Gratten, which were all filmed in the 1980s or early 1990s (Goodsort, Re-Live and More Music). These videos provide many flashback moments to the city as it was twenty or thirty years ago. However, one post-earthquake release became an accidental musical time capsule. The song, Space and Place, was released in February 2013, but both song and video had been recorded not long before the earthquakes occurred. The song was inspired by the feelings experienced when returning home after a long absence, and celebrates the importance of the home town as “a place that knows you as well as you know it” (Anderson, Letter). The chorus features the line, “streets of common ground, I remember, I remember” (Franklin, Mayes, and Roberts, Space and Place), but it is the video, showcasing many of the Christchurch places and spaces only recently lost to the earthquakes, that tugs at people’s heartstrings. The video for Space and Place sweeps through the central city at night, with key heritage buildings like the Christ Church Cathedral, and the Catholic Basilica lit up against the night sky (both are still damaged and inaccessible). Producer and engineer, Rob Mayes, describes the video as “a love letter to something we all lost [with] the song and its lyrics [becoming] even more potent, poignant, and unexpectedly prescient post quake” (“Songs in the Key”). The Arts Centre features prominently in the footage, including the back alleys and archways that hosted all manner of night-time activities – sanctioned or otherwise – as well as many people’s favourite hangout, the Dux de Lux (the Dux). Operating from the corner of the Arts Centre site since the 1970s, the Dux has been described as “the city’s common room” and “Christchurch’s beating heart” by musicians mourning its loss (Anderson, Musicians). While the repair and restoration of some parts of the Arts Centre is currently well advanced, the Student Union building that once housed this inner-city social institution is not slated for reopening until 2019 (“Rebuild and Restore”), and whether the Dux will be welcomed back remains to be seen. Empty Spaces, Missing PlacesA Facebook group, ‘Save Our Dux,’ was created in early March 2011, and quickly filled with messages and memories from around the world. People wandered down memory lane together as they reminisced about their favourite gigs and memorable occasions, like the ‘Big Snow’ of 1992 when the Dux served up mulled wine and looked more like a ski chalet. Memories were shared about the time when the music video for the Dance Exponents’ song, Victoria, was filmed at the Dux and the Art Deco-style apartment building across the street. The reminiscing continued, establishing and strengthening connections, with music providing a stepping stone to shared experience and a sense of community. Physically restricted from visiting a favourite social space, people were converging in virtual hangouts to relive moments and remember places now cut off by the passing of time, the falling of bricks, and the rise of barrier fences.While waiting to find out whether the original Dux site can be re-occupied, the business owners opened new venues that housed different parts of the Dux business (live music, vegetarian food, and the bars/brewery). Although the fit-out of the restaurant and bars capture a sense of the history and charm that people associate with the Dux brand, the empty wasteland and building sites that surround the new Dux Central quickly destroy any illusion of permanence or familiarity. Now that most of the quake-damaged buildings have been demolished, the freshly-scarred earth of the central city is like a child’s gap-toothed smile. Wandering around the city and forgetting what used to occupy an empty space, wanting to visit a shop or bar before remembering it is no longer there, being at the Dux but not at the Dux – these are the kind of things that contributed to a feeling that local music writer, Vicki Anderson, describes as “lost city syndrome” (“Lost City”). Although initially worried she might be alone in mourning places lost, other residents have shared similar experiences. In an online comment on the article, one local resident explained how there are two different cities fighting for dominance in their head: “the new keeps trying to overlay the old [but] when I’m not looking at pictures, or in seeing it as it is, it’s the old city that pushes its way to the front” (Juniper). Others expressed relief that they were not the only ones feeling strangely homesick in their own town, homesick for a place they never left but that had somehow left them.There are a variety of methods available to fill the gaps in both memories and cityscape. The Human Interface Technology Laboratory New Zealand (HITLab), produced a technological solution: interactive augmented reality software called CityViewAR, using GPS data and 3D models to show parts of the city as they were prior to the earthquakes (“CityViewAR”). However, not everybody needed computerised help to remember buildings and other details. Many people found that, just by listening to a certain song or remembering particular gigs, it was not just an image of a building that appeared but a multi-sensory event complete with sound, movement, smell, and emotion. In online spaces like the Save Our Dux group, memories of favourite bands and songs, crowded gigs, old friends, good times, great food, and long nights were shared and discussed, embroidering a rich and colourful tapestry about a favourite part of Christchurch’s social scene. ConclusionMusic is strongly interwoven with memory, and can recreate a particular moment in time and place through the associations carried in lyrics, melody, and imagery. Songs can spark vivid memories of what was happening – when, where, and with whom. A song shared is a connection made: between people; between moments; between good times and bad; between the past and the present. Music provides a soundtrack to people’s lives, and during times of stress it can also provide many benefits. The lyrics and video imagery of songs made in years gone by have been shown to take on new significance and meaning after disaster, offering snapshots of times, people and places that are no longer with us. Even without relying on the accompanying imagery of a video, music has the ability to recreate spaces or relocate the listener somewhere other than the physical location they currently occupy. This small act of musical magic can provide a great deal of comfort when suffering solastalgia, the feeling of homesickness one experiences when the familiar landscapes of home suddenly change or disappear, when one has not left home but that home has nonetheless gone from sight. The earthquakes (and the demolition crews that followed) have created a lot of empty land in Christchurch but the sound of popular music has filled many gaps – not just on the ground, but also in the hearts and lives of the city’s residents. 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There is, in our sense of place, little cognisance of what lies underground. Yet our sense of place, instinctive, unconscious, primeval, has its own underground: the secret spaces which mirror our insides; the world beneath the skin. Our roots lie beneath the ground, with the minerals and the dead. (Hughes 83) The-Home-and-Away-Game Imagine the earth-grounded, “diagrammatological” trajectory of a footballer who as one member of a team is psyching himself up before the start of a game. The siren blasts its trumpet call. The footballer bursts out of the pavilion (where this psyching up has taken place) to engage in the opening bounce or kick of the game. And then: running, leaping, limping after injury, marking, sliding, kicking, and possibly even passing out from concussion. Finally, the elation accompanying the final siren, after which hugs, handshakes and raised fists conclude the actual match on the football oval. This exit from the pavilion, the course the player takes during the game itself, and return to the pavilion, forms a combination of stasis and movement, and a return to exhausted stasis again, that every player engages with regardless of the game code. Examined from a “diagrammatological” perspective, a perspective Rowan Wilken (following in the path of Gilles Deleuze and W. J. T. Mitchell) understands as “a generative process: a ‘metaphor’ or way of thinking — diagrammatic, diagrammatological thinking — which in turn, is linked to poetic thinking” (48), this footballer’s scenario arises out of an aerial perspective that depicts the actual spatial trajectory the player takes during the course of a game. It is a diagram that is digitally encoded via a sensor on the footballer’s body, and being an electronically encoded diagram it can also make available multiple sets of data such as speed, heartbeat, blood pressure, maybe even brain-wave patterns. From this limited point of view there is only one footballer’s playing trajectory to consider; various groupings within the team, the whole team itself, and the diagrammatological depiction of its games with various other teams might also be possible. This singular imagining though is itself an actuality: as a diagram it is encoded as a graphic image by a satellite hovering around the earth with a Global Positioning System (GPS) reading the sensor attached to the footballer which then digitally encodes this diagrammatological trajectory for appraisal later by the player, coach, team and management. In one respect, this practice is another example of a willing self-surveillance critical to explaining the reflexive subject and its attribute of continuous self-improvement. According to Docker, Official Magazine of the Fremantle Football Club, this is a technique the club uses as a part of game/play assessment, a system that can provide a “running map” for each player equipped with such a tracking device during a game. As the Fremantle Club’s Strength and Conditioning Coach Ben Tarbox says of this tactic, “We’re getting a physiological profile that has started to build a really good picture of how individual players react during a game” (21). With a little extra effort (and some sizeable computer processing grunt) this two dimensional linear graphic diagram of a footballer working the football ground could also form the raw material for a three-dimensional animation, maybe a virtual reality game, even a hologram. It could also be used to sideline a non-performing player. Now try another related but different imagining: what if this diagrammatological trajectory could be enlarged a little to include the possibility that this same player’s movements could be mapped out by the idea of home-and-away games; say over the course of a season, maybe even a whole career, for instance? No doubt, a wide range of differing diagrammatological perspectives might suggest themselves. My own particular refinement of this movement/stasis on the footballer’s part suggests my own distinctive comings and goings to and from my own specific piece of home country. And in this incessantly domestic/real world reciprocity, in this diurnally repetitive leaving and coming back to home country, might it be plausible to think of “Home as Capital of the Region”? If, as Walter Benjamin suggests in the prelude to his monumental Arcades Project, “Paris — the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” could it be that both in and through my comings and goings to and from this selfsame home country, my own burgeoning sense of regionality is constituted in every minute-by-minutiae of lived experience? Could it be that this feeling about home is manifested in my every day-to-night manoeuvre of home-and-away-and-away-and-home-making, of every singular instance of exit, play/engage, and the return home? “Home, Capital of the Region” then examines the idea that my home is that part of the country which is the still-point of eternal return, the bedrock to which I retreat after the daily grind, and the point from which I start out and do it all again the next day. It employs, firstly, this ‘diagrammatological’ perspective to illustrate the point that this stasis/movement across country can make an electronic record of my own psychic self-surveillance and actualisation in-situ. And secondly, the architectural plan of the domestic home (examined through the perspective of critical regionalism) is used as a conduit to illustrate how I am physically embedded in country. Lastly, intermingling these digressive threads is chora, Plato’s notion of embodied place and itself an ancient regional rendering of this eternal return to the beginning, the place where the essential diversity of country decisively enters the soul. Chora: Core of Regionality Kevin Lynch writes that, “Our senses are local, while our experience is regional” (10), a combination that suggests this regional emphasis on home-and-away-making might be a useful frame of reference (simultaneously spatiotemporal, both a visceral and encoded communication) for me to include as a crucial vector in my own life-long learning package. Regionality (as, variously, a sub-generic categorisation and an extension/concentration of nationality, as well as a recently re-emerged friend/antagonist to a global understanding) infuses my world of home with a grounded footing in country, one that is a site of an Eternal Return to the Beginning in the micro-world of the everyday. This is a point John Sallis discusses at length in his analysis of Plato’s Timaeus and its founding notion of regionality: chora. More extended absences away from home-base are of course possible but one’s return to home on most days and for most nights is a given of post/modern, maybe even of ancient everyday experience. Even for the continually shifting nomad, nightfall in some part of the country brings the rest and recreation necessary for the next day’s wanderings. This fundamental question of an Eternal Return to the Beginning arises as a crucial element of the method in Plato’s Timaeus, a seemingly “unstructured” mythic/scientific dialogue about the origins and structure of both the psychically and the physically implaced world. In the Timaeus, “incoherence is especially obvious in the way the natural sequence in which a narrative would usually unfold is interrupted by regressions, corrections, repetitions, and abrupt new beginnings” (Gadamer 160). Right in the middle of the Timaeus, in between its sections on the “Work of Reason” and the “Work of Necessity”, sits chora, both an actual spatial and bodily site where my being intersects with my becoming, and where my lived life criss-crosses the various arts necessary to articulating a recorded version of that life. Every home is a grounded chora-logical timespace harness guiding its occupant’s thoughts, feelings and actions. My own regionally implaced chora (an example of which is the diagrammatological trajectory already outlined above as my various everyday comings and goings, of me acting in and projecting myself into context) could in part be understood as a graphical realisation of the extent of my movements and stationary rests in my own particular timespace trajectory. The shorthand for this process is ‘embedded’. Gregory Ulmer writes of chora that, “While chorography as a term is close to choreography, it duplicates a term that already exists in the discipline of geography, thus establishing a valuable resonance for a rhetoric of invention concerned with the history of ‘place’ in relation to memory” (Heuretics 39, original italics). Chorography is the geographic discipline for the systematic study and analysis of regions. Chora, home, country and regionality thus form an important multi-dimensional zone of interplay in memorialising the game of everyday life. In light of these observations I might even go so far as to suggest that this diagrammatological trajectory (being both digital and GPS originated) is part of the increasingly electrate condition that guides the production of knowledge in any global/regional context. This last point is a contextual connection usefully examined in Alan J. Scott’s Regions and the World Economy: The Coming Shape of Global Production, Competition, and Political Order and Michael Storper’s The Regional World: Territorial Development in a Global Economy. Their analyses explicitly suggest that the symbiosis between globalisation and regionalisation has been gathering pace since at least the end of World War Two and the Bretton Woods agreement. Our emerging understanding of electracy also happens to be Gregory Ulmer’s part-remedy for shifting the ground under the intense debates surrounding il/literacy in the current era (see, in particular, Internet Invention). And, for Tony Bennett, Michael Emmison and John Frow’s analysis of “Australian Everyday Cultures” (“Media Culture and the Home” 57–86), it is within the home that our un.conscious understanding of electronic media is at its most intense, a pattern that emerges in the longer term through receiving telegrams, compiling photo albums, listening to the radio, home- and video-movies, watching the evening news on television, and logging onto the computer in the home-office, media-room or home-studio. These various generalisations (along with this diagrammatological view of my comings and goings to and from the built space of home), all point indiscriminately to a productive confusion surrounding the sedentary and nomadic opposition/conjunction. If natural spaces are constituted in nouns like oceans, forests, plains, grasslands, steppes, deserts, rivers, tidal interstices, farmland etc. (and each categorisation here relies on the others for its existence and demarcation) then built space is often seen as constituting its human sedentary equivalent. For Deleuze and Guatteri (in A Thousand Plateaus, “1227: Treatise on Nomadology — The War Machine”) these natural spaces help instigate a nomadic movement across localities and regions. From a nomadology perspective, these smooth spaces unsettle a scientific, numerical calculation, sometimes even aesthetic demarcation and order. If they are marked at all, it is by heterogenous and differential forces, energised through constantly oscillating intensities. A Thousand Plateaus is careful though not to elevate these smooth nomadic spaces over the more sedentary spaces of culture and power (372–373). Nonetheless, as Edward S. Casey warns, “In their insistence on becoming and movement, however, the authors of A Thousand Plateaus overlook the placial potential of settled dwelling — of […] ‘built places’” (309, original italics). Sedentary, settled dwelling centred on home country may have a crust of easy legibility and order about it but it also formats a locally/regionally specific nomadic quality, a point underscored above in the diagrammatological perspective. The sedentary tendency also emerges once again in relation to home in the architectural drafting of the domestic domicile. The Real Estate Revolution When Captain Cook planted the British flag in the sand at Botany Bay in 1770 and declared the country it spiked as Crown Land and henceforth will come under the ownership of an English sovereign, it was also the moment when white Australia’s current fascination with real estate was conceived. In the wake of this spiking came the intense anxiety over Native Title that surfaced in late twentieth century Australia when claims of Indigenous land grabs would repossess suburban homes. While easily dismissed as hyperbole, a rhetorical gesture intended to arouse this very anxiety, its emergence is nonetheless an indication of the potential for political and psychic unsettling at the heart of the ownership and control of built place, or ‘settled dwelling’ in the Australian context. And here it would be wise to include not just the gridded, architectural quality of home-building and home-making, but also the home as the site of the family romance, another source of unsettling as much as a peaceful calming. Spreading out from the boundaries of the home are the built spaces of fences, bridges, roads, railways, airport terminals (along with their interconnecting pathways), which of course brings us back to the communications infrastructure which have so often followed alongside the development of transport infrastructure. These and other elements represent this conglomerate of built space, possibly the most significant transformation of natural space that humanity has brought about. For the purposes of this meditation though it is the more personal aspect of built space — my home and regional embeddedness, along with their connections into the global electrosphere — that constitutes the primary concern here. For a sedentary, striated space to settle into an unchallenged existence though requires a repression of the highest order, primarily because of the home’s proximity to everyday life, of the latter’s now fading ability to sometimes leave its presuppositions well enough alone. In settled, regionally experienced space, repressions are more difficult to abstract away, they are lived with on a daily basis, which also helps to explain the extra intensity brought to their sometimes-unsettling quality. Inversely, and encased in this globalised electro-spherical ambience, home cannot merely be a place where one dwells within avoiding those presuppositions, I take them with me when I travel and they come back with me from afar. This is a point obliquely reflected in Pico Iyer’s comment that “Australians have so flexible a sense of home, perhaps, that they can make themselves at home anywhere” (185). While our sense of home may well be, according to J. Douglas Porteous, “the territorial core” of our being, when other arrangements of space and knowledge shift it must inevitably do so as well. In these shifts of spatial affiliation (aided and abetted by regionalisation, globalisation and electronic knowledge), the built place of home can no longer be considered exclusively under the illusion of an autonomous sanctuary wholly guaranteed by capitalist property relations, one of the key factors in its attraction. These shifts in the cultural, economic and psychic relation of home to country are important to a sense of local and regional implacement. The “feeling” of autonomy and security involved in home occupation and/or ownership designates a component of this implacement, a point leading to Eric Leed’s comment that, “By the sixteenth century, literacy had become one of the definitive signs — along with the possession of property and a permanent residence — of an independent social status” (53). Globalising and regionalising forces make this feeling of autonomy and security dynamic, shifting the ground of home, work-place practices and citizenship allegiances in the process. Gathering these wide-ranging forces impacting on psychic and built space together is the emergence of critical regionalism as a branch of architectonics, considered here as a theory of domestic architecture. Critical Regionality Critical regionalism emerged out of the collective thinking of Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis (Tropical Architecture; Critical Regionalism), and as these authors themselves acknowledge, was itself deeply influenced by the work of Lewis Mumford during the first part of the twentieth century when he was arguing against the authority of the international style in architecture, a style epitomised by the Bauhaus movement. It is Kenneth Frampton’s essay, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance” that deliberately takes this question of critical regionalism and makes it a part of a domestic architectonic project. In many ways the ideas critical regionalism espouses can themselves be a microcosm of this concomitantly emerging global/regional polis. With public examples of built-form the power of the centre is on display by virtue of a building’s enormous size and frequently high-cultural aesthetic power. This is a fact restated again and again from the ancient world’s agora to Australia’s own political bunker — its Houses of Parliament in Canberra. While Frampton discusses a range of aspects dealing with the universal/implaced axis across his discussion, it is points five and six that deserve attention from a domestically implaced perspective. Under the sub-heading, “Culture Versus Nature: Topography, Context, Climate, Light and Tectonic Form” is where he writes that, Here again, one touches in concrete terms this fundamental opposition between universal civilization and autochthonous culture. The bulldozing of an irregular topography into a flat site is clearly a technocratic gesture which aspires to a condition of absolute placelessness, whereas the terracing of the same site to receive the stepped form of a building is an engagement in the act of “cultivating” the site. (26, original italics) The “totally flat datum” that the universalising tendency sometimes presupposes is, within the critical regionalist perspective, an erroneous assumption. The “cultivation” of a site for the design of a building illustrates the point that built space emerges out of an interaction between parallel phenomena as they contrast and/or converge in a particular set of timespace co-ordinates. These are phenomena that could include (but are not limited to) geomorphic data like soil and rock formations, seismic activity, inclination and declension; climatic considerations in the form of wind patterns, temperature variations, rainfall patterns, available light and dark, humidity and the like; the building context in relation to the cardinal points of north, south, east, and west, along with their intermediary positions. There are also architectural considerations in the form of available building materials and personnel to consider. The social, psychological and cultural requirements of the building’s prospective in-dwellers are intermingled with all these phenomena. This is not so much a question of where to place the air conditioning system but the actuality of the way the building itself is placed on its site, or indeed if that site should be built on at all. A critical regionalist building practice, then, is autochthonous to the degree that a full consideration of this wide range of in-situ interactions is taken into consideration in the development of its design plan. And given this autochthonous quality of the critical regionalist project, it also suggests that the architectural design plan itself (especially when it utilised in conjunction with CAD and virtual reality simulations), might be the better model for designing electrate-centred projects rather than writing or even the script. The proliferation of ‘McMansions’ across many Australian suburbs during the 1990s (generally, oversized domestic buildings designed in the abstract with little or no thought to the above mentioned elements, on bulldozed sites, with powerful air-conditioning systems, and no verandas or roof eves to speak of) demonstrates the continuing influence of a universal, centralising dogma in the realm of built place. As summer temperatures start to climb into the 40°C range all these air-conditioners start to hum in unison, which in turn raises the susceptibility of the supporting infrastructure to collapse under the weight of an overbearing electrical load. The McMansion is a clear example of a built form that is envisioned more so in a drafting room, a space where the architect is remote-sensing the locational specificities. In this envisioning (driven more by a direct line-of-sight idiom dominant in “flat datum” and economic considerations rather than architectural or experiential ones), the tactile is subordinated, which is the subject of Frampton’s sixth point: It is symptomatic of the priority given to sight that we find it necessary to remind ourselves that the tactile is an important dimension in the perception of built form. One has in mind a whole range of complementary sensory perceptions which are registered by the labile body: the intensity of light, darkness, heat and cold; the feeling of humidity; the aroma of material; the almost palpable presence of masonry as the body senses it own confinement; the momentum of an induced gait and the relative inertia of the body as it traverses the floor; the echoing resonance of our own footfall. (28) The point here is clear: in its wider recognition of, and the foregrounding of my body’s full range of sensate capacities in relation to both natural and built space, the critical regionalist approach to built form spreads its meaning-making capacities across a broader range of knowledge modalities. This tactility is further elaborated in more thoroughly personal ways by Margaret Morse in her illuminating essay, “Home: Smell, Taste, Posture, Gleam”. Paradoxically, this synaesthetic, syncretic approach to bodily meaning-making in a built place, regional milieu intensely concentrates the site-centred locus of everyday life, while simultaneously, the electronic knowledge that increasingly underpins it expands both my body’s and its region’s knowledge-making possibilities into a global gestalt, sometimes even a cosmological one. It is a paradoxical transformation that makes us look anew at social, cultural and political givens, even objective and empirical understandings, especially as they are articulated through national frames of reference. Domestic built space then is a kind of micro-version of the multi-function polis where work, pleasure, family, rest, public display and privacy intermingle. So in both this reduction and expansion in the constitution of domestic home life, one that increasingly represents the location of the production of knowledge, built place represents a concentration of energy that forces us to re-imagine border-making, order, and the dynamic interplay of nomadic movement and sedentary return, a point that echoes Nicolas Rothwell’s comment that “every exile has in it a homecoming” (80). Albeit, this is a knowledge-making milieu with an expanded range of modalities incorporated and expressed through a wide range of bodily intensities not simply cognitive ones. Much of the ambiguous discontent manifested in McMansion style domiciles across many Western countries might be traced to the fact that their occupants have had little or no say in the way those domiciles have been designed and/or constructed. In Heidegger’s terms, they have not thought deeply enough about “dwelling” in that building, although with the advent of the media room the question of whether a “building” securely borders both “dwelling” and “thinking” is now open to question. As anxieties over border-making at all scales intensifies, the complexities and un/sureties of natural and built space take ever greater hold of the psyche, sometimes through the advance of a “high level of critical self-consciousness”, a process Frampton describes as a “double mediation” of world culture and local conditions (21). Nearly all commentators warn of a nostalgic, romantic or a sentimental regionalism, the sum total of which is aimed at privileging the local/regional and is sometimes utilised as a means of excluding the global or universal, sometimes even the national (Berry 67). Critical regionalism is itself a mediating factor between these dispositions, working its methods and practices through my own psyche into the local, the regional, the national and the global, rejecting and/or accepting elements of these domains, as my own specific context, in its multiplicity, demands it. If the politico-economic and cultural dimensions of this global/regional world have tended to undermine the process of border-making across a range of scales, we can see in domestic forms of built place the intense residue of both their continuing importance and an increased dependency on this electro-mediated world. This is especially apparent in those domiciles whose media rooms (with their satellite dishes, telephone lines, computers, television sets, games consuls, and music stereos) are connecting them to it in virtuality if not in reality. Indeed, the thought emerges (once again keeping in mind Eric Leed’s remark on the literate-configured sense of autonomy that is further enhanced by a separate physical address and residence) that the intense importance attached to domestically orientated built place by globally/regionally orientated peoples will figure as possibly the most viable means via which this sense of autonomy will transfer to electronic forms of knowledge. If, however, this here domestic habitué turns his gaze away from the screen that transports me into this global/regional milieu and I focus my attention on the physicality of the building in which I dwell, I once again stand in the presence of another beginning. This other beginning is framed diagrammatologically by the building’s architectural plans (usually conceived in either an in-situ, autochthonous, or a universal manner), and is a graphical conception that anchors my body in country long after the architects and builders have packed up their tools and left. This is so regardless of whether a home is built, bought, rented or squatted in. Ihab Hassan writes that, “Home is not where one is pushed into the light, but where one gathers it into oneself to become light” (417), an aphorism that might be rephrased as follows: “Home is not where one is pushed into the country, but where one gathers it into oneself to become country.” For the in-and-out-and-around-and-about domestic dweller of the twenty-first century, then, home is where both regional and global forms of country decisively enter the soul via the conduits of the virtuality of digital flows and the reality of architectural footings. 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