Journal articles on the topic 'World politics, 1995-2005'

In November, 1996, the Fifth Meeting of the Commonwealth Ministers Responsible for Women's Affairs recommended that member countries be encouraged to achieve a target of not less than 30 per cent of women in decision-making in the political, public and private sectors by the year 2005. This is an ambitious target for, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the proportion of women involved in politics world-wide declined from 12.1 per cent in 1985 to 11 per cent in 1995. The situation throughout Africa is especially bleak for, as the following table indicates, with the notable exceptions of Mozambique, Seychelles, South Africa, Eritrea and Uganda, most African countries fall well below the world average.

Memory culture and historical politics in today’s RussiaConsidering that other countries are still conducting their studies, it is too early to make conclusions and summarise the question of Russia’s memory culture and historical politics. However, it is possible to share some insights concerning this topic:(1) This analysis indicates that Russia’s case is in stark contrast to the opinions of those theorists who negate the existence of national memory culture. In Russia, this culture began to materialise in 2005, after the complicated period of post-Soviet transformation. What became central was the narrative of the empire (derzhava), whose status should also be recognised by the rest of the world. The main symbolical resource used in the construction of the motif of powerful Russia is a myth of victory in the Great Patriotic War. More recently, however, this general myth has been strengthened by selected facts from other historical periods.(2) Symbolical figures of Russia’s memory culture – both those developing and those already formed – are continuously reinterpreted. Since 1992 the myth of victory has undergone a few stages of transformation: the first years of Boris Yeltsin’s presidency (until 1995) were dominated by active efforts to deconstruct this myth; in the period between 1995 and 2000 it was restored, with a particular stress put on the status of Russian people as the unconquered victim; in 2000–2005, the State regained its vital place in the structure of the myth. Recently, the myth has been instrumentalised and used as an argument in Russia’s confrontation with the West. The period since 2011 has seen a noticeable increase in attempts to expand the symbolic instrumentarium through active use of selected facts from other historical periods(3) Although what dominates in Russia is the imperial mega narrative (derzhava),there is also an alternative stream that makes a substantial opposition – the myth of a victim. The years 2009–2013 have shown us that the memory of Stalin’s crimes is really strong. In this sense, the structure of memory in Russia, although with some exceptions, is comparable to the Polish one. On the other hand, substantial differences are noticed in comparison with Germany, Lithuania or Belarus. Those countries have only one memory culture, although with different topics included in the content. Ukraine remains beyond the regional context: even though the process of forming a single policy of remembrance is in place, it is only in its initial phase. Kultura pamięci i polityka historyczna w dzisiejszej RosjiBadania nad zagadnieniem kultury pamięci w Rosji i krajach ościennych ciągle trwają, dlatego nie można jeszcze mówić o ich podsumowaniu. Istnieją jednak przesłanki, by przedstawić pewne wnioski na ten temat.1. Przeprowadzona analiza ukazuje, że przypadek Rosji wyraźnie przeczy poglądom tych teoretyków, którzy negują możliwość istnienia narodowej kultury pamięci. Po skomplikowanym etapie transformacji postsowieckiej w Rosji kultura pamięci w 2005 roku nabrała konkretnych kształtów. W jej centrum znalazła się opowieść o imperium (dieržava), którego status powinna uznać także reszta świata. Podstawowym symbolicznym zasobem dla toposu silnego państwa rosyjskiego jest mit zwycięstwa w Wielkiej Wojnie Ojczyźnianej. Jednak w ostatnim czasie do wzmocnienia mitu centralnego aktywnie wykorzystuje się także selektywnie wybrane fakty z innych epok historycznych.2. Symboliczne figury tworzącej się czy też już ukształtowanej kultury pamięci są w Rosji stale reinterpretowane. Także mit zwycięstwa po 1992 roku przeszedł kilka etapów transformacji: w pierwszych latach prezydentury Borysa Jelcyna (do roku 1995) dominowały aktywne próby dekonstrukcji tego mitu, w latach 1995–2000 był on odnowiony, akcentowano przede wszystkim status rosyjskiego narodu jako niepokonanej ofiary. W latach 2000–2005 w centrum mitu znów usytuowano państwo, a w ostatnim czasie został on poddany instrumentalizacji i wykorzystany jako argument w konfrontacji Rosji z Zachodem. Po 2011 roku wyraźnie widać próby ilościowego rozszerzenia zasobu instrumentarium symbolicznego za pomocą aktywnego wykorzystania wybranych faktów z innych epok historycznych.3. Choć w Rosji wyraźnie dominuje meganarracja imperialna (dieržava), to jednak ma ona swoją konkurencję. W Rosji nadal w silnej opozycji do mitu zwycięstwa pozostaje mit ofiary. Lata 2009–2013 wyraźnie pokazały żywotność pamięci o ofiarach stalinowskich. W tym sensie struktura pamięci Rosji, choć z pewnymi wyjątkami, może być porównywana do polskiej, jednocześnie różniąc się istotnie od niemieckiej, litewskiej czy białoruskiej. W tych krajach dobitnie wyrażona jest jedna kultura pamięci, choć jej treść zawiera różne wątki tematyczne. W kontekście regionalnym nie mieści się Ukraina, w której jednolita polityka pamięci jest wprawdzie formowana, ale to dopiero początek procesu.

Abstract The Balkan Cities Association of Nephrology, Dialysis, Transplantation and Artificial Organs (BANTAO) was established in Ohrid, Republic of Macedonia on October 9, 1993 during the First Congress of the Macedonian Society of Nephrology, Dialysis, Transplantation and Artificial Organs (MSNDTAO). The idea of the founders was that such Society would have a clear impact on several aspects of practice and research in nephrology and artificial organs in the Balkans, firstly, by increasing its international visibility and potential collaborative work, and recognition by international organizations. Secondly, such a society would facilitate the exchange of experience and knowledge between experts in our area. In addition, it would be a very positive symbolic act showing that collaborative work for the betterment of life is possible and desirable in our area and that coming together will bear better fruits at the human and cultural levels. It will also send a very clear signal to the outside world that the Balkans can be a place of collaboration and mutual understanding. Several international bodies such as the International Society of Artificial Organs and the International Faculty of Artificial Organs have signaled their interest in and support for the creation of such a society. Despite the turbulent times in the Balkan Peninsula, the First BANTAO Congress was held in Varna from September 22 to 24, 1995, which was an impressive event. F. Valderrabano, Chairman of the EDTA–ERA registry reported on that event with a lot of sympathy in the paper entitled “Nephrologists of the Balkan countries meet across political frontiers and war fronts – an example to politicians. The foundation of and the Second Congress of BANTAO were also well accepted by the colleagues nephrologists from Russia. The Second Congress was held on September 6-10, 1997 in Struga, the Third BANTAO Congress was held on September 18-20, 1998 in Belgrade, the Fourth Congress of BANTAO was held in Izmir on November 14-16, 1999, the Fifth Congress of BANTAO was held in Thessaloniki on September 30 – October 3, 2001, the 6th BANTAO Congress was held in Varna, on October 6-9, 2003, the 7th BANTAO Congress was held in Ohrid, on September 8-11, 2005, the 8th BANTAO Congress was held in Belgrade, on September 16-19, 2007, the 9th BANTAO Congress was held in Antalya, November 18-22, 2009, the 10th BANTAO Congress was held in Chalkidiki, October 13-15, 2011, the 11th BANTAO Congress was held from 26 to 29 September 2013 in Timisoara on the 20th Anniversary of the foundation of BANTAO, the 12th BANTAO Congress was held on October 15-18, 2015 in Opatija, the 13th BANTAO Congress was held on 4-8 October, 2017 in Sarajevo, the 14th BANTAO Congress was held on September 20-23, 2018, in Budva and the 15th BANTAO Congress was held in Skopje, 26-29 September 2019. Another milestone in the life of BANTAO was the appearance of the BANTAO journal in 2003, which has been published biannually since then. In the past 17 years there have been 33 editions of the journal and seven supplements reporting BANTAO congresses. The editors of the journal past and present are: 2003–2005 (Dimitar Nenov); 2005–2009 (Ali Basci); 2009–(Goce Spasovski). Up to date, more than 400 papers have been published. The BANTAO journal is registered on EBSCO, DOAJ, SCOPUS, and has become a strong ‘glue’ among nephrologists from the Balkan cities. The BANTAO congresses and the BANTAO journal have succeeded in elevating nephrology knowledge and thus increased the standards of nephrology patient care throughout the Balkans. Standing above the divisive forces of politics, language and war, BANTAO gives a living example that collaboration and humility are feasible in times of maddening destruction, and are transformative.

This article looks at developments in Eastern European civil society (as measured by the participation in organisations) and how this has changed between 1995 and 2005 using the World Values Survey. There are comparisons with Western Europe on the one hand and the United States on the other, which show that although civic participation of this kind has declined in the United States, it remains stable in Europe, including at a low level in Eastern Europe. Surprisingly, there seemed to be little differences between countries that had joined the European Union and those that had not. The article considers reasons for this continued weakness of civil society in Eastern Europe.

In media text on international relations, disagreement between countries is presented metaphorically as a disagreement between people.The relation between metaphor and discourse is studied by Zinken and Musollf (2009). Mussolf studies metaphors related to the EU organized in “scenarios”. In his view, the thematic target (for instance, EU politics) is accessed through a source input for the metaphor complex (family/marriage/concepts) (Mussolf 2006) and this is “characterized by the dominance of a few traditional, gender-coded stereotypes of family roles” (Mussolf 2009: 1).The present paper traces the ways disagreement in the sphere of international relations is presented in the media.In this study, the observed patterns used to represent disagreement between countries are argument, disagreement, conflict, and fight. The level of disagreement varies depending on the metaphoric scenario used to represent it. It was observed that the strongest way of expressing disagreement is based on the “split up”, and “break up” scenario, followed by the “fight”, “conflict” and the “argument” scenario.In expressing disagreement in media text on international affairs, Lakoff’s STATE IS A PERSON metaphor (Lakoff 1990, 1995) is used. In Chilton and Lakoff’s view, metaphors are not mere words or fanciful notions, but one of our primary means of conceptualizing the world. As they have stated, a metaphor is “a means of understanding one domain of one’s experience in terms of another” (Chilton, Lakoff 1989). Member states are presented as people who quarrel and disagree over issues related to international relations or policies. Along with that metaphor, a place for the institution metonymy is used. As Barcelona has stated, proper names are often metonymic in origin, i. e. they refer to a circumstance or distinctive aspect linked to their referent (Barcelona 2004, 2005).The place for the institution metonymy is found in two variants: the country for the institution and the capital for the institution. For instance, a disagreement between the governments of two countries is presented as disagreement between their capitals, as in “Paris and Berlin fundamentally “disagree” on who should succeed Jean-Claude Juncker” (https://www.express.co.uk)”. The same situation is presented as a disagreement between countries: „Germany and France ‘DISAGREE’ over Juncker replacement” (ibid). In the abovementioned examples, an item from one of the two metonymic chains is juxtaposed to a corresponding item in the other chain:Paris (place name - capital) — Berlin (place name - capital)Germany (place name- country) — France (place name- country)It seems that names from one metonymic chain belonging to a certain class of names (country name, names of cities, capitals, regions, continents, etc.) are juxtaposed to names from another metonymic chain, belonging to the same class of names. However, there are texts in which this is not necessarily the case. A name of city (capital) is often juxtaposed to a name of a country, as in “Paris put its foot down, and won’t let Germany get its way” (www.politico.eu). Expressions may vary depending on the stregth of disagreement, ranging from “disagree”, “argue”, “conflict” to “fight’, “split up” and “break up”.

This article is an inductive argumentation and an empirical-analytical paradigm that evaluates the actual relationship between Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita and the Carbon Dioxide (CO2) in country groups of the G8 considered as developed in a period of time from 1960 to 2011. It was developed an Augmented Dickey-Fuller unit root (ADF), a Granger Causality Test and a Johansen Cointegration test. The results evidence the non-stationary of constrains in both countries. It was obtained a VAR model with two variables with a number of lags of four - VAR2 (4) to which were tested for causality by demonstrating a unidirectionality of GDP per capita to CO2.
 Keywords: economic growth, economic development, income distribution, environmental economics.
 References
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 [2]R. Bermejo, Del desarrollo sostenible según Brundtland a la sostenibilidad como biomimesis, Bilbao: Hegoa, 2014.
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The article discusses a shift, of the paradigm structuring Polish official memory of World War II and the state-socialist period from antifascist to anticommunist, that took place in the post-1989 Polish parliament. Based on the example of the political struggle in parliament over the memory of May 1945 (Victory Day) that occurred on three consecutive major anniversaries of this event (1995, 2005, and 2015), the article shows how the right-wing post-Solidarity camp dismantled and eliminated the antifascist narrative that was based on a symbolic continuity between 1945 and 1995–2005, respectively, and was promoted by the postcommunists, replacing it with a primarily anticommunist narrative about “two totalitarianisms,” founded on a symbolic continuity between 1939 and 1989. Within this new paradigm, May 1945 was made into a merely formal commemorative point of reference devoid of any symbolic power.

This article is an inductive argumentation and an empirical-analytical paradigm that evaluates the actual relationship between Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita and the Carbon Dioxide (CO2) in the case of Ecuador and to compare it with Latin America and the Caribbean within a period of analysis from 1960 to 2011. It was developed an Augmented Dickey-Fuller unit root (ADF), a Granger Causality Test and a Johansen Cointegration test. It was obtained a VAR model with two variables with a number of 14 lags – VAR2(14) which were tested for which were tested for causality by demonstrating a bidirectionality for Latin America and the Caribbean and a unidirectionality of GDP per capita to CO2 for the Ecuador.
 Keywords: economic growth, sustainable development, environmental economics.
 References
 [1]E. Urteaga, «Las teorías económicas del desarrollo sostenible,» Cuadernos de Economía, vol. 32, nº 89, pp.113-162, 2009.
 [2]G. Brundtland, «Our Common Future,» de Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987.
 [3]R. Bermejo, Del desarrollo sostenible según Brundtland a la sostenibilidad como biomimesis, Bilbao: Hegoa, 2014.
 [4]W. Beckerman, «Economists, scientists, and environmental catastrophe,» Oxford Economic Papers, vol. 24, nº 3, 1972.
 [5]G. Grossman and A. Krueger, «Economic Growth and the Environment,» The Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 110, nº 2, pp. 353-377, 1995.
 [6]J. y. A. Medina, «Ingreso y desigualdad: la Hipótesis de Kuznets en el caso boliviano,» Espacios, vol. 38, nº31, p. 23, 2017.
 [7]M. Ahluwalia, «Inequality, poverty and development, » Journal of Development Economics, nº 3, pp. 307-342, 1976.
 [8]A. y. R. D. Alesina, «Distributive politics and economic growth,» Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 109, nº 2, pp. 465-490, 1994.
 [9]R. Barro, «Inequality and growth in a panel of countries, » Journal of Economic Growth, vol. 5, nº 1, pp. 5-32, 2000.
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RESUMENEl nacimiento en la Antigua Roma de niños con rasgos sexuales masculinos y femeninos a la vez, los llamados andróginos o hermafroditas, eran considerados como un gravísimo prodigio. Su expiación, necesaria para el restablecimiento de las buenas relaciones entre los hombres y los dioses, quedó en manos exclusivamente de mujeres: ancianas, matronas y virgines.PALABRAS CLAVE: Antigua Roma, Matrona, prodigio, expiación, andróginoABSTRACTThe birth in ancient Rome of children with both male and female sexual features, so-called androgynes or hermaphrodites, was regarded as a an extraordinary phenomenon. Their expiation, necessary for the restoration of good relations between men and gods, remained exclusively in the hands of women: old women, midwives and virgines.KEY WORDS: Ancient Rome, midwife, prodigy, expiation, androgynus BIBLIOGRAFÍAAbaecherly Boyce, A. (1937), “The expiatory rites of 207 B. C.”, TAPhA, 68, 157-171.Allély, A. (2003), “Les enfants malformés et considerés comme prodigia à Rome et en Italie sous la République”, REA, 105, 1, 127-156.Allély, A. (2004), “Les enfants malformés et handicapés à Rome sous le Principat”, REA, 106, 1, 73-101.Androutsos, G. (2006), “Hermaphroditism in Greek and Roman antiquity”, Hormones, 5, 214-217.Berthelet, Y. (2010), “Expiation, par les autorités romaines, de prodiges survenus en terre alliée: Quelques réflexions sur le statut juridique des territoires et des communautés alliés, et sur le processus de romanisation”, Hypothèses, 13, 1, 169-178.Berthelet, Y. (2013), “Expiation, par Rome, de prodiges survenus dans les cités alliées du nomen latinum ou des cités alliées italiennes non latines”, L´Antiquité Classique 82, 91-109.Breglia Pulci Doria, L. (1983), Oracoli Sibillini tra rituali e propaganda (Studi su Flegonte di Tralles), Napoli, Liguori Editori.Brisson, L. (1986), “Neutrum utrumque. 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Multiple births in ancient Rome”, en K. Mustakallio, J. Hanska, H.-L. Sainio, V. Vuolanto (éds.), Hoping for continuity.Childhood, education and death in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Acta Instituti Romani Finlandiae XXXIII), Rome, 72-83.Delcourt, M. (1958), Hermaphrodite. Mythes et rites de la bisexualité dans l´antiquité classique, Paris, PUF.Delcourt, M. (1966), Hermaphroditea. Recherches sur l´être double promoteur de la fertilité dans le monde classique (Coll. Latomus 86), Bruxelles, Latomus.Doroszewska, J. (2013), “Between the monstrous and the Divine: Hermaphrodites in Phlegon of Tralles´Mirabilia”, Acta Ant. Hung, 53, 379–392.Freyburger, G. (1977), “La supplication d´actions de grâces dans la religion romaine archaïque”, Latomus, 36, 283-315.Freyburger, G. (1988), “Supplication grecque et supplication romaine”, Latomus, 47, 3, 501-525.Garland, R. (1995), The Eye of the Beholder. Deformity and Disability in the Graeco-Roman World, London, Duckworth.Graumann, L. A. 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Bringing rightist movement studies into the Iranian context, this study advances a generalizable understanding of the ideological, moral, and cultural activism of Islamist movements and their rightist counterparts. While numerous studies have discussed the economic explanation of rightist movements, I integrate Islamist movements in the Muslim world and rightist movements in the West to develop a generalizable cultural and moral explanation of rightist movements. Value and ideological conflicts, as well as moral outrage, drive this integrated understanding of rightist movements. The rise of innovative and contentious forms of millennialism in Iran—especially the increasing salience of the Jamkaran mosque, the rise of new media outlets and millennial discourses, and pertinent policies—provide evidence for proposing this generalizable understanding. I argue that the rise of performative contentions surrounding millennialism, known as Mahdaviat, within the pro-regime revolutionary rightist movement in Iran was Islamists’ ideological response to liberal threat perceptions. These threat perceptions were activated before the liberal Reform era (1997–2005). After the ascent of Ahmadinejad to power in 2005, ideological millennialism became the dominant discursive field in Iran’s state politics. Drawing on narratives of prominent Islamist figures and media personalities in Iran and events surrounding Mahdaviat, this paper advances a generalizable argument of the moral and cultural explanation of rightist movements.


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During the thirty years of the country’s independence, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Kazakhstan developed several foreign policy concepts. The first document, which established the well-known Kazakh multi-vector approach, appeared in 1995. By that time, Kazakhstan had established constructive cooperation not only with the world major actors (Russia, China, US) and international organizations (EU, NATO, OIC), but also with the neighbors in the Central Asian region. In 1995, the Kazakh leadership took action to remove the Soviet nuclear weapons from its territory. All of the above steps demonstrated that Kazakhstan is a reliable and predictable foreign policy partner, as well as a responsible member of the international community. In 2000, 2005 and 2014, the foreign policy concepts were amended. The necessary amendments were prompted both by domestic developments and the situation in the international arena. In 2019, the Foreign Policy Concept 2020–2030 was adopted. This document was not only part of the election program of the President C.- J. C. Tokayev, it was a concept confirming the continuity of the multi-vector and balanced foreign policy of the “new” and “listening” Kazakhstan. Additionally in this document, Kazakhstan openly declared its intention to secure the status of the “leading state in the region”. Therefore, Kazakhstan’s relations with other countries of Central Asia acquired a strategic character. The Republic of Kazakhstan also called for expansion of multilateral dialogue and cooperation in the region, for strengthening the existing formats of interaction between the Central Asian countries and external partners. The current Foreign Policy Concept is not only a guide to action for Kazakhstan itself, but it also sends clear signals to foreign partners regarding the limits of what is acceptable in relations with the Republic of Kazakhstan. This message seems important in today’s turbulent system of international relations, when new pillars of sustainable development are needed not only for individual countries, but for the entire world.

The European Union (EU) was an influential voice in advocating the adoption of gender mainstreaming by the 4th United Nations World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. Since then gender mainstreaming has become a central policy plank of gender justice globally, but progress has been variable and modest. This paper examines the unfolding of gender mainstreaming in the EU, which was one of the early adopters as reflected by its commitment to gender mainstreaming in 1996. The objective is to identify patterns that may have implications for gender justice on a broader scale. The lenses are the European Employment Strategy dating from 1997 and targeted gender equality initiatives dating from the Community Framework on Gender Equality (2001–2005). Drawing on documentary analysis of these sources constraints on moving form aspiration to policy practice and outcome are identified. These are intensified by the multilevel structure of decision-making in the EU, which means that commitments agreed at the EU level are not pursed with the same fervour by all member states. But constraints are inherent in gender mainstreaming because of the contested and vague nature of the concept, the context of cross-cutting inequalities and the structural basis of these inequalities.

RESUMENLa historia del cristianismo no se entiende sin el complejo fenómeno mariano. El culto mariano ha afianzado la construcción de identidades colectivas, pero también individuales. La figura de la Virgen María estableció un modelo de conducta desde cada contexto histórico-cultural, remarcando especialmente los ideales de maternidad y virginidad. Dentro del imaginario católico, la Europa contemporánea ha estado marcada por la formación de una cultura aparicionista que se ha generadoa partir de diversas apariciones marianas que han establecido un canon y un marco de interpretación que ha alimentado las guerras culturales entre secularismo y catolicismo.PALABRAS CLAVE: catolicismo, Virgen María, cultura aparicionista, Lourdes, guerras culturales.ABSTRACTThe history of Christianity cannot be understood without the complex Marian phenomenon. Marian devotion has reinforced the construction of collective, but also of individual identities. 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The Aid for Trade (AFT) initiative, launched in 2005 to help developing and especially the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) integrate the rules of the World Trade System adopted in the Uruguay Round turned out to be more about mobilizing support for the stalled Doha Round negotiations. A decade later, a broadened AFT agenda has eluded effective evaluation. The recently concluded Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA) provides an ideal opportunity to narrow the scope of AFT activities to heed the call for ‘Managing for Development Results’ (MfDR). The article reviews the evidence on trade costs distinguishing between LDCs and Landlocked LDCS (LLDCs). The article also includes new estimates of time in transit for international parcel data that is measured relatively accurately. New estimates provide support for allocating a greater share of AFT funds towards LDCs and particularly towards LLDCs, both groups showing higher trade costs than comparators and less progress in reducing trade costs since 1995. On average, time in customs for imports and exports are also significantly higher for both groups than for their respective comparators. LDCs and LLDCs have systematically lower scores for the components in the new Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Trade Facilitation Indicator (TFI). These new estimates suggest that a successful implementation of the TFA, defined as moving halfway towards the frontier value of the TFI for the respective country grouping could reduce trade costs for imports of LDCs by 2.5% and by 4.5% for LLDCs. Even though there is more to trade costs than customs management, monitoring implementation of the TFA would be part of the Istanbul Program of Action (IPoA) and a stepping stone towards the concrete trade performance targets that have lacked in AFT activities so far.

The armed aggression against the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina ended with the signing of the General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Dayton Agreement), initialed in Dayton on November 21, 1995, and signed on December 14, 1995 in Paris „in Bosnian, Croatian, English and the Serbian language“. The Dayton Agreement confirmed the fact that the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia had real control (power) over the so-called Republika Srpska. Annex 4 of the Dayton Agreement determined the internal structure of Bosnia and Herzegovina. There are two entities in the internal structure of Bosnia and Herzegovina: the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which consists of 10 cantons, and the Republika Srpska. Apart from the two entities, there is also the Brčko District of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was created by the Decision of the International Arbitration Court. It was established on March 8, 2000. According to the Dayton Agreement, the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, whose official name became „Bosnia and Herzegovina“, continues its legal existence under international law as a state with its internationally recognized borders. It remains a member of the United Nations, and as Bosnia and Herzegovina may retain membership or request membership in organizations within the United Nations system and in other international organizations. The Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Annex 4 of the Dayton Agreement) guarantees human rights and „fundamental freedoms“. Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Entities, according to the Constitution, will ensure „the highest degree of internationally recognized human rights and fundamental freedoms.“ For this purpose, the formation of the Commission for Human Rights is also envisaged, as provided for in Annex 6 of the General Framework Agreement. The issue of the return of refugees and displaced persons is addressed in Annex 7 of the Dayton Agreement, entitled „Agreement on Refugees and Displaced Persons“. According to Annex 7, all refugees and displaced persons have the right to return freely to their homes and have the right to restitution of property confiscated from them during hostilities since 1991 and to receive compensation for all property that cannot be returned to them. The „Agreement“ states that the return of refugees and displaced persons is an important goal of resolving the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In the period 1995-2020. The authorities of the Bosnian-Herzegovinian entity of Republika Srpska did not give up on the project of „separation of peoples“. The implementation of Annex 7 of the Dayton Agreement has been obstructed in various ways: by killings, beatings, intimidation, attacks on religious buildings and in other ways. Obstructions in the implementation of Annex 7 were also carried out in the entity of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. However, this was not as pronounced as in Republika Srpska. The first return of displaced persons (refugees and displaced persons) was to the settlement of Mahala, which until the Dayton Agreement was located in the municipality of Kalesija and after Dayton in the municipality of Osmaci in the entity of Republika Srpska. It was August 24, 1996. This was followed by the return of Bosniaks to the settlements of Jusići and Dugi dio in the municipality of Zvornik and Svjetliča in the municipality of Doboj. These events also marked the official start of the implementation of Annex 7 of the Dayton Peace Agreement in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Although the Dayton Agreement guaranteed the return of the exiles, everything went much harder on the ground, and there were also human casualties. Between 1992 and 1995, approximately 2.2 million people in Bosnia and Herzegovina were forced to flee their homes as a result of the war against Bosnia and Herzegovina. About 1.2 million people have applied for refugee protection in more than 100 countries around the world, while countries in the region have accepted about 40% of the total number of refugees from Bosnia and Herzegovina. Almost one million people were internally displaced in Bosnia and Herzegovina. At the beginning of 2003, the Strategy of Bosnia and Herzegovina for the Implementation of Annex 7 of the Dayton Agreement was adopted. It was the first, at the level of the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina, harmonized, framework document which sets goals and plans the necessary actions and reforms towards the final implementation of Annex 7 of the Dayton Agreement. According to the 2015 UNHCR Annual Statistical Report, the number of refugees from Bosnia and Herzegovina outside the country was 18,748. Of these, 9,080 had refugee status in Serbia, 4,055 in France, 2,274 in Switzerland, 1,412 in Germany, and the remaining number in other countries. It is estimated that at the end of 1995 there were about one million displaced persons, accounting for almost a quarter of Bosnia and Herzegovina's pre-war population. The first comprehensive, official census of displaced persons in Bosnia and Herzegovina was conducted at the end of 2000, when 557,275 displaced persons were registered. The 2005 audit of the status of displaced persons identified 186,138 displaced persons in Bosnia and Herzegovina. According to the data of the Ministry of Human Rights and Refugees from 2016, there were 98,574 displaced persons in Bosnia and Herzegovina, of which 38,345 or 40.6% were displaced in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 59,834 or 58.8% in the Republika Srpska and 395 or 0.5% in the Brčko District of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In the ethnic structure of displaced persons, according to the head of household - families, 32.7% (10,667 families and 30,920 persons) are Bosniaks, 60.0% (19,565 families and 60,737 persons) Serbs, 6.7% (2,195 families and 6,374 persons) Croats and 0.6% (184 families and 542 persons) Others. According to the 2016 data of the Ministry of Human Rights and Refugees, by the end of 2016, around 341,000 housing units had been built or renovated in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In the Bosnian entity of Republika Srpska, the Bosnian language is denied. Teaching in the Bosnian language is prohibited, and the language is called the non-existent Bosniak language. This discriminates against students who want their language to be called Bosnian. In addition, high-ranking officials from the Republika Srpska in public appearances deny the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Bosniaks as a people, deny genocide against Bosniaks, which affects the perspective of the people of this area. Streets in cities bear the names of war criminals from the Second World War and the period of aggression against the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, busts of war criminals are being built, schools and other state institutions are being „sanctified“, etc. In the period 1995-2020. Annex 7 of the Dayton Agreement was not fully implemented in 2006, as an important factor in the reintegration of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the recognition of the results of armed aggression and genocide against Bosniaks.

En este estudio analizaremos el recorrido de los católicos reaccionarios a partir de la Guerra de Independencia y su cambio de antinacionales a nacional-católicos hasta convertirse en fascistizados en el periodo entre la Guerra Civil y el estallido de la Segunda Guerra Mundial. En ese sentido cabe destacar la labor de José Pemartín. La centralidad del estudio la ocupan tres temas contenidos en su obra más importante, Qué es lo Nuevo: la diferencia de matices con respecto a los valores expresados por otros intelectuales nacional-católicos anteriores y contemporáneos a él; la tentativa de conciliar el ideario nacional-católico con las ideas falangistas; y la doctrina fascista. Palabras clave: nacional-catolicismo, fascismo, monarquismo, institucional, circunstancial, tradicionalismo.Topónimo: EspañaPeríodo: Siglo XX ABSTRACTThis study analyses the path traversed by Catholic reactionaries after the War of Independence and their transition from antinational to National Catholic until they converted to Fascism during the period between the Civil War and the outbreak of World War Two. In this respect, it is worth highlighting the work of José Pemartín. This study mainly focuses on three themes in his most important creation, Qué es lo Nuevo: the differences in tone in comparison with the values expressed by both earlier and coetaneous National-Catholic intellectuals; the attempt to reconcile National-Catholic ideology with Falangist thinking; and Fascist doctrine. Keywords: Nacional-Catholism, Fascism, monarchism, institutional, circumstantial, traditionalismPlace names: SpainPeriod: Siglo XX REFERENCIASÁlvarez Junco, J. 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Antologia di testi fascisti (1919-1945), Roma, Minerva Italica.— (1938), Scritti e discorsi politici di Alfredo Rocco, Milán, Giuffré Editore.Sardá y Salvany, F. (1884) [2011], El liberalismo es pecado, Barcelona, Librería y tipografía católica.— (1883), La Gran tesis española, El Correo Catalán.Saz Campos, I. (2003), España contra España. Los nacionalismos franquistas, Madrid, Marcial Pons.— (2004), Fascismo y franquismo, PUV, Valencia.— (2013), Las caras del franquismo, Comares, Granada.Scheler, M. (1936), El resentimiento en la Moral, Madrid, Espasa Calpe.Sepúlveda Muñoz, I. (2005), I. El sueño de la madre patria: hispanoamericanismo y nacionalismo, Madrid, Marcial Pons.Spengler, O. (1923) [2011], La decadencia de Occidente, Barcelona, Austral.— (1933) [2011], Los años decisivos, Madrid, Altera.Spinetti, G. S. (1933), Il concetto della natura umana, La Sapienza, 1.Tarquini, A. (2013), Il Gentile dei fascisti. Gentiliani e antigentiliani nel regime fascista, Bolonia, Il Mulino.Tomás, J. M. (2001), La Falange de Franco: Fascismo y fascistización en el régimen franquista (1937-1945), Barcelona: Plaza y Janes.— (2019), Los fascismos españoles, Barcelona, Ariel.Tovar, A. (1941), El imperio de España, Madrid, Ediciones Afrodísio Aguado.Tusell, J. (1997), Las derechas en la España contemporánea, Madrid, UNED.— (2006), La historia de España en el siglo XX: La dictadura de Franco, Taurus, Madrid.Tuñon de Lara, M. (1993), El régimen de Franco (1936-1975), Madrid, UNED.Vegas Latapie, E. (1938), Romanticismo y democracia, Santander, Cultura Española.— (1989), Los caminos del desengaño. Memorias políticas (1936-1938), Madrid, Tebas.Viñas, A. (2007), Franco, Hitler y el estallido de la Guerra Civil. Antecedentes y consecuencias. Alianza Editorial: Madrid.

The three key conditions for the existence of a state, according to the theory of state and law, are geographical territory, population and organized political power in that area. However, during the twentieth century in some African and Asian countries, due to various political, economic and other factors, problems began to appear in performance of their basic functions: ensuring public order and peace, providing health services, education. Modern science has introduced the term failed states to describe such countries. This scientific phenomenon has been the subject of numerous researches, and international organizations have been publishing annual indices of fragile, failed or unsuccessful world states for years. The first index of its kind was created in 2005 by the American non-profit organization The Fund for Peace in cooperation with the magazine Foreign Policy, which initially included 76 countries. The original term failed state was considered politically extremely incorrect, even when it referred to countries like South Sudan or Somalia, noting that such a term originated in the political terminology of developed countries by which all other countries at a lower level of development were considered to be failed ones. Therefore, in 2014, a new notion of a fragile state was created, and accordingly the existing index was renamed the Fragile State Index (FSI). This parameter determines the degree of fragility for each country on an annual basis, assessing four basic indicators: cohesion (functionality of the state apparatus), economic (overall economic situation), political (legitimacy of the state, availability of public services, respect for human rights and freedoms) and social (demographic structure of the community, number of displaced persons and refugees, external interventions). Based on the values of these indicators, countries are positioned in four groups: sustainable, stable, endangered and alarming. The paper also discusses Bosnia and Herzegovina as a potentially fragile state. Although it enjoys sovereignty and political independence, the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement still provides for the strong participation of the international community in the performance of its basic state functions. Examples include the presence of international military and police forces from the early post-war years to the present (EUFOR), with a special emphasis on the position of High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina. The peace agreement gave him the status of his supreme interpreter, as well as the well-known Bonn powers that he used on several occasions to remove Bosnian political officials and the imposition of laws (Criminal Code of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Law on the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Law on the Prosecutor's Office of Bosnia and Herzegovina) due to the inability of domestic parliamentary bodies to pass them independently. In addition to the extremely complicated constitutional structure, the functioning of Bosnia and Herzegovina is hampered by the inability to reach an agreement between political representatives on key issues in the country. In the first place, these are much-needed changes to the constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina that would in the future allow members of minorities (Jews and Roma) to elect their own representatives in the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In this regard, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in 2009 in the case of Sejdić-Finci assessed that the impossibility of minority participation in political decision-making is a gross violation of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. Numerous international organizations, primarily Human Rights Watch, have been warning for years about other problems in the country: national segregation of children under two schools under one roof, numerous attacks on Bosniak returnees in Republic of Srpska without adequate sanctions and extreme slowness in war crimes proceedings and the administration of transitional justice with the emergence of increasingly frequent denials of war crimes and victims. Although more than 25 years have passed since the end of the war, the participation of the international factor is still noticeable, and in some cases necessary.

This paper is meant to study the apocalyptic scenario of the at the perspectives of the Great Acceleration. the apocalyptic scenario is not a pure imagination of the literature works. Instead, scientific evidences are in favour of dramatic change in the climatic conditions related to the climax of Man actions. the modelling of the future climate leads to horrible situations including intolerable temperatures, dryness, tornadoes, and noticeable sear level rise evading coastal regions. Going far from these scientific claims, Homo Sapiens Sapiens extended his imagination through the Climate-Fiction (cli-fi) to propose a dramatic end. Climate Fiction is developed into a recording machine containing every kind of fictions that depict environmental condition events and has consequently lost its true significance.
 Introduction
 The Great Acceleration may be considered as the Late Anthropocene in which Man actions reached their climax to lead to dramatic climatic changes paving the way for a possible apocalyptic scenario threatening the existence of the humanity. So, the apocalyptic scenario is not a pure imagination of the literature works. Instead, many scientific arguments especially related to climate change are in favour of the apocalypse1. As a matter of fact, the modelling of the future climate leads to horrible situations including intolerable temperatures (In 06/07/2021, Kuwait recorded the highest temperature of 53.2 °C), dryness, tornadoes, and noticeable sear level rise evading coastal regions. These conditions taking place during the Great Acceleration would have direct repercussions on the human species. Considering that the apocalyptic extinction had really caused the disappearance of many stronger species including dinosaurs, Homo Sapiens Sapiens extended his imagination though the Climate-Fiction (cli-fi) to propose a dramatic end due to severe climate conditions intolerable by the humankind. The mass extinction of animal species has occurred several times over the geological ages. Researchers have a poor understanding of the causes and processes of these major crises1. Nonetheless, whatever the cause of extinction, the apocalyptic scenario has always been present in the geological history. For example, dinosaurs extinction either by asteroids impact or climate changes could by no means denies the apocalyptic aspect2.At the same time as them, many animal and plant species became extinct, from marine or flying reptiles to marine plankton. This biological crisis of sixty-five million years ago is not the only one that the biosphere has suffered. It was preceded and followed by other crises which caused the extinction or the rarefaction of animal species. So, it is undeniable that many animal groups have disappeared. It is even on the changes of fauna that the geologists of the last century have based themselves to establish the scale of geological times, scale which is still used. But it is no less certain that the extinction processes, extremely complex, are far from being understood. We must first agree on the meaning of the word "extinction", namely on the apocalyptic aspect of the concept. It is quite understood that, without disappearances, the evolution of species could not have followed its course. Being aware that the apocalyptic extinction had massacred stronger species that had dominated the planet, Homo Sapiens Sapiens has been aware that the possibility of apocalyptic end at the perspective of the Anthropocene (i.e., Great Acceleration) could not be excluded. This conviction is motivated by the progressive defaunation in some regions3and the appearance of alien species in others related to change of mineralogy and geochemistry4 leading to a climate change during the Anthropocene. These scientific claims fed the vast imagination about climate change to set the so-called cli-fi. The concept of the Anthropocene is the new geological era which begins when the Man actions have reached a sufficient power to modify the geological processes and climatic cycles of the planet5. The Anthropocene by no means excludes the possibility of an apocalyptic horizon, namely in the perspectives of the Great Acceleration. On the contrary, two scenarios do indeed seem to dispute the future of the Anthropocene, with a dramatic cross-charge. The stories of the end of the world are as old as it is, as the world is the origin of these stories. However, these stories of the apocalypse have evolved over time and, since the beginning of the 19th century, they have been nourished particularly by science and its advances. These fictions have sometimes tried to pass themselves off as science. This is the current vogue, called collapsology6. This end is more than likely cli-fi driven7and it may cause the extinction of the many species including the Homo Sapiens Sapiens. In this vein, Anthropocene defaunation has become an ultimate reality8. More than one in eight birds, more than one in five mammals, more than one in four coniferous species, one in three amphibians are threatened. The hypothesis of a hierarchy within the living is induced by the error of believing that evolution goes from the simplest to the most sophisticated, from the inevitably stupid inferior to the superior endowed with an intelligence giving prerogative to all powers. Evolution goes in all directions and pursues no goal except the extension of life on Earth. Evolution certainly does not lead from bacteria to humans, preferably male and white. Our species is only a carrier of the DNA that precedes us and that will survive us. Until we show a deep respect for the biosphere particularly, and our planet in general, we will not become much, we will remain a predator among other predators, the fiercest of predators, the almighty craftsman of the Anthropocene. To be in the depths of our humanity, somehow giving back to the biosphere what we have taken from it seems obvious. To stop the sixth extinction of species, we must condemn our anthropocentrism and the anthropization of the territories that goes with it. The other forms of life also need to keep their ecological niches. According to the first, humanity seems at first to withdraw from the limits of the planet and ultimately succumb to them, with a loss of dramatic meaning. According to the second, from collapse to collapse, it is perhaps another humanity, having overcome its demons, that could come. Climate fiction is a literary sub-genre dealing with the theme of climate change, including global warming. The term appears to have been first used in 2008 by blogger and writer Dan Bloom. In October 2013, Angela Evancie, in a review of the novel Odds against Tomorrow, by Nathaniel Rich, wonders if climate change has created a new literary genre. Scientific basis of the apocalyptic scenario in the perspective of the Anthropocene
 Global warming
 All temperature indices are in favour of a global warming (Fig.1). According to the different scenarios of the IPCC9, the temperatures of the globe could increase by 2 °C to 5 °C by 2100. But some scientists warn about a possible runaway of the warming which can reach more than 3 °C. Thus, the average temperature on the surface of the globe has already increased by more than 1.1 °C since the pre-industrial era. The rise in average temperatures at the surface of the globe is the first expected and observed consequence of massive greenhouse gas emissions. However, meteorological surveys record positive temperature anomalies which are confirmed from year to year compared to the temperatures recorded since the middle of the 19th century. Climatologists point out that the past 30 years have seen the highest temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere for over 1,400 years. Several climatic centres around the world record, synthesize and follow the evolution of temperatures on Earth. Since the beginning of the 20th century (1906-2005), the average temperature at the surface of the globe has increased by 0.74 °C, but this progression has not been continuous since 1976, the increase has clearly accelerated, reaching 0.19 °C per decade according to model predictions. Despite the decline in solar activity, the period 1997-2006 is marked by an average positive anomaly of 0.53 °C in the northern hemisphere and 0.27 °C in the southern hemisphere, still compared to the normal calculated for 1961-1990. The ten hottest years on record are all after 1997. Worse, 14 of the 15 hottest years are in the 21st century, which has barely started. Thus, 2016 is the hottest year, followed closely by 2015, 2014 and 2010. The temperature of tropical waters increased by 1.2 °C during the 20th century (compared to 0.5 °C on average for the oceans), causing coral reefs to bleach in 1997.
 In 1998, the period of Fort El Niño, the prolonged warming of the water has destroyed half of the coral reefs of the Indian Ocean. In addition, the temperature in the tropics of the five ocean basins, where cyclones form, increased by 0.5 °C from 1970 to 2004, and powerful cyclones appeared in the North Atlantic in 2005, while they were more numerous in other parts of the world. Recently, mountains of studies focused on the possible scenario of climate change and the potential worldwide repercussions including hell temperatures and apocalyptic extreme events10 , 11, 12.
 Melting of continental glaciers
 As a direct result of the global warming, melting of continental glaciers has been recently noticed13. There are approximately 198,000 mountain glaciers in the world; they cover an area of approximately 726,000 km2. If they all melted, the sea level would rise by about 40 cm. Since the late 1960s, global snow cover has declined by around 10 to 15%. Winter cold spells in much of the northern half of the northern hemisphere are two weeks shorter than 100 years ago. Glaciers of mountains have been declining all over the world by an average of 50 m per decade for 150 years. However, they are also subject to strong multi-temporal variations which make forecasts on this point difficult according to some specialists. In the Alps, glaciers have been losing 1 meter per year for 30 years. Polar glaciers like those of Spitsbergen (about a hundred km from the North Pole) have been retreating since 1880, releasing large quantities of water. The Arctic has lost about 10% of its permanent ice cover every ten years since 1980. In this region, average temperatures have increased at twice the rate of elsewhere in the world in recent decades. The melting of the Arctic Sea ice has resulted in a loss of 15% of its surface area and 40% of its thickness since 1979. The record for melting arctic sea ice was set in 2017. All models predict the disappearance of the Arctic Sea ice in summer within a few decades, which will not be without consequences for the climate in Europe. The summer melting of arctic sea ice accelerated far beyond climate model predictions. Added to its direct repercussions of coastal regions flooding, melting of continental ice leads to radical climatic modifications in favour of the apocalyptic scenario.
 
 Fig.1 Evolution of temperature anomaly from 1880 to 2020: the apocalyptic scenario
 
 Sea level rise
 As a direct result of the melting of continental glaciers, sea level rise has been worldwide recorded14 ,15. The average level of the oceans has risen by 22 cm since 1880 and 2 cm since the year 2000 because of the melting of the glaciers but also with the thermal expansion of the water. In the 20th century, the sea level rose by around 2 mm per year. From 1990 to 2017, it reached the relatively constant rate of just over 3mm per year. Several sources contributed to sea level increase including thermal expansion of water (42%), melting of continental glaciers (21%), melting Greenland glaciers (15%) and melting Antarctic glaciers (8%). Since 2003, there has always been a rapid rise (around 3.3 mm / year) in sea level, but the contribution of thermal expansion has decreased (0.4 mm / year) while the melting of the polar caps and continental glaciers accelerates. Since most of the world’s population is living on coastal regions, sea level rise represents a real threat for the humanity, not excluding the apocalyptic scenario.
 Multiplication of extreme phenomena and climatic anomalies
 On a human scale, an average of 200 million people is affected by natural disasters each year and approximately 70,000 perish from them. Indeed, as evidenced by the annual reviews of disasters and climatic anomalies, we are witnessing significant warning signs. It is worth noting that these observations are dependent on meteorological survey systems that exist only in a limited number of countries with statistics that rarely go back beyond a century or a century and a half. In addition, scientists are struggling to represent the climatic variations of the last two thousand years which could serve as a reference in the projections. Therefore, the exceptional nature of this information must be qualified a little. Indeed, it is still difficult to know the return periods of climatic disasters in each region. But over the last century, the climate system has gone wild. Indeed, everything suggests that the climate is racing. Indeed, extreme events and disasters have become more frequent. For instance, less than 50 significant events were recorded per year over the period 1970-1985, while there have been around 120 events recorded since 1995.
 Drought has long been one of the most worrying environmental issues. But while African countries have been the main affected so far, the whole world is now facing increasingly frequent and prolonged droughts. Chile, India, Australia, United States, France and even Russia are all regions of the world suffering from the acceleration of the global drought. Droughts are slowly evolving natural hazards that can last from a few months to several decades and affect larger or smaller areas, whether they are small watersheds or areas of hundreds of thousands of square kilometres. In addition to their direct effects on water resources, agriculture and ecosystems, droughts can cause fires or heat waves. They also promote the proliferation of invasive species, creating environments with multiple risks, worsening the consequences on ecosystems and societies, and increasing their vulnerability. Although these are natural phenomena, there is a growing understanding of how humans have amplified the severity and impacts of droughts, both on the environment and on people. We influence meteorological droughts through our action on climate change, and we influence hydrological droughts through our management of water circulation and water processes at the local scale, for example by diverting rivers or modifying land use. During the Anthropocene (the present period when humans exert a dominant influence on climate and environment), droughts are closely linked to human activities, cultures, and responses. From this scientific overview, it may be concluded apocalyptic scenario is not only a literature genre inspired from the pure imagination. Instead, many scientific arguments are in favour of this dramatic destiny of Homo Sapiens Sapiens.
 
 Fig.2. Sea level rise from 1880 to 2020: a possible apocalyptic scenario (www.globalchange.gov, 2021)
 
 Apocalyptic genre in recent writing
 As the original landmark of apocalyptic writing, we must place the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in 587 BC and the Exile in Babylon. Occasion of a religious and cultural crossing with imprescriptible effects, the Exile brought about a true rebirth, characterized by the maintenance of the essential ethical, even cultural, of a national religion, that of Moses, kept as pure as possible on a foreign land and by the reinterpretation of this fundamental heritage by the archaic return of what was very old, both national traditions and neighbouring cultures. More precisely, it was the place and time for the rehabilitation of cultures and the melting pot for recasting ancient myths. This vast infatuation with Antiquity, remarkable even in the vocabulary used, was not limited to Israel: it even largely reflected a general trend. The long period that preceded throughout the 7th century BC and until 587, like that prior to the edict of Cyrus in 538 BC, was that of restorations and rebirths, of returns to distant sources and cultural crossings. In the biblical literature of this period, one is struck by the almost systematic link between, on the one hand, a very sustained mythical reinvestment even in form and, on the other, the frequent use of biblical archaisms. The example of Shadday, a word firmly rooted in the Semites of the Northwest and epithet of El in the oldest layers of the books of Genesis and Exodus, is most eloquent. This term reappears precisely at the time of the Exile as a designation of the divinity of the Patriarchs and of the God of Israel; Daily, ecological catastrophes now describe the normal state of societies exposed to "risks", in the sense that Ulrich Beck gives to this term: "the risk society is a society of catastrophe. The state of emergency threatens to become a normal state there1”. Now, the "threat" has become clearer, and catastrophic "exceptions" are proliferating as quickly as species are disappearing and climate change is accelerating. The relationship that we have with this worrying reality, to say the least, is twofold: on the one hand, we know very well what is happening to us; on the other hand, we fail to draw the appropriate theoretical and political consequences. This ecological duplicity is at the heart of what has come to be called the “Anthropocene”, a term coined at the dawn of the 21st century by Eugene Stoermer (an environmentalist) and Paul Crutzen (a specialist in the chemistry of the atmosphere) in order to describe an age when humanity would have become a "major geological force" capable of disrupting the climate and changing the terrestrial landscape from top to bottom. If the term “Anthropocene” takes note of human responsibility for climate change, this responsibility is immediately attributed to overpowering: strong as we are, we have “involuntarily” changed the climate for at least two hundred and fifty years. Therefore, let us deliberately change the face of the Earth, if necessary, install a solar shield in space. Recognition and denial fuel the signifying machine of the Anthropocene. And it is precisely what structures eco-apocalyptic cinema that this article aims to study. By "eco-apocalyptic cinema", we first mean a cinematographic sub-genre: eco-apocalyptic and post-eco-apocalyptic films base the possibility (or reality) of the end of the world on environmental grounds and not, for example, on damage caused by the possible collision of planet Earth with a comet. Post-apocalyptic science fiction (sometimes abbreviated as "post-apo" or "post-nuke") is a sub-genre of science fiction that depicts life after a disaster that destroyed civilization: nuclear war, collision with a meteorite, epidemic, economic or energy crisis, pandemic, alien invasion.
 Conclusion
 Climate and politics have been linked together since Aristotle. With Montesquieu, Ibn Khaldûn or Watsuji, a certain climatic determinism is attributed to the character of a nation. The break with modernity made the climate an object of scientific knowledge which, in the twentieth century, made it possible to document, despite the controversies, the climatic changes linked to industrialization. Both endanger the survival of human beings and ecosystems. Climate ethics are therefore looking for a new relationship with the biosphere or Gaia. For some, with the absence of political agreements, it is the beginning of inevitable catastrophes. For others, the Anthropocene, which henceforth merges human history with natural history, opens onto technical action. The debate between climate determinism and human freedom is revived. The reference to the biblical Apocalypse was present in the thinking of thinkers like Günther Anders, Karl Jaspers or Hans Jonas: the era of the atomic bomb would mark an entry into the time of the end, a time marked by the unprecedented human possibility of 'total war and annihilation of mankind. The Apocalypse will be very relevant in describing the chaos to come if our societies continue their mad race described as extra-activist, productivist and consumerist. In dialogue with different theologians and philosophers (such as Jacques Ellul), it is possible to unveil some spiritual, ethical, and political resources that the Apocalypse offers for thinking about History and human engagement in the Anthropocene. What can a theology of collapse mean at a time when negative signs and dead ends in the human situation multiply? What then is the place of man and of the cosmos in the Apocalypse according to Saint John? Could the end of history be a collapse? How can we live in the time we have left before the disaster? Answers to such questions remain unknown and no scientist can predict the trajectory of this Great Acceleration taking place at the Late Anthropocene.
 When science cannot give answers, Man tries to infer his destiny for the legend, religion and the fiction. Climate Fiction is developed into a recording machine containing every kind of fictions that depict environmental condition events and has consequently lost its true significance. Aware of the prospect of ecological collapse additionally as our apparent inability to avert it, we tend to face geology changes of forceful proportions that severely challenge our ability to imagine the implications. Climate fiction ought to be considered an important supplement to climate science, as a result, climate fiction makes visible and conceivable future modes of existence inside worlds not solely deemed seemingly by science, however that area unit scientifically anticipated. Hence, this chapter, as part of the book itself, aims to contribute to studies of ecocriticism, the environmental humanities, and literary and culture studies.
 
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The pandemic of COVID-19 has afflicted every individual and has initiated a cascade of directly or indirectly involved events in precipitating mental health issues. The human species is a wanderer and hunter-gatherer by nature, and physical social distancing and nationwide lockdown have confined an individual to physical isolation. The present review article was conceived to address psychosocial and other issues and their aetiology related to the current pandemic of COVID-19. The elderly age group has most suffered the wrath of SARS-CoV-2, and social isolation as a preventive measure may further induce mental health issues. Animal model studies have demonstrated an inappropriate interacting endogenous neurotransmitter milieu of dopamine, serotonin, glutamate, and opioids, induced by social isolation that could probably lead to observable phenomena of deviant psychosocial behavior. Conflicting and manipulated information related to COVID-19 on social media has also been recognized as a global threat. Psychological stress during the current pandemic in frontline health care workers, migrant workers, children, and adolescents is also a serious concern. Mental health issues in the current situation could also be induced by being quarantined, uncertainty in business, jobs, economy, hampered academic activities, increased screen time on social media, and domestic violence incidences. The gravity of mental health issues associated with the pandemic of COVID-19 should be identified at the earliest. Mental health organization dedicated to current and future pandemics should be established along with Government policies addressing psychological issues to prevent and treat mental health issues need to be developed.
 
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The article based on materials from military anniversaries of the late XX – early XXI centuries reveals the main trends in the politics of memory in relation to the history of wars of the XIX–XX centuries against the backdrop of digitalization of the information space. The 50th anniversary of the end of World War II (1995) and the events related to the 80th anniversary of the beginning of this war (2019), as well as the 250th anniversary of the birth of Napoleon (2019) are taken as milestone events. As a result of the study, the author identified two trends. Firstly, a trend of a transnational and transcultural nature, focused mainly on general humanistic values. Secondly, the tendency towards a nationally-oriented and politically biased policy, which became prevailing from 2004-2005. The second trend has become characteristic, first of all, for most countries of the post-Soviet space, including the countries of Central and Southeast Europe and Russia. Judging by the fact that a number of Asian countries (primarily China and Japan) have come to the forefront of anniversary events related to World War II, the tendency to decisively revise the transnational and transcultural vectors in the politics of memory in these countries has also become dominant. Western countries also, regardless of attempts to maintain a commitment to tolerance and transnationalism, were caught up in “memory wars” and, as a rule, in connection with the events of military history. The activation of the “memory wars” is largely associated with fundamental changes in the information environment, primarily in connection with the processes of its digitalization. The author believes that the prevalence of the second trend was predetermined by the end of the modernist revolution, which by the end of the twentieth century ended as the dominant world process that determined main parameters of the historical process in the second half of the twentieth century. The consequence of this from the turn of the century has been an increase in the fragmentation of the world and an explosion of thirst for identity. In this regard, historical memory and its twin-antipode, historical politics, have become the main tools (and often creators) of this identity - national, state, religious, ethnic, group and any other form of identity.

Politics in the world have become mediatized and the language of actors and their party’s holders are represented by newspapers by their own ideological factors. The newspaper language has emerged through speech, beliefs and writing practices [20]. To determine the meaning behind the text of Pakistani newspapers, the theory of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) by Norman Fairclough (1995) is employed on hard news of ‘Dawn’ as an independent newspaper and on ‘The News’ as a mainstream newspaper of Pakistan. The online newspapers are selected for data selection on 100 days performance in 2018 of Pakistan Tehreek - e - Insaaf (PTI) on specified date 29th November 2018 on coverage of 100 days event based on social actors’ performance as ‘doer’, which comprises of two news reports having 5,276 words. Imran Khan’s and his party holders’ speeches on the party’s performance on 100 days completion of government is taken as a unit for analysis, which is represented in both newspapers differently. The social actors’ selection is based on a socio-semiotic approach by van Leeuwen (2005). The social actors in the existing study are ‘Pakistan Tehreek – e – Insaaf (PTI)’ and ‘Pakistan Muslim League – Nawaz (PML-N)’. The Systematic Functional Linguistics tool by Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday (2014) is applied to media text for determining the role of social actors by process types as an analytical tool, which is based on the revised work of Matthiessen. ‘Dawn’ has portrayed happening as a hard news while in contrast, ‘The News’ compared PTI performance with PML-N with suggestions

Resilience is an interdisciplinary concept that has been interrogated and investigated in a number of fields of research and practice including psychology, climate change, trauma studies, education and disaster planning. This paper considers its position within critical disability studies, popular understandings of disability and the emergence of a disability culture. Patrick Martin-Breen and J. Marty Anderies offer a colloquial definition of resilience as: Bouncing back after stress, enduring greater stress, and being less disturbed by a given amount of stress. … To be resilient is to withstand a large disturbance without, in the end, changing, disintegrating, or becoming permanently damaged; to return to normal quickly; and to distort less in the face of such stresses. (1182) Conversely, Glenn E. Richardson argues that resiliency is a ‘metatheory’ that can best be described as ‘growth or adaptation through disruption rather than to just recover or bounce back’ (1184). He argues that resiliency theory has progressed through several stages, from the recognition of characteristics of resilient individuals to an appreciation of the support structures required beyond the level of the individual. In her memoir Resilience, Ann Deveson describes resilience as a concept that people think they understand until they are called upon to define it. Deveson offers many definitions and examples of resilience throughout her book, beginning with stories about disability, people with disability and their experiences of changing levels of social inclusion and exclusion (632). She paints an evocative picture of a young mother whose five year old son has cerebral palsy giving evidence before a Royal Commission into Human Relationships during a period of significant social change involving the deinstitutionalisation of people with disabilities: A few years earlier, this child with cerebral palsy would have been placed in an institution. His mother might not even have seen him. Now she had care of her child but the pendulum had swung in the opposite direction. (632) During the 1980s a number of large institutions caring for people with developmental impairments and psychiatric illnesses were closed in favour of community care (Clear 652). Although giving an appearance of endorsing equality of disabled people in the community, the ‘hidden agenda’ of this initiative was to cut public expenditure on social services (Ellis 163). As a result, an undue burden fell to women who became primary carers with little support such as the woman Deveson remembers. She questions where this young mother mustered such ‘magnificent resilience’ when she had such little support: When he was born, she had been discharged from the hospital with her baby, a feeding formula and a tiny pink plate for the child’s cleft palate. The only advice she received was to come back later to have the plate refitted. Her general practitioner prescribed her sedatives for depression, and she and her husband found their own way to the Royal Blind society by asking a blind man they saw outside a supermarket. She had only learned accidentally from one of the nurses that her baby was blind. ‘He’s mentally retarded too,’ the nurse had added, almost as an afterthought. (632) Thus Deveson’s consideration of resilience includes both an individual’s response to what could be described as tragedy and the importance of social support and the drive to demand it. Despite her child’s impairment and the lack of community resources made available to her family to cope, this young woman was leading public discussion about the plight of people with disabilities and their families in the hopes the government would intervene to help improve the situation (Deveson 632). Indeed, when it comes to the experience of disability, resilience is implied and generally understood to mean an attribute of the individual. However, as resilience theory has progressed, resilience can no longer be considered as existing exclusively within the domain of an individual’s personal qualities. Environmental support structures are vital in fostering resilience (Wilkes). Despite resiliency theory moving on from the level of the individual, popular discourses of resiliency as an individual’s attribute continue to dominate disability. As such, some critical disability commentators have redefined resilience as a response to a disabling social world. My aim in this paper is to explore this discourse by engaging with ideas about disability and resilience that emerge in popular culture. Despite the changing social position of people with disabilities in the community, notions of resilience are often invoked to describe the experience of people with disability and attributes of successful (often considered ‘inspiring’) people with disability. I begin by offering a definition of resilience as it is bound up in notions of inspiration and usually applied to people with disabilities. The second part of the paper explores disability as a cultural signifier to comment on the ways in which disability offers cultural meanings that may work to reassure nondisabled people of their privileged position. Finally, the paper considers interpretations of disability as a personal tragedy before exploring the emergence of a disability culture that recognises the social and cultural oppression experienced by people with disabilities and reworks definitions of resilience as a response to that oppression. Defining Resilience: Good Outcomes in Spite of Serious Threats Disability is often invoked in stories about resilience. Gillian King, Elizabeth Brown, and Linda Smith argue that a clear link exists between resilience and feeling that life is meaningful. They argue that the experiences of people with disabilities can offer a template for how to develop resilience and cope with life changes (King, Brown and Smith 633). According to the Oxford English Dictionary Online, resilience is ‘the action or an act of rebounding or springing back’ (653). King et al add that several concepts are associated with resilience such as hardiness, a sense of coherence and learned optimism (633). Deveson, resilience ‘has come to mean an ability to confront adversity and still find hope and meaning in life’. She comments that it conjures up notions of heroism, endurance and determination (632). Each of these characteristics we might describe as inspirational. It is telling that both Deveson and King et al use people with disabilities as signifiers of resilience in practice. However, Katherine Runswick-Cole and Dan Goodley argue that this definition of resilience has not necessarily been useful to people with disabilities and instead recommend a definition of resilience that Deveson only alludes to. For Runswick-Cole and Goodley resilience can be located in social processes. They argue that a thorough investigation of resilience in the lives of people with disabilities considers the broader social and cultural restrictions placed on top of impairments rather than simply individualising resilience as a character trait of people who can ‘overcome the odds’: An exploration of resilience in the lives of disabled people must, then, focus on what resources are available and who is accessing those resources. Crucially, in seeking to build resilience in the lives of disabled people, this can never simply be a matter of building individual capacity or family support, it must also be a case of challenging social, attitudinal and structural barriers which increase adversity in the lives of disabled people. (634) This is an alternative approach to disability that sees ‘the problem’ located in social structures and inaccessible environments. This so-called social model of disability is based on principles of empowerment and argues that able-bodied mainstream society disables people who have impairments through an inaccessible built environment and the perpetuation of stereotypes and prejudicial attitudes. Disability Dustbins and Inspirational Cripples Arthur Frank, sociologist and author of The Wounded Storyteller, explains that ‘the human body, for all its resilience, is fragile; breakdown is built into it. Bodily predictability, if not the exception, should be regarded as exceptional; contingency ought to be accepted as normative’ (634). Frank argues that we do not want to admit that our bodies are unpredictable and could ‘break down’ at any moment. Those bodies that do break down therefore become representatives of many of the things [the able-bodied, normal world] most fear-tragedy, loss, dark and the unknown. Involuntarily we walk- or more often sit- in the valley of the shadow of death. Contact with us throws up in people's faces the fact of sickness and death in the world … A deformed and paralysed body attacks everyone's sense of well-being and invincibility. (Hunt 186) People with disabilities therefore become loaded cultural signifiers, as Tom Shakespeare argues in Cultural Representations of Disabled People: Dustbins for Disavowal: ‘it is non-disabled people’s embodiment which is the issue: disabled people remind non-disabled people of their own vulnerability’ (139). As a result, people with disabilities are culturally othered. Several disability theorists have argued that this makes the non-disabled feel better about themselves and their tenuous privileged position (Barnes; Ellis; Kumari Campbell; Oliver, Goggin and Newell; Shakespeare). Disability, as a concept, is both everywhere and nowhere. Generally considered a medical experience or personal tragedy, the discipline of critical disability studies has emerged to question why disability is considered an inherently negative experience and if there is more to disability than a body that has something wrong with it. Fiona Kumari Campbell suggests ableism – ‘the network of beliefs, processes and practices that produces a particular kind of self and body (the corporeal standard) that is projected as the perfect, species typical and therefore essential and fully human’ – is repeatedly performed in our culture. This cultural project is difficult to sustain because by their very nature all bodies are out of control. People with disability are an acute reminder of the temporariness of an able bodied ontology (650). In order to maintain this division and network of beliefs, the idea that disability is a personal tragedy rather than a set of social relations designed to exclude some bodies but not others is culturally reproduced through stereotypes such as the idea that people with disabilities who achieve both ordinary and extraordinary things are sources of inspiration. Resilience as a personal quality is implicated in this stereotype. In a powerful Ramp Up blog that was republished on the ABC’s Drum and the influential popular culture/mummy blogging site website Mamamia, Stella Young takes issues with the media’s framing of disability as inspirational: We all learn how to use the bodies we're born with, or learn to use them in an adjusted state, whether those bodies are considered disabled or not. So that image of the kid drawing a picture with the pencil held in her mouth instead of her hand? That's just the best way for her, in her body, to do it. For her, it's normal. I can't help but wonder whether the source of this strange assumption that living our lives takes some particular kind of courage is the news media, an incredibly powerful tool in shaping the way we think about disability. Most journalists seem utterly incapable of writing or talking about a person with a disability without using phrases like "overcoming disability", "brave", "suffers from", "defying the odds", "wheelchair bound" or, my personal favourite, "inspirational". If we even begin to question the way we're labelled, we slide immediately to the other end of the scale and become "bitter" and "ungrateful". We fail to be what people expect. (610) These phrases, that Young claims the media rely on to isolate people with disabilities, are synonyms for the qualities Deveson attributes to resilient individuals (632). As Beth Haller notes, although disabled activists and academics attempt to progress important political work, the news media continue to frame people with disability as courageous and inspirational simply for living their lives (216). By comparison, disability theorist Irving Zola describes rejecting his leg braces (symbolic of his professional status) electing instead to use a wheelchair: If we lived in a less healthiest, capitalist, and hierarchal society, which spent less time finding ways to exclude and disenfranchise people and more time finding ways to include and enhance the potentialities of everyone, then there wouldn’t have been so much for me to overcome. (654) Harilyn Russo agrees, and in her memoir Don’t Call Me Inspirational highlights the socially created barriers put in her way and the ways these are ignored in favour of individualising social disablement as something inspirational people ‘overcome’: I’ll tell you why I am inspirational: I put up with the barriers, the barricades, the bullshit you put between us to avoid confronting something—probably yourself—and still pay the rent on time and savor dark chocolate. Now that takes real courage. (651) Throughout her book, Russo seeks to ‘overcome disability prejudice’ rather than ‘overcome disability’. Russo establishes herself and her experiences as normal and every day while articulating the tedium she finds in being pigeon holed as inspirational. These authors are constructing a new way of thinking about disability. Michael Oliver first described this as the ‘social model of disability’ in 1981. He sought to overturn the pathologisation of disability by giving people ‘a way of applying the idea that it was society not people with impairments that should be the target for professional intervention and practice’ (Runswick-Cole and Goodley 634). Resilience: A Key Concept Fiona Kumari Campbell questions whether resilience is a useful concept in the context of disability and reflects on its use to obscure “the ‘real’ problem, namely disability oppression” (649). She interrogates traditional definitions of resilience as they draw on notions of good outcomes in spite of risk factors or experiences of severe trauma and calls for an understanding of the interactive and dynamic features of resilience as opposed to ‘individualised psychological attributes’. Thus, individualised notions of resilience as they are implicated in the cultural stories of inspirational people with disabilities are embedded within the ableist relations that Kumari Campbell seeks to expose. In Empowerment, Self-Advocacy and Resilience, Dan Goodley argues that resilience is a key concept that has repeatedly emerged throughout his research into disability and self-advocacy. He draws on the reflections of people with disabilities to offer a re-definition of resilience as a response to a disabling society that includes five interrelated aspects (648). First is resilience as contextual, which recognises resilience as the result of the contexts in which it emerges, including through relationships with others and the experience of disabling and enabling environments. Secondly, resilience complicates preconceived notions about people with disabilities such as the view that they are passive. Goodley’s third feature of resilience is optimism. He notes resistance toward oppression as a key characteristic of optimistic resilience. Goodley again considers the importance of interpersonal relationships and group identity when he argues that the fourth feature of resilience relies on people with disabilities forming relationships with each other and group identities to question their oppression. Finally, Goodley argues ‘resilience is indicative of disablement’ and suggests that people with disability must be resilient in everyday life because we live in a disabling society. Kumari Campbell posits that individualised notions of resilience are a ‘cop out’ designed to ‘distract and defuse the reality of people labouring under very difficult circumstances of which the solution is better access to quality services’. She is hopeful, like Goodley, that resilience can be redefined as a political project, and encourages people with disabilities to develop a critical consciousness and find a new sense of community through art, humour and peer support. Therefore, according to Kumari Campbell and Goodley, resilience can be redefined as a response to social disablement rather than bodily impairment. Disability Culture: Acts of Resilience in a Disabling Society Russo and Zola’s work is part of a disability culture that has emerged in response to narrow ways of understanding disability. Steven Brown emphasises the importance of experience and personal identity in his definition of disability culture: People with disabilities have forged a group identity. We share a common history of oppression and a common bond of resilience. We generate art, music, literature, and other expressions of our lives and our culture, infused from our experience of disability. Most importantly, we are proud of ourselves as people with disabilities. We claim our disabilities with pride as part of our identity. (520) Brown’s definition of disability culture therefore draws on all five of Goodley’s features of resilience. Disability culture is contextual, complicating, optimistic, interpersonal and indicative of disablement. The forging of a group identity reveals the resilience of disability culture as contextual and interpersonal. The creation of art, music, literature and other cultural artefacts reveals resilience as optimistic. The notion that people with disabilities are proud of their identity complicates traditional understandings of disability as a personal tragedy. Brown’s emphasis on the common history of the oppression of people with disabilities, as it initiated the whole disability culture movement, is ‘indicative of disablement’. The bonds of resilience that create the disability cultural movement are a result of the social oppression of people with disabilities (Gill; Martin; Brown; Goodley). Conclusion Whereas people with disabilities going about their every day lives have often been considered inspirational and as possessing resilient qualities, a new disability culture is emerging that repositions the resilience of people with disabilities as a political response to social oppression. Drawing on Runswick-Cole and Goodley’s argument that individualising qualities of resilience in inspirational people with disabilities has not benefitted people with disabilities, this paper sought to reveal the importance of resilience as a response to social oppression. People with disabilities in their formation of a disability cultural movement are reworking and redefining resilience as a response to oppression. Throughout this paper I have drawn on the reflections of a number of people with disabilities to illustrate the emergence of a disability culture as it has begun the work of redefining resilience as a political project that “‘outs’ the problems that disabled people face and names and prioritises the concerns” (Kumari Campbell 649). As Goodley argues, people with disabilities have developed a politics of resilience ‘in the face of a disabling world’. References Barnes, Colin. “Disabling Imagery and the Media: An Exploration of the Principles for Media Representations of Disabled People.” 1992. Brown, Steven. “What Is Disability Culture?” Disability Studies Quarterly 22.2 (2002). Clear, Mike. Promises, Promises: Disability and Terms of Inclusion. Leichhardt: Federation Press, 2000. Deveson, Ann. Resilience. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2003. Ellis, Katie. Disabling Diversity: The Social Construction of Disability in 1990s Australian National Cinema. Saarbrücken, Germany: VDM Verlag, 2008. Frank, Arthur. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness and Ethics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995. Gill, Carol. “A Psychological View of Disability Culture.” Disability Studies Quarterly (Fall 1995). ———. "Disability in Australia: Exposing a Social Apartheid." Sydney: University of New South Wales, 2005. Goodley, Dan. “Empowerment, Self-Advocacy and Resilience.” Journal of Intellectual Disabilities 9.4 (2005): 333-343. Haller, Beth. Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media. Louisville, KY: Avocado Press, 2010. Hunt, Paul. “A Critical Condition.” Stigma: The Experience of Disability. Ed. Paul Hunt. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1966. King, Gillian, Elizabeth Brown, and Linda Smith. “Resilience: Learning from People with Disabilities and the Turning Points in Their Lives.” Health Psychology. Ed. Barbara, Tinsley. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003. Kumari Campbell, Fiona. Contours of Ableism: The Production of Disability and Abledness. New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2009. ———. “Out of the Shadows: Resilience and Living with Ableism Seminar.” The University of Dundee, 13 Sep. 2010. Martin-Breen, Patrick, and J. Marty Anderies. “Resilience: A Literature Review.” The Rockefeller Foundation, 2011. Martin, Douglas. Disability Culture: Eager to Bite the Hands That Would Feed Them. New York Times, 1997. Oliver, Mike. “Understanding Disability: From Theory to Practice.” Houndsmill, Basingstoke: Macmillian, 1996. Oxford English Dictionary. “resilience, n.” Oxford University Press. Richardson, G. E. “The Metatheory of Resilience and Resiliency,” Journal of Clinical Psychology 58.3. (2002): 307-321. Rousso, Harilyn. "Don’t Call Me Inspirational: A Disabled Feminist Talks Back." Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 2013. Runswick-Cole, Katherine, and Dan Goodley. “Resilience: A Disability Studies and Community Psychology Approach.” Social and Personality Psychology Compass 7. 2 (2013): 67-78. Shakespeare, Tom. “Cultural Representation of Disabled People: Dustbins for Disavowal?” Disability & Society 9.3 (1994): 283-299. Wilkes, Glenda. “Introduction – A Second Generation of Resilience Research.” Journal of Clinical Psychology 58.3 (2002): 229-232. Young, Stella. “We’re Not Here for Your Inspiration.” Ramp Up 2012. Zola, Irving. Missing Pieces: A Chronicle of Living with a Disability. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 1982.


 
 
 One of the most distinct places the politics of affect have played out in Australia of late has been in the struggles around the mandatory detention of undocumented migrants; specifically, in arguments about the amount of compassion border control practices should or do entail. Indeed, in 1990 the newly established Joint Standing Committee on Migration (JSCM) published its first report, Illegal Entrants in Australia: Balancing Control and Compassion. Contemporaneous, thought not specifically concerned, with the establishment of mandatory detention for asylum seekers, this report helped shape the context in which detention policy developed. As the Bureau of Immigration and Population Research put it in their summary of the report, “the Committee endorsed a tough stance regarding all future illegal entrants but a more compassionate stance regarding those now in Australia” (24).
 
 It would be easy now to frame this report in a narrative of decline. Under a Labor government the JSCM had at least some compassion to offer; since the 1996 conservative Coalition victory any such compassion has been in increasingly short supply, if not an outright political liability. This is a popular narrative for those clinging to the belief that Labor is still, in some residual sense, a social-democratic party. I am more interested in the ways the report’s subtitle effectively predicted the framework in which debates about detention have since been constructed: control vs. compassion, with balance as the appropriate mediating term. Control and compassion are presented as the poles of a single governmental project insofar as they can be properly calibrated; but at the same time, compassion is presented as an external balance to the governmental project (control), an extra-political restriction of the political sphere. This is a very formal way to put it, but it reflects a simple, vernacular theory that circulates widely among refugee activists. It is expressed with concision in Peter Mares’ groundbreaking book on detention centres, Borderlines, in the chapter title “Compassion as a vice”.
 
 Compassion remains one of the major themes and demands of Australian refugee advocates. They thematise compassion not only for the obvious reasons that mandatory detention involves a devastating lack thereof, and that its critics are frequently driven by intense emotional connections both to particular detainees and TPV holders and, more generally, to all who suffer the effects of Australian border control. There is also a historical or conjunctural element: as Ghassan Hage has written, for the last ten years or so many forms of political opposition in Australia have organised their criticisms in terms of “things like compassion or hospitality rather than in the name of a left/right political divide” (7).
 
 This tendency is not limited to any one group; it ranges across the spectrum from Liberal Party wets to anarchist collectives, via dozens of organised groups and individuals varying greatly in their political beliefs and intentions. In this context, it would be tendentious to offer any particular example(s) of compassionate activism, so let me instead cite a complaint. In November 2002, the conservative journal Quadrant worried that morality and compassion “have been appropriated as if by right by those who are opposed to the government’s policies” on border protection (“False Refugees” 2). Thus, the right was forced to begin to speak the language of compassion as well. The Department of Immigration, often considered the epitome of the lack of compassion in Australian politics, use the phrase “Australia is a compassionate country, but…” so often they might as well inscribe it on their letterhead. Of course this is hypocritical, but it is not enough to say the right are deforming the true meaning of the term. The point is that compassion is a contested term in Australian political discourse; its meanings are not fixed, but constructed and struggled over by competing political interests.
 
 This should not be particularly surprising. Stuart Hall, following Ernesto Laclau and others, famously argued that no political term has an intrinsic meaning. Meanings are produced – articulated, and de- or re-articulated – through a dynamic and partisan “suturing together of elements that have no necessary or eternal belongingness” (10). Compassion has many possible political meanings; it can be articulated to diverse social (and antisocial) ends. If I was writing on the politics of compassion in the US, for example, I would be talking about George W. Bush’s slogan of “compassionate conservatism”, and whatever Hannah Arendt meant when she argued that “the passion of compassion has haunted and driven the best men [sic] of all revolutions” (65), I think she meant something very different by the term than do, say, Rural Australians for Refugees. As Lauren Berlant has written, “politicized feeling is a kind of thinking that too often assumes the obviousness of the thought it has” (48).
 
 Hage has also opened this assumed obviousness to question, writing that “small-‘l’ liberals often translate the social conditions that allow them to hold certain superior ethical views into a kind of innate moral superiority. They see ethics as a matter of will” (8-9). These social conditions are complex – it isn’t just that, as some on the right like to assert, compassion is a product of middle class comfort. The actual relations are more dynamic and open. Connections between class and occupational categories on the one hand, and social attitudes and values on the other, are not given but constructed, articulated and struggled over. As Hall put it, the way class functions in the distribution of ideologies is “not as the permanent class-colonization of a discourse, but as the work entailed in articulating these discourses to different political class practices” (139).
 
 The point here is to emphasise that the politics of compassion are not straightforward, and that we can recognise and affirm feelings of compassion while questioning the politics that seem to emanate from those feelings. For example, a politics that takes compassion as its basis seems ill-suited to think through issues it can’t put a human face to – that is, the systematic and structural conditions for mandatory detention and border control. Compassion’s political investments accrue to specifiable individuals and groups, and to the harms done to them. This is not, as such, a bad thing, particularly if you happen to be a specifiable individual to whom a substantive harm has been done. But compassion, going one by one, group by group, doesn’t cope well with situations where the form of the one, or the form of the disadvantaged minority, constitutes not only a basis for aid or emancipation, but also violently imposes particular ideas of modern western subjectivity.
 
 How does this violence work? I want to answer by way of the story of an Iranian man who applied for asylum in Australia in 2004. In the available documents he is referred to as “the Applicant”. The Applicant claimed asylum based on his homosexuality, and his fear of persecution should he return to Iran. His asylum application was rejected by the Refugee Review Tribunal because the Tribunal did not believe he was really gay. In their decision they write that “the Tribunal was surprised to observe such a comprehensive inability on the Applicant’s part to identify any kind of emotion-stirring or dignity-arousing phenomena in the world around him”. The phenomena the Tribunal suggest might have been emotion-stirring for a gay Iranian include Oscar Wilde, Alexander the Great, Andre Gide, Greco-Roman wrestling, Bette Midler, and Madonna. I can personally think of much worse bases for immigration decisions than Madonna fandom, but there is obviously something more at stake here. (All quotes from the hearing are taken from the High Court transcript “WAAG v MIMIA”. I have been unable to locate a transcript of the original RRT decision, and so far as I know it remains unavailable. Thanks to Mark Pendleton for drawing my attention to this case, and for help with references.)
 
 Justice Kirby, one of the presiding Justices at the Applicant’s High Court appeal, responded to this with the obvious point, “Madonna, Bette Midler and so on are phenomena of the Western culture. In Iran, where there is death for some people who are homosexuals, these are not in the forefront of the mind”. Indeed, the High Court is repeatedly critical and even scornful of the Tribunal decision. When Mr Bennett, who is appearing for the Minister for Immigration in the appeal begins his case, he says, “your Honour, the primary attack which seems to be made on the decision of the –”, he is cut off by Justice Gummow, who says, “Well, in lay terms, the primary attack is that it was botched in the Tribunal, Mr Solicitor”. But Mr Bennett replies by saying no, “it was not botched. If one reads the whole of the Tribunal judgement, one sees a consistent line of reasoning and a conclusion being reached”. In a sense this is true; the deep tragicomic weirdness of the Tribunal decision is based very much in the unfolding of a particular form of homophobic rationality specific to border control and refugee determination.
 
 There have been hundreds of applications for protection specifically from homophobic persecution since 1994, when the first such application was made in Australia. As of 2002, only 22% of those applications had been successful, with the odds stacked heavily against lesbians – only 7% of lesbian applicants were successful, against a shocking enough 26% of gay men (Millbank, Imagining Otherness 148). There are a number of reasons for this. The Tribunal has routinely decided that even if persecution had occurred on the basis of homosexuality, the Applicant would be able to avoid such persecution if she or he acted ‘discreetly’, that is, hid their sexuality. The High Court ruled out this argument in 2003, but the Tribunal maintains an array of effective techniques of homophobic exclusion. For example, the Tribunal often uses the Spartacus International Gay Guide to find out about local conditions of lesbian and gay life even though it is a tourist guide book aimed at Western gay men with plenty of disposable income (Dauvergne and Millbank 178-9). And even in cases which have found in favour of particular lesbian and gay asylum seekers, the Tribunal has often gone out of its way to assert that lesbians and gay men are, nevertheless, not the subjects of human rights. States, that is, violate no rights when they legislate against lesbian and gay identities and practices, and the victims of such legislation have no rights to protection (Millbank, Fear 252-3).
 
 To go back to Madonna. Bennett’s basic point with respect to the references to the Material Girl et al is that the Tribunal specifically rules them as irrelevant. 
 
 Mr Bennett: The criticism which is being made concerns a question which the Tribunal asked and what is very much treated in the Tribunal’s judgement as a passing reference. If one looks, for example, at page 34 –
 
 
 Kirby J: This is where Oscar, Alexander and Bette as well as Madonna turn up?
 
 
 Mr Bennett: Yes. The very paragraph my learned friend relies on, if one reads the sentence, what the Tribunal is saying is, “I am not looking for these things”.
 
 
 Gummow J: Well, why mention it? What sort of training do these people get in decision making before they are appointed to this body, Mr Solicitor?
 
 
 Mr Bennett: I cannot assist your Honour on that.
 
 
 Gummow J: No. Well, whatever it is, what happened here does not speak highly of the results of it.
 
 
 To gloss this, Bennett argues that the High Court are making too much of an irrelevant minor point in the decision. 
 
 Mr Bennett: One would think [based on the High Court’s questions] that the only things in this judgement were the throwaway references saying, “I wasn’t looking for an understanding of Oscar Wilde”, et cetera. That is simply, when one reads the judgement as a whole, not something which goes to the centre at all… There is a small part of the judgement which could be criticized and which is put, in the judgement itself, as a subsidiary element and prefaced with the word “not”.
 
 
 Kirby J: But the “not” is a bit undone by what follows when I think Marilyn [Monroe] is thrown in.
 
 
 Mr Bennett: Well, your Honour, I am not sure why she is thrown in.
 
 
 Kirby J: Well, that is exactly the point.
 
 
 Mr Bennett holds that, as per Wayne’s World, the word “not” negates any clause to which it is attached. Justice Kirby, on the other hand, feels that this “not” comes undone, and that this undoing – and the uncertainty that accrues to it – is exactly the point. But the Tribunal won’t be tied down on this, and makes use of its “not” to hold gay stereotypes at arm’s length – which is still, of course, to hold them, at a remove that will insulate homophobia against its own illegitimacy. The Tribunal defends itself against accusations of homophobia by announcing specifically and repeatedly, in terms that consciously evoke culturally specific gay stereotypes, that it is not interested in those stereotypes. This unconvincing alibi works to prevent any inconvenient accusations of bias from butting in on the routine business of heteronormativity.
 
 Paul Morrison has noted that not many people will refuse to believe you’re gay: “Claims to normativity are characteristically met with scepticism. Only parents doubt confessions of deviance” (5). In this case, it is not a parent but a paternalistic state apparatus. The reasons the Tribunal
 
 did not believe the applicant [were] (a) because of “inconsistencies about the first sexual experience”, (b) “the uniformity of relationships”, (c) the “absence of a “gay” circle of friends”, (d) “lack of contact with the “gay” underground” and [(e)] “lack of other forms of identification”. 
 
 
 Of these the most telling, I think, are the last three: a lack of gay friends, of contact with the gay underground, or of unspecified other forms of identification. What we can see here is that even if the Tribunal isn’t looking for the stereotypical icons of Western gay culture, it is looking for the characteristic forms of Western gay identity which, as we know, are far from universal. The assumptions about the continuities between sex acts and identities that we codify with names like lesbian, gay, homosexual and so on, often very poorly translate the ways in which non-Western populations understand and describe themselves, if they translate them at all. Gayatri Gopinath, for example, uses the term “queer diaspor[a]... in contradistinction to the globalization of “gay” identity that replicates a colonial narrative of development and progress that judges all other sexual cultures, communities, and practices against a model of Euro-American sexual identity” (11).
 
 I can’t assess the accuracy of the Tribunal’s claims regarding the Applicant’s social life, although I am inclined to scepticism. But if the Applicant in this case indeed had no gay friends, no contact with the gay underground and no other forms of identification with the big bad world of gaydom, he may obviously, nevertheless, have been a Man Who Has Sex With Men, as they sometimes say in AIDS prevention work. But this would not, either in the terms of Australian law or the UN Convention, qualify him as a refugee. You can only achieve refugee status under the terms of the Convention based on membership of a ‘specific social group’. Lesbians and gay men are held to constitute such groups, but what this means is that there’s a certain forcing of Western identity norms onto the identity and onto the body of the sexual other. This shouldn’t read simply as a moral point about how we should respect diversity. There’s a real sense that our own lives as political and sexual beings are radically impoverished to the extent we fail to foster and affirm non-Western non-heterosexualities. There’s a sustaining enrichment that we miss out on, of course, in addition to the much more serious forms of violence others will be subject to. And these are kinds of violence as well as forms of enrichment that compassionate politics, organised around the good refugee, just does not apprehend. 
 
 In an essay on “The politics of bad feeling”, Sara Ahmed makes a related argument about national shame and mourning. “Words cannot be separated from bodies, or other signs of life. So the word ‘mourns’ might get attached to some subjects (some more than others represent the nation in mourning), and it might get attached to some objects (some losses more than others may count as losses for this nation)” (73). At one level, these points are often made with regard to compassion, especially as it is racialised in Australian politics; for example, that there would be a public outcry were we to detain hypothetical white boat people. But Ahmed’s point stretches further – in the necessary relation between words and bodies, she asks not only which bodies do the describing and which are described, but which are permitted a relation to language at all? If “words cannot be separated from bodies”, what happens to those bodies words fail? The queer diasporic body, so reductively captured in that phrase, is a case in point. How do we honour its singularity, as well as its sociality? How do we understand the systematicity of the forces that degrade and subjugate it? 
 
 What do the politics of compassion have to offer here? It’s easy for the critic or the cynic to sneer at such politics – so liberal, so sentimental, so wet – or to deconstruct them, expose “the violence of sentimentality” (Berlant 62), show “how compassion towards the other’s suffering might sustain the violence of appropriation” (Ahmed 74). These are not moves I want to make. A guiding assumption of this essay is that there is never a unilinear trajectory between feelings and politics. Any particular affect or set of affects may be progressive, reactionary, apolitical, or a combination thereof, in a given situation; compassionate politics are no more necessarily bad than they are necessarily good. On the other hand, “not necessarily bad” is a weak basis for a political movement, especially one that needs to understand and negotiate the ways the enclosures and borders of late capitalism mass-produce bodies we can’t put names to, people outside familiar and recognisable forms of identity and subjectivity. As Etienne Balibar has put it, “in utter disregard of certain borders – or, in certain cases, under covers of such borders – indefinable and impossible identities emerge in various places, identities which are, as a consequence, regarded as non-identities. However, their existence is, none the less, a life-and-death question for large numbers of human beings” (77).
 
 Any answer to that question starts with our compassion – and our rage – at an unacceptable situation. But it doesn’t end there.
 
 References
 
 Ahmed, Sara. “The Politics of Bad Feeling.” Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association Journal 1.1 (2005): 72-85. Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973. Balibar, Etienne. We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship. Trans. James Swenson. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004. Berlant, Lauren. “The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy and Politics.” Cultural Studies and Political Theory. Ed. Jodi Dean. Ithaca and Cornell: Cornell UP, 2000. 42-62. Bureau of Immigration and Population Research. Illegal Entrants in Australia: An Annotated Bibliography. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1994. Dauvergne, Catherine and Jenni Millbank. “Cruisingforsex.com: An Empirical Critique of the Evidentiary Practices of the Australian Refugee Review Tribunal.” Alternative Law Journal 28 (2003): 176-81. “False Refugees and Misplaced Compassion” Editorial. Quadrant 390 (2002): 2-4. Hage, Ghassan. Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society. Annandale: Pluto, 2003. Hall, Stuart. The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. London: Verso, 1988. Joint Standing Committee on Migration. Illegal Entrants in Australia: Balancing Control and Compassion. Canberra: The Committee, 1990. Mares, Peter. Borderline: Australia’s Treatment of Refugees and Asylum Seekers. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2001. Millbank, Jenni. “Imagining Otherness: Refugee Claims on the Basis of Sexuality in Canada and Australia.” Melbourne University Law Review 26 (2002): 144-77. ———. “Fear of Persecution or Just a Queer Feeling? Refugee Status and Sexual orientation in Australia.” Alternative Law Journal 20 (1995): 261-65, 299. Morrison, Paul. The Explanation for Everything: Essays on Sexual Subjectivity. New York: New York UP, 2001. Pendleton, Mark. “Borderline.” Bite 2 (2004): 3-4. “WAAG v MIMIA [2004]. HCATrans 475 (19 Nov. 2004)” High Court of Australia Transcripts. 2005. 17 Oct. 2005 http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/other/HCATrans/2004/475.html>.
 
 
 
 
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In 1858 EBB declared her son Pen “shall be a ‘citizen of the world’ after my own heart & ready for the millennium.”[i] Living in Italy for most of the fifteen years of her married life and passionately supporting Italian unification and independence in her mature poetry, Elizabeth Barrett Browning proudly regarded herself as “a citizen of the world.” But world citizenship is a perspective toward which EBB[ii] strove in her juvenilia long before she employed the phrase. Much of her childhood writing expresses her compulsion to address social and political issues and to transcend national prejudices in doing so. Recent critics have illuminated EBB’s gender and political views in fascinating detail. Marjorie Stone, to cite one example, has ably traced EBB’s commitment to “a poetry of the present and ‘the Real’” and her “turn towards human and contemporary subjects, away from the self-confessedly mystical and abstract subject matter of her 1838 volume….”[iii] We should recognize, however, that a strong political impulse surfaces in even her earliest writings and in her recollections of childhood. Her letters from early childhood demonstrate her precocious interest in power negotiations between nations, and also between individual citizens and governments. At age six, for example, she informed her mother and father that “the Rusians has beat the french killd 18.000 men and taken 14000 prisners”--an account which, though mistakenly attributing victory to the wrong side, documents her early interest in the Napoleonic wars (31 August 1812, BC 1: 9). More telling for consideration of her aesthetic-political theory, her earliest known poem—composed in the month she turned six—in four lines critiques the British government’s policy of impressing civilians (even Americans) to serve in the British navy.[iv] Entitled “On the Cruelty of Forcement to Man: Alluding to the Press Gang” (1812), it suggests in its final two lines the viewer’s--specifically the extremely young female poet’s--responsibility to grapple with the moral and ethical implications of this military practice:
 Ah! the poor lad in yonder boat,
 Forced from his wife, his friends, his home,
 Now gentle Maiden how can you,
 Look at the misery of his doom![v]
 Her last two lines pose a question that will shape her poetic career: How can you represent disturbing issues that demand your attention? Although her brief first poem does not resolve this conundrum, by expressing her query as an exclamation, she leaves no uncertainty that she must do so.
 
 [i] The Brownings’ Correspondence, 26 vols. to date, ed. Philip Kelley, et al. (Winfield, KS, and Waco, TX: Wedgestone Press, 1984- ), vol. 25, p. 98; hereafter cited parenthetically as BC. For discussion of EBB’s views on the cosmopolitan education of her son and its relationship to her poetic practice, see Beverly Taylor, “Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Politics of Childhood,” Victorian Poetry 46 (2008): 405-27; and Christopher M. Keirstead, “‘He Shall Be a “Citizen of the World”’: Cosmopolitanism and the Education of Pen Browning,” Browning Society Notes 32 (2007): 74-82. EBB associated the concept “citizen” or “citizeness of the world” with both personal experience and international political concerns. In 1852 she wrote to her beloved distant kinsman and friend John Kenyon about her bitter estrangement from England, on the personal level fostered particularly by her father’s obdurate refusal to reconcile following her marriage, and on the political level, by England’s failure to support Italy’s independence: “I’m a citizeness of the world now, you see, and float loose” (BC 17: 70).
 [ii] To avoid the confusion of using her maiden name (Elizabeth Barrett Barrett) and her married name, throughout the essay I refer to Elizabeth Barrett Browning by the initials she frequently used to sign her manuscripts and letters. Both she and Robert Browning expressed pleasure that her initials and characteristic signature would not change with their marriage (BC 11: 248-49).
 [iii] Marjorie Stone, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995), pp. 27, 24-25. Yet even so magisterial a study as Isobel Armstrong’s Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London: Routledge, 1993), while it ranges beyond the traditional canon to include many women and working-class writers, scarcely mentions EBB.
 [iv] What were you thinking about at age six?
 Britain’s practice of seizing sailors from merchant ships and forcing them to serve in the Royal Navy (“forcement” or “impressment”) constituted one cause the United States declared war on England in 1812, while England was still at war with France. The London Times discussed the problem of impressment. See, e.g., “Parliamentary Proceedings,” 26 June 1812; “American Papers,” 10 March 1812; as well as editorial comment calling impressment “the disgrace of England and of a civilized age” (“Upon Hearing Cuxhaven,” 3 October 1811). On naval impressment see Nicholas Rogers, The Press Gang: Naval Impressment and Its Opponents in Georgian Britain (London: Continuum, 2007), esp. pp. 134-38.
 [v] First published in H. Buxton Forman’s edition of EBB’s Hitherto Unpublished Poems and Stories with an Inedited Autobiography, vol. 1 (Boston: Bibliophile Society, 1914), p. 31; subsequently cited as HUP. Punctuation follows that of the manuscript copied into a notebook by EBB’s mother, in the Berg collection of the New York Public Library; see The Browning Collections: A Reconstruction with Other Memorabilia, compiled by Philip Kelley & Betty A. Coley (Winfield, KS: Armstrong Browning Library of Baylor University, The Browning Institute, Mansel Publishing, Wedgestone Press, 1984), D666. All quotations from EBB’s works follow The Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 5 vols., vol. eds. Sandra Donaldson, Rita Patteson, Marjorie Stone, and Beverly Taylor (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2010); subsequently cited as WEBB. EBB’s juvenilia appear in vol. 5, this first poem on pp. 159-60. On this poem and other juvenilia, see Beverly Taylor, “Childhood Writings of Elizabeth Barrett Browning: ‘At four I first mounted Pegasus,’” The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf, ed. Christine Alexander and Juliet McMaster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 138-53.

In Feminist theory: from margin to center, bell hooks puts into question the works by reformist feminists who happens to be mostly white, privileged women. She insists that these reformists do not address the plight of other oppressed women who were subjugated not only by their sex alone but by other factors such as race and class. Consequently, she proposes a cultural criticism that investigates the systems of domination in place through a disruption and deconstruction of cultural productions. This paper aims to critically evaluate hooks’ radical feminism and cultural criticism, and show its philosophical heritage through an engagement with the key ideas of critical theory and postmodernism.
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One should not overlook the fact that Asia is a home to humanism, atheism, and secularism. In the 18th-20th century, atheism, communism and other forms of western liberalism and humanistic ideology had taken their roots in several Asian societies. In recent history, various forms of secular worldview, humanistic, atheistic, communistic, agnostic, etc. have also found their niche in the Philippines. Hence, we set out this study to probe the extent of secularization in the Philippines today and from there, to draw some challenges it poses to the future of Asian theology and Christianity.
 The first part of this article will tackle the answer on the first question presented. I will be a presenting both a theoretical and empirical representations in the macro, meso, and micro level for us to examine the phenomenon of secularization. It is to help the readers to investigate how this phenomenon is manifested empirically among the Filipino youths. On the second part of the paper, I will draw some challenges which secularization poses to the future of theology and Christianity in Asia. This study hopefully will modestly contribute to the configuration of an Asian paradigm of theology that proffers some perspectives in helping individuals, communities and society to envision and live out the contingencies of their faith in the future.
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 Capucao, Dave and Rico Ponce. “Secularization and Spirituality from a Theoretical and Empirical Perspective,” in Secularization and Spirituality: Issues, Challenges, and Opportunities. Quezon City: Institute of Spirituality in Asia. 2016.
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To coalesce politically is to join together whilst retaining singularity. This is the aim of much contemporary social movement activism, marked most consistently under the sign of the global justice movement – the movement ‘for humanity and against neoliberalism’, as a common slogan goes. This movement regularly writes itself as one composed of diversity and a commitment to horizontal power relations. Within this, the discourse of the movement demonstrates a particular consciousness around privilege and oppression (Starr 95-97). The demands, in this regard, on a coalescence that brings together such groups as middle-class university students, landless peasant farmers, indigenous militants and child labourers are strong (Maeckelbergh). What kinds of solidarities are required for such a precipitation across difference and power? What ethical imperatives are produced for those activists who occupy the normatively first world, white, middle-class activist subject position within this?For activism in the Australian context, this question has had particular implications for practices of alliance and resistance around, for example, the Northern Territory Intervention as well as the treatment of refugees, particularly their mandatory detention and deportation. Many activist individuals and groups involved in these social movements can also be found occupying various positions within global justice movement discourse. There were shouts of “no borders, no nations, no deportations” at the 2002 World Trade Organisation protests in Sydney; there are declarations of Indigenous sovereignty at the gates of the Villawood detention centre in 2010. Under these circumstances, the question for coalition between singularities is negotiated at the difference between being an incarcerated refugee or a citizen of the incarcerating state; or between a person whose livelihood is administered through their race and class and one who has relative control over their own means of existence.Whilst these differentials are neither static nor binarised opposites, they do manifest in this way, among other ways, at the moment of claiming coalition. Again, then: what are the ethics of coalition that might be produced here for the relatively or differently privileged subject? By way of a response, this article is an address to the ethical scene of activist coalition, drawing on anti-colonial feminism, discourses of precarity, and Derrida’s “fiduciary register” (Acts of Religion). I pose three interpenetrating ethics of coalition for the privileged subject in (the) global justice movement: risk, prayer and gift. I’ll leave it up to you to decide if you are interpellated as this subject, in view of its instability. By the same token, this meditation is not specifically applied to the cases of alliance sketched above; which is not to say it cannot be.RiskAs global justice movement discourse recognises, the contemporary global polis is heavily marked by practices of securitisation and containment. Under such conditions, anticolonial theorist Leela Gandhi suggests that a collective oppositional consciousness may be defined by risk. For Gandhi it is the risk (of pain, sacrifice, humiliation, or exile) taken by the “philoxenic”, or stranger-oriented, subject in transnational activism that defines their politics as one of friendship, after Jacques Derrida (Politics; Gandhi 29–30). Risk takes the subject beyond recognition; it means facing something you might not recognise, something you cannot know. Easily commodified, risk cannot be pre-planned; “philoxenia”, says Gandhi, “is not reducible to a form of masochistic moral adventurism or absolutism, to a sort of ethics-as-bungie-jumping-at-any-cost school of thought” (30). Risk, rather, is partial, open-ended; always to come. (Risk here is distinguished, thus, from its actuarial register. The regimes of risk underpinning global securitisation are defined by imminence rather than immanence.)Risk, in this ethical imaginary, is a threat to subjectivity; the catalyst for any coalitional process of deactivating the habits of privilege and hierarchy. This is viscerally articulated by Bernice Johnson Reagon in her speech "Turning the Century: Coalition Politics":I feel as if I’m gonna keel over any minute and die. That is often what it feels like if you’re really doing coalition work. Most of the time you feel threatened to the core and if you don’t, you’re not really doing no coalescing. (Reagon)Reagon (a musician, scholar and activist speaking at a women’s music festival in 1981) highlighted that, as displacement is necessary to coalition, so do we risk displacement every time we seek coalition. Reagon’s speech remains a landmark challenge for allies to stake their subjectivity on social justice. A response is perhaps prefigured by feminist philosopher and activist Simone de Beauvoir, in her reflection on her pro-abortion activism in early 1970s France:I believed that it was up to women like me to take the risk on behalf of those who could not, because we could afford to do it. We had the money and the position and we were not likely to be punished for our actions. I was already a sacred cow to the authorities and no-one would dare arrest me, so don’t give me too much credit for bravery because I was untouchable. Save your sympathy for the ordinary women who really suffered by their admission. (Bair 547)Contemporarily, queer theorist and activist Judith Butler expresses similar coalescent displacement in Precarious Life, her manifesto for a politics of mourning:For if I am confounded by you, then you are already of me, and I am nowhere without you. I cannot muster the “we” except by finding the way in which I am tied to “you”, by trying to translate but finding that my own language must break up and yield if I am to know you. You are what I gain through this disorientation and loss. This is how the human comes into being, again and again, as that which we have yet to know. (49)Indeed: Butler and de Beauvoir, two different feminists equally concerned with coalition, provide two orientations to the risky solidarity forecast by Reagon. Butler’s is a commitment to displacing privilege, in order to bring about political relationship to another. De Beauvoir’s is to use her privilege to protect and advance the rights of those who are oppressed by that privilege. Both recognise a re-distributive, even liberatory, power that is created by giving up privilege, or by recognising it in order to work against it. Both statements might be located in particular timespace: de Beauvoir’s from a feminism beginning to consider the homogeneity in the white middle class heterosexual feminist construct of “woman”, and Butler’s reflecting a thoroughly raced, classed, queered, feminist subject. An anticolonial feminist reworking of this scene might thus see de Beauvoir and Butler as both deploying forms of Chela Sandoval's “tactical subjectivity”, that “capacity to de- and recenter, given the forms of power to be moved” (58-9). In doing this, both may run the risk of fetishising the others they de/refer to: Butler’s as the source of her humanity, de Beauvoir’s in speaking on their behalf (Ahmed 4-5). So in risking their personal empowerment activists still, simultaneously, risk replicating the very dominations to which they are opposed. The risk still, must not ‘stop’ alliance work, as Sandoval’s theory appreciates (62). These themes - of endurance and disorienting imagination - are rife in activist discourse: from the unionist “dare to struggle, dare to win” to the World Social Forum’s “another world is possible”. The ethical precept of risk is unpredictability, uncertainty; the interception of otherness. PrayerIn a world overdetermined by risk it is no surprise that much global justice movement activism is founded on notions of precarity. “Precarious work” is a term in labour politics that refers to widespread workforce casualisation and the decline of certain industrial standards, particularly in the geopolitical west. An example of its political deployment may be found in the performative Italian meme of San Precario, created by Milanese activists in 2000. For a decade now, San Precario has appeared at rallies, in grottoes and on devotional cards as the patron saint of precarious workers in Italy (Johal); enacting an iconic-ironic twist on prayer. Precarity as activist trope has its roots in wage instability but has been extended (particularly since the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York) to refer to the condition of life during neoliberal globalisation.Within this there are those such as Ida Dominijanni who invoke Butler’s “precarious life” for an alliance politics formed from a shared vulnerability and instability. Butler’s notion of precarity here entails an acknowledgement that September 11 generated a “dislocation from First World privilege” (xii) in the Anglosphere.The ethical content of such a risky politics can be gleaned from these examples. On the one hand Butler and Dominijanni demonstrate that to be open to risk is to refuse the obsessive securitisations of neoliberal globalisation. On the other, San Precario highlights the value of security to those who are denied it under those same conditions. In evaluating the many-edged significance of precarity in global justice movement activism, Australian scholar Angela Mitropoulos puts it this way:“Precarious” is as much a description of patterns of worktime as it is the description, experience, hopes and fears of a faltering movement … This raises the risk of movements that become trapped in communitarian dreams of a final end to risk in the supposedly secure embrace of global juridical recognition. Yet, it also makes clear that a different future, by definition, can only be constructed precariously, without firm grounds for doing so, without the measure of a general rule, and with questions that should, often, shake us – particularly what “us” might mean. (Mitropoulos, Precari-Us?)Our precarious lives in partiality require, then, a contemplative sensibility - in order to discern and deploy, to tell the difference between containment and critique, and so on. We need to “take a moment” to balance on precarity’s shaky edge: to mourn the loss of certainty, seek guidance, affirm hope and belief, express the desires of futurity. It is arguably in this way that the Latin precarium became the English word prayer; as its simplest root/route it means “entreaty, petition, request” (Oxford English Dictionary).Prayer implies an address, though not necessarily as supplication to a sovereign. Prayer may instead be a gesture to a time of justice that may arrive despite all odds. Activism is social creativity: it requires the imagination of other worlds. It thus negotiates the transcendant: as other-to-this, other-to-now – simultaneously multiplying conceptions of time. This is a fiduciary mode of being; an openness to otherness that may be distinguished from institutional religion (Derrida, Acts of Religion 51), and that generates a “social divine” (Lacey).Crucially, prayer also tends to belong to the time and space of solitude (the “time out”, the “space outside”). In her thinking on solitude, Angela Mitropoulos suggests of contemporary activists – who are in social movement under hyperconnected capitalism – that “connection is not necessarily relation” (Mitropoulos, What Is to Be Undone?), particularly when said hypernetwork underscores an “injunction to stay connected in order to be a political subject.” Mitropoulos reinforces how “the solitude that can derive from disconnection” need not be “a retreat to the personal … neither individualism or quietism.” Instead, “a politics that disconnects as well as connects remains a form of relation”.To be sure, as Sara Ahmed notes, (more) ethical relations may be formed by a disinvestment that allows one to detect difference and disconnection; “getting closer to others in order to occupy or inhabit the distance between us” (179). In turning away, activists can nuance their responses to the domination they resist: choosing, sometimes, not to reproduce hegemonic sociality. The implication may be that those in social movement who adhere only to the communitarian community critiqued by Mitropoulos will lack the critical expansiveness required of coalition. The ethical precept of prayer may thus question, reaffirm and sustain activism through disconnection from coalition and disinvestment from activism by the privileged subject. Indeed, this may be a particularly just movement when the participation of privileged allies threatens to dominate the resistance of those they ally with.GiftTo think of yourself as being an activist means to think of yourself as being somehow privileged or more advanced than others in your appreciation of the need for social change, in the knowledge of how to achieve it and as leading or being in the forefront of the practical struggle to create this change. (X 160)These remarks from Andrew X, heavily circulated in some activist milieux, suggest that to Give Up Activism is something of an impossible gift for the activist. Indeed, one response to this text is entitled “The Impossibility and Necessity of Anti-Activism” (Kellstadt). For the geopolitically privileged agent to whom X’s text is addressed, Giving Up Activism would mean giving up privilege – which is itself the necessary and impossible catalyst for ethical coalition in the global justice movement (Spivak). On this logic, those who resist the exclusions of identity, community and geopolity may do well to give up activism when that identification is at risk of reproducing the force of these categories. It is one thing to give up activism as a literal casting off of the label and a refusal of activity addressed to patriarch, polis or nation; an interlinked giving up may be in understanding activism as an impossible gift, along lines traced by Jacques Derrida, Georges Bataille and Hélène Cixous. In these specific readings, the gift is reconceptualised as operating outside of the capitalist system of exchange (Cowell). But, under the modern system of ubiquitous global capital, there is something impossible about this gesture. For the privileged subject who “gives up privilege” for the other, she enacts a “giving which is also always a taking”, as Fiona Probyn puts it (42). So, the impossible gift of “giving up activism” – as strategic action or tactical consciousness – is one made with the awareness that the privileged activist in social movement cannot not risk reinscribing domination. Such an understanding in activist discourse would continue to nuánce the question of “What Is to Be Done?” (or indeed, What is to Be Undone, in Mitropoulos’ formulation). The ethical precept of gift is the capacity to give up the privileged investments of activism, and understanding that you cannot.Meta-MovementTo give up activism when it is called for, within an understanding of activism as the impossible gift of the privileged subject, is reflective of the Derridean friendship that shapes Gandhi’s explorations of anticolonial transnational solidarity. This is the friendship that requires turning one’s back, or “‘facing’ back to front” (Wills 9). If horizontal coalitions are to work with and against privilege, and if this means working beyond that limited horizon where activist recognises activist, then “giving up”, “turning one’s back on” activism may be a tactical exercise of power. This “turning one’s back” will also, therefore, be “the turn outwards” implied by prayer: a metaphysical movement that engages the other worlds that are imagined and sought. It is a movement which allows one to risk “giving up activism”, when that is required, in order to give (in)to or over to (the) other(ness). The metaphysical move goes outwards, from “physical” to “meta”: not towards a totalising meta, but as a sense of the other which overwrites present certainties: meta-. I recall Chela Sandoval’s words here: “Without making this metamove any ‘liberation’ or social movement eventually becomes destined to repeat the oppressive authoritarianism from which it is attempting to free itself” (59, my emphasis). It is in the space of such a movement that the ethics of coalition are disclosed.ReferencesAhmed, Sara. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Postcoloniality. London: Routledge, 2000.Bair, Dierdre. Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography. New York: Summit Books, 1990.Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2004.Cowell, Andrew. “The Pleasures and Pains of the Gift." The Question of the Gift: Essays across Disciplines. Ed. Mart Osteen. London: Routledge, 2002.Derrida, Jacques. Acts of Religion. Ed. Gil Anidjar. London: Routledge, 2002.———. Politics of Friendship. Trans. David Wills. London: Verso, 1997.Dominijanni, Ida. "Rethinking Change: Italian Feminism between Crisis and Critique of Politics." Cultural Studies Review 11.2 (2005): 25-35.Gandhi, Leela. Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.Gandhi, M.K. “Non-Violent Non-Cooperation.” The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, 82. Delhi: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1995 (1942).Johal, Am. “Precarious Labour: Interview with San Precario Connection Organizer Alessandro Delfanti.” Rabble.ca 11 Sep. 2010. 10 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/amjohal/2010/09/precarious-labour-interview-san-precario-connection-organizer-alessan>. Kellstadt, J. “The Necessity and Impossibility of Anti-Activism.” A Critical Discussion on the Role of Activism. n.d. 10 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.archive.org/details/ACriticalDiscussionOnTheRoleOfActivism>. Lacey, Anita. “Spaces of Justice: The Social Divine of Global Anti-Capital Activists’s Sites of Resistance.” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 42.4 (2005): 403-420.Maeckelbergh, Marian. The Will of the Many: How the Alterglobalisation Movement Is Changing the Face of Democracy. London: Pluto Press, 2009.Mitropoulos, Angela. “Precari-Us?” Mute 29 (Jan. 2005). 23 Sep. 2010 ‹http://www.metamute.org/en/Precari-us>. Mitropoulos, Angela. “What Is to Be Undone?" archive:s0metim3s, 27 Jan. 2007. 28 Jan. 2005 ‹http://archive.blogsome.com/2007/01/25/activism>. Probyn, Fiona. "Playing Chicken at the Intersection: The White Critic in/of Whiteness." borderlands 3.2 (2004). 10 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au>. Reagon, Bernice Johnson. “Turning the Century: Coalition Politics.” Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. Ed. Barbara Smith. New York: Kitchen Table Press, 1983 [1981].Sandoval, Chela. Methodology of the Oppressed. Minneaopolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “A Note on the New International.” Parallax 3.1 (2001): 12-16.Starr, Amory. Global Revolt: A Guide to the Movements against Globalization. New York: Zed Books, 2005.Wills, David. “Full Dorsal: Derrida’s Politics of Friendship.” Postmodern Culture 15.3 (2005).X, Andrew. “Give up Activism”. Do or Die 9 (2001): 160-166.


 
 
 Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and most particularly since 9/11, the government of the United States has used its security services to enforce the order it desires for the world. The US government and its security services appreciate the importance of creating the ideological environment that allows them full-scope in their activities. To these ends they have turned to the movie industry which has not been slow in accommodating the purposes of the state. In establishing the parameters of the War Against Terror after 9/11, one of the Bush Administration’s first stops was Hollywood. White House strategist Karl Rove called what is now described as the Beverley Hills Summit on 19 November 2001 where top movie industry players including chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, Jack Valenti met to discuss ways in which the movie industry could assist in the War Against Terror. After a ritual assertion of Hollywood’s independence, the movie industry’s powerbrokers signed up to the White House’s agenda: “that Americans must be called to national service; that Americans should support the troops; that this is a global war that needs a global response; that this is a war against evil” (Cooper 13). Good versus evil is, of course, a staple commodity for the movie industry but storylines never require the good guys to fight fair so with this statement the White House got what it really wanted: Hollywood’s promise to stay on the big picture in black and white while studiously avoiding the troubling detail in the exercise extra-judicial force and state-sanctioned murder. This is not to suggest that the movie industry is a monolithic ideological enterprise. Alternative voices like Mike Moore and Susan Sarandon still find space to speak. But the established economics of the scenario trade are too strong for the movie industry to resist: producers gain access to expensive weaponry to assist production if their story-lines are approved by Pentagon officials (‘Pentagon provides for Hollywood’); the Pentagon finances movie and gaming studios to provide original story formulas to keep their war-gaming relevant to emerging conditions (Lippman); and the Central Intelligence Agency’s “entertainment liaison officer” assists producers in story development and production (Gamson). In this context, the moulding of story-lines to the satisfaction of the Pentagon and CIA is not even an issue, and protestations of Hollywood’s independence is meaningless, as the movie industry pursues patriotic audiences at home and seeks to garner hearts and minds abroad. This is old history made new again. The Cold War in the 1950s saw movies addressing the disruption of world order not so much by Communists as by “others”: sci-fi aliens, schlock horror zombies, vampires and werewolves and mad scientists galore. By the 1960s the James Bond movie franchise, developed by MI5 operative Ian Fleming, saw Western secret agents ‘licensed to kill’ with the justification that such powers were required to deal with threats to world order, albeit by fanciful “others” such as the fanatical scientist Dr. No (1962). The Bond villains provide a catalogue of methods for the disruption of world order: commandeering atomic weapons and space flights, manipulating finance markets, mind control systems and so on. As the Soviet Union disintegrated, Hollywood produced a wealth of material that excused the paranoid nationalism of the security services through the hegemonic masculinity of stars such as Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Steven Seagal and Bruce Willis (Beasley). Willis’s Die Hard franchise (1988/1990/1995) characterised US insouciance in the face of newly created terrorist threats. Willis personified the strategy of the Reagan, first Bush and Clinton administrations: a willingness to up the ante, second guess the terrorists and cower them with the display of firepower advantage. But the 1997 instalment of the James Bond franchise saw an important shift in expectations about the source of threats to world order. Tomorrow Never Dies features a media tycoon bent on world domination, manipulating the satellite feed, orchestrating conflicts and disasters in the name of ratings, market share and control. Having dealt with all kinds of Cold War plots, Bond is now confronted with the power of the media itself. As if to mark this shift, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997) made a mockery of the creatively bankrupt conventions of the spy genre. But it was the politically corrupt use to which the security services could be put that was troubling a string of big-budget filmmakers in the late 90s. In Enemy of the State (1998), an innocent lawyer finds himself targeted by the National Security Agency after receiving evidence of a political murder motivated by the push to extend the NSA’s powers. In Mercury Rising (1998), a renegade FBI agent protects an autistic boy who cracks a top-secret government code and becomes the target for assassins from an NSA-like organisation. Arlington Road (1999) features a college professor who learns too much about terrorist organisations and has his paranoia justified when he becomes the target of a complex operation to implicate him as a terrorist. The attacks on September 11 and subsequent Beverley Hills Summit had a major impact on movie product. Many film studios edited films (Spiderman) or postponed their release (Schwarzenegger’s Collateral Damage) where they were seen as too close to actual events but insufficiently patriotic (Townsend). The Bond franchise returned to its staple of fantastical villains. In Die Another Day (2002), the bad guy is a billionaire with a laser cannon. The critical perspective on the security services disappeared overnight. But the most interesting development has been how fantasy has become the key theme in a number of franchises dealing with world order that have had great box-office success since 9/11, particularly Lord of the Rings (2001/2/3) and Harry Potter (2001/2/4). While deeply entrenched in the fantasy genre, each of these franchises also addresses security issues: geo-political control in the Rings franchise; the subterfuges of the Ministry for Muggles in the _Potter _franchise. Looking at world order through the supernatural lens has particular appeal to audiences confronted with everyday threats. These fantasies follow George Bush’s rhetoric of the “axis of evil” in normalising the struggle for world order in term of black and white with the expectation that childish innocence and naïve ingenuity will prevail. Only now with three years hindsight since September 11 can we begin to see certain amount of self-reflection by disenchanted security staff return to the cinema. In Man on Fire (2004) the burned-out ex-CIA assassin has given up on life but regains some hope while guarding a child only to have everything disintegrate when the child is killed and he sets out on remorseless revenge. Spartan (2004) features a special forces officer who fails to find a girl and resorts to remorseless revenge as he becomes lost in a maze of security bureaucracies and chance events. Security service personnel once again have their doubts but only find redemption in violence and revenge without remorse. From consideration of films before and after September 11, it becomes apparent that the movie industry has delivered on their promises to the Bush administration. The first response has been the shift to fantasy that, in historical terms, will be seen as akin to the shift to musicals in the Depression. The flight to fantasy makes the point that complex situations can be reduced to simple moral decisions under the rubric of good versus evil, which is precisely what the US administration requested. The second, more recent response has been to accept disenchantment with the personal costs of the War on Terror but still validate remorseless revenge. Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill franchise (2003/4) seeks to do both. Thus the will to world order being fought out in the streets of Iraq is sublimated into fantasy or excused as a natural response to a world of violence. It is interesting to note that television has provided more opportunities for the productive consideration of world order and the security services than the movies since September 11. While programs that have had input from the CIA’s “entertainment liaison officer” such as teen-oriented, Buffy-inspired Alias and quasi-authentic The Agency provide a no-nonsense justification for the War on Terror (Gamson), others such as 24, West Wing _and _Threat Matrix have confronted the moral problems of torture and murder in the War on Terrorism. 24 uses reality TV conventions of real-time plot, split screen exposition, unexpected interventions and a close focus on personal emotions to explore the interactions between a US President and an officer in the Counter Terrorism Unit. The CTU officer does not hesitate to summarily behead a criminal or kill a colleague for operational purposes and the president takes only a little longer to begin torturing recalcitrant members of his own staff. Similarly, the president in West Wing orders the extra-judicial death of a troublesome player and the team in Threat Matrix are ready to exceeded their powers. But in these programs the characters struggle with the moral consequences of their violent acts, particularly as family members are drawn into the plot. A running theme of Threat Matrix is the debate within the group of their choices between gung-ho militarism and peaceful diplomacy: the consequences of a simplistic, hawkish approach are explored when an Arab-American college professor is wrongfully accused of supporting terrorists and driven towards the terrorists because of his very ordeal of wrongful accusation. The world is not black and white. Almost half the US electorate voted for John Kerry. Television still must cater for liberal, and wealthy, demographics who welcome the extended format of weekly television that allows a continuing engagement with questions of good or evil and whether there is difference between them any more. Against the simple world view of the Bush administration we have the complexities of the real world. References Beasley, Chris. “Reel Politics.” Australian Political Studies Association Conference, University of Adelaide, 2004. Cooper, Marc. “Lights! Cameras! Attack!: Hollywood Enlists.” The Nation 10 December 2001: 13-16. Gamson, J. “Double Agents.” The American Prospect 12.21 (3 December 2001): 38-9. Lippman, John. “Hollywood Casts About for a War Role.” Wall Street Journal 9 November 2001: A1. “Pentagon Provides for Hollywood.” USA Today 29 March 2001. http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/2001-05-17-pentagon-helps-hollywood.htm>. Townsend, Gary. “Hollywood Uses Selective Censorship after 9/11.” e.press 12 December 2002. http://www.scc.losrios.edu/~express/021212hollywood.html>. 
 
 
 
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In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election victory in 2016, feminist and online craft communities responded with a call to arms (or needles) aimed at resistance through collective action in thread, yarn, and textiles. One such project, Diana Weymar’s Tiny Pricks Project, records the incessant barrage of Trump’s media coverage: tweets, journalist reportage, and statements in stitched thread. Weymar started Tiny Pricks Project on 8 January 2018, stitching the 45th President’s bluster of a 6 January tweet, “I AM A VERY STABLE GENIUS”, in yellow thread across a field of tapestry flowers. Issuing an invitation for contributions from stitchers around the world, Weymar accrued a vast archive of over 5,000 individual textile works which transform political rhetoric into thread. Although the project has been exhibited in its material form in galleries around the United States (particularly in the lead-up to the 2020 election), its primary display is online, where the textured and tactile objects are imaged and uploaded to Instagram. Drawing on the associations of a medium associated with intimacy and femininity, @tinypricksproject traces Trump’s presidency, rejecting the immediacy of the 24-hour media cycle with careful, time-consuming stitching that bears the imprint of its makers. As an attempt to reshape Trump’s violent utterances as a material symbol of resistance, Tiny Pricks Project has a close parallel in the bright pink hand-knitted “pussyhats” that became the symbol of the 2017 Women’s March. With a pattern distributed online through platforms such as Ravelry and sold on online marketplaces such as Etsy, the Pussyhat Project exemplifies the ambitions of twentyfirst-century craftivism, that “creativity can be a catalyst for change” (Greer, 183), but also the neoliberal commodification of these ideals. The contested legacy of the Pussyhat Project, lauded as a means of participatory politics but criticised for the whiteness and transphobic essentialism of its chosen symbol, demonstrates the challenges in harnessing craft as collective activism (Black), and suggests the need for individualised, responsive ways of connecting politics and hand-making. The same phrase that inspired the Pussyhats, Trump’s recording of 2005 admitting sexual assault (“They let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy.”) also appears across the Tiny Pricks Project as an embroidered text where it performs a very different role. In contrast to the performative use of knitted projects as a garment to wear in action, Weymar describes Tiny Pricks Project as a “stitched material record” and as “testimony”. Both acts, of stitching and posting, are acts of memory-making and communication, and as such, the cumulative posts of Tiny Pricks Project function as a feminist vernacular temporary memorial. Initially focussed exclusively on Trump, the project has expanded in both territory (with a dedicated Tiny Pricks Project UK) and politically to encompass direct statements of opposition. The intimacy and history of needlework in Tiny Pricks Project punctures distance, drawing the violence of Trump’s political rhetoric (against women, immigrants, the disabled, and the vulnerable) into a direct, affective contact with the bodies of stitchers and viewers. This article proposes the contact of Tiny Pricks Project as a form of haunting, where threads pierce through memories of the past and bodies in the present. Embroiderers have a term for stitching which follows a pattern from the other side – ghost stitching – allowing for the thread to create a pattern which is elsewhere but not visible, a tracing through to the inverse and across multiple layers of textile. To consider threads as conveying presence recognises the powerful affective charge of stitching. As Roszika Parker asserts in her influential work of feminist art history, The Subversive Stitch, “embroiderers … transform materials to produce sense” (6), making complex embodied meaning through thread and fabric. A digital ghost stitch, the tracing of online content in needlework that records the sense of its maker, which is then reposted elsewhere, draws out the affective quality of the material that “pricks” the user. Ghosts here are defined through the work of Avery Gordon, where they are “that special instance of the merging of the visible and the invisible, the dead and the living, the past and the present” (25). In their production of material effects, ghosts are the manifestation of haunting, which for Gordon is a particular form of mediation that breaks down distance: in haunting, organized forces and systemic structures that appear removed from us make their impact felt in everyday life in a way that confounds our analytic separations and confounds the social separations themselves. (19) A ghost stitch, then, is the specific quality of stitched thread in a digital post to puncture mediatised politics, drawing together otherwise invisible bodies and histories. To draw out the haunted nature of thread this article locates the affective quality of the stitched politics of Tiny Pricks Project in the context of contemporary memorial cultures, rather than the field of craftivism or digital activism. Focussing on the histories and politics of needlework, I begin by understanding the material use of thread and stitching in Tiny Pricks Project as a connection to intimate forms of memory-making, specifically American traditions of quilting. I then locate the specific form of @tinypricksproject, cumulative posts on Instagram in response and reaction to historical events, as a form of vernacular memorial that punctures the screen with the presence of stitchers, framing this discussion in relationship to new forms of public memory-making in both public spaces and online. Finally, I consider the combination of these forms, threaded stitches and digital memorials, as a “ghost stitch” that “pricks” me when I scroll through the feed, forcing an embodied relationship with its haunted political texts. The stitched thread has a powerful emotional charge that intimately traces the body, through the gestural mark of a hand, and evokes memory, through a connection to family heirlooms and domestic material culture. This nostalgic embodiment is exploited in the material form of Tiny Pricks Project, where Trump’s words in are stitched into vintage textiles, such as lace-edged napkins or printed children’s handkerchiefs, each carrying sentimental associations. Items of clothing sometimes appear as the support – as Trump’s response to the 2019 Senate inquiry that “I did nothing wrong” stitched in red on the front of a child’s dress decorated with red, white, and blue ric-rac and stars. The technical skill on display varies across the project, but most text is rendered in simple back stitch, creating a punctuated and punctured line that wobbles and reveals its handmade quality. Weymar’s own hand is evident in the use of bold, block lettering, often layered over tapestry – such in a repeat of “I AM A VERY STABLE GENIUS” in blue and yellow thread stitched over a stag tapestry by her grandmother. Some have the addition of more elaborative embroidered imagery or applique in the form of anachronistic illustrations and decorative motifs. Whilst information on individual panels (the stitcher, the source of the quote, and sometimes an account of the work’s production) is available in the Instagram caption in the feed and tag, each individual painstakingly stitched post is understood in relationship to the surrounding images. The combination of the individual panels of repurposed fabric of Tiny Pricks Project evokes the iconic American form of the patchwork quilt that pieces together textiles with their own histories and memories to make new form that is both fragmented and connected. On @tinyprickproject the visual similarity to a quilt is striking, as an image of each textile panel is joined to the next via Instagram’s gridded interface. In the individualised feeds of the account’s followers, each Tiny Pricks Project post is stitched together with other algorithmically selected images, generating a unique piecing together of politics with the personal, as a digital quilt. Although the image of quilting in the popular imagination remains dominated by images of white femininity (as in the 1996 film How to Make an American Quilt), quilts have historically also been a site of expression and memory-making for bodies otherwise effaced in American culture. The tradition of Black quilting, for example, has a complicated history, as bell hooks describes, where quilts were produced out of basic material need but were also a powerful form of aesthetic expression. Remembering her grandmother’s quilting, hooks identifies the way that the reuse of the family’s tattered and worn clothing in crazy quilts results in “bits and pieces of my mama’s life, held and contained there” (121). Peter Stallybrass similarly articulates the powerful communication of presence and absence of using worn garments for quilting, where “a network of cloth can trace the connection of love across the boundaries of absence, of death, because cloth is able to carry the absent body, memory, genealogy” (36-37). In their material and form, quilts have a powerful connection to memories outside dominant narratives as an assertion of the bodies who laboured on them, those bodies whose worn garments have been transformed into pattern, and the bodies they symbolically cover. This quality of intimacy, memory, and embodiment has a political potentiality, as exploited in the cumulative, community NAMES project AIDS Memorial Quilt. Founded by Cleve Jones and first displayed in 1987 in Washington D.C., each individual panel approximates the size of a body (or coffin) and is stitched with the name and memory of someone lost in the AIDS crisis. In its public display through the late 1980s and early 1990s, with the panels spread out on the ground in public spaces, AIDS quilts (both the original NAMES project and subsequent localised versions around the world) controversially drew individual memory into public politics, deploying feeling as a form of activism. At the height of AIDS crisis, Queer art theorist and ACT UP member Douglas Crimp, for example, positioned the spectacle of mourning in opposition to militancy, where “public mourning rituals may of course have their own political force, but they nevertheless often seem, from an activist perspective, indulgent, sentimental, defeatist” (5). Countering this position, Peter Hawkins argued that the quilt “made intimacy its object; it has enabled quite private reality (sometimes sentimental and homey, sometimes kinky and erotic) to ‘come out’ in public” (770), a powerful personification of social and political ambitions. The recent digitisation of the 50,000 panels of the quilt on the National AIDS Memorial Website makes more direct the connect between the intimate feeling of mourning and the “stitching” ability of digital memory. Beyond the specific form of the quilt, on a broader social level the nostalgic quality of Tiny Pricks Project’s accumulation of hand-stitched textiles draws together the past and the present. The rise of craft culture is underpinned by online platforms (including Instagram) that have facilitated DIY and craftivist communities, where historical material processes such as knitting, crocheting, needlework, and sewing provide powerful affective and political points of connection. Addressing the relationship of contemporary artists working in textiles to the economic, political, and social context of globalised late capitalism, Kirsty Robertson argues that such works are “haunted by their passages through time and space”, specifically the “ghosts of textile artists and workers” (195). This connection to bodies across history is wrapped up in the materiality and gestural process of needlework. These are the ghosts of those whose presence is rendered invisible in twentyfirst-century deindustrialised countries, where textile industries have largely disappeared and where feminism has fundamentally changed the ubiquity of domestic crafts in the home. Their return, either in art or the “hobby” sphere, carries both a radical political legacy and a complicated nostalgic charge. In the context of the United States, a further material trace in the stitched and embroidered works of Tiny Pricks Project is in the fibres of the materials themselves, in the bleached history of cotton’s brutal past that connects enslavement and contemporary capitalism (Beckert). The threads of handmade embroidery, quilt, and woven crafts move across time, as art historian Julia Bryan Wilson argues: textiles warp between the past and the present: relentlessly recruited for pressing contemporary concerns they are also tasked with reminding us of, and are often pulled back to, the traditions from which they sprung. (261) Ironically, then, the popularity of online textile and needlecraft projects such as Tiny Pricks Project can then be mapped alongside the rhetoric of Trump’s populist “recruitment” of America’s industrial history (Making America Great Again) as an emotive “pull” to an imagined past within contemporary politics more broadly (Kenny). This deployment of sentimentality untethered from facts is one part of what Lauren Berlant described as the “noise” of Trump, the concentration of feeling as the substance of his politics: Trump is sound and fury and garble. Yet—and this is key—the noise in his message increases the apparent value of what’s clear about it. The ways he’s right seem more powerful, somehow, in relief against the ways he’s blabbing. Rather than communicating a political messaging, Trump’s bluster exemplifies a mediatised politics that has taken on the logic of social media and 24-hour news cycles, fragmenting and dissipating attention (Crary). The disconnection of noisy mediatised politics makes it always just in the past, endlessly present in its digital archive, but evasive in its meaning. Tiny Pricks Project is just one example of drawing affective attention to Trump’s words through this same medium, recontextualising them as an act of memorial-making. Certain key quotes are recovered again and again in different hands alongside “I am a very stable genius” and “grab ‘em by the pussy”. Some are ironic, such as “I know words, I have the best words” (from a speech about Barack Obama in 2015) and “I don’t have a racist bone in my body” (a tweet in 2019); but many capture the most misogynist and racist records of Trump’s speech including “Nasty Woman” (directed at Hillary Clinton in 2016); and “send her back” (a rally chant about Ilhan Omar, 2019). Embroidering Trump’s tweets and soundbites into material form, then preserving these on a digital wall for all to see, Tiny Pricks Project appropriates into thread the American tradition of hagiographic presidential monuments that immortalise political actors through their speech made material. Across Washington D.C., epigraphs are carved into stone and cast in steel, as at the Lincoln Memorial (1922), which fixes its subject’s meaning in historical place with select quotations that evade the mention of slavery. The dominance of these forms of monument to America’s past efface the complex racial violence of the country’s past, as Kirk Savage has argued, and it is only when encountered with living bodies that this becomes legible again as in the iconic use of the Lincoln Memorial for Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech (1963). Indicative of a shift in the culture of memory-making and memorials, this visible contest between vulnerable bodies and symbols of state power played out during Trump’s administration in sites across the country, most notably at Charlottesville in 2017, where conflict over the fate of the city’s Robert E. Lee statue boiled over into fatal white supremacist violence. Tiny Prick Project’s function as a collectively generated memorial is part of this broader cultural shift: what Erica Doss has described as America’s “memorial mania”, an explosion in fragmentary memory-making where an ever-growing number of official monuments are joined by individualised commemoration and contestation. Inscribing Trump’s words on repurposed materials, Tiny Pricks Project reshapes presidential monuments through the aesthetics of temporary memorials. Examples such as the spontaneous memorials around the city of New York in the wake of September 11 and mementos left in the chain fence near the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing site “embod[y] the faith that Americans place in things to negotiate complex moments and events” (Doss, 71). Such memorials rely upon stable and commodified ideas of identity such as teddy bears and American flags to assert the “comfort culture” (Sturken, Tourists of History, 6) of American consumerism in the midst of trauma and loss. This has created a visual lexicon for traumatic events that is predicated on the accumulation of the mundane and everyday of material culture. In the sheer scale of posts on the @tinypricksproject Instagram feed the effect is of a cumulative vernacular memorial where the stitched posts accrue over time like mementoes on a wall, each with an affective connection both individual and collective. In many ways the process of memory-making online mirrors the assertion of presence on physical sites, most directly in the convergence of selfies and social media posts at memorial sites: what Kate Douglas describes as “dark selfies” where the act of photographing and sharing is a form of witnessing that locates the self in relationship to the past. Like temporary memorials, on platforms such as Instagram the emphasis is on individualised traces of memories constituted through a shared use of a platform and set of recognisable imagery. The participatory function of digital culture connects memory to identity and communication, through “mediated memories”: media theorist José van Dijck’s term for "the activities and objects we produce and appropriate by means of media technology for creating and re-creating a sense of past, present, and future of ourselves in relation to others” (21). The specific agency of Instagram to hold memory (a capacity built into functionality such as “on this day” or “Memories” features) casts all its posts into memory, but with the potential to return as “mediatised ghosts to haunt participants” (Garde-Hansen et al., 6). There is a distancing effect facilitated by the mediation of digital memory, a re-directing of absence into the presence of participation in social media consumption, echoing the participatory consumption of memorial culture more broadly. As Martin Pogačar argues, digital memorials online facilitate the “exteriorization of intimate and affective … practices of memory and remembering”, but he claims there is still a subversive potential here, “to elude these constraints by negotiating and revising the institutionalized forms and canons of memory and remembering” (33). Similarly, despite official intentions or commoditisation, physical memorials are also sites of feeling that can rupture any containment: they are “haunted” as Marita Sturken describes in her analysis of the Ground Zero Memorial in New York as an official memorial that cannot “contain the ghosts that live there” (“Containing Absence”, 314). In her analysis, Sturken is drawing on Gordon, who argues that haunting has the capacity to produce counter-memory by allowing for unexpected and potentially contradictory connections to be formed that challenge official structures. For Sturken it is the direct embodied trace of individual experience, such as recordings of victims’ voices, that is the ghost here. The difference between the official, intended meaning of a memorial and the haunted counter-memory is akin to the distinction between Roland Barthes’s studium and punctum in a photograph. Where the studium is the communication of conventionalised forms of meaning across a surface, the punctum pierces the viewer’s body, it is “that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)” (27). The “prick” of the punctum is, in the context of haunted memorials, the ghost making its presence felt as a material impact. The “prick” of the stitched thread in the posts of Tiny Pricks Project is a similar form of haunting, a ghost stitch that allows direct feeling through in the externalised context of mediatised politics and digital memory as followers scroll and touch each post in close and intimate contact or see the works exhibited in a gallery. As Weymar has said of the project as a site of feeling, “if you can stay present long enough to read what he’s saying, you will become politically active. You will feel a sense of urgency” (Chernick). With its ironic use of nostalgia, the ghost stitch of the Tiny Prick Project posts also punctures through contemporary political rhetoric, exposing the artifice and contradictions of sentimentality for an American past. Instead, Tiny Pricks Project proposes a counter-memorial of Trump’s presidency. A counter-memory of stitched thread runs through American political history, and when introduced to the space of digital memory this thread has a capacity to “prick” by bringing with it an affective connection to the familiar, intimate, and embodied presence distinct to hand-stitching. Defying the fragmentary nature of digital culture, thread sutures and connects, but also punctures and pierces, bringing together but also allowing points of escape. Considering Tiny Pricks Project as an example of digital ghost stitching opens up possibilities for the active role of thread as a way to “prick” the viewer and pull through connections across and between bodies and social systems as a form of political resistance. References Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. Hill and Wang, 1981. Beckert, Sven. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. Berlant, Lauren. “Trump. Or Political Emotions.” Supervalent Thought Blog, 4 Aug. 2016. <https://supervalentthought.com/2016/08/04/trump-or-political-emotions/#more-964>. Black, Shannon. “KNIT RESIST: Placing the Pussyhat Project in the Context of Craft Activism.” Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 24.5 (2017): 696–710. Bryan-Wilson, Julia. Fray: Art + Textile Politics. U of Chicago P, 2017. Chernick, Karen. “US President Donald Trump’s Angry Tweets Recorded in Tiny Pricks.” The Art Newspaper, 20 Sep. 2020. <https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2020/09/21/us-president-donald-trumps-angry-tweets-recorded-in-tiny-pricks>. Crary, Jonathan. Scorched Earth beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World. Verso, 2022. Crimp, Douglas. “Mourning and Militancy.” October 51 (1989): 3-18. Douglas, Kate. “Youth, Trauma and Memorialisation: The Selfie as Witnessing.” Memory Studies 13.4 (2020): 384–399. Doss, Erika. Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America. U of Chicago P, 2010. Garde-Hansen, Joanne, et al. Save As... Digital Memories. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. 2nd ed. U of Minnesota P, 2008. Greer, Betsy. “Craftivist History.” Extra/Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art. Ed. Maria Elena Buszek. Duke UP, 2011. 175-183. Hawkins, Peter S. “The Art of Memory and the NAMES Project AIDS Quilt.” Critical Inquiry 19.4 (1993): 752-779. hooks, bell. ‘Aesthetic Inheritances: History Worked by Hand.” Yearning. 2nd ed. Routledge, 2015. 115-122. Kenny, Michael. “Back to the Populist Future?: Understanding Nostalgia in Contemporary Ideological Discourse.” Journal of Political Ideologies 22.3 (2017): 256-273. Parker, Rozsika. The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine. New ed. I.B. Tauris, 2010. Pogačar, Martin. “Culture of the Past: Digital Connectivity and Dispotentiated Futures.” Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition. Ed. Andrew Hoskins. Taylor & Francis, 2017. 27-47. Robertson, Kirsty. “Rebellious Doilies and Subversive Stitches: Writing a Craftivist History.” Extra/Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art. Ed. Maria Elena Buszek. Duke UP, 2011. 184-203. Savage, Kirk. Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America. New ed. Princeton UP, 2018. Stallybrass, Peter. “Worn Worlds: Clothes, Mourning, and the Life of Things.” Cultural Memory and the Construction of Identity. Eds. Liliane Weissberg and Dan Ben-Amos. Wayne State UP, 1999. 27-45. Sturken, Marita. Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero. Duke UP, 2007. ———. “Containing Absence, Shaping Presence at Ground Zero.” Memory Studies 13.3 (2020): 313–321. Van Dijck, José. Mediated Memories in the Digital Age. Stanford UP, 2007.

Drawing upon popular magazines, newspapers, blogs, Web sites, and videos, this essay compares the media framing of six, “fat” political figures from around the world. Framing refers to the suggested interpretations that are imbedded in media reports (Entman; McCombs and Ghanem; Seo, Dillard and Shen). As Robert Entman explains, framing is the process of culling a few elements of perceived reality and assembling a narrative that highlights connections among them to promote a particular interpretation. Frames introduce or raise the salience of certain ideas. Fully developed frames typically perform several functions, such as problem definition and moral judgment. Framing is connected to the [covert] wielding of power as, for example, when a particular frame is intentionally applied to obscure other frames. This comparative international study is an inquiry into “what people and societies make of the reality of [human weight]” (Marilyn Wann as quoted in Rothblum 3), especially in the political arena. The cultural and historical dimensions of human weight are illustrated by the practice of force-feeding girls and young women in Mauritania, because “fat” women have higher status and are more sought after as brides (Frenkiel). The current study, however, focuses on “fat” politics. The research questions that guide the study are: [RQ1] which terms do commentators utilize to describe political figures as “fat”? [RQ2] Why is the term “fat” utilized in the political arena? [RQ3] To what extent can one detect gender, national, or other differences in the manner in which the term “fat” is used in the political arena? After a brief introduction to the current media obsession with fat, the analysis begins in 1908 with William Howard Taft, the 330 pound, twenty-seventh President of the United States. The other political figures are: Chris Christie (Governor of New Jersey), Bill Clinton (forty-second President of the United States), Michelle Obama (current First Lady of the United States), Carla Bruni (former First Lady of France), and Julia Gillard (former Prime Minister of Australia). The final section presents some conclusions that may help readers and viewers to take a more critical perspective on “fat politics.” All of the individuals selected for this study are powerful, rich, and privileged. What may be notable is that their experiences of fat shaming by the media are different. This study explores those differences, while suggesting that, in some cases, their weight and appearance are being attacked to undercut their legitimate and referent power (Gaski). Media Obsession with Fat “Fat,” or “obesity,” the more scientific term that reflects the medicalisation of “fat” (Sobal) and which seems to hold sway today, is a topic with which the media currently is obsessed, both in Asia and in the United States. A quick Google search using the word “obesity” reports over 73 million hits. Ambady Ramachandran and Chamukuttan Snehalatha report on “The Rising Burden of Obesity in Asia” in a journal article that emphasizes the term “burden.” The word “epidemic” is featured prominently in a 2013 medical news report. According to the latter, obesity among men was at 13.8 per cent in Mongolia and 19.3 per cent in Australia, while the overall obesity rate has increased 46 per cent in Japan and has quadrupled in China (“Rising Epidemic”). Both articles use the word “rising” in their titles, a fear-laden term that suggests a worsening condition. In the United States, obesity also is portrayed as an “epidemic.” While some progress is being made, the obesity rate nonetheless increased in sixteen states in 2013, with Louisiana at 34.7 per cent as the highest. “Extreme obesity” in the United States has grown dramatically over thirty years to 6.3 per cent. The framing of obesity as a health/medical issue has made obesity more likely to reinforce social stereotypes (Saguy and Riley). In addition, the “thematic framing” (Shugart) of obesity as a moral failure means that “obesity” is a useful tool for undermining political figures who are fat. While the media pay considerable attention to the psychological impact of obesity, such as in “fat shaming,” the media, ironically, participate in fat shaming. Shame is defined as an emotional “consequence of the evaluation of failure” and often is induced by critics who attack the person and not the behavior (Boudewyns, Turner and Paquin). However, in a backlash against fat shaming, “Who you callin' fat?” is now a popular byline in articles and in YouTube videos (Reagan). Nevertheless, the dynamics of fat are even more complicated than an attack-and-response model can capture. For example, in an odd instance of how women cannot win, Rachel Frederickson, the recent winner of the TV competition The Biggest Loser, was attacked for being “too thin” (Ceja and Valine). Framing fat, therefore, is a complex process. Fat shaming is only one way that the media frame fat. However, fat shaming does not appear to be a major factor in media coverage of William Howard Taft, the first person in this study. William Howard Taft William Howard Taft was elected the 27th President of the United States in 1908 and served 1909-1913. Whitehouse.com describes Taft as “Large, jovial, conscientious…” Indeed, comments on the happy way that he carried his “large” size (330 pounds) are the main focus here. This ‹happy fat› framing is much different than the media framing associated with ‹fat shaming›. His happy personality was often mentioned, as can be seen in his 1930 obituary in The New York Times: “Mr. Taft was often called the most human President who ever sat in the White House. The mantle of office did not hide his winning personality in any way” (“Taft Gained Peaks”). Notice how “large” and “jovial” are combined in the framing of Taft. Despite his size, Taft was known to be a good dancer (Bromley 129). Two other words associated with Taft are “rotund” (round, plump, chubby) and “pudgy.” These terms seem a bit old-fashioned in 2015. “Rotund” comes from the Latin for “round,” “circular,” “spherical.” “Pudgy,” a somewhat newer term, comes from the colloquial for “short and thick” (Etymology Online). Taft was comfortable with being called “pudgy.” A story about Taft’s portrait in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. illustrates the point: Artist William Schevill was a longtime acquaintance of Taft and painted him several times between 1905 and 1910. Friendship did not keep Taft from criticizing the artist, and on one occasion he asked Schevill to rework a portrait. On one point, however, the rotund Taft never interfered. When someone said that he should not tolerate Schevill's making him look so pudgy in his likenesses, he simply answered, "But I am pudgy." (Kain) Taft’s self-acceptance, as seen in the portrait by Schevill (circa 1910), stands in contrast to the discomfort caused by media framing of other fat political figures in the era of more intense media scrutiny. Chris Christie Governor Christie has tried to be comfortable with his size (300+ pounds), but may have succumbed to the medicalisation of fat and the less than positive framing of his appearance. As Christie took the national stage in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy (2012), and subsequently explored running for President, he may have felt pressure to look more “healthy” and “attractive.” Even while scoring political points for his leadership in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, Christie’s large size was apparent. Filmed in his blue Governor jacket during an ABC TV News report that can be accessed as a YouTube video, Christie obviously was much larger than the four other persons on the speakers’ platform (“Jersey Shore Devastated”). In the current media climate, being known for your weight may be a political liability. A 2015 Rutgers’ Eagleton Poll found that 53 percent of respondents said that Governor Christie did not have “the right look” to be President (Capehart). While fat traditionally has been associated with laziness, it now is associated with health issues, too. The media framing of fat as ‹morbidly obese› may have been one factor that led Christie to undergo weight loss surgery in 2013. After the surgery, he reportedly lost a significant amount of weight. Yet his new look was partially tarnished by media reports on the specifics of lap-band-surgery. One report in The New York Daily News stressed that the surgery is not for everyone, and that it still requires much work on the part of the patient before any long-term weight loss can be achieved (Engel). Bill Clinton Never as heavy as Governor Christie, Bill Clinton nonetheless received considerable media fat-attention of two sorts. First, he could be portrayed as a kind of ‹happy fat “Bubba”› who enjoyed eating high cholesterol fast food. Because of his charm and rhetorical ability (linked to the political necessity of appearing to understand the “average person”), Clinton could make political headway by emphasizing his Arkansas roots and eating a hamburger. This vision of Bill Clinton as a redneck, fast-food devouring “Bubba” was spoofed in a popular 1992 Saturday Night Live skit (“President-Elect Bill Clinton Stops by a McDonald's”). In 2004, after his quadruple bypass surgery, the media adopted another way to frame Bill Clinton. Clinton became the poster-child for coronary heart disease. Soon he would be framed as the ‹transformed Bubba›, who now consumed a healthier diet. ‹Bill Clinton-as-vegan› framing fit nicely with the national emphasis on nutrition, including the widespread advocacy for a largely plant-based diet (see film Forks over Knives). Michelle Obama Another political figure in the United States, whom the media has connected both to fast food and healthy nutrition, is Michelle Obama. Now in her second term as First Lady, Michelle Obama is associated with the national campaign for healthier school lunches. At the same time, critics call her “fat” and a “hypocrite.” A harsh diatribe against Obama was revealed by Media Matters for America in the personal attacks on Michelle Obama as “too fat” to be a credible source on nutrition. Dr. Keith Ablow, a FOX News medical adviser said, Michelle Obama needs to “drop a few” [pounds]. “Who is she to be giving nutrition advice?” Another biting attack on Obama can be seen in a mocking 2011 Breitbart cartoon that portrayed Michelle Obama devouring hamburgers while saying, “Please pass the bacon” (Hahn). Even though these attacks come from conservative media utterly opposed to the presidency of Barack Obama, they nonetheless reflect a more widespread political use of media framing. In the case of Michelle Obama, the media sometimes cannot decide if she is “statuesque” or “fat.” She is reported to be 5’11 tall, but her overall appearance has been described as “toned” (in her trademark sleeveless dresses) yet never as “thin.” The media’s ambivalence toward tall/large women is evident in the recent online arguments over whether Robyn Lawley, named one of the “rookies of the year” by the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue, has a “normal” body or a “plus-size” body (Blair). Therefore, we have two forms of media framing in the case of Michelle Obama. First, there is the ‹fat hypocrite› frame, an ad hominem framing that she should not be a spokesperson for nutrition. This first form of framing, perhaps, is linked to the traditional tendency to tear down political figures, to take them off their pedestals. The second form of media framing is a ‹large woman ambiguity› frame. If you are big and tall, are you “fat”? Carla Bruni Carla Bruni, a model and singer/songwriter, was married in 2008 to French President Nicolas Sarkozy (who served 2007 to 2012). In 2011, Bruni gave birth to a daughter, Giulia. After 2011, Bruni reports many attacks on her as being too “fat” (Kim; Strang). Her case is quite interesting, because it goes beyond ‹fat shaming› to illustrate two themes not previously discussed. First, the attacks on Bruni seem to connect age and fat. Specifically, Bruni’s narrative introduces the frame: ‹weight loss is difficult after giving birth›. Motherhood is taxing enough, but it becomes even more difficulty when the media are watching your waist line. It is implied that older mothers should receive more sympathy. The second frame represents an odd form of reverse fat shaming: ‹I am so sick and tired of skinny people saying they are fat›. As Bruni explains: “I’m kind of tall, with good-size shoulders, and when I am 40 pounds overweight, I don’t even look fat—I just look ugly” (Orth). Critics charge that celebs like Bruni not only do not look fat, they are not fat. Moreover, celebs are misguided in trying to cultivate sympathy that is needed by people who actually are fat. Several blogs echo this sentiment. The site Whisper displays a poster that states: “I am so sick and tired of skinny people saying they are fat.” According to Anarie in another blog, the comment, “I’m fat, too,” is misplaced but may be offered as a form of “sisterhood.” One of the best examples of the strong reaction to celebs’ fat claims is the case of actress Jennifer Lawrence. According The Gloss, Lawrence isn’t chubby. She isn’t ugly. She fits the very narrow parameters for what we consider beautiful, and has been rewarded significantly for it. There’s something a bit tone deaf in pretending not to have thin or attractive privilege when you’re one of the most successful actresses in Hollywood, consistently lauded for your looks. (Sonenshein) In sum, the attempt to make political gain out of “I’m fat” comments, may backfire and lead to a loss in political capital. Julia Gillard The final political figure in this study is Julia Eileen Gillard. She is described on Wikipedia as“…a former Australian politician who served as the 27th Prime Minister of Australia, and the Australian Labor Party leader from 2010 to 2013. She was the first woman to hold either position” (“Julia Gillard”). Gillard’s case provides a useful example of how the media can frame feminism and fat in almost opposite manners. The first version of framing, ‹woman inappropriately attacks fat men›, is set forth in a flashback video on YouTube. Political enemies of Gillard posted the video of Gillard attacking fat male politicians. The video clip includes the technique of having Gillard mouth and repeat over and over again the phrase, “fat men”…”fat men”…”fat men” (“Gillard Attacks”). The effect is to make Gillard look arrogant, insensitive, and shrill. The not-so-subtle message is that a woman should not call men fat, because a woman would not want men to call her fat. The second version of framing in the Gillard case, ironically, has a feminist leader calling Gillard “fat” on a popular Australian TV show. Australian-born Germaine Greer, iconic feminist activist and author of The Female Eunuch (1970 international best seller), commented that Gillard wore ill-fitting jackets and that “You’ve got a big arse, Julia” (“You’ve Got”). Greer’s remarks surprised and disappointed many commentators. The Melbourne Herald Sun offered the opinion that Greer has “big mouth” (“Germaine Greer’s”). The Gillard case seems to support the theory that female politicians may have a more difficult time navigating weight and appearance than male politicians. An experimental study by Beth Miller and Jennifer Lundgren suggests “weight bias exists for obese female political candidates, but that large body size may be an asset for male candidates” (p. 712). Conclusion This study has at least partially answered the original research questions. [RQ1] Which terms do commentators utilize to describe political figures as “fat”? The terms include: fat, fat arse, fat f***, large, heavy, obese, plus size, pudgy, and rotund. The media frames include: ‹happy fat›, ‹fat shaming›, ‹morbidly obese›, ‹happy fat “Bubba›, ‹transformed “Bubba›, ‹fat hypocrite›, ‹large woman ambiguity›, ‹weight gain women may experience after giving birth›, ‹I am so sick and tired of skinny people saying they are fat›, ‹woman inappropriately attacks fat men›, and ‹feminist inappropriately attacks fat woman›. [RQ2] Why is the term “fat” utilized in the political arena? Opponents in attack mode, to discredit a political figure, often use the term “fat”. It can imply that the person is “unhealthy” or has a character flaw. In the attack mode, critics can use “fat” as a tool to minimize a political figure’s legitimate and referent power. [RQ3] To what extent can one detect gender, national, or other differences in the manner in which the term “fat” is used in the political arena? In the United States, “obesity” is the dominant term, and is associated with the medicalisation of fat. Obesity is linked to health concerns, such as coronary heart disease. Weight bias and fat shaming seem to have a disproportionate impact on women. This study also has left many unanswered questions. Future research might fruitfully explore more of the international and intercultural differences in fat framing, as well as the differences between the fat shaming of elites and the fat shaming of so-called ordinary citizens.References Anarie. “Sick and Tired.” 7 July 2013. 17 May 2015 ‹http://www.sparkpeople.com/ma/sick-of--thin-people-saying-they-are-fat!/1/1/31404459›. Blair, Kevin. “Rookie Robyn Lawley Is the First Plus-Size Model to Be Featured in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue.” 6 Feb. 2015. 22 Apr. 2015 ‹http://www.starpulse.com/news/Kevin_Blair/2015/02/06/rookie-robin-lawley-is-the-first-pluss›. Boudewyns, Vanessa, Monique Turner, and Ryan Paquin. “Shame-Free Guilt Appeals.” Psychology & Marketing 23 July 2013. doi: 10.1002/mar.20647. Bromley, Michael L. William Howard Taft and the First Motoring Presidency. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2007. Capehart, Jonathan. “Chris Christie’s Dirty Image Problem.” 18 Feb. 2015. 22 Apr. 2015 ‹http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2015/02/18/chris-christies-dirty-image-problem/›.“Carla Bruni.” n.d. 22 Apr. 2015 ‹http://www.biography.com/people/carla-bruni-17183782›. Ceja, Berenice, and Karissa Valine. “Women Can’t Win: Gender Irony and the E-Politics of Food in The Biggest Loser.” Unpublished manuscript. Humboldt State University, 2015. “Chris Christie to Consider.” 17 April 2012. 22 Apr. 2015 ‹http://www.seeyounexttuesday.com-468›. Conason, Joe. “Bill Clinton Explains Why He Became a Vegan.” AARP The Magazine, Aug./Sep. 2013. 22 Apr. 2015 ‹http://www.aarp.org/health/healthy-living/info-08-2013/bill-clinton-vegan.html›. Engel, Meredith. “Lap Band Surgery.” New York Daily News. 24 Sep. 2014. 22 Apr. 2015 ‹http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/lap-band-surgery-helped-chris-christie-article-1.1951266›. Entman, Robert M. “Framing Bias: Media in the Distribution of Power.” Journal of Communication 57 (2007): 163-173. Etymology Online. n.d. 22 Apr. 2015 ‹http://etymonline.com/›. Frenkiel, Olenka. “Forced to Be Fat.” The Sunday Mail (Queensland, Australia). 13 Nov. 2005: 64. Gaski, John. “Interrelations among a Channel Entity's Power Sources: Impact of the Expert, Referent, and Legitimate Power Sources.” Journal of Marketing Research 23 (Feb. 1986): 62-77. Hahn, Laura. “Irony and Food Politics.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 12 Feb. 2015. doi: 10.1080/14791420.2015.1014185.“Julia Gillard.” n.d. 22 Apr. 2015 ‹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Gillard›. Kain, Erik. “A History of Fat Presidents.” Forbes.com 28 Sep. 2011. 22 Apr. 2015 ‹http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/09/28/a-history-of-fat-presidents/›.Kim, Eun Kyung. “Carla Bruni on Media: They Get Really Nasty.” 22 Apr. 2015 ‹http://www.today.com/news/carla-bruni-media-they-get-really-nasty-6C9733510›. McCombs, Max, and S.I. Ghanem. “The Convergence of Agenda Setting and Framing.” In Stephen D. Reese, Oscar. H. Gandy, Jr., and August Grant (eds.), Framing Public Life: Perspectives on Media and Our Understanding of the Social World. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2001. 67-83. Miller, Beth, and Jennifer Lundgren. “An Experimental Study on the Role of Weight Bias in Candidate Evaluation.” Obesity 18 (Apr. 2010): 712-718. Orth, Maureen. “Carla on a Hot Tin Roof.” Vanity Fair June 2013. 22 Apr. 2015 ‹http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2013/06/carla-bruni-musical-career-album›. “President-Elect Bill Clinton Stops by a McDonalds.” n.d. 22 Apr. 2015 ‹https://screen.yahoo.com/clinton-mcdonalds-000000491.html›. Ramachandran, Ambady, and Chamukuttan Snehalatha. “The Rising Burden of Obesity in Asia.” Journal of Obesity (2010). doi: 10.1155/2010868573. 22 Apr. 2015 ‹http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2939400/›.Reagan, Gillian. “Ex-Chubettes Unite! Former Fat Kids Let It All Out.” New York Observer 22 Apr. 2008. 22 Apr. 2015 ‹http://observer.com/2008/04/exchubettes-unite-former-fat-kids-let-it-all-out/›. “Rising Epidemic of Obesity in Asia.” News Medical 21 Feb. 2013. 23 Apr. 2015 ‹http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2939400/›. Rothblum, Esther. “Why a Journal on Fat Studies?” Fat Studies 1 (2012): 3-5. Saguy, Abigail C., and Kevin W. Riley. “Weighing Both Sides: Morality, Mortality, and Framing Contests over Obesity.” Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 30.5 (2005): 869-921. Seo, Kiwon, James P. Dillard, and Fuyuan Shen. “The Effects of Message Framing and Visual Image on Persuasion. Communication Quarterly 61 (2013): 564-583. Shugart, Helene A. “Heavy Viewing: Emergent Frames in Contemporary News Coverage of Obesity.” Health Communication 26 (Oct./Nov. 2011): 635-648. Sobal, Jeffery. “The Medicalization and Demedicalization of Obesity.” Eating Agendas: Food and Nutrition as Social Problems. Ed. Jeffery Sobal and Donna Maurer. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1995. 67-90. Sonenshein, Julia. “Jennifer Lawrence Does More Harm than Good with Her ‘I’m Chubby’ Comments.” 3 Jan. 2014. 16 May 2015 ‹http://www.thegloss.com/2014/01/03/culture/jennifer-lawrence-fat-comments-body-image/#ixzz3aWTEg35U›. Strang, Fay. ”Carla Bruni Admits Used Therapy.” 3 May 2013. 22 Apr. 2015 ‹http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2318719/Carla-Bruni-admits-used-therapy-deal-comments-fat-giving-birth-forties.html›. “Taft Gained Peaks in Unusual Career.” The New York Times 9 March 1930. 22 Apr. 2015 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0915.html›. Vedantam, Shankar. “Clinton's Heart Bypass Surgery Called a Success.” Washington Post 7 Sep. 2004: A01. “William Howard Taft.” Whitehouse.com. n.d. 12 May 2015. Whisper. n.d. 16 May 2015 ‹https://sh.whisper/o5o8bf3810d45295605bce53f8082Db6ddb29/I-am-so-sick-and-tired-of-skinny-people-saying-that-they-are-fat›. “You’ve Got a Big Arse, Julia. Germaine Greer Advice for Julia Gillard.” Politics and Porn in a Post-Feminist World. 24 Aug. 2012. 22 Apr. 2015 ‹https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lFtww!D3ss›. See also: ‹http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/greer-defends-fat-arse-pm-comment-20120827-24x5i.html›.

Aiming to investigate the role of governance in modifying the relationship between public finance and economic growth, this study applied a seemingly unrelated regression model for the panel data of 38 developed and 44 developing countries from 1996 to 2016. It is easy to see that this research measures public finance by two parts of the subcomponents: total tax revenue and general government expenditure. We also call governance the “control of corruption indicator”. The finding indicates that governance always positively affects the economy. However, when it interacts with public finance, this interaction has a diverse effect on economic growth in developed countries, depending on tax revenue or government expenditure. Nevertheless, in developing countries, this interaction has a beneficial impact on the growth of an economy.
 Keywords: Governance, public finance, economic growth, developed and developing countries.
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Obscured in contemporary climate change discourse is the fact that under even the most serious mitigation scenarios being envisaged it will be virtually impossible to avoid runaway ecosystem collapse; so great is the momentum of global greenhouse build-up (Anderson and Bows). And under even the best-case scenario, two-degree warming, the ecological, social, and economic costs are proving to be much deeper than first thought. The greenhouse genie is out of the bottle, but the best that appears to be on offer is a gradual transition to the pro-growth, pro-consumption discourse of “ecological modernisation” (EM); anything more seems politically unpalatable (Barry, Ecological Modernisation; Adger et al.). Here, I aim to account for how cheaply EM has managed to allay ecology. To do so, I detail the operations of the co-optive, definitional strategy which I call the “high-ground” strategy, waged by a historic bloc of actors, discourses, and institutions with a common interest in resisting radical social and ecological critique. This is not an argument about climate laggards like the United States and Australia where sceptic views remain near the centre of public debate. It is a critique of climate leaders such as the United Kingdom, Germany, and the Netherlands—nations at the forefront of the adoption of EM policies and discourses. With its antecedent in sustainable development discourse, by emphasising technological innovation, eco-efficiency, and markets, EM purports to transcend the familiar dichotomy between the economy and the environment (Hajer; Barry, ‘Towards’). It rebuts the 1970s “limits to growth” perspective and affirms that “the only possible way out of the ecological crisis is by going further into the process of modernisation” (Mol qtd. in York and Rosa 272, emphasis in original). Its narrative is one in which the “dirty and ugly industrial caterpillar transforms into an ecological butterfly” (Huber, qtd. in Spaargaren and Mol). How is it that a discourse notoriously quiet on endless growth, consumer culture, and the offshoring of dirty production could become the cutting edge of environmental policy? To answer this question we need to examine the discursive and ideological effects of EM discourse. In particular, we must analyse the strategies that work to continually naturalise dominant institutions and create the appearance that they are fit to respond to climate change. Co-opting Environmental Discourse Two features characterise state environmental discourse in EM nations: an almost universal recognition of the problem, and the reassurance that present institutions are capable of addressing it. The key organs of neoliberal capitalism—markets and states—have “gone green”. In boardrooms, in advertising and public relations, in governments, and in international fora, climate change is near the top of the agenda. While EM is the latest form of this discourse, early hints can be seen in President Nixon’s embrace of the environment and Margaret Thatcher’s late-1980s green rhetoric. More recently, David Cameron led a successful Conservative Party “detoxification” program with an ostentatious rhetorical strategy featuring the electoral slogan, “Vote blue, go green” (Carter). We can explain this transformation with reference to a key shift in the discursive history of environmental politics. The birth of the modern environmental movement in the 1960s and 70s brought a new symbolic field, a new discourse, into the public sphere. Yet by the 1990s the movement was no longer the sole proprietor of its discourse (Eder 203). It had lost control of its symbols. Politicians, corporations, and media outlets had assumed a dominant role in efforts to define “what climate change was and what it meant for the world” (Carvalho and Burgess 1464). I contend that the dramatic rise to prominence of environmental issues in party-political discourse is not purely due to short-term tactical vote-winning strategy. Nor is it the case that governments are finally, reluctantly waking up to the scientific reality of ecological degradation. Instead, they are engaged in a proactive attempt to redefine the contours of green critique so as to take the discourse onto territory in which established interests already control the high ground. The result is the defusing of the oppositional element of political ecology (Dryzek et al. 665–6), as well as social critique in general: what I term the gentrification of climate change. If we view environmentalism as, at least partially, a cultural politics in which contested definitions of problem is the key political battleground, we can trace how dominant interests have redefined the contours of climate change discourse. We can reveal the extent to which environmentalism, rather than being integrated into capitalism, has been co-opted. The key feature of this strategy is to present climate change as a mere aberration against a background of business-as-usual. The solutions that are presented are overwhelmingly extensions of existing institutions: bringing CO2 into the market, the optimistic development of new techno-scientific solutions to climate problems, extending regulatory regimes into hitherto overlooked domains. The agent of this co-optive strategy is not the state, industry, capital, or any other manifest actor, but a “historic bloc” cutting across divisions between society, politics, and economy (Laclau and Mouffe 42). The agent is an abstract coalition that is definable only to the extent that its strategic interests momentarily intersect at one point or another. The state acts as a locus, but the bloc is itself not reducible to the state. We might also think of the agent as an assemblage of conditions of social reproduction, in which dominant social, political, and economic interests have a stake. The bloc has learned the lesson that to be a player in a definitional battle one must recognise what is being fought over. Thus, exhortations to address climate change and build a green economy represent the first stage of the definitional battle for climate change: an attempt to enter the contest. In practical terms, this has manifest as the marking out of a self-serving division between action and inaction. Articulated through a binary modality climate change becomes something we either address/act on/tackle—or not. Under such a grammar even the most meagre efforts can be presented as “tackling climate change.” Thus Kevin Rudd was elected in 2007 on a platform of “action on climate change”, and he frequently implored that Australia would “do its bit” on climate change during his term. Tony Blair is able to declare that “tackling climate change… need not limit greater economic opportunity” and mean it in all sincerity (Barry, ‘Towards’ 112). So deployed, this binary logic minimises climate change to a level at which existing institutions are validated as capable of addressing the “problem,” and the government legitimised for its moral, green stand. The Hegemonic Articulation of Climate Change The historic bloc’s main task in the high-ground strategy is to re-articulate the threat in terms of its own hegemonic discourse: market economics. The widely publicised and highly influential Stern Review, commissioned by the British Government, is the standard-bearer of how to think about climate change from an economic perspective. It follows a supremely EM logic: economy and ecology have been reconciled. The Review presents climate change, famously, as “the greatest market failure the world has ever seen” (Stern et al. viii). The structuring horizon of the Stern Review is the correction of this failure, the overcoming of what is perceived to be not a systemic problem requiring a reappraisal of social institutions, but an issue of carbon pricing, technology policy, and measures aimed at “reducing barriers to behavioural change”. Stern insists that “we can be ‘green’ and grow. Indeed, if we are not ‘green’, we will eventually undermine growth, however measured” (iv). He reassures us that “tackling climate change is the pro-growth strategy for the longer term, and it can be done in a way that does not cap the aspirations for growth of rich or poor countries” (viii). Yet Stern’s seemingly miraculous reconciliation of growth with climate change mitigation in fact implies a severe degree of warming. The Stern Review aims to stabilise carbon dioxide equivalent concentrations at 550ppm, which would correspond to an increase of global temperature of 3-4 degrees Celsius. As Foster et al. note, this scenario, from an orthodox economist who is perceived as being pro-environment, is ecologically unsustainable and is viewed as catastrophic by many scientists (Foster, Clark, and York 1087–88). The reason Stern gives for not attempting deeper cuts is that they “are unlikely to be economically viable” (Stern et al. 231). In other words, the economy-ecology articulation is not a meeting of equals. Central to the policy prescriptions of EM is the marketising of environmental “bads” like carbon emissions. Carbon trading schemes, held in high esteem by moderate environmentalists and market economists alike, are the favoured instruments for such a task. Yet, in practice, these schemes can do more harm than good. When Prime Minister Kevin Rudd tried to legislate the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme as a way of addressing the “greatest moral challenge of our generation” it represented Australia’s “initial foray into ecological modernisation” (Curran 211). Denounced for its weak targets and massive polluter provisions, the Scheme was opposed by environmental groups, the CSIRO, and even the government’s own climate change advisor (Taylor; Wilkinson). While the Scheme’s defenders claimed it was as a step in the right direction, these opponents believed it would hurt more than help the environment. A key strategy in enshrining a particular hegemonic articulation is the repetition and reinforcement of key articulations in a way which is not overtly ideological. As Spash notes of the Stern Review, while it does connect to climate change such issues as distributive justice, value and ethical conflicts, intergenerational issues, this amounts to nothing but lip service given the analysis comes pre-formed in an orthodox economics mould. The complex of interconnected issues raised by climate change is reduced to the impact of carbon control on consumption growth (see also Swyngedouw and While, Jonas, and Gibbs). It is as if the system of relations we call global capitalism—relations between state and industry, science and technology, society and nature, labour and capital, North and South—are irrelevant to climate change, which is nothing but an unfortunate over-concentration of certain gases. In redrawing the discursive boundaries in this way it appears that climate change is a temporary blip on the path to a greener prosperity—as if markets and capitalism merely required minor tinkering to put them on the green-growth path. Markets are constituted as legitimate tools for managing climate change, in concert with regulation internalised within neoliberal state competition (While, Jonas, and Gibbs 81). The ecology-economy articulation both marketises “green,” and “greens” markets. Consonant with the capitalism-environment articulation is the prominence of the sovereign individual. Both the state and the media work to reproduce subjects largely as consumers (of products and politics) rather than citizens, framing environmental responsibility as the responsibility to consume “wisely” (Carvalho). Of course, what is obscured in this “self-greening” discourse is the culpability of consumption itself, and of a capitalist economy based on endless consumption growth, exploitation of resources, and the pursuit of new markets. Greening Technology EM also “greens” technology. Central to its pro-growth ethos is the tapering off of ecosystem impacts through green technologies like solar, wind, tidal, and geothermal. While green technologies are preferable to dependence upon resource-intensive technologies of oil and coal, that they may actually deliver on such promises has been shown to be contingent upon efficiency outstripping economic growth, a prospect that is dubious at best, especially considering the EM settlement is one in which any change to consumption practices is off the agenda. As Barry and Paterson put it, “all current experience suggests that, in most areas, efficiency gains per unit of consumption are usually outstripped by overall increases in consumption” (770). The characteristic ideological manoeuvre of foregrounding non-representative examples is evident here: green technologies comprise a tiny fraction of all large-scale deployed technologies, yet command the bulk of attention and work to cast technology generally in a green light. It is also false to assume that green technologies do not put their own demands on material resources. Deploying renewables on the scale that is required to address climate change demands enormous quantities of concrete, steel, glass and rare earth minerals, and vast programs of land-clearing to house solar and wind plants (Charlton 40). Further, claims that economic growth can become detached from ecological disturbance are premised on a limited basket of ecological indicators. Corporate marketing strategies are driving this green-technology articulation. While a single advertisement represents an appeal to consume an individual commodity, taken collectively advertising institutes a culture of consumption. Individually, “greenwash” is the effort to spin one company’s environmental programs out of proportion while minimising the systemic degradation that production entails. But as a burgeoning social institution, greenwash constitutes an ideological apparatus constructing industry as fundamentally working in the interests of ecology. In turn, each corporate image of pristine blue skies, flourishing ecosystems, wind farms, and solar panels constitutes a harmonious fantasy of green industry. As David Mackay, chief scientific advisor to the UK Government has pointed out, the political rhetoric of green technology lulls people into a false sense of security (qtd. in Charlton 38). Again, a binary logic works to portray greener technologies—such as gas, “clean coal”, and biomass combustion—as green. Rescuing Legitimacy There are essentially two critical forces that are defused in the high-ground strategy’s definitional project. The first is the scientific discourse which maintains that the measures proposed by leading governments are well below what is required to reign in dangerous climate change. This seems to be invisible not so much because it is radical but because it is obscured by the uncertainties in which climate science is couched, and by EM’s noble-sounding rhetoric. The second is the radical critique which argues that climate change is a classic symptom of an internal contradiction of a capitalist economy seeking endless growth in a finite world. The historic bloc’s successful redefinition strategy appears to jam the frequency of serious, scientifically credible climate discourse, yet at the level of hegemonic struggle its effects range wider. In redefining climate change and other key signifiers of green critique – “environment”, “ecology”, “green”, “planet”—it expropriates key properties of its antagonist. Were it not that climate change is now defined on the cheery, reassuring ground of EM discourse, the gravity of the alarming—rather than alarmist (Risbey)—scientific discourse may just have offered radical critique the ammunition it needed to provoke society into serious deliberations over its socioeconomic path. Radical green critique is not in itself the chief enemy of the historic bloc. But it is a privileged element within antagonistic discourse and reinforces the critical element of the feminist, civil rights, and student movements of the 1960s and 1970s. In this way ecology has tended to act as a nodal point binding general social critique: all of the other demands began to be inscribed with the green critique, just as the green critique became a metaphor for all of the others (Laclau). The metaphorical value of the green critique not only relates to the size and vibrancy of the movement—the immediate visibility of ecological destruction stood as a powerful symbol of the kernel of antagonistic politics: a sense that society had fundamentally gone awry. While green critique demands that progress should be conditional upon ecology, EM professes that progress is already green (Eder 217n). Thus the great win achieved by the high-ground strategy is not over radical green critique per se but over the shifting coalition that threatens its legitimacy. As Stavrakakis observes, what is novel about green discourse is nothing essential to the signifiers it deploys, but the way that a common signifier comes to stand in and structure the field as a whole – to serve as a nodal point. It has a number of signifiers: environmental sustainability, social justice, grassroots democracy, and peace and non-violence, all of which are “quilted” around the master-signifiers of “ecology”, “green”, or “planet”. While these master-signifiers are not unique to green ideology, what is unique is that they stand at the centre. But the crucial point to note about the green signifier at the heart of political ecology is that its value is accorded, in large part, through its negation of the dominant ideology. That is to say, it is not that green ideology stands as merely another way of mapping the social; rather, the master-signifier "green" contains an implicit refutation of the dominant social order. That “green” is now almost wholly evacuated of its radical connotations speaks to the effectiveness of the redefinitional effort.The historic bloc is aided in its efforts by the complexity of climate change. Such opacity is characteristic of contemporary risks, whose threats are mostly “a type of virtual reality, real virtuality” (Beck 213). The political struggle then takes place at the level of meaning, and power is played out in a contest to fix the definitions of key risks such as climate change. When relations of (risk) definition replace relations of production as the site of the effects of power, a double mystification ensues and shifts in the ground on which the struggle takes place may go unnoticed. Conclusion By articulating ecology with markets and technology, EM transforms the threat of climate change into an opportunity, a new motor of neoliberal legitimacy. The historic bloc has co-opted environmentalist discourse to promote a gentrified climate change which present institutions are capable of managing: “We are at the fork in the road between order and catastrophe. Stick with us. We will get you through the crisis.” The sudden embrace of the environment by Nixon and by Thatcher, the greening of Cameron’s Conservatives, the Garnaut and Stern reports, and the Australian Government’s foray into carbon trading all have their more immediate policy and political aims. Yet they are all consistent with the high-ground definitional strategy, professing no contraction between sustainability and the present socioeconomic order. Undoubtedly, EM is vastly preferable to denial and inaction. It may yet open the doors to real ecological reform. But in its present form, its preoccupation is the legitimation crisis threatening dominant interests, rather than the ecological crisis facing us all. References Adger, W. Neil, Tor A. Benjaminsen, Katrina Brown, and Hanne Svarstad. ‘Advancing a Political Ecology of Global Environmental Discourses.’ Development and Change 32.4 (2001): 681–715. 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Mol, “Sociology, Environment, and Modernity: Ecological Modernization as a Theory of Social Change.” Society and Natural Resources 5.4 (1992): 323-44. Spash, Clive. L. “Review of The Economics of Climate Change (The Stern Review).”Environmental Values 16.4 (2007): 532–35. Stavrakakis, Yannis. “Green Ideology: A Discursive Reading.” Journal of Political Ideologies 2.3 (1997): 259–79. Stern, Nicholas et al. Stern Review: The Economics of Climate Change. Vol. 30. London: HM Treasury, 2006. Swyngedouw, Erik. “Apocalypse Forever? Post-political Populism and the Spectre of Climate Change.” Theory, Culture & Society 27.2-3 (2010): 213–32. Taylor, Lenore. “Try Again on Carbon: Garnaut.” The Australian 17 Apr. 2009: 1. While, Aidan, Andrew E.G. Jonas, and David Gibbs. “From Sustainable Development to Carbon Control: Eco-state Restructuring and the Politics of Urban and Regional Development.”Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 35.1 (2010): 76–93. 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This article explores how fat women protesting challenges norms of womanhood, the place of women in society, and who has the power to have their say in public spaces. We use the term fat as a political reclamation; Fat Studies scholars and fat activists prefer the term fat, over the normative term “overweight” and the pathologising term “obese/obesity” (Lee and Pausé para 3). Who is and who isn’t fat, we suggest, is best left to self-determination, although it is generally accepted by fat activists that the term is most appropriately adopted by individuals who are unable to buy clothes in any store they choose. Using a tweet from conservative commentator Ann Coulter as a leaping-off point, we examine the narratives around women in the public sphere and explore how fat bodies might transgress further the norms set by society. The public representations of women in politics and protest are then are set in the context of ‘activist wisdom’ (Maddison and Scalmer) from two sides of the globe. Activist wisdom gives preference to the lived knowledge and experience of activists as tools to understand social movements. It seeks to draw theoretical implications from the practical actions of those on the ground. In centring the experiences of ourselves and other activists, we hope to expand existing understandings of body politics, gender, and political power in this piece. It is important in researching social movements to look both at the representations of protest and protestors in all forms of media as this is the ‘public face’ of movements, but also to examine the reflections of the individuals who collectively put their weight behind bringing social change.A few days after the 45th President of the United States was elected, people around the world spilled into the streets and participated in protests; precursors to the Women’s March which would take place the following January. Pictures of such marches were shared via social media, demonstrating the worldwide protest against the racism, misogyny, and overall oppressiveness, of the newly elected leader. Not everyone was supportive of these protests though; one such conservative commentator, Ann Coulter, shared this tweet: Image1: A tweet from Ann Coulter; the tweet contains a picture of a group of protestors, holding signs protesting Trump, white supremacy, and for the rights of immigrants. In front of the group, holding a megaphone is a woman. Below the picture, the text reads, “Without fat girls, there would be no protests”.Coulter continued on with two more tweets, sharing pictures of other girls protesting and suggesting that the protestors needed a diet programme. Kivan Bay (“Without Fat Girls”) suggested that perhaps Coulter was implying that skinny girls do not have time to protest because they are too busy doing skinny girl things, like buying jackets or trying on sweaters. Or perhaps Coulter was arguing that fat girls are too visible, too loud, and too big, to be taken seriously in their protests. These tweets provide a point of illustration for how fat women protesting challenge norms of womanhood, the place of women in society, and who has the power to have their say in public spaces While Coulter’s tweet was most likely intended as a hostile personal attack on political grounds, we find it useful in its foregrounding of gender, bodies and protest which we consider in this article, beginning with a review of fat girls’ role in social justice movements.Across the world, we can point to fat women who engage in activism related to body politics and more. Australian fat filmmaker and activist Kelli Jean Drinkwater makes documentaries, such as Aquaporko! and Nothing to Lose, that queer fat embodiment and confronts body norms. Newly elected Ontario MPP Jill Andrew has been fighting for equal rights for queer people and fat people in Canada for decades. Nigerian Latasha Ngwube founded About That Curvy Life, Africa’s leading body positive and empowerment site, and has organised plus-size fashion show events at Heineken Lagos Fashion and Design Week in Nigeria in 2016 and the Glitz Africa Fashion Week in Ghana in 2017. Fat women have been putting their bodies on the line for the rights of others to live, work, and love. American Heather Heyer was protesting the hate that white nationalists represent and the danger they posed to her friends, family, and neighbours when she died at a rally in Charlottesville, North Carolina in late 2017 (Caron). When Heyer was killed by one of those white nationalists, they declared that she was fat, and therefore her body size was lauded loudly as justification for her death (Bay, “How Nazis Use”; Spangler).Fat women protesting is not new. For example, the Fat Underground was a group of “radical fat feminist women”, who split off from the more conservative NAAFA (National Association to Aid Fat Americans) in the 1970s (Simic 18). The group educated the public about weight science, harassed weight-loss companies, and disrupted academic seminars on obesity. The Fat Underground made their first public appearance at a Women’s Equality Day in Los Angeles, taking over the stage at the public event to accuse the medical profession of murdering Cass Elliot, the lead singer of the folk music group, The Mamas and the Papas (Dean and Buss). In 1973, the Fat Underground produced the Fat Liberation Manifesto. This Manifesto began by declaring that they believed “that fat people are full entitled to human respect and recognition” (Freespirit and Aldebaran 341).Women have long been disavowed, or discouraged, from participating in the public sphere (Ginzberg; van Acker) or seen as “intruders or outsiders to the tough world of politics” (van Acker 118). The feminist slogan the personal is political was intended to shed light on the role that women needed to play in the public spheres of education, employment, and government (Caha 22). Across the world, the acceptance of women within the public sphere has been varied due to cultural, political, and religious, preferences and restrictions (Agenda Feminist Media Collective). Limited acceptance of women in the public sphere has historically been granted by those ‘anointed’ by a male family member or patron (Fountaine 47).Anti-feminists are quick to disavow women being in public spaces, preferring to assign them the role as helpmeet to male political elite. As Schlafly (in Rowland 30) notes: “A Positive Woman cannot defeat a man in a wrestling or boxing match, but she can motivate him, inspire him, encourage him, teach him, restrain him, reward him, and have power over him that he can never achieve over her with all his muscle.” This idea of women working behind the scenes has been very strong in New Zealand where the ‘sternly worded’ letter is favoured over street protest. An acceptable route for women’s activism was working within existing political institutions (Grey), with activity being ‘hidden’ inside government offices such as the Ministry of Women’s Affairs (Schuster, 23). But women’s movement organisations that engage in even the mildest form of disruptive protest are decried (Grey; van Acker).One way women have been accepted into public space is as the moral guardians or change agents of the entire political realm (Bliss; Ginzberg; van Acker; Ledwith). From the early suffrage movements both political actors and media representations highlighted women were more principled and conciliatory than men, and in many cases had a moral compass based on restraint. Cartoons showed women in the suffrage movement ‘sweeping up’ and ‘cleaning house’ (Sheppard 123). Groups like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union were celebrated for protesting against the demon drink and anti-pornography campaigners like Patricia Bartlett were seen as acceptable voices of moral reason (Moynihan). And as Cunnison and Stageman (in Ledwith 193) note, women bring a “culture of femininity to trade unions … an alternative culture, derived from the particularity of their lives as women and experiences of caring and subordination”. This role of moral guardian often derived from women as ‘mothers’, responsible for the physical and moral well-being of the nation.The body itself has been a sight of protest for women including fights for bodily autonomy in their medical decisions, reproductive justice, and to live lives free from physical and sexual abuse, have long been met with criticisms of being unladylike or inappropriate. Early examples decried in NZ include the women’s clothing movement which formed part of the suffrage movement. In the second half of the 20th century it was the freedom trash can protests that started the myth of ‘women burning their bras’ which defied acceptable feminine norms (Sawer and Grey). Recent examples of women protesting for body rights include #MeToo and Time’s Up. Both movements protest the lack of bodily autonomy women can assert when men believe they are entitled to women’s bodies for their entertainment, enjoyment, and pleasure. And both movements have received considerable backlash by those who suggest it is a witch hunt that might ensnare otherwise innocent men, or those who are worried that the real victims are white men who are being left behind (see Garber; Haussegger). Women who advocate for bodily autonomy, including access to contraception and abortion, are often held up as morally irresponsible. As Archdeacon Bullock (cited in Smyth 55) asserted, “A woman should pay for her fun.”Many individuals believe that the stigma and discrimination fat people face are the consequences they sow from their own behaviours (Crandall 892); that fat people are fat because they have made poor decisions, being too indulgent with food and too lazy to exercise (Crandall 883). Therefore, fat people, like women, should have to pay for their fun. Fat women find themselves at this intersection, and are often judged more harshly for their weight than fat men (Tiggemann and Rothblum). Examining Coulter’s tweet with this perspective in mind, it can easily be read as an attempt to put fat girl protestors back into their place. It can also be read as a warning. Don’t go making too much noise or you may be labelled as fat. Presenting troublesome women as fat has a long history within political art and depictions. Marianne (the symbol of the French Republic) was depicted as fat and ugly; she also reinforced an anti-suffragist position (Chenut 441). These images are effective because of our societal views on fatness (Kyrölä). Fatness is undesirable, unworthy of love and attention, and a representation of poor character, lack of willpower, and an absence of discipline (Murray 14; Pausé, “Rebel Heart” para 1).Fat women who protest transgress rules around body size, gender norms, and the appropriate place for women in society. Take as an example the experiences of one of the authors of this piece, Sandra Grey, who was thrust in to political limelight nationally with the Campaign for MMP (Grey and Fitzsimmons) and when elected as the President of the New Zealand Tertiary Education Union in 2011. Sandra is a trade union activist who breaches too many norms set for the “good woman protestor,” as well as the norms for being a “good fat woman”. She looms large on a stage – literally – and holds enough power in public protest to make a crowd of 7,000 people “jump to left”, chant, sing, and march. In response, some perceive Sandra less as a tactical and strategic leader of the union movement, and more as the “jolly fat woman” who entertains, MCs, and leads public events. Though even in this role, she has been criticised for being too loud, too much, too big.These criticisms are loudest when Sandra is alongside other fat female bodies. When posting on social media photos with fellow trade union members the comments often note the need of the group to “go on a diet”. The collective fatness also brings comments about “not wanting to fuck any of that group of fat cows”. There is something politically and socially dangerous about fat women en masse. This was behind the responses to Sandra’s first public appearance as the President of TEU when one of the male union members remarked “Clearly you have to be a fat dyke to run this union.” The four top elected and appointed positions in the TEU have been women for eight years now and both their fatness and perceived sexuality present as a threat in a once male-dominated space. Even when not numerically dominant, unions are public spaces dominated by a “masculine culture … underpinned by the undervaluation of ‘women’s worth’ and notions of womanhood ‘defined in domesticity’” (Cockburn in Kirton 273-4). Sandra’s experiences in public space show that the derision and methods of putting fat girls back in their place varies dependent on whether the challenge to power is posed by a single fat body with positional power and a group of fat bodies with collective power.Fat Girls Are the FutureOn the other side of the world, Tara Vilhjálmsdóttir is protesting to change the law in Iceland. Tara believes that fat people should be protected against discrimination in public and private settings. Using social media such as Facebook and Instagram, Tara takes her message, and her activism, to her thousands of followers (Keller, 434; Pausé, “Rebel Heart”). And through mainstream media, she pushes back on fatphobia rhetoric and applies pressure on the government to classify weight as a protected status under the law.After a lifetime of living “under the oppression of diet culture,” Tara began her activism in 2010 (Vilhjálmsdóttir). She had suffered real harm from diet culture, developing an eating disorder as a teen and being told through her treatment for it that her fears as a fat woman – that she had no future, that fat people experienced discrimination and stigma – were unfounded. But Tara’s lived experiences demonstrated fat stigma and discrimination were real.In 2012, she co-founded the Icelandic Association for Body Respect, which promotes body positivity and fights weight stigma in Iceland. The group uses a mixture of real life and online tools; organising petitions, running campaigns against the Icelandic version of The Biggest Loser, and campaigning for weight to be a protected class in the Icelandic constitution. The Association has increased the visibility of the dangers of diet culture and the harm of fat stigma. They laid the groundwork that led to changing the human rights policy for the city of Reykjavík; fat people cannot be discriminated against in employment settings within government jobs. As the city is one of the largest employers in the country, this was a large step forward for fat rights.Tara does receive her fair share of hate messages; she’s shared that she’s amazed at the lengths people will go to misunderstand what she is saying (Vilhjálmsdóttir). “This isn’t about hurt feelings; I’m not insulted [by fat stigma]. It’s about [fat stigma] affecting the livelihood of fat people and the structural discrimination they face” (Vilhjálmsdóttir). She collects the hateful comments she receives online through screenshots and shares them in an album on her page. She believes it is important to keep a repository to demonstrate to others that the hatred towards fat people is real. But the hate she receives only fuels her work more. As does the encouragement she receives from people, both in Iceland and abroad. And she is not alone; fat activists across the world are using Web 2.0 tools to change the conversation around fatness and demand civil rights for fat people (Pausé, “Rebel Heart”; Pausé, “Live to Tell").Using Web 2.0 tools as a way to protest and engage in activism is an example of oppositional technologics; a “political praxis of resistance being woven into low-tech, amateur, hybrid, alternative subcultural feminist networks” (Garrison 151). Fat activists use social media to engage in anti-assimilationist activism and build communities of practice online in ways that would not be possible in real life (Pausé, “Express Yourself” 1). This is especially useful for those whose protests sit at the intersections of oppressions (Keller 435; Pausé, “Rebel Heart” para 19). Online protests have the ability to travel the globe quickly, providing opportunities for connections between protests and spreading protests across the globe, such as SlutWalks in 2011-2012 (Schuster 19). And online spaces open up unlimited venues for women to participate more freely in protest than other forms (Harris 479; Schuster 16; Garrison 162).Whether online or offline, women are represented as dangerous in the political sphere when they act without male champions breaching norms of femininity, when their involvement challenges the role of woman as moral guardians, and when they make the body the site of protest. Women must ‘do politics’ politely, with utmost control, and of course caringly; that is they must play their ‘designated roles’. Whether or not you fit the gendered norms of political life affects how your protest is perceived through the media (van Acker). Coulter’s tweet loudly proclaimed that the fat ‘girls’ protesting the election of the 45th President of the United States were unworthy, out of control, and not worthy of attention (ironic, then, as her tweet caused considerable conversation about protest, fatness, and the reasons not to like the President-Elect). What the Coulter tweet demonstrates is that fat women are perceived as doubly-problematic in public space, both as fat and as women. They do not do politics in a way that is befitting womanhood – they are too visible and loud; they are not moral guardians of conservative values; and, their bodies challenge masculine power.ReferencesAgenda Feminist Media Collective. “Women in Society: Public Debate.” Agenda: Empowering Women for Gender Equity 10 (1991): 31-44.Bay, Kivan. “How Nazis Use Fat to Excuse Violence.” Medium, 7 Feb. 2018. 1 May 2018 <https://medium.com/@kivabay/how-nazis-use-fat-to-excuse-violence-b7da7d18fea8>.———. “Without Fat Girls, There Would Be No Protests.” Bullshit.ist, 13 Nov. 2016. 16 May 2018 <https://bullshit.ist/without-fat-girls-there-would-be-no-protests-e66690de539a>.Bliss, Katherine Elaine. Compromised Positions: Prostitution, Public Health, and Gender Politics in Revolutionary Mexico City. Penn State Press, 2010.Caha, Omer. 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This paper is about the relationships between infrastructural, interzonal spaces and the communities and individuals that interact with them. It attempts to describe the politics of their aesthetics and their legitimation as two aspects of the same process of semiological warfare and its governance. For example, think about a street-corner, preferably one in a big city. Consider the processes and operations that occur there, who creates them, legitimates them, and what they mean. For the sake of this paper, the road, the sidewalk, the streetlights with their cabling and electrical grid, the sewers and their gutters, are all infrastructural zones, and they come together and intermix to form the interzone. That is, the complex assemblage of meanings, things, and peoples, that is at once the street-corner and beyond it. Zones are inscribed through codes and conventions to form pragmatic regimes through which we enact our lives and our roles (Thévenot, “Rules and Implements” 9-15; Thévenot, “Pragmatic Regimes” 64–5). Though these zones are integral to our lives, the deterritorialisation of these zones has dispersed them throughout our world, splintering and disintegrating the meanings we can assign to them, thus forcing the perpetual re-creation of new zones and interzones across spaces and times. Through this dispersal, the integrated world capitalism in which we live, allows us to be ignorant of their processes as the experience of the zones are removed from our subjective experiences (Guattari, The Three Ecologies 137). Because our ignorance of and alienation from our infrastructural zones, a subpolitics forms and spawns semiologic warfare for our attention and disattention that causes us to be “zoned out” about the zones in which we live (Beck 35). Instead of zoning out, this paper zones in on infrastructure zones and interzones. An interzone is an interstitial zone of extraterratoriality governed by a broader set of rules, as with international zones such as the infamous Green Zone in Iraq or the international zone of Tangiers made famous by William Burroughs (Thévenot, “Rules and Implements” 9–15; Thévenot, “Pragmatic Regimes” 64–5). Interzones are the territories between zones that we project our subjectivities through. They cut or splinter the empty spaces of the dispersed and fragmented zones of our capitalist realities. Our subjective projection of these interzones creates and requires modes of interpretation and governance that comes into being as we share our knowledge of them. As interzones become reified through our shared interpretations and governance, they become zones themselves, forming a pragmatic regime of codes and conventions that eventually is alienated from our experience. This perpetual passage from zone to interzone based on our spatial subjectivities, requires significant amounts of work—intellectual and other. Without this work, interzones are entropic and temporary; fading from our shared memories. But even as they fade, interzones have changed the zones around them, transforming the necessities of their governance through the vacating of the semiological and social spaces the interzone once occupied with its own processes.This paper confronts these interzones that are frequently within a five-minute walk from anywhere humans inhabit. These interzones contain infrastructures such as sidewalks, roads, sewers, passageways, or in the digital world web servers, routers, and fibre optic cabling. As we pass through these zones and have the opportunity to interact with them, we occasionally intermix them, creating new possibilities of understanding and operating; this is the creation of an interzone. The interzone exists when we make it and share it from the zones we inhabit, transforming their infrastructures through our interaction with them. However, our actions tend to be vitalist and pluralist in that our interactions with infrastructures tend to create a multiplicity of livable interzones existing between the zones as new spaces of autonomy, occupation, and legitimising politics. This plurality combined with our immersion within infrastructural zones provides the living semiological space of self-legitimation in which we deny the existence of the very infrastructural zones it requires: In the “private,” in the “domestic” sphere (and so also in the environment of objects) in which the individual lives as a refuge zone, as an autonomous field of needs and satisfactions, below or beyond social constraints, the individual nevertheless always continues to evince or to claim a legitimacy and to assure it by signs. In the least of behaviors, through the least of objects, he or she translates the immanence of a jurisdiction which in appearance is rejected. (Baudrillard 40) Our objects; our actions within this domestic environment constitute elements of several zones and provide our own subjective system of legitimation within them, and our autonomy within that space is guaranteed by our ignorance of the operation of that system of legitimation. It is only our situatedness through our inscriptions and actions within these spaces that gives us the ability to read the codes that we co-construct through these spaces. (Thévenot, “Rules and Implements” 9–15; Thévenot, “Pragmatic Regimes” 64–5) This situatedness allows us this sense of refuge, safety, and in the end as Baudrillard claims, this refuge zone allows for us to exist socially, if ignorantly within the infrastructures we require. (Baudrillard 40, 49) But even in our ignorance, infrastructural zones still provide us with the background necessities of our everyday lives; eliminating dangers and constituting a significant part of our artifactual world (Star 377-90; Star and Ruhleder 253-64; Hunsinger 277-79). As Paul Edwards says: Infrastructures constitute an artificial environment, channeling and/or reproducing those properties of the natural environment that we find most useful and comfortable; providing others that the natural environment cannot; and eliminating features we find dangerous, uncomfortable, or merely inconvenient. In doing so, they simultaneously constitute our experience of the natural environment, as commodity, object of romantic or pastoralist emotions and aesthetic sensibilities, or occasional impediment. (189) Zones too are artificial environments, performing the same sort of functions as described by Edwards above. Zones operate through their semiological form as desire/seduction and they operate through their borders where their aesthetization is at play. More specifically how we imagine and react to zones and interzones, and who and what occupies their border spaces, defines the interoperation of their interpretation, their aesthetisation, and their governance. Edges and borders define the relations of zones; the screen of the monitor is like a wall with a window that defines our access to cyberinfrastructures beyond, much like the curb or ditch defines the edge of the street or road. These borders and edges are more than spaces of interoperation, they are spaces of politics. It is through these borders, and the actions we can pursue through them, where the operations of legitimacy will be most tested and transgressed. Infrastructural zones operate in and across those borders both as real and phantasmal aesthetics that operate as a becoming system of governance and interpretation. They operate as a cross-ecologic, semiological, and pragmatic regime that is established in relation to production of subjectivity in their cultural milieu. The zones and interzones articulate a form of alienated subjectivity in all cultural milieus. This is an articulation of our acted environment that is assembled through our distributed cognition of zones and interzones, which as part of the politics of legitimation, we inscribe, erase, and re-inscribe in perpetual semiological warfare until the zones fade into the background losing their salience. Edwards agrees with this lack of salience, “The most salient characteristic of technology in the modern (industrial and postindustrial) world is the degree to which most technology is not salient for most people, most of the time” (184). Even without particular salience to most people, infrastructural zones are spaces and aggregations of perceived fixity or normality demarcated by their transgression. The modes of transgression that demarcate them can occur in any part of our experience. Normally the boundaries are constructed in the forms of visibility and knowability centered on questions of expertise and/or professionalism amongst other boundary processes (Star and Griesemer 387–420; Star and Ruhleder 253–64 ; Gieryn 791–2). Plumbers, for instance, confront a reality of certain infrastructures on a daily basis, as do other professionals such as those that work at Internet service providers. As outsiders to these epistemic communities, we are made aware of zones when we transgress in or through them as we are breaking rules or borders that define these communities define and in part communicate to us. It is through our actions and transgressions that we enact and inscribe interzones in our subjective world, but it is through our reactions and transgressions also that they are territorialized and deterritorialized in our social world. Zones, then are constructs of our purported, construed, and communicated phantasmal objectivities and beyond that they are the aesthetization of our shared needs and satisfactions. By recognizing them, we transform them in to actants in our social world, and by communicating our experience of them, we construct them as codes and conventions that add meaning to that social world. One way to imagine these infrastructural manifestations is through thinking about them as substrates. People commonly envision infrastructure as a system of substrates—railroad lines, pipes and plumbing, electrical power plants, and wires. It is by definition invisible, part of the background for other kinds of work. It is ready-to-hand. This image holds up well enough for many purposes—turn on the faucet for a drink of water and you use a vast infrastructure of plumbing and water regulation without usually thinking much about it. (Star 380) As substrates, these infrastructures form a pragmatic regime, or zone through which we pass, which exists underneath the strata that is our everyday life. The faucet is part of the strata of our everyday lives, like the sidewalk, while the pipes and the standards of plumbing form a space of expertise as they do with sidewalks. The operations of expertise cultures on specific sets of infrastructures helps to disperse and fragment the knowledge of the various strata involved, especially the substrates. Experts knowledgeable of these substrates will have come to their knowledge by transgressing the borders, by witnessing and inscribing the objects, the aestheticisations, and the other border processes with meanings that the community of experts share amongst themselves and isolate from the public at large (Illich et al. 15–20). Expertise becomes complicit in the processes of the zone and its interzones. This complicity, if reflexive, will come to question the system of integrated world capitalism in which this zone is established as a form of semiological warfare against other zones and regimes (Guattari, “The Three Ecologies” 1989 137). In other words, experts on infrastructural zones have to come to terms not only with the knowing of the previously unknown, but also the know-how that the unknown plays into the broader culture and capitalist system in which it operates. However, while experts might zone in on infrastructural zones and their contexts, most people continue to be zoned out. Even for experts in infrastructures, some infrastructures get far less investigation than others, and like all zones, they eventually are forgotten and experts become ignorant of them (Hunsinger 277–79). The challenge of knowing or bringing attention to the infrastructural zones and their interzones is a challenge of territorialisation and thus of subjective awareness. Knowingly operating with subjective awareness within them is a form of semiological warfare that we can perpetrate, because by establishing the semiological subjective space, we reconstruct a system of interpreting and governing the territory and thus establishing political importance and awareness of our techno-semiological existence. For the territory to be won, the war and its strategies have to be taken to the public arena and brought forth in political discourse as a purposive politics. We must resist the temptation to forget and remain ignorant, which as Ulrich Beck points out, relegates this political space to corporations and other non-public entities as a form of subpolitics. We need to take back the politics and subpolitics of infrastructure and recognize the choices or lack thereof that we are making across all ecological systems (Beck 38; Beck, Giddens and Lash 24–36). In conclusion, this exposition on zones, interzones, and infrastructures is meant to challenge us to rethink our subjective positions in relation to zones, their aesthetics, and their legitimation as functions of semiological warfare. We need to find new opportunities to make a mess of these spaces, to transgress, and create new spaces of autonomy for ourselves and future participants in the zones. We have to move beyond the appreciation of “this is a street-corner” and into the realm of “this is our street-corner and we know how it works.” This act will create a new interzone, which will be a new space of possibility for our lives. We cannot rely on our everyday experiences to guide us through these zones or the construction of interzones, because they will certainly only reflect our normal, accepted behaviors within the established pragmatic regimes and as such, lead to an ongoing ignorance of the operation of these interzones and infrastructures. Our challenge is to transgress and thus deterritorialise these semiological zones, and perhaps through this transgression transform the interzones into zones better reflecting our aesthetics, our desires, and our satisfactions. References Baudrillard, Jean. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. St. Louis, Missouri: Telos Press, 1981. Beck, Ulrich. Democracy without Enemies. Malden, Mass.: Polity, 1998. Beck, Ulrich, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash. Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1995. Edwards, Paul. N. “Infrastructure and Modernity: Force, Time, and Social Organization in the History of Sociotechnical Systems.” Modernity and Technology. Eds. Thomas J. Misa, Philip Brey, and Andrew Feenberg. Cambridge: MIT P, 2004. Gieryn, Thomas F. “Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists.” American Sociological Review 48.6 (1983): 781–95. Guattari, Felix. “The Three Ecologies.” New Formations 8 (Summer 1989): 131–47. ———. The Three Ecologies. Translated by Gary Genosko. London: Athlone Press, 2000. Hunsinger, Jeremy. “Toward a Transdisciplinary Internet Research.” The Information Society 21.4 (2005): 277–79. Illich, Ivan, et al. Disabling Professions. London: Marion Boyars Publishers, 1977. Star, Susan Leigh. “The Ethnography of Infrastructure.” American Behavioral Scientist 43.3 (1999): 377-91. Star, Susan Leigh, and James R. Griesemer. “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39.” Social Studies of Science 19.3 (1989): 387–420. Star, Susan Leigh, and Karen Ruhleder. “Steps towards an Ecology of Infrastructure: Complex Problems in Design and Access for Large-Scale Collaborative Systems.” Proceedings of the 1994 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Work. North Carolina, 1994. 253–64. Thévenot, Laurent. “Rules and Implements: Investment in Forms.” Social Science Information 23.1 (1984): 1–45. ———. “Pragmatic Regimes Governing the Engagement with the World.” The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. Eds. Theodore R. Schatzki, Karin Knorr Cetina, and Eike von Savigny. New York: Routledge, 2001. 56–73.

Abstract: Nowadays, Vietnamese women are participating actively in parts of the economy that were previously deemed male domain. Women are involved in business activities at all levels in Vietnam, making significant contributions to the economic development of the country. By December 2011, there were 81,226 small and medium enterprises headed by women, accounting for 25% of the total number of enterprises in the country (GSO, 2013). In Vietnam, despite recent economic development, socio-cultural and legal barriers are still very difficult for women since the general perception in society is that a woman’s main duty is to be a good housewife and mother and they are also often perceived as weak, passive and irrational (VWEC, 2007). Even though the studies related to women entrepreneurship development are quite extensive, amongst them only a limited number of researches on the role of legal and socio - cultural barriers on women entrepreneurs in the context of Vietnam have been investigated. Thus, supported by the World Trade Institute (WTI) in Bern, Switzerland, the researchers have chosen this as the subject of this study. Based on a quantitative survey of 110 companies in Hanoi and adjacent areas, the research has taken legal and socio - cultural barriers and explored their effect on the development of women entrepreneurship in the context of Vietnam in order to indicate how women entrepreneurs perceive the impact of socio-cultural factors, economic impacts, and policy reforms on their entrepreneurial situations and initiatives, and to then provide policy implications for promoting women’s entrepreneurship and gender equality in Vietnam.
 Keywords
 Entrepreneurship, female entrepreneurs, gender equality, Vietnam
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 lity in Vietnam.

Previous studies contend that Philippines is still a ‘collectivist’ society (Cf. Hofstede Center; Cukur et al. 2004:613-634). In this collectivist or community-oriented society, individualism is not something that is highly valued. Being ‘individualistic’ is often associated to being narcissistic, loner, asocial, selfish, etc. However, one may ask whether the youth in the Philippines are not spared from this insidious culture of individualism, notwithstanding the seemingly dominant collective and communitarian character of the society. Although the overwhelming poverty is still the main problem in the Philippines, where according to Wostyn (2010:26) “only the wonderland of movies gives some respite to their consciousness of suffering and oppression”, the Filipino youth of today are also exposed to the consumeristic values of the ‘city’ and are not spared from the contradictions and insecurities posed by the pluralistic society. They are citizens of an increasing social and cultural pluralism characteristic of many liberal societies. Is it possible that individualism may also exist within this culture, especially among the younger generation? Is individualism slowly creeping in as caused by their exposure and easy access to modern technology, to higher education, mobility, interactions with other cultures, etc. Would this individualistic tendency have any influence on their religious beliefs, especially their belief on salvation? What would be the implications and challenges of these findings to the families in the Philippines? These are the questions we wish to answer in this study.
 This paper is structured in four parts: first, we will discuss the theoretical framework of individualism and salvation; second, we will examine the empirical attitudes on individualism and salvation; third, we will explore the relationship between individualism and salvation; and finally, we will draw some pastoral implication especially in relation to the document “Lineamenta - The Vocation and Mission of the Family in the church and Contemporary Word” (henceforth, Lineamenta).
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 The word “anarchy” comes from the ancient Greek word “anarchos” and means “without a ruler.” While rulers, quite expectedly, claim that the end of rule will inevitably lead to a descent into chaos and turmoil, anarchists maintain that rule is unnecessary for the preservation of order. Rather than a descent into Hobbes’s war of all against all, a society without government suggests to anarchists the very possibility for creative and peaceful human relations. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon neatly summed up the anarchist position in his famous slogan: “Anarchy is Order.” Historically, anarchists have sought to create a society without government or State, free from coercive, hierarchical and authoritarian relations, in which people associate voluntarily. Anarchists emphasize freedom from imposed authorities. They envision a society based upon autonomy, self-organization and voluntary federation which they oppose to “the State as a particular body intended to maintain a compulsory scheme of legal order” (Marshall 12). Contemporary anarchists focus much of their efforts on transforming everyday life through the development of alternative social arrangements and organizations. Thus, they are not content to wait either for elite-initiated reforms or for future “post-revolutionary” utopias. If social and individual freedoms are to be expanded the time to start is today. In order to bring their ideas to life, anarchists create working examples. To borrow the old Wobbly phrase, they are “forming the structure of the new world in the shell of the old.” These experiments in living, popularly referred to as “DIY” (Do-It-Yourself), are the means by which contemporary anarchists withdraw their consent and begin “contracting” other relationships. DIY releases counter-forces, based upon notions of autonomy and self-organization as motivating principles, against the normative political and cultural discourses of neo-liberalism. Anarchists create autonomous spaces which are not about access but about refusal of the terms of entry (e.g. nationalism, etc). The “Do-it-Yourself” ethos has a long and rich association with anarchism. One sees it as far back as Proudhon’s notions of People’s Banks and local currencies which have returned in the form of LETS (Local Exchange and Trade Systems). In North America, 19th Century anarchist communes, such as those of Benjamin Tucker, find echoes in the Autonomous Zones and squat communities of the present day. In the recent past, Situationists, Kabouters, and the British punk movements have encouraged DIY activities as means to overcome alienating consumption practices and the authority and control of work. Punks turned to DIY to record and distribute music outside of the record industry. At the forefront of contemporary DIY are the “Autonomous Zones” or more simply “A-Zones.” “Autonomous Zones” are community centres based upon anarchist principles, often providing meals, clothing and shelter for those in need. These sites, sometimes but not always squats, provide gathering places for exploring and learning about anti-authoritarian histories and traditions. Self-education is an important aspect of anarchist politics. A-Zones are important as sites of re-skilling. DIY and participatory democracy are important precisely because they encourage the processes of learning and independence necessary for self-determined communities. A-Zones are often sites for quite diverse and complex forms of activity. The “Trumbellplex” in Detroit is an interesting example. Housed, ironically, in the abandoned home of an early-Century industrialist, the Trumbell Theatre serves as a co-operative living space, temporary shelter, food kitchen and lending library. The carriage house has been converted into a theatre site for touring anarchist and punk bands and performance troops like the “Bindlestiff Circus.” Because of their concern with transcending cultural barriers, residents of A-Zones try to build linkages with residents of the neighbourhoods in which they were staying. The intention is to create autonomous free zones that may be extended as resources and conditions permit. These various practices are all part of complex networks that are trans-national, trans-boundary and trans-movement. They encourage us to think about writing against the movement as movement. Movement processes involve complex networks outside of and alongside of the State (trans-national and trans-boundary). These are the building blocks of what Howard Ehrlich refers to as the anarchist transfer culture, an approximation of the new society within the context of the old. Within it anarchists try to meet the basic demands of building sustainable communities. A transfer culture is that agglomeration of ideas and practices that guide people in making the trip from the society here to the society there in the future….As part of the accepted wisdom of that transfer culture we understand that we may never achieve anything that goes beyond the culture itself. It may be, in fact, that it is the very nature of anarchy that we shall always be building the new society within whatever society we find ourselves (Ehrlich 329). In this sense, anarchist autonomous zones are liminal sites, spaces of transformation and passage. As such they are important sites of re-skilling, in which anarchists prepare themselves for the new forms of relationship necessary to break authoritarian and hierarchical structures. Participants also learn the diverse tasks and varied interpersonal skills necessary for collective work and living. This skill sharing serves to discourage the emergence of knowledge elites and to allow for the sharing of all tasks, even the least desirable, necessary for social maintenance. For Paul Goodman, an American anarchist whose writings influenced the 1960s New Left and counterculture, anarchist futures-present serve as necessary acts of “drawing the line” against the authoritarian and oppressive forces in society. Anarchism, in Goodman’s view, was never oriented only towards some glorious future; it involved also the preservation of past freedoms and previous libertarian traditions of social interaction. “A free society cannot be the substitution of a ‘new order’ for the old order; it is the extension of spheres of free action until they make up most of the social life” (Goodman quoted in Marshall 598). Utopian thinking will always be important, Goodman argued, in order to open the imagination to new social possibilities, but the contemporary anarchist would also need to be a conservator of society’s benevolent tendencies. As many recent anarchist writings suggest, the potential for resistance might be found anywhere in everday life. If power is exercised everywhere, it might give rise to resistance everywhere. Present-day anarchists like to suggest that a glance across the landscape of contemporary society reveals many groupings that are anarchist in practice if not in ideology. Examples include the leaderless small groups developed by radical feminists, coops, clinics, learning networks, media collectives, direct action organizations; the spontaneous groupings that occur in response to disasters, strikes, revolutions and emergencies; community-controlled day-care centers; neighborhood groups; tenant and workplace organizing; and so on (Ehrlich, Ehrlich, DeLeon and Morris 18). While these are obviously not strictly anarchist groups, they often operate to provide examples of mutual aid and non-hierarchical and non-authoritarian modes of living that carry the memory of anarchy within them. It is within these everyday examples that anarchists glimpse the possibilities for a libertarian social order. If, as Colin Ward suggests, anarchy is a seed beneath the snow of authoritarian society, daily expressions of mutual aid are the first blooms from which a new order will grow. In viewing the projects that emerge from contemporary anarchist movements, I would suggest that, in the words of Castells, Yazawa and Kiselyova, such projects offer “alternative visions and projects of social transformation that reject the patterns of domination, exploitation and exclusion embedded in the current forms of globalization” (22). Following Leslie Sklair I suggest that autonomist/anarchy movements exemplify a “disruption” model of social movements and resistances to capitalism (as opposed to an “organizational model” or an “integrationist model”). Through their uncompromising rhetoric and immodest strategies they resist attempts to divert their disruptive force into normal politics. Activists attempt to reject the entire context within which they can be either marginalized or assimilated; they occupy their own ground. This “autonomy” must be constantly constructed, reconstructed and defended in the face of powerful foes as events of the last four years have shown. Autonomy movements in abandoned or impoverished inner-city areas are movements involving individuals, social groups or territories excluded or made precarious by the “new world order”. This distinguishes them somewhat from institutional global social movements that seek increased participation by members who are not yet rendered irrelevant (and who thus have something with which to bargain). In any event, how does one ask a global (or national) body to grant the “subversion of the dominant paradigm” or the “liberation of desire?” References Ehrlich, Howard J. “Introduction to Reinventing Anarchist Tactics.” Reinventing Anarchy, Again. Ed. H. J. Ehrlich. Edinburgh: AK Press, 1996: 329-330. ———. “How to Get from Here to There: Building Revolutionary Transfer Culture.” Reinventing Anarchy, Again. Ed. Howard J. Ehrlich. Edinburgh: AK Press, 1996: 331-349. Ehrlich, Howard J., Carol Ehrlich, David DeLeon, and Glenda Morris. “Questions and Answers about Anarchism.” Reinventing Anarchy, Again. Ed. Howard J. Ehrlich. Edinburgh: AK Press, 1996: 4-18. Horowitz, Irving L (Ed.). The Anarchists. New York: Dell, 1964. Joll, James. The Anarchists. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964. Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. London: Verso, 1985. Lange, Jonathan, I. “Refusal to Compromise: The Case of Earth First!” Western Journal of Speech Communication 54 (1990): 473-94. Marshall, Peter. Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism. London: Fontana Press, 1993. Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph. Selected Writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Garden City: Anchor Books, 1969. Sklair, Leslie. 1995. “Social Movements and Global Capitalism.” Sociology 29.3 (1995): 495-512. Ward, Colin. Anarchy in Action. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1973. Woodcock, George. Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements. New York: World Publishing, 1962. 
 
 
 
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Diaspora This article looks at diaspora through the transformations of an established public service broadcaster, the BBC World Service, by considering some of the findings of the AHRC-funded Tuning In: Contact Zones at the BBC World Service, which is part of the Diasporas, Migration and Identities program. Tuning In has six themes, each of which focuses upon the role of the BBC WS: The Politics of Translation, Diasporic Nationhood, Religious Transnationalism, Sport across Diasporas, Migrating Music and Drama for Development. The World Service, which was until 2011 funded by the Foreign Office, was set up to cater for the British diaspora and had the specific remit of transmitting ideas about Britishness to its audiences overseas. Tuning In demonstrates interrelationships between the global and the local in the diasporic contact zone of the BBC World Service, which has provided a mediated home for the worldwide British diaspora since its inception in 1932. The local and the global have merged, elided, and separated at different times and in different spaces in the changing story of the BBC (Briggs). The BBC WS is both local and global with activities that present Britishness both at home and abroad. The service has, however, come a long way since its early days as the Empire Service. Audiences for the World Service’s 31 foreign language services, radio, television, and Internet facilities include substantive non-British/English-speaking constituencies, rendering it a contact zone for the exploration of ideas and political opportunities on a truly transnational scale. This heterogeneous body of exilic, refugee intellectuals, writers, and artists now operates alongside an ongoing expression of Britishness in all its diverse reconfiguration. This includes the residual voice of empire and its patriarchal paternalism, the embrace of more recent expressions of neoliberalism as well as traditional values of impartiality and objectivism and, in the case of the arts, elements of bohemianism and creative innovation. The World Service might have begun as a communication system for the British ex-pat diaspora, but its role has changed along with the changing relationship between Britain and its colonial past. In the terrain of sport, for example, cricket, the “game of empire,” has shifted from Britain to the Indian subcontinent (Guha) with the rise of “Twenty 20” and the Indian Premier League (IPL); summed up in Ashis Nandy’s claim that “cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English” (Nandy viii). English county cricket dominated the airways of the World Service well into the latter half of the twentieth century, but the audiences of the service have demanded a response to social and cultural change and the service has responded. Sport can thus be seen to have offered a democratic space in which new diasporic relations can be forged as well as one in which colonial and patriarchal values are maintained. The BBC WS today is part of a network through which non-British diasporic peoples can reconnect with their home countries via the service, as well as an online forum for debate across the globe. In many regions of the world, it continues to be the single most trusted source of information at times of crisis and disaster because of its traditions of impartiality and objectivity, even though (as noted in the article on Al-Jazeera in this special issue) this view is hotly contested. The principles of objectivity and impartiality are central to the BBC WS, which may seem paradoxical since it is funded by the Commonwealth and Foreign office, and its origins lie in empire and colonial discourse. Archive material researched by our project demonstrates the specifically ideological role of what was first called the Empire Service. The language of empire was deployed in this early programming, and there is an explicit expression of an ideological purpose (Hill). For example, at the Imperial Conference in 1930, the service was supported in terms of its political powers of “strengthening ties” between parts of the empire. This view comes from a speech by John Reith, the BBC’s first Director General, which was broadcast when the service opened. In this speech, broadcasting is identified as having come to involve a “connecting and co-ordinating link between the scattered parts of the British Empire” (Reith). Local British values are transmitted across the globe. Through the service, empire and nation are reinstated through the routine broadcasting of cyclical events, the importance of which Scannell and Cardiff describe as follows: Nothing so well illustrates the noiseless manner in which the BBC became perhaps the central agent of national culture as its cyclical role; the cyclical production year in year out, of an orderly, regular progression of festivities, rituals and celebrations—major and minor, civic and sacred—that mark the unfolding of the broadcast year. (278; italics in the original) State occasions and big moments, including those directly concerned with governance and affairs of state, and those which focused upon sport and religion, were a big part in these “noiseless” cycles, and became key elements in the making of Britishness across the globe. The BBC is “noiseless” because the timetable is assumed and taken for granted as not only what is but what should be. However, the BBC WS has been and has had to be responsive to major shifts in global and local—and, indeed, glocal—power geometries that have led to spatial transformations, notably in the reconfiguration of the service in the era of postcolonialism. Some of these massive changes have involved the large-scale movement of people and a concomitant rethinking of diaspora as a concept. Empire, like nation, operates as an “imagined community,” too big to be grasped by individuals (Anderson), as well as a material actuality. The dynamics of identification are rarely linear and there are inconsistencies and disruptions: even when the voice is officially that of empire, the practice of the World Service is much more diverse, nuanced, and dialogical. The BBC WS challenges boundaries through the connectivities of communication and through different ways of belonging and, similarly, through a problematisation of concepts like attachment and detachment; this is most notable in the way in which programming has adapted to new diasporic audiences and in the reworkings of spatiality in the shift from empire to diversity via multiculturalism. There are tensions between diaspora and multiculturalism that are apparent in a discussion of broadcasting and communication networks. Diaspora has been distinguished by mobility and hybridity (Clifford, Hall, Bhaba, Gilroy) and it has been argued that the adjectival use of diasporic offers more opportunity for fluidity and transformation (Clifford). The concept of diaspora, as it has been used to explain the fluidity and mobility of diasporic identifications, can challenge more stabilised, “classic” understandings of diaspora (Chivallon). A hybrid version of diaspora might sit uneasily with a strong sense of belonging and with the idea that the broadcast media offer a multicultural space in which each voice can be heard and a wide range of cultures are present. Tuning In engaged with ways of rethinking the BBC’s relationship to diaspora in the twenty-first century in a number of ways: for example, in the intersection of discursive regimes of representation; in the status of public service broadcasting; vis-à-vis the consequences of diverse diasporic audiences; through the role of cultural intermediaries such as journalists and writers; and via global economic and political materialities (Gillespie, Webb and Baumann). Tuning In thus provided a multi-themed and methodologically diverse exploration of how the BBC WS is itself a series of spaces which are constitutive of the transformation of diasporic identifications. Exploring the part played by the BBC WS in changing and continuing social flows and networks involves, first, reconfiguring what is understood by transnationalism, diaspora, and postcolonial relationalities: in particular, attending to how these transform as well as sometimes reinstate colonial and patriarchal discourses and practices, thus bringing together different dimensions of the local and the global. Tuning In ranges across different fields, embracing cultural, social, and political areas of experience as represented in broadcasting coverage. These fields illustrate the educative role of the BBC and the World Service that is also linked to its particular version of impartiality; just as The Archers was set up to provide information and guidance through a narrative of everyday life to rural communities and farmers after the Second World War, so the Afghan version plays an “edutainment” role (Skuse) where entertainment also serves an educational, public service information role. Indeed, the use of soap opera genre such as The Archers as a vehicle for humanitarian and health information has been very successful over the past decade, with the “edutainment” genre becoming a feature of the World Service’s broadcasting in places such as Rwanda, Somalia, Nigeria, India, Nepal, Burma, Afghanistan, and Cambodia. In a genre that has been promoted by the World Service Trust, the charitable arm of the BBC WS uses drama formats to build transnational production relationships with media professionals and to strengthen creative capacities to undertake behaviour change through communication work. Such programming, which is in the tradition of the BBC WS, draws upon the service’s expertise and exhibits both an ideological commitment to progressive social intervention and a paternalist approach drawing upon colonialist legacies. Nowadays, however, the BBC WS can be considered a diasporic contact zone, providing sites of transnational intra-diasporic contact as well as cross-cultural encounters, spaces for cross-diasporic creativity and representation, and a forum for cross-cultural dialogue and potentially cosmopolitan translations (Pratt, Clifford). These activities are, however, still marked by historically forged asymmetric power relations, notably of colonialism, imperialism, and globalisation, as well as still being dominated by hegemonic masculinity in many parts of the service, which thus represent sites of contestation, conflict, and transgression. Conversely, diasporic identities are themselves co-shaped by media representations (Sreberny). The diasporic contact zone is a relational space in which diasporic identities are made and remade and contested. Tuning In employed a diverse range of methods to analyse the part played by the BBC WS in changing and continuing social and cultural flows, networks, and reconfigurations of transnationalisms and diaspora, as well as reinstating colonial, patriarchal practices. The research deconstructed some assumptions and conditions of class-based elitism, colonialism, and patriarchy through a range of strategies. Texts are, of course, central to this work, with the BBC Archives at Caversham (near Reading) representing the starting point for many researchers. The archive is a rich source of material for researchers which carries a vast range of data including fragile memos written on scraps of paper: a very local source of global communications. Other textual material occupies the less locatable cyberspace, for example in the case of Have Your Say exchanges on the Web. People also featured in the project, through the media, in cyberspace, and physical encounters, all of which demonstrate the diverse modes of connection that have been established. Researchers worked with the BBC WS in a variety of ways, not only through interviews and ethnographic approaches, such as participant observation and witness seminars, but also through exchanges between the service, its practitioners, and the researchers (for example, through broadcasts where the project provided the content and the ideas and researchers have been part of programs that have gone out on the BBC WS (Goldblatt, Webb), bringing together people who work for the BBC and Tuning In researchers). On this point, it should be remembered that Bush House is, itself, a diasporic space which, from its geographical location in the Strand in London, has brought together diasporic people from around the globe to establish international communication networks, and has thus become the focus and locus of some of our research. What we have understood by the term “diasporic space” in this context includes both the materialities of architecture and cyberspace which is the site of digital diasporas (Anderssen) and, indeed, the virtual exchanges featured on “Have Your Say,” the online feedback site (Tuning In). Living the Glocal The BBC WS offers a mode of communication and a series of networks that are spatially located both in the UK, through the material presence of Bush House, and abroad, through the diasporic communities constituting contemporary audiences. The service may have been set up to provide news and entertainment for the British diaspora abroad, but the transformation of the UK into a multi-ethnic society “at home,” alongside its commitment to, and the servicing of, no less than 32 countries abroad, demonstrates a new mission and a new balance of power. Different diasporic communities, such as multi-ethnic Londoners, and local and British Muslims in the north of England, demonstrate the dynamics and ambivalences of what is meant by “diaspora” today. For example, the BBC and the WS play an ambiguous role in the lives of UK Muslim communities with Pakistani connections, where consumers of the international news can feel that the BBC is complicit in the conflation of Muslims with terrorists. Engaging Diaspora Audiences demonstrated the diversity of audience reception in a climate of marginalisation, often bordering on moral panic, and showed how diasporic audiences often use Al-Jazeera or Pakistani and Urdu channels, which are seen to take up more sympathetic political positions. It seems, however, that more egalitarian conversations are becoming possible through the channels of the WS. The participation of local people in the BBC WS global project is seen, for example, as in the popular “Witness Seminars” that have both a current focus and one that is projected into the future, as in the case of the “2012 Generation” (that is, the young people who come of age in 2012, the year of the London Olympics). The Witness Seminars demonstrate the recuperation of past political and social events such as “Bangladesh in 1971” (Tuning In), “The Cold War seminar” (Tuning In) and “Diasporic Nationhood” (the cultural movements reiterated and recovered in the “Literary Lives” project (Gillespie, Baumann and Zinik). Indeed, the WS’s current focus on the “2012 Generation,” including an event in which 27 young people (each of whom speaks one of the WS languages) were invited to an open day at Bush House in 2009, vividly illustrates how things have changed. Whereas in 1948 (the last occasion when the Olympic Games were held in London), the world came to London, it is arguable that, in 2012, in contemporary multi-ethnic Britain, the world is already here (Webb). This enterprise has the advantage of giving voice to the present rather than filtering the present through the legacies of colonialism that remain a problem for the Witness Seminars more generally. The democratising possibilities of sport, as well as the restrictions of its globalising elements, are well represented by Tuning In (Woodward). Sport has, of course become more globalised, especially through the development of Internet and satellite technologies (Giulianotti) but it retains powerful local affiliations and identifications. At all levels and in diverse places, there are strong attachments to local and national teams that are constitutive of communities, including diasporic and multi-ethnic communities. Sport is both typical and distinctive of the BBC World Service; something that is part of a wider picture but also an area of experience with a life of its own. Our “Sport across Diasporas” project has thus explored some of the routes the World Service has travelled in its engagement with sport in order to provide some understanding of the legacy of empire and patriarchy, as well as engaging with the multiplicities of change in the reconstruction of Britishness. Here, it is important to recognise that what began as “BBC Sport” evolved into “World Service Sport.” Coverage of the world’s biggest sporting events was established through the 1930s to the 1960s in the development of the BBC WS. However, it is not only the global dimensions of sporting events that have been assumed; so too are national identifications. There is no question that the superiority of British/English sport is naturalised through its dominance of the BBC WS airways, but the possibilities of reinterpretation and re-accommodation have also been made possible. There has, indeed, been a changing place of sport in the BBC WS, which can only be understood with reference to wider changes in the relationship between broadcasting and sport, and demonstrates the powerful synchronies between social, political, technological, economic, and cultural factors, notably those that make up the media–sport–commerce nexus that drives so much of the trajectory of contemporary sport. Diasporic audiences shape the schedule as much as what is broadcast. There is no single voice of the BBC in sport. The BBC archive demonstrates a variety of narratives through the development and transformation of the World Service’s sports broadcasting. There are, however, silences: notably those involving women. Sport is still a patriarchal field. However, the imperial genealogies of sport are inextricably entwined with the social, political, and cultural changes taking place in the wider world. There is no detectable linear narrative but rather a series of tensions and contradictions that are reflected and reconfigured in the texts in which deliberations are made. In sport broadcasting, the relationship of the BBC WS with its listeners is, in many instances, genuinely dialogic: for example, through “Have Your Say” websites and internet forums, and some of the actors in these dialogic exchanges are the broadcasters themselves. The history of the BBC and the World Service is one which manifests a degree of autonomy and some spontaneity on the part of journalists and broadcasters. For example, in the case of the BBC WS African sports program, Fast Track (2009), many of the broadcasters interviewed report being able to cover material not technically within their brief; news journalists are able to engage with sporting events and sports journalists have covered social and political news (Woodward). Sometimes this is a matter of taking the initiative or simply of being in the right place at the right time, although this affords an agency to journalists which is increasingly unlikely in the twenty-first century. The Politics of Translation: Words and Music The World Service has played a key role as a cultural broker in the political arena through what could be construed as “educational broadcasting” via the wider terrain of the arts: for example, literature, drama, poetry, and music. Over the years, Bush House has been a home-from-home for poets: internationalists, translators from classical and modern languages, and bohemians; a constituency that, for all its cosmopolitanism, was predominantly white and male in the early days. For example, in the 1930s and 1940s, Louis MacNeice was commissioning editor and surrounded by a friendship network of salaried poets, such as W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, C. Day Lewis, and Stephen Spender, who wrote and performed their work for the WS. The foreign language departments of the BBC WS, meanwhile, hired émigrés and exiles from their countries’ educated elites to do similar work. The biannual, book-format journal Modern Poetry in Translation (MPT), which was founded in 1965 by Daniel Weissbort and Ted Hughes, included a dedication in Weissbort’s final issue (MPT 22, 2003) to “Poets at Bush House.” This volume amounts to a celebration of the BBC WS and its creative culture, which extended beyond the confines of broadcasting spaces. The reminiscences in “Poets at Bush House” suggest an institutional culture of informal connections and a fluidity of local exchanges that is resonant of the fluidity of the flows and networks of diaspora (Cheesman). Music, too, has distinctive characteristics that mark out this terrain on the broadcast schedule and in the culture of the BBC WS. Music is differentiated from language-centred genres, making it a particularly powerful medium of cross-cultural exchange. Music is portable and yet is marked by a cultural rootedness that may impede translation and interpretation. Music also carries ambiguities as a marker of status across borders, and it combines aesthetic intensity and diffuseness. The Migrating Music project demonstrated BBC WS mediation of music and identity flows (Toynbee). In the production and scheduling notes, issues of migration and diaspora are often addressed directly in the programming of music, while the movement of peoples is a leitmotif in all programs in which music is played and discussed. Music genres are mobile, diasporic, and can be constitutive of Paul Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic” (Gilroy), which foregrounds the itinerary of West African music to the Caribbean via the Middle Passage, cross-fertilising with European traditions in the Americas to produce blues and other hybrid forms, and the journey of these forms to Europe. The Migrating Music project focused upon the role of the BBC WS as narrator of the Black Atlantic story and of South Asian cross-over music, from bhangra to filmi, which can be situated among the South Asian diaspora in east and south Africa as well as the Caribbean where they now interact with reggae, calypso, Rapso, and Popso. The transversal flows of music and lyrics encompasses the lived experience of the different diasporas that are accommodated in the BBC WS schedules: for example, they keep alive the connection between the Irish “at home” and in the diaspora through programs featuring traditional music, further demonstrating the interconnections between local and global attachments as well as points of disconnection and contradiction. Textual analysis—including discourse analysis of presenters’ speech, program trailers and dialogue and the BBC’s own construction of “world music”—has revealed that the BBC WS itself performs a constitutive role in keeping alive these traditions. Music, too, has a range of emotional affects which are manifest in the semiotic analyses that have been conducted of recordings and performances. Further, the creative personnel who are involved in music programming, including musicians, play their own role in this ongoing process of musical migration. Once again, the networks of people involved as practitioners become central to the processes and systems through which diasporic audiences are re-produced and engaged. Conclusion The BBC WS can claim to be a global and local cultural intermediary not only because the service was set up to engage with the British diaspora in an international context but because the service, today, is demonstrably a voice that is continually negotiating multi-ethnic audiences both in the UK and across the world. At best, the World Service is a dynamic facilitator of conversations within and across diasporas: ideas are relocated, translated, and travel in different directions. The “local” of a British broadcasting service, established to promote British values across the globe, has been transformed, both through its engagements with an increasingly diverse set of diasporic audiences and through the transformations in how diasporas themselves self-define and operate. On the BBC WS, demographic, social, and cultural changes mean that the global is now to be found in the local of the UK and any simplistic separation of local and global is no longer tenable. The educative role once adopted by the BBC, and then the World Service, nevertheless still persists in other contexts (“from Ambridge to Afghanistan”), and clearly the WS still treads a dangerous path between the paternalism and patriarchy of its colonial past and its responsiveness to change. In spite of competition from television, satellite, and Internet technologies which challenge the BBC’s former hegemony, the BBC World Service continues to be a dynamic space for (re)creating and (re)instating diasporic audiences: audiences, texts, and broadcasters intersect with social, economic, political, and cultural forces. The monologic “voice of empire” has been countered and translated into the language of diversity and while, at times, the relationship between continuity and change may be seen to exist in awkward tension, it is clear that the Corporation is adapting to the needs of its twenty-first century audience. ReferencesAnderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities, Reflections of the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Anderssen, Matilda. “Digital Diasporas.” 2010. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www8.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/diasporas/cross-research/digital-diasporas›. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Briggs, Asa. A History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Volume II: The Golden Age of Wireless. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. Cheesman, Tom. “Poetries On and Off Air.” 2010. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www8.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/diasporas/cross-research/bush-house-cultures›. Chivallon, Christine. “Beyond Gilroy’s Black Atlantic: The Experience of the African Diaspora.” Diaspora 11.3 (2002): 359–82. Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Fast Track. BBC, 2009. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/sport/2009/03/000000_fast_track.shtml›. Gillespie, Marie, Alban Webb, and Gerd Baumann (eds.). “The BBC World Service 1932–2007: Broadcasting Britishness Abroad.” Special Issue. The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 28.4 (Oct. 2008). Gillespie, Marie, Gerd Baumann, and Zinovy Zinik. “Poets at Bush House.” 2010. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www8.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/diasporas/about›. Gilroy, Paul. Black Atlantic. MA: Harvard UP, 1993. Giulianotti, Richard. Sport: A Critical Sociology. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. Goldblatt, David. “The Cricket Revolution.” 2009. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0036ww9›. Guha, Ramachandra. A Corner of a Foreign Field: The Indian History of an English Game. London: Picador, 2002. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. Ed. Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990, 223–37. Hill, Andrew. “The BBC Empire Service: The Voice, the Discourse of the Master and Ventriloquism.” South Asian Diaspora 2.1 (2010): 25–38. Hollis, Robert, Norma Rinsler, and Daniel Weissbort. “Poets at Bush House: The BBC World Service.” Modern Poetry in Translation 22 (2003). Nandy, Ashis. The Tao of Cricket: On Games of Destiny and the Destiny of Games. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1989. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992. Reith, John. “Opening of the Empire Service.” In “Empire Service Policy 1932-1933”, E4/6: 19 Dec. 1932. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/diasporas/research.htm›. Scannell, Paddy, and David Cardiff. A Social History of British Broadcasting, 1922-1938. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991. Skuse, Andrew. “Drama for Development.” 2010. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www8.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/diasporas/core-research/drama-for-development›. Sreberny, Annabelle. “The BBC World Service and the Greater Middle East: Comparisons, Contrasts, Conflicts.” Guest ed. Annabelle Sreberny, Marie Gillespie, Gerd Baumann. Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 3.2 (2010). Toynbee, Jason. “Migrating Music.” 2010. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www8.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/diasporas/core-research/migrating-music›. Tuning In. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/diasporas/index.htm›. Webb, Alban. “Cold War Diplomacy.” 2010. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www8.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/diasporas/projects/cold-war-politics-and-bbc-world-service›. Woodward, Kath. Embodied Sporting Practices. Regulating and Regulatory Bodies. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.


 
 
 According to Oscar Wilde, the problem with socialism was that it took up too many evenings. Wilde’s aphorism alludes to a major issue that bedevils all attempts to influence the public sphere: the fact that public activities encroach unduly on citizens’ valuable time. In the 21st century, the dilemma of how to deal with “too many evenings” is one that many citizen journalists face as they give their own time to public pursuits. This paper will look at the development of the public citizen and what it means to be a citizen journalist with reference to some of the writer’s own experiences in the field. The paper will conclude with an examination of future possibilities. While large media companies change their change their focus from traditional news values, citizen journalism can play a stronger role in public life as long as it grasps some of the opportunities that are available. There are substantial compensations available to citizen journalists for the problems presented by Wilde’s evenings. The quote from Wilde is borrowed from Albert Hirschman’s Shifting Involvements, which among other things, is an examination of the disappointments of public action. Hirschman noted how it was a common experience for beginners who engage in public action to find that takes up more time than expected (96). As public activity encroaches not only on time devoted to private consumption but also on to the time devoted to the production of income, it can become a costly pursuit which may cause a sharp reaction against the “practice of citizenship” (Hirschman 97). Yet the more stimuli about politics people receive, the greater the likelihood is they will participate in politics and the greater the depth of their participation (Milbrath & Goel 35). People with a positive attraction to politics are more likely to receive stimuli about politics and participate more (Milbrath & Goel 36). Active citizenship, it seems, has its own feedback loops. An active citizenry is not a new idea. The concepts of citizen and citizenship emerged from the sophisticated polity established in the Greek city states about 2,500 years ago. The status of a citizen signified that the individual had the right to full membership of, and participation in, an independent political society (Batrouney & Goldlust 24). In later eras that society could be defined as a kingdom, an empire, or a nation state. The conditions for a bourgeois public sphere were created in the 13th century as capitalists in European city states created a traffic in commodities and news (Habermas 15). A true public sphere emerged in the 17th century with the rise of the English coffee houses and French salons where people had the freedom to express opinions regardless of their social status (Habermas 36). In 1848, France held the first election under universal direct suffrage (for males) and the contemporary slogan was that “universal suffrage closes the era of revolutions” (Hirschman 113). Out of this heady optimism, the late 19th century ushered in the era of the “informed citizen” as voting changed from a social and public duty to a private right – a civic obligation enforceable only by private conscience (Schudson). These concepts live on in the modern idea that the model voter is considered to be a citizen vested with the ability to understand the consequences of his or her choice (Menand 1). The internet is a new knowledge space which offers an alternative reading of the citizen. In Pierre Lévy’s vision of cyberculture, identity is no longer a function of belonging, it is “distributed and nomadic” (Ross & Nightingale 149). The Internet has diffused widely and is increasingly central to everyday life as a place where people go to get information (Dutton 10). Journalism initially prospered on an information scarcity factor however the technology of the Internet has created an information rich society (Tapsall & Varley 18). But research suggests that online discussions do not promote consensus, are short-lived with little impact and end up turning into “dialogues of the deaf” (Nguyen 148). The easy online publishing environment is a fertile ground for rumours, hoaxes and cheating games to circulate which risk turning the public sphere into a chaotic and anarchic space (Nguyen 148). The stereotypical blogger is pejoratively dismissed as “pajama-clad” (Papandrea 516) connoting a sense of disrespect for the proper transmission of ideas. Nevertheless the Internet offers powerful tools for collaboration that is opening up many everyday institutions to greater social accountability (Dutton 3). Recent research by the 2007 Digital Futures project shows 65 percent of respondents consider the Internet “to be a very important or extremely important source of information” (Cowden 76). By 2006, Roy Morgan was reporting that three million Australians were visiting online news site each month (Cowden.76). Crikey.com.au, Australia’s first online-only news outlet, has become a significant independent player in the Australia mediascape claiming over 5,000 subscribers by 2005 with three times as many non-paying “squatters” reading its daily email (Devine 50). Online Opinion has a similar number of subscribers and was receiving 750,000 page views a month by 2005 (National Forum). Both Crikey.com.au and Online Opinion have made moves towards public journalism in an attempt to provide ordinary people access to the public sphere. As professional journalists lose their connection with the public, bloggers are able to fill the public journalism niche (Simons, Content Makers 208). At their best, blogs can offer a “more broad-based, democratic involvement of citizens in the issues that matter to them” (Bruns 7). The research of University of North Carolina journalism professor Philip Meyer showed that cities and towns with public journalism-oriented newspapers led to a better educated local public (Simons, Content Makers 211). Meyer’s idea of good public journalism has six defining elements: a) the need to define a community’s sense of itself b) devotion of time to issues that demand community attention c) devotion of depth to the issues d) more attention to the middle ground e) a preference for substance over tactics and f) encouraging reciprocal understanding (Meyer 1). The objective of public journalism is to foster a greater sense of connection between the community and the media. It can mean journalists using ordinary people as sources and also ordinary people acting as journalists. Jay Rosen proposed a new model based on journalism as conversation (Simons, Content Makers 209). He believes the technology has now overtaken the public journalism movement (Simons, Content Makers 213). His own experiments at pro-am Internet open at assignment.net have had mixed results. His conclusion was that it wasn’t easy for people working voluntarily on the Internet to report on big stories together nor had they “unlocked” the secret of successful pro-am methods (Rosen). Nevertheless, the people formerly known as the audience, as Rosen called them, have seized the agenda. The barriers to entry into journalism have disappeared. Blogging has made Web publishing easy and the social networks are even more user friendly. The problem today is not getting published but finding an audience. And as the audience fragments, the issue will become finding a niche. One such niche is local political activism. The 2007 Australian federal election saw many online sites actively promoting citizen journalism. Most prominent was Youdecide2007 at Queensland University of Technology, funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC) in partnership with SBS, Online Opinion and the Brisbane Institute. Site co-editor Graham Young said the site’s aim was to use citizen journalists to report on their own electorates to fill the gap left by fewer journalists on the ground, especially in less populated areas (Young). While the site’s stated aim was to provide a forum for a seat-by-seat coverage and provide “a new perspective on national politics” (Youdecide2007), the end result was significantly skewed by the fact that the professional editorial team was based in Brisbane. Youdecide2007 published 96 articles in its news archive of which 59 could be identified as having a state-based focus. Figure 1 shows 62.7% of these state-based stories were about Queensland. Figure 1: Youdecide2007 news stories identifiable by state (note: national stories are omitted from this table): State Total no. of stories %age Qld 37 62.7 NSW 8 13.6 Vic 6 10.2 WA 3 5.1 Tas 2 3.4 ACT 2 3.4 SA 1 1.6 Modern election campaigns are characterised by a complex and increasingly fragmented news environment and the new media are rapidly adding another layer of complexity to the mix (Norris et al. 11-12). The slick management of national campaigns are is counter-productive to useful citizen journalism. According to Matthew Clayfield from the citizen journalism site electionTracker.net, “there are very few open events which ordinary people could cover in a way that could be described as citizen journalism” (qtd. in Hills 2007). Similar to other systems, the Australian campaign communication empowers the political leaders and media owners at the expense of ordinary party members and citizens (Warhurst 135). However the slick modern national “on message” campaign has not totally replaced old-style local activity. Although the national campaign has superimposed upon the local one and displaced it from the focus of attention, local candidates must still communicate their party policies in the electorate (Warhurst 113). Citizen journalists are ideally placed to harness this local communication. A grassroots approach is encapsulated in the words of Dan Gillmor who said “every reporter should realise that, collectively, the readers know more than they do about what they write about” (qtd. in Quinn & Quinn-Allan 66). With this in mind, I set out my own stall in citizen journalism for the 2007 Australian federal election with two personal goals: to interview all my local federal Lower House candidates and to attend as many public election meetings as possible. As a result, I wrote 19 election articles in the two months prior to the election. This consisted of 9 news items, 6 candidate interviews and 4 reports of public meetings. All the local candidates except one agreed to be interviewed. The local Liberal candidate refused to be interviewed despite repeated requests. There was no reason offered, just a continual ignoring of requests. Liberal candidates were also noticeably absent from most candidate forums I attended. This pattern of non-communicative behaviour was observed elsewhere (Bartlett, Wilson). I tried to turn this to my advantage by turning their refusal to talk into a story itself. For those that were prepared to talk, I set the expectation that the entire interview would be on the record and would be edited and published on my blog site. As a result, all candidates asked for a list of questions in advance which I supplied. Because politicians devote considerable energy and financial resources to ensure the information they impart to citizens has an appropriate ‘spin’ on it, (Negrine 10) I reserved the right to ask follow-up questions on any of their answers that required clarification. For the interviews themselves, I followed the advice of Spradley’s principle by starting with a conscious attitude of near-total ignorance, not writing the story in advance, and attempting to be descriptive, incisive, investigative and critical (Alia 100). After I posted the results of the interview, I sent a link to each of the respondents offering them a chance to clarify or correct any inaccuracies in the interview statements. Defamation skirts the boundary between free speech and reputation (Pearson 159) and a good working knowledge of the way defamation law affects journalists (citizen or otherwise) is crucial, particularly in dealing with public figures. This was an important consideration for some of the lesser known candidates as Google searches on their names brought my articles up within the top 20 results for each of the Democrat, Green and Liberal Democratic Party candidates I interviewed. None of the public meetings I attended were covered in the mainstream media. These meetings are the type of news Jan Schaffer of University of Maryland’s J-Lab saw as an ecological niche for citizen journalists to “create opportunities for citizens to get informed and inform others about micro-news that falls under the radar of news organisations who don’t have the resources” (Schaffer in Glaser). As Mark Bahnisch points out, Brisbane had three daily newspapers and a daily state based 7.30 Report twenty years ago which contrasts with the situation now where there’s no effective state parliamentary press gallery and little coverage of local politics at all (“State of Political Blogging”). Brisbane’s situation is not unique and the gaps are there to be exploited by new players. While the high cost of market entry renders the “central square” of the public sphere inaccessible to new players (Curran 128) the ease of Web access has given the citizen journalists the chance to roam its back alleys. However even if they fill the voids left by departing news organisations, there will still be a large hole in the mediascape. No one will be doing the hardhitting investigative journalism. This gritty work requires great resources and often years of time. The final product of investigative journalism is often complicated to read, unentertaining and inconclusive (Bower in Negrine 13). Margaret Simons says that journalism is a skill that involves the ability to find things out. She says the challenge of the future will be to marry the strengths of the newsroom and the dirty work of investigative journalism with the power of the conversation of blogs (“Politics and the Internet”). One possibility is raised by the Danish project Scoop. They offer financial support to individual journalists who have good ideas for investigative journalism. Founded by the Danish Association for Investigative Journalism and funded by the Danish Foreign Ministry, Scoop supports media projects across the world with the only proviso being that a journalist has to have an agreement with an editor to publish the resulting story (ABC Media Report). But even without financial support, citizens have the ability to perform rudimentary investigative journalism. The primary tool of investigative journalism is the interview (McIlwane & Bowman 260). While an interview can be arranged by anyone with access to a telephone or e-mail, it should not be underestimated how difficult a skill interviewing is. According to American journalist John Brady, the science of journalistic interviewing aims to gain two things, trust and information (Brady in White 75). In the interviews I did with politicians during the federal election, I found that getting past the “spin” of the party line to get genuine information was the toughest part of the task. There is also a considerable amount of information in the public domain which is rarely explored by reporters (Negrine 23). Knowing how to make use of this information will become a critical success factor for citizen journalists. Corporate journalists use databases such as Lexis/Nexis and Factiva to gain background information, a facility unavailable to most citizen journalists unless they are either have access through a learning institution or are prepared to pay a premium for the information. While large corporate vendors supply highly specialised information, amateurs can play a greater role in the creation and transmission of local news. According to G. Stuart Adam, journalism contains four basic elements: reporting, judging, a public voice and the here and now (13). Citizen journalism is capable of meeting all four criteria. The likelihood is that the future of communications will belong to the centralised corporations on one hand and the unsupervised amateur on the other (Bird 36). Whether the motive to continue is payment or empowerment, the challenge for citizen journalists is to advance beyond the initial success of tactical actions towards the establishment as a serious political and media alternative (Bruns 19). Nguyen et al.’s uses and gratification research project suggests there is a still a long way to go in Australia. While they found widespread diffusion of online news, the vast majority of users (78%) were still getting their news from newspaper Websites (Nguyen et al. 13). The research corroborates Mark Bahnisch’s view that “most Australians have not heard of blogs and only a tiny minority reads them (quoted in Simons, Content Makers 219). The Australian blogosphere still waits for its defining Swiftboat incident or Rathergate to announce its arrival. But Bahnisch doesn’t necessarily believe this is a good evolutionary strategy anyway. Here it is becoming more a conversation than a platform “with its own niche and its own value” (Bahnisch, “This Is Not America”). As far as my own experiments go, the citizen journalism reports I wrote gave me no financial reward but plenty of other compensations that made the experience richly rewarding. It was important to bring otherwise neglected ideas, stories and personalities into the public domain and the reports helped me make valuable connections with public-minded members of my local community. They were also useful practice to hone interview techniques and political writing skills. Finally the exercise raised my own public profile as several of my entries were picked up or hyperlinked by other citizen journalism sites and blogs. Some day, and probably soon, a model will be worked out which will make citizen journalism a worthwhile economic endeavour. In the meantime, we rely on active citizens of the blogosphere to give their evenings freely for the betterment of the public sphere. References ABC Media Report. “Scoop.” 2008. 17 Feb. 2008 http://www.abc.net.au/rn/mediareport/stories/2008/2151204.htm#transcript>. Adam, G. Notes towards a Definition of Journalism: Understanding an Old Craft as an Art Form. St Petersburg, Fl.: Poynter Institute, 1993. Alia, V. “The Rashomon Principle: The Journalist as Ethnographer.” In V. Alia, B. Brennan, and B. Hoffmaster (eds.), Deadlines and Diversity: Journalism Ethics in a Changing World. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 1996. Bahnisch, M. “This Is Not America.” newmatilda.com 2007. 17 Feb. 2008 http://www.newmatilda.com/2007/10/04/not-america>. Bahnisch, M. “The State of Political Blogging.” Larvatus Prodeo 2007. 17 Feb. 2008 http://larvatusprodeo.net/2007/09/30/the-state-of-political-blogging/>. Bartlett, A. “Leaders Debate.” The Bartlett Diaries 2007. 19 Feb. 2008 http://andrewbartlett.com/blog/?p=1767>. Batrouney, T., and J. Goldlust. Unravelling Identity: Immigrants, Identity and Citizenship in Australia. Melbourne: Common Ground, 2005. Bird, R. “News in the Global Village.” The End of the News. Toronto: Irwin Publishing, 2005. Bruns, A. “News Blogs and Citizen Journalism: New Directions for e-Journalism.” In K. Prasad (ed.), E-Journalism: New Directions in Electronic News Media. New Delhi: BR Publishing, 2008. 2 Feb. 2008 http://snurb.info/files/News%20Blogs%20and%20Citizen%20Journalism.pdf>. Cowden, G. “Online News: Patterns, Participation and Personalisation.” Australian Journalism Review 29.1 (July 2007). Curran, J. “Rethinking Media and Democracy.” In J. Curran and M. Gurevitch (eds.), Mass Media and Society. 3rd ed. London: Arnold, 2000. Devine, F. “Curse of the Blog.” Quadrant 49.3 (Mar. 2005). Dutton, W. Through the Network (of Networks) – The Fifth Estate. Oxford Internet Institute, 2007. 6 April 2007 http://people.oii.ox.ac.uk/dutton/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/ 5th-estate-lecture-text.pdf>. Glaser, M. “The New Voices: Hyperlocal Citizen’s Media Sites Want You (to Write!).” Online Journalism Review 2004. 16 Feb. 2008 http://ojr.org/ojr/glaser/1098833871.php>. Habermas, J. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989 [1962]. Hills, R. “Citizen Journos Turning Inwards.” The Age 18 Nov. 2007. 17 Feb. 2008 http://www.theage.com.au/news/federal-election-2007-news/citizen-journos- turning-inwards/2007/11/17/1194767024688.html>. Hirschman, A, Shifting Involvements: Private Interest and Public Action. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1982. Hunter, C. “The Internet and the Public Sphere: Revitalization or Decay?” Virginia Journal of Communication 12 (2000): 93-127. Killenberg, G., and R. Dardenne. “Instruction in News Reporting as Community Focused Journalism.” Journalism & Mass Communication Educator 52.1 (Spring 1997). McIlwane, S., and L. Bowman. “Interviewing Techniques.” In S. Tanner (ed.), Journalism: Investigation and Research. Sydney: Longman, 2002. Menand, L. “The Unpolitical Animal: How Political Science Understands Voters.” The New Yorker 30 Aug. 2004. 17 Feb. 2008 http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/08/30/040830crat_atlarge>. Meyer, P. Public Journalism and the Problem of Objectivity. 1995. 16 Feb. 2008 http://www.unc.edu/%7Epmeyer/ire95pj.htm>. Milbrath, L., and M. Goel. Political Participation: How and Why Do People Get Involved in Politics? Chicago: Rand McNally M, 1975. National Forum. “Annual Report 2005.” 6 April 2008 http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/documents/reports/ annual_report_to_agm_2005.pdf>. Negrine, R. The Communication of Politics. London: Sage, 1996. Nguyen, A. “Journalism in the Wake of Participatory Publishing.” Australian Journalism Review 28.1 (July 2006). Nguyen, A., E. Ferrier, M. Western, and S. McKay. “Online News in Australia: Patterns of Use and Gratification.” Australian Studies in Journalism 15 (2005). Norris, P., J. Curtice, D. Sanders, M. Scammell, and H. Setemko. On Message: Communicating the Campaign. London: Sage, 1999. Papandrea, M. “Citizen Journalism and the Reporter’s Privilege.” Minnesota Law Review 91 (2007). Pearson, M. The Journalist’s Guide to Media Law. 2nd ed. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2004. Quinn, S., and D. Quinn-Allan. “User-Generated Content and the Changing News Cycle.” Australian Journalism Review 28.1 (July 2006). Rosen, J. “Assignment Zero: Can Crowds Create Fiction, Architecture and Photography?” Wired 2007. 6 April 2008 http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2007/07/assignment_zero_all>. Ross, K., and V. Nightingale. Media Audiences: New Perspectives. Maidenhead, Berkshire: Open UP, 2003. Schaffer, J. “Citizens Media: Has It Reached a Tipping Point.” Nieman Reports 59.4 (Winter 2005). Schudson, M. Good Citizens and Bad History: Today’s Political Ideals in Historical Perspective. 1999. 17 Feb. 2008 http://www.mtsu.edu/~seig/paper_m_schudson.html>. Simons, M. The Content Makers. Melbourne: Penguin, 2007. Simons, M. “Politics and the Internet.” Keynote speech at the Brisbane Writers’ Festival, 14 Sep. 2007. Tapsall, S., and C. Varley (eds.). Journalism: Theory in Practice. South Melbourne: Oxford UP, 2001. Warhurst, J. “Campaign Communications in Australia.” In F. Fletcher (ed.), Media, Elections and Democracy, Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1991. White, S. Reporting in Australia. 2nd ed. Melbourne: MacMillan, 2005. Wilson, J. “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Electorate.” Youdecide2007 2007. 19 Feb. 2008 http://www.youdecide2007.org/content/view/283/101/>. Young, G. “Citizen Journalism.” Presentation at the Australian Blogging Conference, 28 Sep. 2007. 
 
 
 
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According to Oscar Wilde, the problem with socialism was that it took up too many evenings. Wilde’s aphorism alludes to a major issue that bedevils all attempts to influence the public sphere: the fact that public activities encroach unduly on citizens’ valuable time. In the 21st century, the dilemma of how to deal with “too many evenings” is one that many citizen journalists face as they give their own time to public pursuits. This paper will look at the development of the public citizen and what it means to be a citizen journalist with reference to some of the writer’s own experiences in the field. The paper will conclude with an examination of future possibilities. While large media companies change their change their focus from traditional news values, citizen journalism can play a stronger role in public life as long as it grasps some of the opportunities that are available. There are substantial compensations available to citizen journalists for the problems presented by Wilde’s evenings. The quote from Wilde is borrowed from Albert Hirschman’s Shifting Involvements, which among other things, is an examination of the disappointments of public action. Hirschman noted how it was a common experience for beginners who engage in public action to find that takes up more time than expected (96). As public activity encroaches not only on time devoted to private consumption but also on to the time devoted to the production of income, it can become a costly pursuit which may cause a sharp reaction against the “practice of citizenship” (Hirschman 97). Yet the more stimuli about politics people receive, the greater the likelihood is they will participate in politics and the greater the depth of their participation (Milbrath & Goel 35). People with a positive attraction to politics are more likely to receive stimuli about politics and participate more (Milbrath & Goel 36). Active citizenship, it seems, has its own feedback loops. An active citizenry is not a new idea. The concepts of citizen and citizenship emerged from the sophisticated polity established in the Greek city states about 2,500 years ago. The status of a citizen signified that the individual had the right to full membership of, and participation in, an independent political society (Batrouney & Goldlust 24). In later eras that society could be defined as a kingdom, an empire, or a nation state. The conditions for a bourgeois public sphere were created in the 13th century as capitalists in European city states created a traffic in commodities and news (Habermas 15). A true public sphere emerged in the 17th century with the rise of the English coffee houses and French salons where people had the freedom to express opinions regardless of their social status (Habermas 36). In 1848, France held the first election under universal direct suffrage (for males) and the contemporary slogan was that “universal suffrage closes the era of revolutions” (Hirschman 113). Out of this heady optimism, the late 19th century ushered in the era of the “informed citizen” as voting changed from a social and public duty to a private right – a civic obligation enforceable only by private conscience (Schudson). These concepts live on in the modern idea that the model voter is considered to be a citizen vested with the ability to understand the consequences of his or her choice (Menand 1). The internet is a new knowledge space which offers an alternative reading of the citizen. In Pierre Lévy’s vision of cyberculture, identity is no longer a function of belonging, it is “distributed and nomadic” (Ross & Nightingale 149). The Internet has diffused widely and is increasingly central to everyday life as a place where people go to get information (Dutton 10). Journalism initially prospered on an information scarcity factor however the technology of the Internet has created an information rich society (Tapsall & Varley 18). But research suggests that online discussions do not promote consensus, are short-lived with little impact and end up turning into “dialogues of the deaf” (Nguyen 148). The easy online publishing environment is a fertile ground for rumours, hoaxes and cheating games to circulate which risk turning the public sphere into a chaotic and anarchic space (Nguyen 148). The stereotypical blogger is pejoratively dismissed as “pajama-clad” (Papandrea 516) connoting a sense of disrespect for the proper transmission of ideas. Nevertheless the Internet offers powerful tools for collaboration that is opening up many everyday institutions to greater social accountability (Dutton 3). Recent research by the 2007 Digital Futures project shows 65 percent of respondents consider the Internet “to be a very important or extremely important source of information” (Cowden 76). By 2006, Roy Morgan was reporting that three million Australians were visiting online news site each month (Cowden.76). Crikey.com.au, Australia’s first online-only news outlet, has become a significant independent player in the Australia mediascape claiming over 5,000 subscribers by 2005 with three times as many non-paying “squatters” reading its daily email (Devine 50). Online Opinion has a similar number of subscribers and was receiving 750,000 page views a month by 2005 (National Forum). Both Crikey.com.au and Online Opinion have made moves towards public journalism in an attempt to provide ordinary people access to the public sphere. As professional journalists lose their connection with the public, bloggers are able to fill the public journalism niche (Simons, Content Makers 208). At their best, blogs can offer a “more broad-based, democratic involvement of citizens in the issues that matter to them” (Bruns 7). The research of University of North Carolina journalism professor Philip Meyer showed that cities and towns with public journalism-oriented newspapers led to a better educated local public (Simons, Content Makers 211). Meyer’s idea of good public journalism has six defining elements: a) the need to define a community’s sense of itself b) devotion of time to issues that demand community attention c) devotion of depth to the issues d) more attention to the middle ground e) a preference for substance over tactics and f) encouraging reciprocal understanding (Meyer 1). The objective of public journalism is to foster a greater sense of connection between the community and the media. It can mean journalists using ordinary people as sources and also ordinary people acting as journalists. Jay Rosen proposed a new model based on journalism as conversation (Simons, Content Makers 209). He believes the technology has now overtaken the public journalism movement (Simons, Content Makers 213). His own experiments at pro-am Internet open at assignment.net have had mixed results. His conclusion was that it wasn’t easy for people working voluntarily on the Internet to report on big stories together nor had they “unlocked” the secret of successful pro-am methods (Rosen). Nevertheless, the people formerly known as the audience, as Rosen called them, have seized the agenda. The barriers to entry into journalism have disappeared. Blogging has made Web publishing easy and the social networks are even more user friendly. The problem today is not getting published but finding an audience. And as the audience fragments, the issue will become finding a niche. One such niche is local political activism. The 2007 Australian federal election saw many online sites actively promoting citizen journalism. Most prominent was Youdecide2007 at Queensland University of Technology, funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC) in partnership with SBS, Online Opinion and the Brisbane Institute. Site co-editor Graham Young said the site’s aim was to use citizen journalists to report on their own electorates to fill the gap left by fewer journalists on the ground, especially in less populated areas (Young). While the site’s stated aim was to provide a forum for a seat-by-seat coverage and provide “a new perspective on national politics” (Youdecide2007), the end result was significantly skewed by the fact that the professional editorial team was based in Brisbane. Youdecide2007 published 96 articles in its news archive of which 59 could be identified as having a state-based focus. Figure 1 shows 62.7% of these state-based stories were about Queensland. Figure 1: Youdecide2007 news stories identifiable by state (note: national stories are omitted from this table): State Total no. of stories %age Qld 37 62.7 NSW 8 13.6 Vic 6 10.2 WA 3 5.1 Tas 2 3.4 ACT 2 3.4 SA 1 1.6 Modern election campaigns are characterised by a complex and increasingly fragmented news environment and the new media are rapidly adding another layer of complexity to the mix (Norris et al. 11-12). The slick management of national campaigns are is counter-productive to useful citizen journalism. According to Matthew Clayfield from the citizen journalism site electionTracker.net, “there are very few open events which ordinary people could cover in a way that could be described as citizen journalism” (qtd. in Hills 2007). Similar to other systems, the Australian campaign communication empowers the political leaders and media owners at the expense of ordinary party members and citizens (Warhurst 135). However the slick modern national “on message” campaign has not totally replaced old-style local activity. Although the national campaign has superimposed upon the local one and displaced it from the focus of attention, local candidates must still communicate their party policies in the electorate (Warhurst 113). Citizen journalists are ideally placed to harness this local communication. A grassroots approach is encapsulated in the words of Dan Gillmor who said “every reporter should realise that, collectively, the readers know more than they do about what they write about” (qtd. in Quinn & Quinn-Allan 66). With this in mind, I set out my own stall in citizen journalism for the 2007 Australian federal election with two personal goals: to interview all my local federal Lower House candidates and to attend as many public election meetings as possible. As a result, I wrote 19 election articles in the two months prior to the election. This consisted of 9 news items, 6 candidate interviews and 4 reports of public meetings. All the local candidates except one agreed to be interviewed. The local Liberal candidate refused to be interviewed despite repeated requests. There was no reason offered, just a continual ignoring of requests. Liberal candidates were also noticeably absent from most candidate forums I attended. This pattern of non-communicative behaviour was observed elsewhere (Bartlett, Wilson). I tried to turn this to my advantage by turning their refusal to talk into a story itself. For those that were prepared to talk, I set the expectation that the entire interview would be on the record and would be edited and published on my blog site. As a result, all candidates asked for a list of questions in advance which I supplied. Because politicians devote considerable energy and financial resources to ensure the information they impart to citizens has an appropriate ‘spin’ on it, (Negrine 10) I reserved the right to ask follow-up questions on any of their answers that required clarification. For the interviews themselves, I followed the advice of Spradley’s principle by starting with a conscious attitude of near-total ignorance, not writing the story in advance, and attempting to be descriptive, incisive, investigative and critical (Alia 100). After I posted the results of the interview, I sent a link to each of the respondents offering them a chance to clarify or correct any inaccuracies in the interview statements. Defamation skirts the boundary between free speech and reputation (Pearson 159) and a good working knowledge of the way defamation law affects journalists (citizen or otherwise) is crucial, particularly in dealing with public figures. This was an important consideration for some of the lesser known candidates as Google searches on their names brought my articles up within the top 20 results for each of the Democrat, Green and Liberal Democratic Party candidates I interviewed. None of the public meetings I attended were covered in the mainstream media. These meetings are the type of news Jan Schaffer of University of Maryland’s J-Lab saw as an ecological niche for citizen journalists to “create opportunities for citizens to get informed and inform others about micro-news that falls under the radar of news organisations who don’t have the resources” (Schaffer in Glaser). As Mark Bahnisch points out, Brisbane had three daily newspapers and a daily state based 7.30 Report twenty years ago which contrasts with the situation now where there’s no effective state parliamentary press gallery and little coverage of local politics at all (“State of Political Blogging”). Brisbane’s situation is not unique and the gaps are there to be exploited by new players. While the high cost of market entry renders the “central square” of the public sphere inaccessible to new players (Curran 128) the ease of Web access has given the citizen journalists the chance to roam its back alleys. However even if they fill the voids left by departing news organisations, there will still be a large hole in the mediascape. No one will be doing the hardhitting investigative journalism. This gritty work requires great resources and often years of time. The final product of investigative journalism is often complicated to read, unentertaining and inconclusive (Bower in Negrine 13). Margaret Simons says that journalism is a skill that involves the ability to find things out. She says the challenge of the future will be to marry the strengths of the newsroom and the dirty work of investigative journalism with the power of the conversation of blogs (“Politics and the Internet”). One possibility is raised by the Danish project Scoop. They offer financial support to individual journalists who have good ideas for investigative journalism. Founded by the Danish Association for Investigative Journalism and funded by the Danish Foreign Ministry, Scoop supports media projects across the world with the only proviso being that a journalist has to have an agreement with an editor to publish the resulting story (ABC Media Report). But even without financial support, citizens have the ability to perform rudimentary investigative journalism. The primary tool of investigative journalism is the interview (McIlwane & Bowman 260). While an interview can be arranged by anyone with access to a telephone or e-mail, it should not be underestimated how difficult a skill interviewing is. According to American journalist John Brady, the science of journalistic interviewing aims to gain two things, trust and information (Brady in White 75). In the interviews I did with politicians during the federal election, I found that getting past the “spin” of the party line to get genuine information was the toughest part of the task. There is also a considerable amount of information in the public domain which is rarely explored by reporters (Negrine 23). Knowing how to make use of this information will become a critical success factor for citizen journalists. Corporate journalists use databases such as Lexis/Nexis and Factiva to gain background information, a facility unavailable to most citizen journalists unless they are either have access through a learning institution or are prepared to pay a premium for the information. While large corporate vendors supply highly specialised information, amateurs can play a greater role in the creation and transmission of local news. According to G. Stuart Adam, journalism contains four basic elements: reporting, judging, a public voice and the here and now (13). Citizen journalism is capable of meeting all four criteria. The likelihood is that the future of communications will belong to the centralised corporations on one hand and the unsupervised amateur on the other (Bird 36). Whether the motive to continue is payment or empowerment, the challenge for citizen journalists is to advance beyond the initial success of tactical actions towards the establishment as a serious political and media alternative (Bruns 19). Nguyen et al.’s uses and gratification research project suggests there is a still a long way to go in Australia. While they found widespread diffusion of online news, the vast majority of users (78%) were still getting their news from newspaper Websites (Nguyen et al. 13). The research corroborates Mark Bahnisch’s view that “most Australians have not heard of blogs and only a tiny minority reads them (quoted in Simons, Content Makers 219). The Australian blogosphere still waits for its defining Swiftboat incident or Rathergate to announce its arrival. But Bahnisch doesn’t necessarily believe this is a good evolutionary strategy anyway. Here it is becoming more a conversation than a platform “with its own niche and its own value” (Bahnisch, “This Is Not America”). As far as my own experiments go, the citizen journalism reports I wrote gave me no financial reward but plenty of other compensations that made the experience richly rewarding. It was important to bring otherwise neglected ideas, stories and personalities into the public domain and the reports helped me make valuable connections with public-minded members of my local community. They were also useful practice to hone interview techniques and political writing skills. Finally the exercise raised my own public profile as several of my entries were picked up or hyperlinked by other citizen journalism sites and blogs. Some day, and probably soon, a model will be worked out which will make citizen journalism a worthwhile economic endeavour. In the meantime, we rely on active citizens of the blogosphere to give their evenings freely for the betterment of the public sphere. References ABC Media Report. “Scoop.” 2008. 17 Feb. 2008 < http://www.abc.net.au/rn/mediareport/stories/2008/2151204.htm#transcript >. Adam, G. Notes towards a Definition of Journalism: Understanding an Old Craft as an Art Form. St Petersburg, Fl.: Poynter Institute, 1993. Alia, V. “The Rashomon Principle: The Journalist as Ethnographer.” In V. Alia, B. Brennan, and B. Hoffmaster (eds.), Deadlines and Diversity: Journalism Ethics in a Changing World. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 1996. Bahnisch, M. “This Is Not America.” newmatilda.com 2007. 17 Feb. 2008 < http://www.newmatilda.com/2007/10/04/not-america >. Bahnisch, M. “The State of Political Blogging.” Larvatus Prodeo 2007. 17 Feb. 2008 < http://larvatusprodeo.net/2007/09/30/the-state-of-political-blogging/ >. Bartlett, A. “Leaders Debate.” The Bartlett Diaries 2007. 19 Feb. 2008 < http://andrewbartlett.com/blog/?p=1767 >. Batrouney, T., and J. Goldlust. Unravelling Identity: Immigrants, Identity and Citizenship in Australia. Melbourne: Common Ground, 2005. Bird, R. “News in the Global Village.” The End of the News. Toronto: Irwin Publishing, 2005. Bruns, A. “News Blogs and Citizen Journalism: New Directions for e-Journalism.” In K. Prasad (ed.), E-Journalism: New Directions in Electronic News Media. New Delhi: BR Publishing, 2008. 2 Feb. 2008 < http://snurb.info/files/News%20Blogs%20and%20Citizen%20Journalism.pdf >. Cowden, G. “Online News: Patterns, Participation and Personalisation.” Australian Journalism Review 29.1 (July 2007). Curran, J. “Rethinking Media and Democracy.” In J. Curran and M. Gurevitch (eds.), Mass Media and Society. 3rd ed. London: Arnold, 2000. Devine, F. “Curse of the Blog.” Quadrant 49.3 (Mar. 2005). Dutton, W. Through the Network (of Networks) – The Fifth Estate. Oxford Internet Institute, 2007. 6 April 2007 < http://people.oii.ox.ac.uk/dutton/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/ 5th-estate-lecture-text.pdf >. Glaser, M. “The New Voices: Hyperlocal Citizen’s Media Sites Want You (to Write!).” Online Journalism Review 2004. 16 Feb. 2008 < http://ojr.org/ojr/glaser/1098833871.php >. Habermas, J. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989 [1962]. Hills, R. “Citizen Journos Turning Inwards.” The Age 18 Nov. 2007. 17 Feb. 2008 < http://www.theage.com.au/news/federal-election-2007-news/citizen-journos- turning-inwards/2007/11/17/1194767024688.html >. Hirschman, A, Shifting Involvements: Private Interest and Public Action. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1982. Hunter, C. “The Internet and the Public Sphere: Revitalization or Decay?” Virginia Journal of Communication 12 (2000): 93-127. Killenberg, G., and R. Dardenne. “Instruction in News Reporting as Community Focused Journalism.” Journalism & Mass Communication Educator 52.1 (Spring 1997). McIlwane, S., and L. Bowman. “Interviewing Techniques.” In S. Tanner (ed.), Journalism: Investigation and Research. Sydney: Longman, 2002. Menand, L. “The Unpolitical Animal: How Political Science Understands Voters.” The New Yorker 30 Aug. 2004. 17 Feb. 2008 < http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/08/30/040830crat_atlarge >. Meyer, P. Public Journalism and the Problem of Objectivity. 1995. 16 Feb. 2008 < http://www.unc.edu/%7Epmeyer/ire95pj.htm >. Milbrath, L., and M. Goel. Political Participation: How and Why Do People Get Involved in Politics? Chicago: Rand McNally M, 1975. National Forum. “Annual Report 2005.” 6 April 2008 < http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/documents/reports/ annual_report_to_agm_2005.pdf >. Negrine, R. The Communication of Politics. London: Sage, 1996. Nguyen, A. “Journalism in the Wake of Participatory Publishing.” Australian Journalism Review 28.1 (July 2006). Nguyen, A., E. Ferrier, M. Western, and S. McKay. “Online News in Australia: Patterns of Use and Gratification.” Australian Studies in Journalism 15 (2005). Norris, P., J. Curtice, D. Sanders, M. Scammell, and H. Setemko. On Message: Communicating the Campaign. London: Sage, 1999. Papandrea, M. “Citizen Journalism and the Reporter’s Privilege.” Minnesota Law Review 91 (2007). Pearson, M. The Journalist’s Guide to Media Law. 2nd ed. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2004. Quinn, S., and D. Quinn-Allan. “User-Generated Content and the Changing News Cycle.” Australian Journalism Review 28.1 (July 2006). Rosen, J. “Assignment Zero: Can Crowds Create Fiction, Architecture and Photography?” Wired 2007. 6 April 2008 < http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2007/07/assignment_zero_all >. Ross, K., and V. Nightingale. Media Audiences: New Perspectives. Maidenhead, Berkshire: Open UP, 2003. Schaffer, J. “Citizens Media: Has It Reached a Tipping Point.” Nieman Reports 59.4 (Winter 2005). Schudson, M. Good Citizens and Bad History: Today’s Political Ideals in Historical Perspective. 1999. 17 Feb. 2008 < http://www.mtsu.edu/~seig/paper_m_schudson.html >. Simons, M. The Content Makers. Melbourne: Penguin, 2007. Simons, M. “Politics and the Internet.” Keynote speech at the Brisbane Writers’ Festival, 14 Sep. 2007. Tapsall, S., and C. Varley (eds.). Journalism: Theory in Practice. South Melbourne: Oxford UP, 2001. Warhurst, J. “Campaign Communications in Australia.” In F. Fletcher (ed.), Media, Elections and Democracy, Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1991. White, S. Reporting in Australia. 2nd ed. Melbourne: MacMillan, 2005. Wilson, J. “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Electorate.” Youdecide2007 2007. 19 Feb. 2008 < http://www.youdecide2007.org/content/view/283/101/ >. Young, G. “Citizen Journalism.” Presentation at the Australian Blogging Conference, 28 Sep. 2007.

AbstractGeneral Sir Rupert Smith served in the British Army in East and South Africa, Arabia, the Caribbean, Europe and Malaysia before commanding, as a major-general, the British 1st Armoured Division during the Gulf War. As the first Assistant Chief of Defence Operations and Security at the United Kingdom Ministry of Defence in 1992, he was intimately involved in the United Kingdom's development of the strategy in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In 1995 he was Commander UNPROFOR in Sarajevo and in 1996–8 was the Officer Commanding in Northern Ireland. His final assignment was as Deputy Supreme Commander Allied Powers Europe in 1998–2001, covering the NATO operation “Allied Force” during the Kosovo conflict and the development of the European Security and Defence Identity. He retired from the army in 2002. Since 2006 he has been international advisor to the ICRC. His experience is shared to some extent through the words of his treatise on modern warfare, The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World (Penguin, London, 2005).

Introduction This paper offers a survey of familiar popular music performers and songwriters who reference coffee in their work. It examines three areas of discourse: the psychoactive effects of caffeine, coffee and courtship rituals, and the politics of coffee consumption. I claim that coffee carries a cultural and musicological significance comparable to that of the chemical stimulants and consumer goods more readily associated with popular music. Songs about coffee may not be as potent as those featuring drugs and alcohol (Primack; Schapiro), or as common as those referencing commodities like clothes and cars (Englis; McCracken), but they do feature across a wide range of genres, some of which enjoy archetypal associations with this beverage. m.o.m.m.y. Needs c.o.f.f.e.e.: The Psychoactive Effect of Coffee The act of performing and listening to popular music involves psychological elements comparable to the overwhelming sensory experience of drug taking: altered perceptions, repetitive grooves, improvisation, self-expression, and psychological empathy—such as that between musician and audience (Curry). Most popular music genres are, as a result, culturally and sociologically identified with the consumption of at least one mind-altering substance (Lyttle; Primack; Schapiro). While the analysis of lyrics referring to this theme has hitherto focused on illegal drugs and alcoholic beverages (Cooper), coffee and its psychoactive ingredient caffeine have been almost entirely overlooked (Summer). The most recent study of drugs in popular music, for example, defined substance use as “tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, cocaine and other stimulants, heroin and other opiates, hallucinogens, inhalants, prescription drugs, over-the-counter drugs, and nonspecific substances” (Primack 172), thereby ignoring a chemical stimulant consumed by 90 per cent of adult Americans every day (Lovett). The wide availability of coffee and the comparatively mild effect of caffeine means that its consumption rarely causes harm. One researcher has described it as a ubiquitous and unobtrusive “generalised public activity […] ‘invisible’ to analysts seeking distinctive social events” (Cooper 92). Coffee may provide only a relatively mild “buzz”—but it is now accepted that caffeine is an addictive substance (Juliano) and, due to its universal legality, coffee is also the world’s most extensively traded and enthusiastically consumed psychoactive consumer product (Juliano 1). The musical genre of jazz has a longstanding relationship with marijuana and narcotics (Curry; Singer; Tolson; Winick). Unsurprisingly, given its Round Midnight connotations, jazz standards also celebrate the restorative impact of coffee. Exemplary compositions include Burke/Webster’s insomniac torch song Black Coffee, which provided hits for Sarah Vaughan (1949), Ella Fitzgerald (1953), and Peggy Lee (1960); and Frank Sinatra’s recordings of Hilliard/Dick’s The Coffee Song (1946, 1960), which satirised the coffee surplus in Brazil at a time when this nation enjoyed a near monopoly on production. Sinatra joked that this ubiquitous drink was that country’s only means of liquid refreshment, in a refrain that has since become a headline writer’s phrasal template: “There’s an Awful Lot of Coffee in Vietnam,” “An Awful Lot of Coffee in the Bin,” and “There’s an Awful Lot of Taxes in Brazil.” Ethnographer Aaron Fox has shown how country music gives expression to the lived social experience of blue-collar and agrarian workers (Real 29). Coffee’s role in energising working class America (Cooper) is featured in such recordings as Dolly Parton’s Nine To Five (1980), which describes her morning routine using a memorable “kitchen/cup of ambition” rhyme, and Don't Forget the Coffee Billy Joe (1973) by Tom T. Hall which laments the hardship of unemployment, hunger, cold, and lack of healthcare. Country music’s “tired truck driver” is the most enduring blue-collar trope celebrating coffee’s analeptic powers. Versions include Truck Drivin' Man by Buck Owens (1964), host of the country TV show Hee Haw and pioneer of the Bakersfield sound, and Driving My Life Away from pop-country crossover star Eddie Rabbitt (1980). Both feature characteristically gendered stereotypes of male truck drivers pushing on through the night with the help of a truck stop waitress who has fuelled them with caffeine. Johnny Cash’s A Cup of Coffee (1966), recorded at the nadir of his addiction to pills and alcohol, has an incoherent improvised lyric on this subject; while Jerry Reed even prescribed amphetamines to keep drivers awake in Caffein [sic], Nicotine, Benzedrine (And Wish Me Luck) (1980). Doye O’Dell’s Diesel Smoke, Dangerous Curves (1952) is the archetypal “truck drivin’ country” song and the most exciting track of its type. It subsequently became a hit for the doyen of the subgenre, Red Simpson (1966). An exhausted driver, having spent the night with a woman whose name he cannot now recall, is fighting fatigue and wrestling his hot-rod low-loader around hairpin mountain curves in an attempt to rendezvous with a pretty truck stop waitress. The song’s palpable energy comes from its frenetic guitar picking and the danger implicit in trailing a heavy load downhill while falling asleep at the wheel. Tommy Faile’s Phantom 309, a hit for Red Sovine (1967) that was later covered by Tom Waits (Big Joe and the Phantom 309, 1975), elevates the “tired truck driver” narrative to gothic literary form. Reflecting country music’s moral code of citizenship and its culture of performative storytelling (Fox, Real 23), it tells of a drenched and exhausted young hitchhiker picked up by Big Joe—the driver of a handsome eighteen-wheeler. On arriving at a truck stop, Joe drops the traveller off, giving him money for a restorative coffee. The diner falls silent as the hitchhiker orders up his “cup of mud”. Big Joe, it transpires, is a phantom trucker. After running off the road to avoid a school bus, his distinctive ghost rig now only reappears to rescue stranded travellers. Punk rock, a genre closely associated with recreational amphetamines (McNeil 76, 87), also features a number of caffeine-as-stimulant songs. Californian punk band, Descendents, identified caffeine as their drug of choice in two 1996 releases, Coffee Mug and Kids on Coffee. These songs describe chugging the drink with much the same relish and energy that others might pull at the neck of a beer bottle, and vividly compare the effects of the drug to the intense rush of speed. The host of “New Music News” (a segment of MTV’s 120 Minutes) references this correlation in 1986 while introducing the band’s video—in which they literally bounce off the walls: “You know, while everybody is cracking down on crack, what about that most respectable of toxic substances or stimulants, the good old cup of coffee? That is the preferred high, actually, of California’s own Descendents—it is also the subject of their brand new video” (“New Music News”). Descendents’s Sessions EP (1997) featured an overflowing cup of coffee on the sleeve, while punk’s caffeine-as-amphetamine trope is also promulgated by Hellbender (Caffeinated 1996), Lagwagon (Mr. Coffee 1997), and Regatta 69 (Addicted to Coffee 2005). Coffee in the Morning and Kisses in the Night: Coffee and Courtship Coffee as romantic metaphor in song corroborates the findings of early researchers who examined courtship rituals in popular music. Donald Horton’s 1957 study found that hit songs codified the socially constructed self-image and limited life expectations of young people during the 1950s by depicting conservative, idealised, and traditional relationship scenarios. He summarised these as initial courtship, honeymoon period, uncertainty, and parting (570-4). Eleven years after this landmark analysis, James Carey replicated Horton’s method. His results revealed that pop lyrics had become more realistic and less bound by convention during the 1960s. They incorporated a wider variety of discourse including the temporariness of romantic commitment, the importance of individual autonomy in relationships, more liberal attitudes, and increasingly unconventional courtship behaviours (725). Socially conservative coffee songs include Coffee in the Morning and Kisses in the Night by The Boswell Sisters (1933) in which the protagonist swears fidelity to her partner on condition that this desire is expressed strictly in the appropriate social context of marriage. It encapsulates the restrictions Horton identified on courtship discourse in popular song prior to the arrival of rock and roll. The Henderson/DeSylva/Brown composition You're the Cream in My Coffee, recorded by Annette Hanshaw (1928) and by Nat King Cole (1946), also celebrates the social ideal of monogamous devotion. The persistence of such idealised traditional themes continued into the 1960s. American pop singer Don Cherry had a hit with Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye (1962) that used coffee as a metaphor for undying and everlasting love. Otis Redding’s version of Butler/Thomas/Walker’s Cigarettes and Coffee (1966)—arguably soul music’s exemplary romantic coffee song—carries a similar message as a couple proclaim their devotion in a late night conversation over coffee. Like much of the Stax catalogue, Cigarettes and Coffee, has a distinctly “down home” feel and timbre. The lovers are simply content with each other; they don’t need “cream” or “sugar.” Horton found 1950s blues and R&B lyrics much more sexually explicit than pop songs (567). Dawson (1994) subsequently characterised black popular music as a distinct public sphere, and Squires (2002) argued that it displayed elements of what she defined as “enclave” and “counterpublic” traits. Lawson (2010) has argued that marginalised and/or subversive blues artists offered a form of countercultural resistance against prevailing social norms. Indeed, several blues and R&B coffee songs disregard established courtship ideals and associate the product with non-normative and even transgressive relationship circumstances—including infidelity, divorce, and domestic violence. Lightnin’ Hopkins’s Coffee Blues (1950) references child neglect and spousal abuse, while the narrative of Muddy Waters’s scorching Iodine in my Coffee (1952) tells of an attempted poisoning by his Waters’s partner. In 40 Cups of Coffee (1953) Ella Mae Morse is waiting for her husband to return home, fuelling her anger and anxiety with caffeine. This song does eventually comply with traditional courtship ideals: when her lover eventually returns home at five in the morning, he is greeted with a relieved kiss. In Keep That Coffee Hot (1955), Scatman Crothers supplies a counterpoint to Morse’s late-night-abandonment narrative, asking his partner to keep his favourite drink warm during his adulterous absence. Brook Benton’s Another Cup of Coffee (1964) expresses acute feelings of regret and loneliness after a failed relationship. More obliquely, in Coffee Blues (1966) Mississippi John Hurt sings affectionately about his favourite brand, a “lovin’ spoonful” of Maxwell House. In this, he bequeathed the moniker of folk-rock band The Lovin’ Spoonful, whose hits included Do You Believe in Magic (1965) and Summer in the City (1966). However, an alternative reading of Hurt’s lyric suggests that this particular phrase is a metaphorical device proclaiming the author’s sexual potency. Hurt’s “lovin’ spoonful” may actually be a portion of his seminal emission. In the 1950s, Horton identified country as particularly “doleful” (570), and coffee provides a common metaphor for failed romance in a genre dominated by “metanarratives of loss and desire” (Fox, Jukebox 54). Claude Gray’s I'll Have Another Cup of Coffee (Then I’ll Go) (1961) tells of a protagonist delivering child support payments according to his divorce lawyer’s instructions. The couple share late night coffee as their children sleep through the conversation. This song was subsequently recorded by seventeen-year-old Bob Marley (One Cup of Coffee, 1962) under the pseudonym Bobby Martell, a decade prior to his breakthrough as an international reggae star. Marley’s youngest son Damian has also performed the track while, interestingly in the context of this discussion, his older sibling Rohan co-founded Marley Coffee, an organic farm in the Jamaican Blue Mountains. Following Carey’s demonstration of mainstream pop’s increasingly realistic depiction of courtship behaviours during the 1960s, songwriters continued to draw on coffee as a metaphor for failed romance. In Carly Simon’s You’re So Vain (1972), she dreams of clouds in her coffee while contemplating an ostentatious ex-lover. Squeeze’s Black Coffee In Bed (1982) uses a coffee stain metaphor to describe the end of what appears to be yet another dead-end relationship for the protagonist. Sarah Harmer’s Coffee Stain (1998) expands on this device by reworking the familiar “lipstick on your collar” trope, while Sexsmith & Kerr’s duet Raindrops in my Coffee (2005) superimposes teardrops in coffee and raindrops on the pavement with compelling effect. Kate Bush’s Coffee Homeground (1978) provides the most extreme narrative of relationship breakdown: the true story of Cora Henrietta Crippin’s poisoning. Researchers who replicated Horton’s and Carey’s methodology in the late 1970s (Bridges; Denisoff) were surprised to find their results dominated by traditional courtship ideals. The new liberal values unearthed by Carey in the late 1960s simply failed to materialise in subsequent decades. In this context, it is interesting to observe how romantic coffee songs in contemporary soul and jazz continue to disavow the post-1960s trend towards realistic social narratives, adopting instead a conspicuously consumerist outlook accompanied by smooth musical timbres. This phenomenon possibly betrays the influence of contemporary coffee advertising. From the 1980s, television commercials have sought to establish coffee as a desirable high end product, enjoyed by bohemian lovers in a conspicuously up-market environment (Werder). All Saints’s Black Coffee (2000) and Lebrado’s Coffee (2006) identify strongly with the culture industry’s image of coffee as a luxurious beverage whose consumption signifies prominent social status. All Saints’s promotional video is set in a opulent location (although its visuals emphasise the lyric’s romantic disharmony), while Natalie Cole’s Coffee Time (2008) might have been itself written as a commercial. Busting Up a Starbucks: The Politics of Coffee Politics and coffee meet most palpably at the coffee shop. This conjunction has a well-documented history beginning with the establishment of coffee houses in Europe and the birth of the public sphere (Habermas; Love; Pincus). The first popular songs to reference coffee shops include Jaybird Coleman’s Coffee Grinder Blues (1930), which boasts of skills that precede the contemporary notion of a barista by four decades; and Let's Have Another Cup of Coffee (1932) from Irving Berlin’s depression-era musical Face The Music, where the protagonists decide to stay in a restaurant drinking coffee and eating pie until the economy improves. Coffee in a Cardboard Cup (1971) from the Broadway musical 70 Girls 70 is an unambiguous condemnation of consumerism, however, it was written, recorded and produced a generation before Starbucks’ aggressive expansion and rapid dominance of the coffee house market during the 1990s. The growth of this company caused significant criticism and protest against what seemed to be a ruthless homogenising force that sought to overwhelm local competition (Holt; Thomson). In response, Starbucks has sought to be defined as a more responsive and interactive brand that encourages “glocalisation” (de Larios; Thompson). Koller, however, has characterised glocalisation as the manipulative fabrication of an “imagined community”—whose heterogeneity is in fact maintained by the aesthetics and purchasing choices of consumers who make distinctive and conscious anti-brand statements (114). Neat Capitalism is a more useful concept here, one that intercedes between corporate ideology and postmodern cultural logic, where such notions as community relations and customer satisfaction are deliberately and perhaps somewhat cynically conflated with the goal of profit maximisation (Rojek). As the world’s largest chain of coffee houses with over 19,400 stores in March 2012 (Loxcel), Starbucks is an exemplar of this phenomenon. Their apparent commitment to environmental stewardship, community relations, and ethical sourcing is outlined in the company’s annual “Global Responsibility Report” (Vimac). It is also demonstrated in their engagement with charitable and environmental non-governmental organisations such as Fairtrade and Co-operative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere (CARE). By emphasising this, Starbucks are able to interpellate (that is, “call forth”, “summon”, or “hail” in Althusserian terms) those consumers who value environmental protection, social justice and ethical business practices (Rojek 117). Bob Dylan and Sheryl Crow provide interesting case studies of the persuasive cultural influence evoked by Neat Capitalism. Dylan’s 1962 song Talkin’ New York satirised his formative experiences as an impoverished performer in Greenwich Village’s coffee houses. In 1995, however, his decision to distribute the Bob Dylan: Live At The Gaslight 1962 CD exclusively via Starbucks generated significant media controversy. Prominent commentators expressed their disapproval (Wilson Harris) and HMV Canada withdrew Dylan’s product from their shelves (Lynskey). Despite this, the success of this and other projects resulted in the launch of Starbucks’s in-house record company, Hear Music, which released entirely new recordings from major artists such as Ray Charles, Paul McCartney, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon and Elvis Costello—although the company has recently announced a restructuring of their involvement in this venture (O’Neil). Sheryl Crow disparaged her former life as a waitress in Coffee Shop (1995), a song recorded for her second album. “Yes, I was a waitress. I was a waitress not so long ago; then I won a Grammy” she affirmed in a YouTube clip of a live performance from the same year. More recently, however, Crow has become an avowed self-proclaimed “Starbucks groupie” (Tickle), releasing an Artist’s Choice (2003) compilation album exclusively via Hear Music and performing at the company’s 2010 Annual Shareholders’s Meeting. Songs voicing more unequivocal dissatisfaction with Starbucks’s particular variant of Neat Capitalism include Busting Up a Starbucks (Mike Doughty, 2005), and Starbucks Takes All My Money (KJ-52, 2008). The most successful of these is undoubtedly Ron Sexsmith’s Jazz at the Bookstore (2006). Sexsmith bemoans the irony of intense original blues artists such as Leadbelly being drowned out by the cacophony of coffee grinding machines while customers queue up to purchase expensive coffees whose names they can’t pronounce. In this, he juxtaposes the progressive patina of corporate culture against the circumstances of African-American labour conditions in the deep South, the shocking incongruity of which eventually cause the old bluesman to turn in his grave. Fredric Jameson may have good reason to lament the depthless a-historical pastiche of postmodern popular culture, but this is no “nostalgia film”: Sexsmith articulates an artfully framed set of subtle, sensitive, and carefully contextualised observations. Songs about coffee also intersect with politics via lyrics that play on the mid-brown colour of the beverage, by employing it as a metaphor for the sociological meta-narratives of acculturation and assimilation. First popularised in Israel Zangwill’s 1905 stage play, The Melting Pot, this term is more commonly associated with Americanisation rather than miscegenation in the United States—a nuanced distinction that British band Blue Mink failed to grasp with their memorable invocation of “coffee-coloured people” in Melting Pot (1969). Re-titled in the US as People Are Together (Mickey Murray, 1970) the song was considered too extreme for mainstream radio airplay (Thompson). Ike and Tina Turner’s Black Coffee (1972) provided a more accomplished articulation of coffee as a signifier of racial identity; first by associating it with the history of slavery and the post-Civil Rights discourse of African-American autonomy, then by celebrating its role as an energising force for African-American workers seeking economic self-determination. Anyone familiar with the re-casting of black popular music in an industry dominated by Caucasian interests and aesthetics (Cashmore; Garofalo) will be unsurprised to find British super-group Humble Pie’s (1973) version of this song more recognisable. Conclusion Coffee-flavoured popular songs celebrate the stimulant effects of caffeine, provide metaphors for courtship rituals, and offer critiques of Neat Capitalism. Harold Love and Guthrie Ramsey have each argued (from different perspectives) that the cultural micro-narratives of small social groups allow us to identify important “ethnographic truths” (Ramsey 22). Aesthetically satisfying and intellectually stimulating coffee songs are found where these micro-narratives intersect with the ethnographic truths of coffee culture. 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Introduction For some time now there has been a strong critical framework that identifies a significant shift in the politics of homosexuality in the Anglo-oriented West over the last fifteen to twenty years. In this article I draw on this framework to describe the current moment in the Australian cultural politics of homosexuality. I focus on the issue of same-sex marriage as a key indicator of the currently emerging era. I then turn to two Australian texts about marriage that were produced in “the period before” this time, with the aim of recovering what has been partially lost from current formations of GLBT politics and from available memories of the past. Critical Histories Lisa Duggan’s term “the new homonormativity” is the frame that has gained widest currency among writers who point to the incorporation of certain versions of homosexuality into the neo-liberal (U.S.) mainstream. She identifies a sexual politics that “does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions, but upholds and sustains them, while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption” (50). More recently, writing of the period inaugurated by the so-called “war on terror” and following Duggan, Jasbir Puar has introduced the term “homonationalism” to refer to “a collusion between homosexuality and American nationalism that is generated both by national rhetorics of patriotic inclusion and by gay and queer subjects themselves” (39). Damien Riggs adds the claims of Indigenous peoples in ongoing colonial contexts to the ground from which contemporary GLBT political claims can be critiqued. He concludes that while “queer people” will need to continue to struggle for rights, it is likely that cultural intelligibility “as a subject of the nation” will be extended only to those “who are established through the language of the nation (i.e., one that is founded upon the denial of colonial violence)” (97). Most writers who follow these kinds of critical analyses refer to the discursive place of homosexual couples and families, specifically marriage. For Duggan it was the increasing focus on “full gay access to marriage and military service” that defined homonormativity (50). Puar allows for a diversity of meanings of same-sex marriage, but claims that for many it is “a demand for reinstatement of white privileges and rights—rights of property and inheritance in particular” (29; see also Riggs 66–70). Of course not all authors locate the political focus on same-sex marriage and its effects as a conservative affair. British scholar Jeffrey Weeks stresses what “we” have gained and celebrates the rise of the discourse of human rights in relation to sexuality. “The very ordinariness of recognized same-sex unions in a culture which until recently cast homosexuality into secret corners and dark whispers is surely the most extraordinary achievement of all” (198), he writes. Australian historian Graham Willett takes a similar approach in his assessment of recent Australian history. Noting the near achievement of “the legal equality agenda for gay people” (“Homos” 187), he notes that “the gay and lesbian movement went on reshaping Australian values and culture and society through the Howard years” (193). In his account it did this in spite of, and untainted by, the dominance of Howard's values and programs. The Howard period was “littered with episodes of insult and discrimination … [as the] government tried to stem the tide of gay, lesbian and transgender rights that had been flowing so strongly since 1969”, Willett writes (188). My own analysis of the Howard years acknowledges the significant progress made in law reform relating to same-sex couples and lesbian and gay parents but draws attention to its mutual constitution with the dominance of the white, patriarchal, neo-liberal and neo-conservative ideologies which dominated social and political life (2013 forthcoming). I argue that the costs of reform, fought for predominantly by white and middle class lesbians and gay men deploying homonormative discourses, included the creation of new identities—single lesbians and gays whose identity did not fit mainstream notions, non-monogamous couples and bad mothers—which were positioned on the illegitimate side of the newly enfranchised. Further the success of the reforms marginalised critical perspectives that are, for many, necessary tools for survival in socially conservative neoliberal times. Same-Sex Marriage in Australia The focus on same-sex marriage in the Australian context was initiated in April 2004 by then Prime Minister Howard. An election was looming and two same-sex couples were seeking recognition of their Canadian marriages through the courts. With little warning, Howard announced that he would amend the Federal Marriage Act to specify that marriage could only take place between a man and a woman. His amendment also prevented the recognition of same-sex marriages undertaken overseas. Legislation was rushed through the parliament in August of that year. In response, Australian Marriage Equality was formed in 2004 and remains at the centre of the GLBT movement. Since that time political rallies in support of marriage equality have been held regularly and the issue has become the key vehicle through which gay politics is understood. Australians across the board increasingly support same-sex marriage (over 60% in 2012) and a growing majority of gay and lesbian people would marry if they could (54% in 2010) (AME). Carol Johnson et al. note that while there are some critiques, most GLBT people see marriage “as a major equality issue” (Johnson, Maddison and Partridge 37). The degree to which Howard’s move changed the terrain of GLBT politics cannot be underestimated. The idea and practice of (non-legal) homosexual marriage in Australia is not new. And some individuals, publicly and privately, were calling for legal marriage for same-sex couples before 2004 (e.g. Baird, “Kerryn and Jackie”). But before 2004 legal marriage did not inspire great interest among GLBT people nor have great support among them. Only weeks before Howard’s announcement, Victorian legal academic and co-convenor of the Victorian Gay & Lesbian Rights Lobby Miranda Stewart concluded an article about same-sex relationship law reform in Victoria with a call to “begin the debate about gay marriage” (80, emphasis added). She noted that the growing number of Australian couples married overseas would influence thinking about marriage in Australia. She also asked “do we really want to be part of that ‘old edifice’ of marriage?” (80). Late in 2003 the co-convenors of the NSW Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby declared that “many members of our community are not interested in marriage” and argued that there were more pressing, and more practical, issues for the Lobby to be focused on (Cerise and McGrory 5). In 2001 Jenni Millbank and Wayne Morgan, two leading legal academics and activists in the arena of same-sex relationship politics in Australia, wrote that “The notion of ‘same-sex marriage’ is quite alien to Australia” (Millbank and Morgan, 295). They pointed to the then legal recognition of heterosexual de facto relationships as the specific context in Australia, which meant that marriage was not viewed as "paradigmatic" (296). In 1998 a community consultation conducted by the Equal Opportunity Commission in Victoria found that “legalising marriage for same-sex couples did not enjoy broad based support from either the community at large or the gay and lesbian community” (Stewart 76). Alongside this general lack of interest in marriage, from the early-mid 1990s gay and lesbian rights groups in each state and territory began to think about, if not campaign for, law reform to give same-sex couples the same entitlements as heterosexual de facto couples. The eventual campaigns differed from state to state, and included moments of high profile public activity, but were in the main low key affairs that met with broadly sympathetic responses from state and territory ALP governments (Millbank). The previous reforms in every state that accorded heterosexual de facto couples near equality with married couples meant that gay and lesbian couples in Australia could gain most of the privileges available to heterosexual couples without having to encroach on the sacred territory (and federal domain) of marriage. In 2004 when Howard announced his marriage bill only South Australia had not reformed its law. Notwithstanding these reforms, there were matters relating to lesbian and gay parenting that remained in need of reform in nearly every jurisdiction. Further, Howard’s aggressive move in 2004 had been preceded by his dogged refusal to consider any federal legislation to remove discrimination. But in 2008 the new Rudd government enacted legislation to remove all discrimination against same-sex couples in federal law, with marriage and (ironically) the lack of anti-discrimination legislation on the grounds of sexuality the exceptions, and at the time of writing most states have made or will soon implement the reforms that give full lesbian and gay parenting rights. In his comprehensive account of gay politics from the 1950s onwards, published in 2000, Graham Willett does not mention marriage at all, and deals with the moves to recognise same-sex relationships in one sixteen line paragraph (Living 249). Willett’s book concludes with the decriminalisation of sex between men across every state of Australia. It was written just as the demand for relationship reform was becoming the central issue of GLBT politics. In this sense, the book marks the end of one era of homosexual politics and the beginning of the next which, after 2004, became organised around the desire for marriage. This understanding of the recent gay past has become common sense. In a recent article in the Adelaide gay paper blaze a young male journalist wrote of the time since the early 1970s that “the gay rights movement has shifted from the issue of decriminalising homosexuality nationwide to now lobbying for full equal rights for gay people” (Dunkin 3). While this (reductive and male-focused) characterisation is not the only one possible, I simply note that this view of past and future progress has wide currency. The shift of attention in this period to the demand for marriage is an intensification and narrowing of political focus in a period of almost universal turn by state and federal governments to neoliberalism and an uneven turn to neo-conservatism, directions which have detrimental effects on the lives of many people already marginalised by discourses of sexuality, race, class, gender, migration status, (dis)ability and so on. While the shift to the focus on marriage from 2004 might be understood as the logical final step in gaining equal status for gay and lesbian relationships (albeit one with little enthusiasm from the GLBT political communities before 2004), the initiation of this shift by Prime Minister Howard, with little preparatory debate in the LGBT political communities, meant that the issue emerged onto the Australian political agenda in terms defined by the (neo)conservative side of politics. Further, it is an example of identity politics which, as Lisa Duggan has observed in the US case, is “increasingly divorced from any critique of global capitalism” and settles for “a stripped-down equality, paradoxically imagined as compatible with persistent overall inequality” (xx). Brides before Marriage In the last part of this article I turn to two texts produced early in 1994—an activist document and an ephemeral performance during the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade. If we point only to the end of the era of (de)criminalisation, then the year 1997, when the last state, Tasmania, decriminalised male homosex, marks the shift from one era of the regulation of homosexuality to another. But 1994 bore the seeds of the new era too. Of course attempts to identify a single year as the border between one era and the next are rhetorical devices. But some significant events in 1994 make it a year of note. The Australian films Priscilla: Queen of the Desert and The Sum of Us were both released in 1994, marking particular Australian contributions to the growing presence of gay and lesbian characters in Western popular culture (e.g. Hamer and Budge). 1994 was the UN International Year of the Family (IYF) and the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras chose the theme “We are Family” and published endorsement from both Prime Minister Keating and the federal opposition leader John Hewson in their program. In 1994 the ACT became the first Australian jurisdiction to pass legislation that recognised the rights and entitlements of same-sex couples, albeit in a very limited and preliminary form (Millbank 29). The NSW Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby's (GLRL) 1994 discussion paper, The Bride Wore Pink, can be pinpointed as the formal start to community-based activism for the legal recognition of same-sex relationships. It was a revision of an earlier version that had been the basis for discussion among (largely inner Sydney) gay and lesbian communities where there had been lively debate and dissent (Zetlein, Lesbian Bodies 48–57). The 1994 version recommended that the NSW government amend the existing definition of de facto in various pieces of legislation to include lesbian and gay relationships and close non-cohabiting interdependent relationships as well. This was judged to be politically feasible. In 1999 NSW became the first state to implement wide ranging reforms of this nature although these were narrower than called for by the GLRL, “including lesser number of Acts amended and narrower application and definition of the non-couple category” (Millbank 10). My concern here is not with the politics that preceded or followed the 1994 version of The Bride, but with the document itself. Notwithstanding its status for some as a document of limited political vision, The Bride bore clear traces of the feminist and liberationist thinking, the experiences of the AIDS crisis in Sydney, and the disagreements about relationships within lesbian and gay communities that characterised the milieu from which it emerged. Marriage was clearly rejected, for reasons of political impossibility but also in light of a list of criticisms of its implication in patriarchal hierarchies of relationship value (31–2). Feminist analysis of relationships was apparent throughout the consideration of pros and cons of different legislative options. Conflict and differences of opinion were evident. So was humour. The proliferation of lesbian and gay commitment ceremonies was listed as both a pro and a con of marriage. On the one hand "just think about the prezzies” (31); on the other, “what will you wear” (32). As well as recommending change to the definition of de facto, The Bride recommended the allocation of state funds to consider “the appropriateness or otherwise of bestowing entitlements on the basis of relationships,” “the focusing on monogamy, exclusivity and blood relations” and the need for broader definitions of “relationships” in state legislation (3). In a gesture towards a political agenda beyond narrowly defined lesbian and gay interests, The Bride also recommended that “the lesbian and gay community join together with other groups to lobby for the removal of the cohabitation rule in the Social Security Act 1991” (federal legislation) (34). This measure would mean that the payment of benefits and pensions would not be judged in the basis of a person’s relationship status. While these radical recommendations may not have been energetically pursued by the GLRL, their presence in The Bride records their currency at the time. The other text I wish to excavate from 1994 is the “flotilla of lesbian brides” in the 1994 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. These lesbians later appeared in the April 1994 issue of Sydney lesbian magazine Lesbians on the Loose, and they have a public afterlife in a photo by Sydney photographer C Moore Hardy held in the City of Sydney archives (City of Sydney). The group of between a dozen and twenty lesbians (it is hard to tell from the photos) was dressed in waist-to-ankle tulle skirts, white bras and white top hats. Many wore black boots. Unshaven underarm hair is clearly visible. Many wore long necklaces around their necks and the magazine photo makes clear that one bride has a black whip tucked into the band of her skirt. In an article about lesbians and legal recognition of their relationships published in 1995, Sarah Zetlein referred to the brides as “chicks in white satin” (“Chicks”). This chick was a figure that refused the binary distinction between being inside and outside the law, which Zetlein argued characterised thinking about the then emerging possibilities of the legal recognition of lesbian (and gay) relationships. Zetlein wrote that “the chick in white satin”: Represents a politics which moves beyond the concerns of one’s own identity and demands for inclusion to exclusion to a radical reconceptualisation of social relations. She de(con)structs and (re) constructs. … The chick in white satin’s resistance often lies in her exposure and manipulation of her regulation. It is not so much a matter of saying ‘no’ to marriage outright, or arguing only for a ‘piecemeal’ approach to legal relationship regulation, or lobbying for de facto inclusion as was recommended by The Bride Wore Pink, but perverting the understanding of what these legally-sanctioned sexual, social and economic relationships mean, hence undermining their shaky straight foundations.(“Chicks” 56–57) Looking back to 1994 from a time nearly twenty years later when (straight) lesbian brides are celebrated by GLBT culture, incorporated into the mainstream and constitute a market al.ready anticipated by “the wedding industrial complex” (Ingraham), the “flotilla of lesbian brides” can be read as a prescient queer negotiation of their time. It would be a mistake to read the brides only in terms of a nascent interest in legally endorsed same-sex marriage. In my own limited experience, some lesbians have always had a thing for dressing up in wedding garb—as brides or bridesmaids. The lesbian brides marching group gave expression to this desire in queer ways. The brides were not paired into couples. Zetlein writes that “the chick in white satin … [has] a veritable posse of her girlfriends with her (and they are all the brides)” (“Chicks” 63, original emphasis). Their costumes were recognisably bridal but also recognisably parodic and subverting; white but hardly innocent; the tulle and bras were feminine but the top hats were accessories conventionally worn by the groom and his men; the underarm hair a sign of feminist body politics. The whip signalled the lesbian underground sexual culture that flourished in Sydney in the early 1990s (O’Sullivan). The black boots were both lesbian street fashion and sensible shoes for marching! Conclusion It would be incorrect to say that GLBT politics and lesbian and gay couples who desire legal marriage in post-2004 Australia bear no trace of the history of ambivalence, critique and parody of marriage and weddings that have come before. The multiple voices in the 2011 collection of “Australian perspectives on same-sex marriage” (Marsh) put the lie to this claim. But in a climate where our radical pasts are repeatedly forgotten and lesbian and gay couples increasingly desire legal marriage, the political argument is hell-bent on inclusion in the mainstream. There seems to be little interest in a dance around the margins of inclusion/exclusion. I add my voice to the concern with the near exclusive focus on marriage and the terms on which it is sought. It is not a liberationist politics to which I have returned in recalling The Bride Wore Pink and the lesbian brides of the 1994 Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, but rather an attention to the differences in the diverse collective histories of non-heterosexual politics. The examples I elaborate are hardly cases of radical difference. But even these instances might remind us that “we” have never been on a single road to equality: there may be incommensurable differences between “us” as much as commonalities. They also remind that desires for inclusion and recognition by the state should be leavened with a strong dose of laughter as well as with critical political analysis. References Australian Marriage Equality (AME). “Public Opinion Nationally.” 22 Oct. 2012. ‹http://www.australianmarriageequality.com/wp/who-supports-equality/a-majority-of-australians-support-marriage-equality/›. Baird, Barbara. “The Politics of Homosexuality in Howard's Australia.” Acts of Love and Lust: Sexuality in Australia from 1945-2010. Eds. Lisa Featherstone, Rebecca Jennings and Robert Reynolds. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013 (forthcoming). —. “‘Kerryn and Jackie’: Thinking Historically about Lesbian Marriages.” Australian Historical Studies 126 (2005): 253–271. Butler, Judith. “Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?” Differences 13.1 (2002): 14–44. Cerise, Somali, and Rob McGrory. “Why Marriage Is Not a Priority.” Sydney Star Observer 28 Aug. 2003: 5. City of Sydney Archives [061\061352] (C. Moore Hardy Collection). ‹http://www.dictionaryofsydney.org//image/40440?zoom_highlight=c+moore+hardy›. Duggan Lisa. The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural politics, and the Attack on Democracy. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003. Dunkin, Alex. “Hunter to Speak at Dr Duncan Memorial.” blaze 290 (August 2012): 3. Hamer, Diane, and Belinda Budege, Eds. The Good Bad And The Gorgeous: Popular Culture's Romance With Lesbianism. London: Pandora, 1994. Ingraham, Chrys. White Weddings: Romancing Heterosexuality in Popular Culture, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2008. Johnson, Carol, and Sarah Maddison, and Emma Partridge. “Australia: Parties, Federalism and Rights Agendas.” The Lesbian and Gay Movement and the State. Ed. Manon Tremblay, David Paternotte and Carol Johnson. Surrey: Ashgate, 2011. 27–42. Lesbian and Gay Legal Rights Service. The Bride Wore Pink, 2nd ed. Sydney: GLRL, 1994. Marsh, Victor, ed. Speak Now: Australian Perspectives on Same-Sex Marriage. Melbourne: Clouds of Mgaellan, 2011. Millbank Jenni, “Recognition of Lesbian and Gay Families in Australian Law—Part one: Couples.” Federal Law Review 34 (2006): 1–44Millbank, Jenni, and Wayne Morgan. “Let Them Eat Cake and Ice Cream: Wanting Something ‘More’ from the Relationship Recognition Menu.” Legal Recognition of Same-Sex Partnerships: A Study of National, European and International Law. Ed. Robert Wintermute and Mads Andenaes. Portland: Hart Publishing, 2001. 295–316. O'Sullivan Kimberley. “Dangerous Desire: Lesbianism as Sex or Politics.” Ed. Jill Julius Matthews. Sex in Public: Australian Sexual Cultures Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1997. 120–23. Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham: Duke UP, 2007 Stewart, Miranda, “It’s a Queer Thing: Campaigning for Equality and Social Justice for Lesbians and Gay Men”. Alternative Law Journal 29.2 (April 2004): 75–80. Walker, Kristen. “The Same-Sex Marriage Debate in Australia.” The International Journal of Human Rights 11.1–2 (2007): 109–130. Weeks, Jeffrey. The World We Have Won: The Remaking of Erotic and Intimate Life. Abindgdon: Routledge, 2007. Willett, Graham. Living Out Loud: A History of Gay and Lesbian Activism in Australia. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2000. Willett, Graham. “Howard and the Homos.” Social Movement Studies 9.2 (2010): 187–199. Zetlein, Sarah. Lesbian Bodies Before the Law: Intimate Relations and Regulatory Fictions. Honours Thesis, University of Adelaide, 1994. —. “Lesbian Bodies before the Law: Chicks in White Satin.” Australian Feminist Law Journal 5 (1995): 48–63.

This article proposes that the growing popularity of reality television in the southernmost state of India, Kerala – disseminated locally and throughout the Indian diaspora – is not the product of an innocuous nostalgia for a fast-disappearing regional identity but rather a spectacular example of an emergent ideology that displaces cultural memory, collective identity, and secular nationalism with new, globalised forms of public sentiment. Further, it is arguable that this g/local media culture also displaces hard-won secular feminist constructions of gender and the contemporary modern “Indian woman.” Shows like Idea Star Singer (hereafter ISS) (Malayalam [the language spoken in Kerala] television’s most popular reality television series), based closely on American Idol, is broadcast worldwide to dozens of nations including the US, the UK, China, Russia, Sri Lanka, and several nations in the Middle East and the discussion that follows attempts both to account for this g/local phenomenon and to problematise it. ISS concentrates on staging the diversity and talent of Malayalee youth and, in particular, their ability to sing ‘pitch-perfect’, by inviting them to perform the vast catalogue of traditional Malayalam songs. However, inasmuch as it is aimed at both a regional and diasporic audience, ISS also allows for a diversity of singing styles displayed through the inclusion of a variety of other songs: some sung in Tamil, some Hindi, and some even English. This leads us to ask a number of questions: in what ways are performers who subscribe to regional or global models of televisual style rewarded or punished? In what ways are performers who exemplify differences in terms of gender, sexuality, religion, class, or ability punished? Further, it is arguable that this show—packaged as the “must-see” spectacle for the Indian diaspora—re-imagines a traditional past and translates it (under the rubric of “reality” television) into a vulgar commodification of both “classical” and “folk” India: an India excised of radical reform, feminists, activists, and any voices of multiplicity clamouring for change. Indeed, it is my contention that, although such shows claim to promote women’s liberation by encouraging women to realise their talents and ambitions, the commodification of the “stars” as televisual celebrities points rather to an anti-feminist imperial agenda of control and domination. Normalising Art: Presenting the Juridical as Natural Following Foucault, we can, indeed, read ISS as an apparatus of “normalisation.” While ISS purports to be “about” music, celebration, and art—an encouragement of art for art’s sake—it nevertheless advocates the practice of teaching as critiqued by Foucault: “the acquisition and knowledge by the very practice of the pedagogical activity and a reciprocal, hierarchised observation” (176), so that self-surveillance is built into the process. What appears on the screen is, in effect, the presentation of a juridically governed body as natural: the capitalist production of art through intense practice, performance, and corrective measures that valorise discipline and, at the end, produce ‘good’ and ‘bad’ subjects. The Foucauldian isomorphism of punishment with obligation, exercise with repetition, and enactment of the law is magnified in the traditional practice of music, especially Carnatic, or the occasional Hindustani refrain that separates those who come out of years of training in the Gury–Shishya mode (teacher–student mode, primarily Hindu and privileged) from those who do not (Muslims, working-class, and perhaps disabled students). In the context of a reality television show sponsored by Idea Cellular Ltd (a phone company with global outposts), the systems of discipline are strictly in line with the capitalist economy. Since this show depends upon the vast back-catalogue of film songs sung by playback singers from the era of big studio film-making, it may be seen to advocate a mimetic rigidity that ossifies artistic production, rather than offering encouragement to a new generation of artists who might wish to take the songs and make them their own. ISS, indeed, compares and differentiates the participants’ talents through an “opaque” system of evaluations which the show presents as transparent, merit-based and “fair”: as Foucault observes, “the perpetual penalty that traverses all points and supervises every instant in the disciplinary institutions compares, differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes, excludes. In short, it normalizes” (183). On ISS, this evaluation process (a panel of judges who are renowned singers and composers, along with a rotating guest star, such as an actor) may be seen as a scopophilic institution where training and knowledge are brought together, transforming “the economy of visibility into the exercise of power” (187). The contestants, largely insignificant as individuals but seen together, at times, upon the stage, dancing and singing and performing practised routines, represent a socius constituting the body politic. The judges, enthroned on prominent and lush seats above the young contestants, the studio audience and, in effect, the show’s televised transnational audience, deliver judgements that “normalise” these artists into submissive subjectivity. In fact, despite the incoherence of the average judgement, audiences are so engrossed in the narrative of “marks” (a clear vestige of the education and civilising mission of the colonial subject under British rule) that, even in the glamorous setting of vibrating music, artificial lights, and corporate capital, Indians can still be found disciplining themselves according to the values of the West. Enacting Keraleeyatham for Malayalee Diaspora Ritty Lukose’s study on youth and gender in Kerala frames identity formations under colonialism, nationalism, and capitalism as she teases out ideas of resistance and agency by addressing the complex mediations of consumption or consumptive practices. Lukose reads “consumer culture as a complex site of female participation and constraint, enjoyment and objectification” (917), and finds the young, westernised female as a particular site of consumer agency. According to this theory, the performers on ISS and the show’s MC, Renjini Haridas, embody this body politic. The young performers all dress in the garb of “authentic identity”, sporting saris, pawaadu-blouse, mundum-neertha, salwaar-kameez, lehenga-choli, skirts, pants, and so on. This sartorial diversity is deeply gendered and discursively rich; the men have one of two options: kurta-mundu or some such variation and the pant–shirt combination. The women, especially Renjini (educated at St Theresa’s College in Kochi and former winner of Ms Kerala beauty contest) evoke the MTV DJs of the mid-1990s and affect a pidgin-Malayalam spliced with English: Renjini’s cool “touching” of the contestants and airy gestures remove her from the regional masses; and yet, for Onam (festival of Kerala), she dresses in the traditional cream and gold sari; for Id (high holy day for Muslims), she dresses in some glittery salwaar-kameez with a wrap on her head; and for Christmas, she wears a long dress. This is clearly meant to show her ability to embody different socio-religious spheres simultaneously. Yet, both she and all the young female contestants speak proudly about their authentic Kerala identity. Ritty Lukose spells this out as “Keraleeyatham.” In the vein of beauty pageants, and the first-world practice of indoctrinating all bodies into one model of beauty, the youngsters engage in exuberant performances yet, once their act is over, revert back to the coy, submissive docility that is the face of the student in the traditional educational apparatus. Both left-wing feminists and BJP activists write their ballads on the surface of women’s bodies; however, in enacting the chethu or, to be more accurate, “ash-push” (colloquialism akin to “hip”) lifestyle advocated by the show (interrupted at least half a dozen times by lengthy sequences of commercials for jewellery, clothing, toilet cleaners, nutritious chocolate bars, hair oil, and home products), the participants in this show become the unwitting sites of a large number of competing ideologies. Lukose observes the remarkable development from the peasant labor-centered Kerala of the 1970s to today’s simulacrum: “Keraleeyatham.” When discussing the beauty contests staged in Kerala in the 1990s, she discovers (through analysis of the dress and Sanskrit-centred questions) that: “Miss Kerala must be a naden pennu [a girl of the native/rural land] in her dress, comportment, and knowledge. Written onto the female bodies of a proliferation of Miss Keralas, the nadu, locality itself, becomes transportable and transposable” (929). Lukose observes that these women have room to enact their passions and artistry only within the metadiegetic space of the “song and dance” spectacle; once they leave it, they return to a modest, Kerala-gendered space in which the young female performers are quiet to the point of inarticulate, stuttering silence (930). However, while Lukose’s term, Keraleeyatham, is useful as a sociological compass, I contend that it has even more complex connotations. Its ethos of “Nair-ism” (Nayar was the dominant caste identity in Kerala), which could have been a site of resistance and identity formation, instead becomes a site of nationalist, regional linguistic supremacy arising out of Hindu imaginary. Second, this ideology could not have been developed in the era of pre-globalised state-run television but now, in the wake of globalisation and satellite television, we see this spectacle of “discipline and punish” enacted on the world stage. Thus, although I do see a possibility for a more positive Keraleeyatham that is organic, inclusive, and radical, for the moment we have a hegemonic, exclusive, and hierarchical statist approach to regional identity that needs to be re-evaluated. Articulating the Authentic via the Simulacrum Welcome to the Malayalee matrix. Jean Baudrillard’s simulacrum is our entry point into visualising the code of reality television. In a state noted for its distinctly left-leaning politics and Communist Party history which underwent radical reversal in the 1990s, the political front in Kerala is still dominated by the LDF (Left Democratic Front), and resistance to the state is an institutionalised and satirised daily event, as marked by the marchers who gather and stop traffic at Palayam in the capital city daily at noon. Issues of poverty and corporate disenfranchisement plague the farming and fishing communities while people suffer transportation tragedies, failures of road development and ferry upkeep on a daily basis. Writers and activists rail against imminent aerial bombing of Maoists insurgent groups, reading in such statist violence repression of the Adivasi (indigenous) peoples scattered across many states of eastern and southern India. Alongside energy and ration supply issues, politics light up the average Keralaite, and yet the most popular “reality” television show reflects none of it. Other than paying faux multicultural tribute to all the festivals that come and go (such as Id, Diwaali, Christmas, and Kerala Piravi [Kerala Day on 1 November]), mainly through Renjini’s dress and chatter, ISS does all it can to remove itself from the turmoil of the everyday. Much in the same way that Bollywood cinema has allowed the masses to escape the oppressions of “the everyday,” reality television promises speculative pleasure produced on the backs of young performers who do not even have to be paid for their labour. Unlike Malayalam cinema’s penchant for hard-hitting politics and narratives of unaccounted for, everyday lives in neo-realist style, today’s reality television—with its excessive sound and light effects, glittering stages and bejewelled participants, repeat zooms, frontal shots, and artificial enhancements—exploits the paradox of hyper-authenticity (Rose and Wood 295). In her useful account of America’s top reality show, American Idol, Katherine Meizel investigates the fascination with the show’s winners and the losers, and the drama of an American “ideal” of diligence and ambition that is seen to be at the heart of the show. She writes, “It is about selling the Dream—regardless of whether it results in success or failure—and about the enactment of ideology that hovers at the edges of any discourse about American morality. It is the potential of great ambition, rather than of great talent, that drives these hopefuls and inspires their fans” (486). In enacting the global via the site of the local (Malayalam and Tamil songs primarily), ISS assumes the mantle of Americanism through the plain-spoken, direct commentaries of the singers who, like their US counterparts, routinely tell us how all of it has changed their lives. In other words, this retrospective meta-narrative becomes more important than the show itself. True to Baudrillard’s theory, ISS blurs the line between actual need and the “need” fabricated by the media and multinational corporations like Idea Cellular and Confident Group (which builds luxury homes, primarily for the new bourgeoisie and nostalgic “returnees” from the diaspora). The “New Kerala” is marked, for the locals, by extravagant (mostly unoccupied) constructions of photogenic homes in garish colours, located in the middle of chaos: the traditional nattumparathu (countryside) wooden homes, and traffic congestion. The homes, promised at the end of these shows, have a “value” based on the hyper-real economy of the show rather than an actual utility value. Yet those who move from the “old” world to the “new” do not always fare well. In local papers, the young artists are often criticised for their new-found haughtiness and disinclination to visit ill relatives in hospital: a veritable sin in a culture that places the nadu and kin above all narratives of progress. In other words, nothing quite adds up: the language and ideologies of the show, espoused most succinctly by its inarticulate host, is a language that obscures its distance from reality. ISS maps onto its audience the emblematic difference between “citizen” and “population”. Through the chaotic, state-sanctioned paralegal devices that allow the slum-dwellers and other property-less people to dwell in the cities, the voices of the labourers (such as the unions) have been silenced. It is a nation ever more geographically divided between the middle-classes which retreat into their gated neighbourhoods, and the shanty-town denizens who are represented by the rising class of religio-fundamentalist leaders. While the poor vote in the Hindu hegemony, the middle classes text in their votes to reality shows like ISS. Partha Chatterjee speaks of the “new segregated and exclusive spaces for the managerial and technocratic elite” (143) which is obsessed by media images, international travel, suburbanisation, and high technology. I wish to add to this list the artificially created community of ISS performers and stars; these are, indeed, the virtual and global extension of Chatterjee’s exclusive, elite communities, decrying the new bourgeois order of Indian urbanity, repackaged as Malayalee, moneyed, and Nayar. Meanwhile, the Hindu Right flexes its muscle under the show’s glittery surface: neither menacing nor fundamentalist, it is now “hip” to be Hindu. Thus while, on the surface, ISS operates according to the cliché, musicinu mathamilla (“music has no religion”), I would contend that it perpetuates a colonising space of Hindu-nationalist hegemony which standardises music appreciation, flattens music performance into an “art” developed solely to serve commercial cinema, and produces a dialectic of Keraleeyatham that erases the multiplicities of its “real.” This ideology, meanwhile, colonises from within. The public performance plays out in the private sphere where the show is consumed; at the same time, the private is inserted into the public with SMS calls that ultimately help seal the juridicality of the show and give the impression of “democracy.” Like the many networks that bring the sentiments of melody and melancholy to our dinner table, I would like to offer you this alternative account of ISS as part of a bid for a more vociferous, and critical, engagement with reality television and its modes of production. Somehow we need to find a way to savour, once again, the non-mimetic aspects of art and to salvage our darkness from the glitter of the “normalising” popular media. References Baudrillard, Jean. The Mirror of Production. Trans. Mark Poster. New York: Telos, 1975. ———. Selected Writings. Ed. Mark Poster. California: Stanford UP, 1988. Chatterjee, Partha. The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1995. Lukose, Ritty. “Consuming Globalization: Youth and Gender in Kerala, India.” Journal of Social History 38.4 (Summer 2005): 915-35. Meizel, Katherine. “Making the Dream a Reality (Show): The Celebration of Failure in American Idol.” Popular Music and Society 32.4 (Oct. 2009): 475-88. Rose, Randall L., and Stacy L. Wood. “Paradox and the Consumption of Authenticity through Reality Television.” Journal of Consumer Research 32 (Sep. 2005): 284-96.

Consumer or home use (previously ‘amateur’) moving image formats are distinguished from professional (still known as ‘professional’) ones by relative affordability, ubiquity and simplicity of use. Since Pathé Frères released its Pathé Baby camera, projector and 9.5mm film gauge in 1922, a distinct line of viewing and making equipment has been successfully marketed at nonprofessional use, especially in the home. ‘Amateur film’ is a simple term for a complex, variegated and longstanding set of activities. Conceptually it is bounded only by the negative definition of nonprofessional (usually intended as sub-professional), and the positive definition of being for the love of the activity and motivated by personal passion alone. This defines a field broad enough that two major historians of US amateur film, Patricia R. Zimmermann and Alan D. Kattelle, write about different subjects. Zimmermann focuses chiefly on domestic use and ‘how-to’ literature, while Kattelle unearths the collective practices and institutional structure of the Amateur Ciné Clubs and the Amateur Ciné League (Zimmerman, Reel Families, Professional; Kattelle, Home Movies, Amateur Ciné). Marion Norris Gleason, a test subject in Eastman Kodak’s development of 16mm and advocate of amateur film, defined it as having three parts, the home movie, “the photoplay produced by organised groups”, and the experimental film (Swanson 132). This view was current at least until the 1960s, when domestic documentation, Amateur Ciné clubs and experimental filmmakers shared the same film gauges and space in the same amateur film magazines, but paths have diverged somewhat since then. Domestic documentation remains committed to the moving image technology du jour, the Amateur Ciné movement is much reduced, and experimental film has developed a separate identity, its own institutional structure, and won some legitimacy in the art world. The trajectory of Super 8, a late-coming gauge to amateur film, has been defined precisely by this disintegration. Obsolescence was manufactured far more slowly during the long reign of amateur film gauges, allowing 9.5mm (1922-66), 16mm (1923-), 8mm (1932-), and Super 8 (1965-) to engage in protracted format wars significantly longer than the life spans of their analogue and digital video successors. The range of options available to nonprofessional makers – the quality but relative expense of 16mm, the near 16mm frame size of 9.5mm, the superior stability of 8mm compared to 9.5mm and Super 8, the size of Super 8’s picture relative to 8mm’s – are not surprising in the context of general competition for a diverse popular market on the usual basis of price, quality, and novelty. However, since analogue video’s ascent the amateur film gauges have all comprehensibly lost the battle for the home use market. This was by far the largest section of amateur film and the manufacturers’ overt target segment, so the amateur film gauges’ contemporary survival and significance is as something else. Though all the gauges from 8mm to 16mm remain available today to the curious and enthusiastic, Super 8’s afterlife is distinguished by the peculiar combination of having been a tremendously popular substandard to the substandard (ie, to 16mm, the standardised film gauge directly below 35mm in both price and quality), and now being prized for its technological excellence. When the large scale consumption that had supported Super 8’s manufacture dropped away, it revealed the set of much smaller, apparently non-transferable uses that would determine whether and as what Super 8 survived. Consequently, though Super 8 has been superseded many times over as a home movie format, it is not obsolete today as an art medium, a professional format used in the commercial industry, or as an alternative to digital video and 16mm for low budget independent production. In other words, everything it was never intended to be. I lately witnessed an occasion of the kind of high-fetishism for film-versus-video and analogue-versus-digital that the experimental moving image world is justifiably famed for. Discussion around the screening of Peter Tscherkassky’s films at the Xperimenta ‘09 festival raised the specifics and availability of the technology he relies on, both because of the peculiarity of his production method – found-footage collaging onto black and white 35mm stock via handheld light pen – and the issue of projection. Has digital technology supplied an alternative workflow? Would 35mm stock to work on (and prints to pillage) continue to be available? Is the availability of 35mm projectors in major venues holding up? Although this insider view of 35mm’s waning market share was more a performance of technological cultural politics than an analysis of it, it raised a series of issues central to any such analysis. Each film format is a gestalt item, consisting of four parts (that an individual might own): film stock, camera, projector and editor. Along with the availability of processing services, these items comprise a gauge’s viability (not withstanding the existence of camera-less and unedited workflows, and numerous folk developing methods). All these are needed to conjure the geist of the machine at full strength. More importantly, the discussion highlights what happens when such a technology collides with idiosyncratic and unintended use, which happens only because it is manufactured on a much wider scale than eccentric use alone can support. Although nostalgia often plays a role in the advocacy of obsolete technology, its role here should be carefully qualified and not overstated. If it plays a role in the three main economies that support contemporary Super 8, it need not be the same role. Further, even though it is now chiefly the same specialist shops and technicians that supply and service 9.5mm, 8mm, Super 8, and 16mm, they are not sold on the same scale nor to the same purpose. There has been no reported Renaissances of 9.5mm or 8mm, though, as long term home movie formats, they must loom large in the memories of many, and their particular look evokes pastness as surely as any two-colour process. There are some specifics to the trajectory of Super 8 as a non-amateur format that cannot simply be subsumed to general nostalgia or dead technology fetishism. Super 8 as an Art Medium Super 8 has a longer history as an art medium than as a pro-tool or low budget substandard. One key aspect in the invention and supply of amateur film was that it not be an adequate substitute for the professional technology used to populate the media sphere proper. Thus the price of access to motion picture making through amateur gauges has been a marginalisation of the outcome for format reasons alone (Zimmermann, Professional 24; Reekie 110) Eastman Kodak established their 16mm as the acceptable substandard for many non-theatrical uses of film in the 1920s, Pathé’s earlier 28mm having already had some success in this area (Mebold and Tepperman 137, 148-9). But 16mm was still relatively expensive for the home market, and when Kiyooka Eiichi filmed his drive across the US in 1927, his 16mm camera alone cost more than his car (Ruoff 240, 243). Against this, 9.5mm, 8mm and eventually Super 8 were the increasingly affordable substandards to the substandard, marginalised twice over in the commercial world, but far more popular in the consumer market. The 1960s underground film, and the modern artists’ film that was partly recuperated from it, was overwhelmingly based on 16mm, as the collections of its chief distributors, the New York Film-Makers’ Co-op, Canyon Cinema and the Lux clearly show. In the context of experimental film’s longstanding commitment to 16mm, an artist filmmaker’s choice to work with Super 8 had important resonances. Experimental work on 8mm and Super 8 is not hard to come by, even from the 1960s, but consider the cultural stakes of Jonas Mekas’s description of 8mm films as “beautiful folk art, like song and lyric poetry, that was created by the people” (Mekas 83). The evocation of ‘folk art’ signals a yawning gap between 8mm, whose richness has been produced collectively by a large and anonymous group, and the work produced by individual artists such as those (like Mekas himself) who founded the New American Cinema Group. The resonance for artists of the 1960s and 1970s who worked with 8mm and Super 8 was from their status as the premier vulgar film gauge, compounding-through-repetition their choice to work with film at all. By the time Super 8 was declared ‘dead’ in 1980, numerous works by canonical artists had been made in the format (Stan Brakhage, Derek Jarman, Carolee Schneemann, Anthony McCall), and various practices had evolved around the specific possibilities of this emulsion and that camera. The camcorder not only displaced Super 8 as the simplest to use, most ubiquitous and cheapest moving image format, at the same time it changed the hierarchy of moving image formats because Super 8 was now incontestably better than something. Further, beyond the ubiquity, simplicity and size, camcorder video and Super 8 film had little in common. Camcorder replay took advantage of the ubiquity of television, but to this day video projection remains a relatively expensive business and for some time after 1980 the projectors were rare and of undistinguished quality. Until the more recent emergence of large format television (also relatively expensive), projection was necessary to screen to anything beyond very small audience. So, considering the gestalt aspect of these technologies and their functions, camcorders could replace Super 8 only for the capture of home movies and small-scale domestic replay. Super 8 maintained its position as the cheapest way into filmmaking for at least 20 years after its ‘death’, but lost its position as the premier ‘folk’ moving image format. It remained a key format for experimental film through the 1990s, but with constant competition from evolving analogue and digital video, and improved and more affordable video projection, its market share diminished. Kodak has continued to assert the viability of its film stocks and gauges, but across 2005-06 it deleted its Kodachrome Super 8, 16mm and slide range (Kodak, Kodachrome). This became a newsworthy Super 8 story (see Morgan; NYT; Hodgkinson; Radio 4) because Super 8 was the first deletion announced, this was very close to 8 May 2005, which was Global Super 8 Day, Kodachrome 40 (K40) was Super 8’s most famous and still used stock, and because 2005 was Super 8’s 40th birthday. Kodachome was then the most long-lived colour process still available, but there were only two labs left in the world which could supply processing- Kodak’s Lausanne Kodachrome lab in Switzerland, using the authentic company method, and Dwayne’s Photo in the US, using a tolerable but substandard process (Hodgkinson). Kodak launched a replacement stock simultaneously, and indeed the variety of Super 8 stocks is increasing year to year, partly because of new Kodak releases and partly because other companies split Kodak’s 16mm and 35mm stock for use as Super 8 (Allen; Muldowney; Pro8mm; Dager). Nonetheless, the cancelling of K40 convulsed the artists’ film community, and a spirited defence of its unique and excellent properties was lead by artist and activist Pip Chodorov. Chodorov met with a Kodak executive at the Cannes Film Festival, appealed to the French Government and started an online petition. His campaign circular read: EXPLAIN THE ADVANTAGES OF K40We have to show why we care specifically about Kodachrome and why Ektachrome is not a replacement. Kodachrome […] whose fine grain and warm colors […] are often used as a benchmark of quality for other stocks. The unique qualities of the Kodachrome image should be pointed out, and especially the differences between Kodachrome and Ektachrome […]. What great films were shot in Kodachrome, and why? […] What are the advantages to the K-14 process and the Lausanne laboratory? Is K40 a more stable stock, is it more preservable, do the colors fade resistant? Point out differences in the sensitometry curves, the grain structure... There was a rash of protest screenings, including a special all-day programme at Le Festival des Cinemas Différents de Paris, about which Raphaël Bassan wrote This initiative was justified, Kodak having announced in 2005 that it was going to stop the manufacturing of the ultra-sensitive film Kodachrome 40, which allowed such recognized artists as Gérard Courant, Joseph Morder, Stéphane Marti and a whole new generation of filmmakers to express themselves through this supple and inexpensive format with such a particular texture. (Bassan) The distance Super 8 has travelled culturally since analogue video can be seen in the distance between these statements of excellence and the attributes of Super 8 and 8mm that appealed to earlier artists: The great thing about Super 8 is that you can switch is onto automatic and get beyond all those technicalities” (Jarman)An 8mm camera is the ballpoint of the visual world. Soon […] people will use camera-pens as casually as they jot memos today […] and the narrow gauge can make finished works of art. (Durgnat 30) Far from the traits that defined it as an amateur gauge, Super 8 is now lionised in terms more resembling a chemistry historian’s eulogy to the pigments used in Dark Ages illuminated manuscripts. From bic to laspis lazuli. Indie and Pro Super 8 Historian of the US amateur film Patricia R. Zimmermann has charted the long collision between small gauge film, domesticity and the various ‘how-to’ publications designed to bridge the gap. In this she pays particular attention to the ‘how-to’ publications’ drive to assert the commercial feature film as the only model worthy of emulation (Professional 267; Reel xii). This drive continues today in numerous magazines and books addressing the consumer and pro-sumer levels. Alan D. Kattelle has charted a different history of the US amateur film, concentrating on the cine clubs and their national organisation, the Amateur Cine League (ACL), competitive events and distribution, a somewhat less domestic part of the movement which aimed less at family documentation more toward ‘photo-plays’, travelogues and instructionals. Just as interested in achieving professional results with amateur means, the ACL encouraged excellence and some of their filmmakers received commissions to make more widely seen films (Kattelle, Amateur 242). The ACL’s Ten Best competition still exists as The American International Film and Video Festival (Kattelle, Amateur 242), but its remit has changed from being “a showcase for amateur films” to being open “to all non-commercial films regardless of the status of the film makers” (AMPS). This points to both the relative marginalisation of the mid-century notion of the amateur, and that successful professionals and others working in the penumbra of independent production surrounding the industry proper are now important contributors to the festival. Both these groups are the economically important contemporary users of Super 8, but they use it in different ways. Low budget productions use it as cheap alternative to larger gauges or HD digital video and a better capture format than dv, while professional productions use it as a lo-fi format precisely for its degradation and archaic home movie look (Allen; Polisin). Pro8mm is a key innovator, service provider and advocate of Super 8 as an industry standard tool, and is an important and long serving agent in what should be seen as the normalisation of Super 8 – a process of redressing its pariah status as a cheap substandard to the substandard, while progressively erasing the special qualities of Super 8 that underlay this. The company started as Super8 Sound, innovating a sync-sound system in 1971, prior to the release of Kodak’s magnetic stripe sound Super 8 in 1973. Kodak’s Super 8 sound film was discontinued in 1997, and in 2005 Pro8mm produced the Max8 format by altering camera front ends to shoot onto the unused stripe space, producing a better quality image for widescreen. In between they started cutting professional 35mm stocks for Super 8 cameras and are currently investing in ever more high-quality HD film scanners (Allen; Pro8mm). Simultaneous to this, Kodak has brought out a series of stocks for Super 8, and more have been cut down for Super 8 by third parties, that offer a wider range of light responses or ever finer grain structure, thus progressively removing the limitations and visible artefacts associated with the format (Allen; Muldowney; Perkins; Kodak, Motion). These films stocks are designed to be captured to digital video as a normal part of their processing, and then entered into the contemporary digital work flow, leaving little or no indication of the their origins on a format designed to be the 1960s equivalent of the Box Brownie. However, while Super 8 has been used by financially robust companies to produce full-length programmes, its role at the top end of production is more usually as home movie footage and/or to evoke pastness. When service provider and advocate OnSuper8 interviewed professional cinematographer James Chressanthis, he asserted that “if there is a problem with Super 8 it is that it can look too good!” and spent much of the interview explaining how a particular combination of stocks, low shutter speeds and digital conversion could reproduce the traditional degraded look and avoid “looking like a completely transparent professional medium” (Perkins). In his history of the British amateur movement, Duncan Reekie deals with this distinction between the professional and amateur moving image, defining the professional as having a drive towards clarity [that] eventually produced [what] we could term ‘hyper-lucidity’, a form of cinematography which idealises the perception of the human eye: deep focus, increased colour saturation, digital effects and so on. (108) Against this the amateur as distinguished by a visible cinematic surface, where the screen image does not seem natural or fluent but is composed of photographic grain which in 8mm appears to vibrate and weave. Since the amateur often worked with only one reversal print the final film would also often become scratched and dirty. (108-9) As Super 8’s function has moved away from the home movie, so its look has adjusted to the new role. Kodak’s replacement for K40 was finer grained (Kodak, Kodak), designed for a life as good to high quality digital video rather than a film strip, and so for video replay rather than a small gauge projector. In the economy that supports Super 8’s survival, its cameras and film stock have become part of a different gestalt. Continued use is still justified by appeals to geist, but the geist of film in a general and abstract way, not specific to Super 8 and more closely resembling the industry-centric view of film propounded by decades of ‘how-to’ guides. Activity that originally supported Super 8 continues, and currently has embraced the ubiquitous and extremely substandard cameras embedded in mobile phones and still cameras for home movies and social documentation. As Super 8 has moved to a new cultural position it has shed its most recognisable trait, the visible surface of grain and scratches, and it is that which has become obsolete, discontinued and the focus of nostalgia, along with the sound of a film projector (which you can get to go with films transferred to dvd). So it will be left to artist filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky, talking in 1995 about what Super 8 was to him in the 1980s, to evoke what there is to miss about Super 8 today. Unlike any other format, Super-8 was a microscope, making visible the inner life of images by entering beneath the skin of reality. […] Most remarkable of all was the grain. While 'resolution' is the technical term for the sharpness of a film image, Super-8 was really never too concerned with this. Here, quite a different kind of resolution could be witnessed: the crystal-clear and bright light of a Xenon-projection gave us shapes dissolving into the grain; amorphous bodies and forms surreptitiously transformed into new shapes and disappeared again into a sea of colour. Super-8 was the pointillism, impressionism and the abstract expressionism of cinematography. (Howath) Bibliography Allen, Tom. “‘Making It’ in Super 8.” MovieMaker Magazine 8 Feb. 1994. 1 May 2009 ‹http://www.moviemaker.com/directing/article/making_it_in_super_8_3044/›. AMPS. “About the American Motion Picture Society.” American Motion Picture Society site. 2009. 25 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.ampsvideo.com›. Bassan, Raphaël. “Identity of Cinema: Experimental and Different (review of Festival des Cinémas Différents de Paris, 2005).” Senses of Cinema 44 (July-Sep. 2007). 25 Apr. 2009 ‹http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/07/44/experimental-cinema-bassan.html›. Chodorov, Pip. “To Save Kodochrome.” Frameworks list, 14 May 2005. 28 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.hi-beam.net/fw/fw29/0216.html›. Dager, Nick. “Kodak Unveils Latest Film Stock in Vision3 Family.” Digital Cinema Report 5 Jan. 2009. 27 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.digitalcinemareport.com/Kodak-Vision3-film›. Durgnat, Raymond. “Flyweight Flicks.” GAZWRX: The Films of Jeff Keen booklet. Originally published in Films and Filming (Feb. 1965). London: BFI, 2009. 30-31. Frye, Brian L. “‘Me, I Just Film My Life’: An Interview with Jonas Mekas.” Senses of Cinema 44 (July-Sep. 2007). 15 Apr. 2009 ‹http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/07/44/jonas-mekas-interview.html›. Hodgkinson, Will. “End of the Reel for Super 8.” Guardian 28 Sep. 2006. 20 Mar. 2009 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2006/sep/28/1›. Horwath, Alexander. “Singing in the Rain - Supercinematography by Peter Tscherkassky.” Senses of Cinema 28 (Sep.-Oct. 2003). 5 May 2009 ‹http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/28/tscherkassky.html›. Jarman, Derek. In Institute of Contemporary Arts Video Library Guide. London: ICA, 1987. Kattelle, Alan D. Home Movies: A History of the American Industry, 1897-1979. Hudson, Mass.: self-published, 2000. ———. “The Amateur Cinema League and its films.” Film History 15.2 (2003): 238-51. Kodak. “Kodak Celebrates 40th Anniversary of Super 8 Film Announces New Color Reversal Product to Portfolio.“ Frameworks list, 9 May 2005. 23 Mar. 2009 ‹http://www.hi-beam.net/fw/fw29/0150.html›. ———. “Kodachrome Update.” 30 Jun. 2006. 24 Mar. 2009 ‹http://www.hi-beam.net/fw/fw32/0756.html›. ———. “Motion Picture Film, Digital Cinema, Digital Intermediate.” 2009. 2 Apr. 2009 ‹http://motion.kodak.com/US/en/motion/index.htm?CID=go&idhbx=motion›. Mekas, Jonas. “8mm as Folk Art.” Movie Journal: The Rise of the New American Cinema, 1959-1971. Ed. Jonas Mekas. Originally Published in Village Voice 1963. New York: Macmillan, 1972. Morgan, Spencer. “Kodak, Don't Take My Kodachrome.” New York Times 31 May 2005. 4 Apr. 2009 ‹http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F05E1DF1F39F932A05756C0A9639C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=2›. ———. “Fans Beg: Don't Take Kodachrome Away.” New York Times 1 Jun. 2005. 4 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/31/technology/31iht-kodak.html›. Muldowney, Lisa. “Kodak Ups the Ante with New Motion Picture Film.” MovieMaker Magazine 30 Nov. 2007. 6 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.moviemaker.com/cinematography/article/kodak_ups_the_ante_with_new_motion_picture_film/›. New York Times. “Super 8 Blues.” 31 May 2005: E1. Perkins, Giles. “A Pro's Approach to Super 8.” OnSuper8 Blogspot 16 July 2007. 13 Apr. 2009 ‹http://onsuper8.blogspot.com/2007/07/pros-approach-to-super-8.html›. Polisin, Douglas. “Pro8mm Asks You to Think Big, Shoot Small.” MovieMaker Magazine 4 Feb. 2009. 1 May 2009 ‹http://www.moviemaker.com/cinematography/article/think_big_shoot_small_rhonda_vigeant_pro8mm_20090127/›. Pro8mm. “Pro8mm Company History.” Super 8 /16mm Cameras, Film, Processing & Scanning (Pro8mm blog) 12 Mar. 2008. 3 May 2009 ‹http://pro8mm-burbank.blogspot.com/2008/03/pro8mm-company-history.html›. Radio 4. No More Yellow Envelopes 24 Dec. 2006. 4 May 2009 ‹http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/pip/m6yx0/›. Reekie, Duncan. Subversion: The Definitive History of the Underground Cinema. London: Wallflower Press, 2007. Sneakernet, Christopher Hutsul. “Kodachrome: Not Digital, But Still Delightful.” Toronto Star 26 Sep. 2005. Swanson, Dwight. “Inventing Amateur Film: Marion Norris Gleason, Eastman Kodak and the Rochester Scene, 1921-1932.” Film History 15.2 (2003): 126-36 Zimmermann, Patricia R. “Professional Results with Amateur Ease: The Formation of Amateur Filmmaking Aesthetics 1923-1940.” Film History 2.3 (1988): 267-81. ———. Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995.


 
 
 Was it seven or eight summers ago, when the sun first became our enemy and set our skin on fire? We find it now in the normality of strange weather and the telescoping of the seasons; wherein it’s 27 degrees and there are no leaves yet on the trees, a hot August day in April. We watch the media spectacles of monster storms and mud slides that arrive with increasing force and frequency. And we despair over the death of the Polar bears, starving because the Arctic sea-ice upon which they catch seals can no longer bear their weight. Up there, we hear, the permafrost is melting, and the Inuit of Baffin Island are witnessing thunder and lightning for the first time in their lives. Down here, along the southern border of Canada, we are just beginning to feel the fear in our guts. 
 
 The ambivalence and discomfort which we may feel about these changes – whose effects are as intimate as they are remote – speak to a more subtle perception that everything has now come undone: realigned and re-made by forces beyond our control, and yet, of our own making. That significant futurity which was once the sine qua non of a rational modernity – the self-confident assurance that things can only get better and never worse – has fallen to the wayside of our collective memory, useful now only for the purposes of Hallmark greeting cards. As usual, we suffer from a failure of imagination, wherein the only facts worth knowing become unspeakable, verboten vulgarities never to be uttered out-loud in polite company. 
 
 What accounts for this silence? While we may increasingly feel that something is amiss in the world, this experience is not authorised or legitimated by the propositions of commercial media or conventional thought. What are the social consequences of this gap between the corporeal experience of global warming and its public representation? Can such affectual experience be mined as a means to advocate social change? 
 
 In Canadian and American commercial media, discussion of “global warming” is still largely absent (Ungar; Weingart, Engels and Pansegrau). When the hurricanes Katrina and Rita whirled into Level 5 status across the very hot waters of the Gulf of Mexico this Fall, mention of global warming was quickly flicked away as a minor irritant. Such omissions are not surprising, given the political economy of American media. The automobile industry spends US$3 billion out of a total of US$9 billion annual expenditures of all advertising on network television. Not one of these ads is for hybrid cars.
 
 It is also our idea of nature that allows us to relegate matters of the environment to the periphery of our concerns. In its more piously Wordsworthian vestiges, nature is deemed as self-evident and unaltered by the ravages of time. It’s this temporal stasis attributed to nature that allows us to absolve ourselves from its fate. Nature, after all, is the non-human. And while the argument that only humans make history – that only humans transform and innovate themselves and their environment and manipulate the dimensions of time – can be recognised as a neat piece of social construction built in the interests of human conquest, we are still reticent to acknowledge nature on its own terms. Val Plumwood has argued that, “if the category of ‘nature’ is seen as phony, if it can only appear when suitably surrounded by scare quotes, [then] we are less likely to be inspired by appeals to nature’s integrity in [it’s defence]” (3). Somehow, believing in nature slides into an unseemly essentialism or a fetishistic form of love. 
 
 Perhaps it’s not surprising then that so many people do not feel compelled to come to nature’s defense. Survey research from the United States, published in 2000 and 2003, shows that while 90% of Americans have now heard of global warming and believe it’s an important issue, a much smaller percentage are actually concerned about it (Stamm, Clark and Eblacas; Leiserowitz). Other matters such as employment, the economy and the rising costs of housing take priority over environmental issues. Furthermore, the research finds that while espousing environmental values, only a small percentage of respondents would self-identify as “environmentalist”. While being pro-environment is perceived as “having good character”, having too much of this good character is a bad thing. 
 
 Still, can’t they feel what’s going on? Certainly here on the coast of British Columbia, where rainforests still run along the ocean’s edge, something has changed. Nothing is quite as ‘temperate’ as it once was. The weather shifts unexpectedly and dramatically, and the summers have become too hot and too dry. Global warming has brought a new atmosphere to the forests, as if under all this unfamiliar dryness and dust a latent extinction is beginning to stir. This current prospect – the death of not just a million species of plant and animal life (Kirby), but of countless human lives – may be redirecting our attention now to the interdependent relation, the fluid interchanges, between human and non-human worlds. This deadly probability may engender a new vitality, new ways of feeling life. “Nature”, as Michel Serres puts it, “is reminding us of its existence” (29).
 
 The challenge posed by this recognition prohibits the perception of nature in static terms, as a commodity or as handy oubliette for societal debris. In so doing, feeling the life of nature allows consideration of the ways in which nature and human culture have long been wedded to one another, not just in terms of the semiotic operations of a binarism, but as a complex and reciprocal project of interdependent life. Recognition of the interdependence of human and non-human life may also entail a particular affectual sensibility – a means of feeling life as it resonates against our skin and fills our senses. In this moment, “everything that is, resounds”. Here, “the sense and recognisability of things … do not lie in conceptual categories in which we mentally place them, but in their positions and orientations which our postures address” (Lingus 59). It’s not a question then of what nature means to us, but does nature do with us? How does it make us feel?
 
 Emotion has remained discursively submerged in discussions of climate change, not only because the stakes are such that only the scientists, with their particular authority and legitimacy, are afforded a voice, but also because it threatens the legitimacy of a formal rationalist representation of nature which excludes the non-human from the purview of ethical consideration. An affectual relationship to the natural world does have its difficulties. “Feeling nature” is based upon some sort of understanding with it, a form of competency, of ‘knowing your way around’. Such knowledges are often bound by class: the privileged remit of the romantic individual in search of an authentic experience, or the uncomfortable locale of hard and often violent labour. Still, it is in feeling the shrinking of life into the shadows of an uncommon heat that we may use this sentience to good effect. 
 
 In his book The Natural Contract, Michel Serres argues that, “through exclusively social contracts, we have abandoned the bond that connects us to the world. … What language do the things of the world speak that we might come to an understanding of them contractually? … In fact, the Earth speaks to us in terms of forces, bonds and interactions … each of the partners in symbiosis thus owes … life to the other, on pain of death” (39).
 
 Long ago, when we were young, many of us made good money working in the coastal forest of British Columbia – either cutting it or milling it or planting it. I was alone there once for 6 weeks and was haunted daily by a raven who would track my movements through the trees, muttering incantations and clicks. By the time I walked out of the woods I was nearly speechless and it took me weeks to recover the easy cultural behaviour that came so naturally before. 
 
 A friend of mine once had the job of getting rid of the young poplar and alder trees that colonise the logging slash. His task was to “cut and squirt”: to slash the trees with a machete and squirt poison inside the cut. Maybe it was a bad case of anthropomorphism, or maybe it was the drugs, but to this day, he swears he could hear the trees scream. 
 
 References
 
 Kirby, Alex. “Climate Risk to Million Species.” BBC News Online, U.K. Edition, 7 Jan. 2004. Leiserowitz, A. American Opinions on Global Warming: Project Results. Eugene: U of Oregon, 2003. Lingus, Alphonso. The Imperitive. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1998. Plumwood, Val. “Nature as Agency and the Prospects for a Progressive Naturalism.” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 4 (2001): 3-32. Serres, Michel. The Natural Contract. (Trans. E. MacArthur and W. Paulson), Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 1995. Stamm, K.R., F. Clark and P.R. Eblacas. “Mass Communication and Public Understanding of Environmental Problems: The Case of Global Warming.” Public Understanding of Science 9 (2000): 219-37. Ungar, S. “Is Strange Weather in the Air?: A Study of U.S. National News Coverage of Extreme Weather Events.” Climatic Change 41 (1999): 133-50. Weingart, P.A., A. Engels and P. Pansegrau. “Risks of Communication: Discourses on Climate Change in Science, Politics and the Mass Media.” Public Understanding of Science 9 (2000): 261-83.
 
 
 
 
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Background: In the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, leftist ideologies were promoted under the shadow of pacifism, as opposed to which Crnjanski, a right-wing writer and nationalist, was placed. Unfortunately, even after the Second World War, such position cost Crnjanski a decades-long exile, the political stigmatisation of his literary work in school curricula and in historical reviews of the then Yugoslav literatures, all the way until the writer’s return to Belgrade in 1965, when such perception slowly started to change. Even though Crnjanski, as a right-winger, nationalist and fascist, would bear this mark for quite a while, his literary works, at least those written before 1934, have since the early 1970s returned to the sphere of scientific interpretations. Purpouse: This paper adopts an interdisciplinary method to approach the work of Miloš Crnjanski from the 1930s in light of the two latest publications – Diplomatic Papers (1936–1941) and Political Articles (1919–1939). Based on the hitherto unknown historical materials and Crnjanski’s reports from the diplomatic missions in Berlin and Rome, and from his travels across Spain at the time, we will present a complex network of prejudices about a writer who was declared a right-winger. By analysing a work published in this period, Crnjanski’s Love in Tuscany, and the reports written in the capacity of a press and culture attaché in Berlin from 1935 to 1938 and in Rome from 1938 to 1941, we will present Crnjanski in the framework of a new reception that has been shifting in scientific circles and memories Embahade. Milo Lompar’s book Crnjanski – Biography of One Feeling (2018) and Gorana Raičević’s latest study Agon and Melancholy. The Life and Work of Miloš Crnjanski (2021) bring a new reception of the work and life of Crnjanski. Results: With the development of interdisciplinary studies and certain forms of awakening and strengthening of the right in Europe since the beginning of the 21st century, bolder and bolder studies, statements and interpretations of fascism have been appearing. In this vein, Umberto Eco published the essay ‘Ur-Fascism’ in English in 1995, which has been translated into the Serbian language. An important text by Enco Traverso was also translated. The study in question poses a modern understanding of the strengthening of right-wing movements in Europe at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century. In this manner, the Italian literary historian Alessandra Tarquini in the study History of Fascist Culture gives a precise view of the breadth of fascism in the entire Italian society from its first appearances in the early 1920s to its collapse in 1943. In this study, fascism is interpreted as an ideology, but also as a form of culture and a way of living determined by myths, old and new. By taking into account the latest findings in historical documents and literature on fascism in Italy, this paper show the connections between literature, political ideas and basic writings of Crnjanski as a diplomat in the period between 1935 and 1941. In this text we show new reception in Serbian literature science and history after printed – Diplomatic Papers (1936–1941) and Political Articles (1919–1939) and Milo Lompar’s book Crnjanski – Biography of One Feeling (2018) and Gorana Raičević’s latest study Agon and Melancholy. The Life and Work of Miloš Crnjanski (2021). In conlusion we can see that Crnjanski has been writer and diplomatic atase for culture and information but that he is on rightets in political and any other way with fascism in Europe. Key words: Slavonic histories, literatures, cultures, diplomatic missions, rightist ideas, nationalist and fascist ideas. Aćimović, D., 2005. With Crnjanski in London. Belgrade: Filip Višnjić. (In Serbian) Avramović, Z., 2004. The defense of Crnjanski. Private edition Zoran Avramović: Belgrade. (In Serbian) Avramović. Z., 2016. Writers and Politics in Serbian Culture 1804–2014. Novi Sad: Pravoslavna Reč. (In Serbian) Crnjanski, M., 1995a. Travelogues I. Belgrade: the Serbian Literary Guild or Serbian Literary Cooperative (SKZ), Belgrade Publishing Institute (the BIGZ company), edited by N. Bertolino. Belgrade: the Miloš Crnjanski Endowment. (In Serbian) Crnjanski, M., 1995a. Travelogues II. Belgrade: the Serbian Literary Guild or Serbian Literary Cooperative (SKZ), BIGZ – Publishing Institute (the BIGZ company), edited by N. Bertolino. Belgrade: the Miloš Crnjanski Endowment. (In Serbian) Crnjanski, M., 2010. Embassies. Edited by Nada Mirkov, Belgrade: the Endowment Miloš Crnjanski, Faculty of Orthodox Theology, University of Belgrade. (In Serbian) Crnjanski. M., 2017. Political articles 1919–1939. Edited by Časlav Nikolić. Belgrade: the Miloš CrnjanskiEndowment, Catena Mundi. (In Serbian) Crnjanski, M., 2019. Diplomatic Reports (1936–1941). edited by Aleksandar Stojanović, Rastko Lompar, Belgrade: Miloš Crnjanski Catena Mundi. (In Serbian) Crnjanski, M., 2020. The Serbian Viewpoint. Third edition. Belgrade: Catena Mundi. (In Serbian) Jaćimović, S., 2009. Travelogue prose of Miloš Crnjanski. Belgrade: Teacher Education Faculty. (In Serbian) Lompar, M., 2018. Crnjanski – A Biography of a Feeling. Novi Sad: Pravoslavna Reč. (In Serbian) Mićić, S., 2018. From the bureaucracy to the diplomacy. History of the Yugoslav Diplomatic Service 1918–1939. Belgrade: The Institute for Recent History of Serbia (INIS). (In Serbian) Popović, R., 2004. The Letters of Love and Hate:Letters to Marko Ristić. Edited by Radovan Popović. Belgrade: Filip Višnjić. (In Serbian) Raičević, G., 2021. Agon and Melancholy. The life and work of Miloš Crnjanski. Novi Sad: Academic book. (In Serbian) Simić, B., 2019. Milan Stojadinović and Italy: Between diplomacy and propaganda. Belgrade: the Institute for Recent History of Serbia (INIS). (In Serbian) Eco, U., 2019. Ur-Fascism. Translated by Aleksandra Nedeljković. Belgrade: The Faculty of Media and Communications. (In Serbian) Tarquini, A., 2011. Storia della cultura fascista. Bologna: il Mulino. (In Italian) Giubilei, F., 2018. Storia dellla cultura di destra. Giubilei Regnani: Roma-Cesena. (In Italian)

Our culture abhors the world.Yet Quicksand is swallowing the duellists; the river is threatening the fighter: earth, waters and climate, the mute world, the voiceless things once placed as a decor surrounding the usual spectacles, all those things that never interested anyone, from now on thrust themselves brutally and without warning into our schemes and manoeuvres (Michel Serres, The Natural Contract, p 3). When Michel Serres describes culture's abhorrence of the world in the opening pages of The Natural Contract he draws our attention to the sidelining of nature in histories and theories that have sought to describe Western culture. As Serres argues, cultural histories are quite often built on the debates and struggles of humanity, which are largely held apart from their natural surroundings, as if on a stage, "purified of things" (3). But, as he is at pains to point out, human activity and conflict always take place within a natural milieu, a space of quicksand, swelling rivers, shifting earth, and atmospheric turbulence. Recently, via the potential for vast environmental change, what was once thought of as a staid “nature” has reasserted itself within culture. In this paper I explore how Serres’s positioning of nature can be understood amid new communication systems, which, via the apparent dematerialization of messages, seems to have further removed culture from nature. From here, I focus on a set of artworks that work against this division, reformulating the connection between information, a topic usually considered in relation to media and anthropic communication (and something about which Serres too has a great deal to say), and nature, an entity commonly considered beyond human contrivance. In particular, I explore how information visualisation and sonification has been used to give a new sense of materiality to the atmosphere, repotentialising the air as a natural and informational entity. The Natural Contract argues for the legal legitimacy of nature, a natural contract similar in standing to Rousseau’s social contract. Serres’ss book explores the history and notion of a “legal person”, arguing for a linking of the scientific view of the world and the legal visions of social life, where inert objects and living beings are considered within the same legal framework. As such The Natural Contract does not deal with ecology per-se, but instead focuses on an argument for the inclusion of nature within law (Serres, “A Return” 131). In a drastic reconfiguring of the subject/object relationship, Serres explains how the space that once existed as a backdrop for human endeavour now seems to thrust itself directly into history. "They (natural events) burst in on our culture, which had never formed anything but a local, vague, and cosmetic idea of them: nature" (Serres, The Natural Contract 3). In this movement, nature does not simply take on the role of a new object to be included within a world still dominated by human subjects. Instead, human beings are understood as intertwined with a global system of turbulence that is both manipulated by them and manipulates them. Taking my lead from Serres’s book, in this paper I begin to explore the disconnections and reconnections that have been established between information and the natural environment. While I acknowledge that there is nothing natural about the term “nature” (Harman 251), I use the term to designate an environment constituted by the systematic processes of the collection of entities that are neither human beings nor human crafted artefacts. As the formation of cultural systems becomes demarcated from these natural objects, the scene is set for the development of culturally mediated concepts such as “nature” and “wilderness,” as entities untouched and unspoilt by cultural process (Morton). On one side of the divide the complex of communication systems is situated, on the other is situated “nature”. The restructuring of information flows due to developments in electronic communication has ostensibly removed messages from the medium of nature. Media is now considered within its own ecology (see Fuller; Strate) quite separate from nature, except when it is developed as media content (see Cubitt; Murray; Heumann). A separation between the structures of media ecologies and the structures of natural ecologies has emerged over the history of electronic communication. For instance, since the synoptic media theory of McLuhan it has been generally acknowledged that the shift from script to print, from stone to parchment, and from the printing press to more recent developments such as the radio, telephone, television, and Web2.0, have fundamentally altered the structure and effects of human relationships. However, these developments – “the extensions of man” (McLuhan)— also changed the relationship between society and nature. Changes in communications technology have allowed people to remain dispersed, as ideas, in the form of electric currents or pulses of light travel vast distances and in diverse directions, with communication no longer requiring human movement across geographic space. Technologies such as the telegraph and the radio, with their ability to seemingly dematerialize the media of messages, reformulated the concept of communication into a “quasi-physical connection” across the obstacles of time and space (Clarke, “Communication” 132). Prior to this, the natural world itself was the medium through which information was passed. Rather than messages transmitted via wires, communication was associated with the transport of messages through the world via human movement, with the materiality of the medium measured in the time it took to cover geographic space. The flow of messages followed trade flows (Briggs and Burke 20). Messages moved along trails, on rail, over bridges, down canals, and along shipping channels, arriving at their destination as information. More recently however, information, due to its instantaneous distribution and multiplication across space, seems to have no need for nature as a medium. Nature has become merely a topic for information, as media content, rather than as something that takes part within the information system itself. The above example illustrates a separation between information exchange and the natural environment brought about by a set of technological developments. As Serres points out, the word “media” is etymologically related to the word “milieu”. Hence, a theory of media should be always related to an understanding of the environment (Crocker). But humans no longer need to physically move through the natural world to communicate, ideas can move freely from region to region, from air-conditioned room to air-conditioned room, relatively unimpeded by natural forces or geographic distance. For a long time now, information exchange has not necessitated human movement through the natural environment and this has consequences for how the formation of culture and its location in (or dislocation from) the natural world is viewed. A number of artists have begun questioning the separation between media and nature, particularly concerning the materiality of air, and using information to provide new points of contact between media and the atmosphere (for a discussion of the history of ecoart see Wallen). In Eclipse (2009) (fig. 1) for instance, an internet based work undertaken by the collective EcoArtTech, environmental sensing technology and online media is used experimentally to visualize air pollution. EcoArtTech is made up of the artist duo Cary Peppermint and Leila Nadir and since 2005 they have been inquiring into the relationship between digital technology and the natural environment, particularly regarding concepts such as “wilderness”. In Eclipse, EcoArtTech garner photographs of American national parks from social media and photo sharing sites. Air quality data gathered from the nearest capital city is then inputted into an algorithm that visibly distorts the image based on the levels of particle pollution detected in the atmosphere. The photographs that circulate on photo sharing sites such as Flickr—photographs that are usually rather banal in their adherence to a history of wilderness photography—are augmented by the environmental pollution circulating in nearby capital cities. Figure 1: EcoArtTech, Eclipse (detail of screenshot), 2009 (Internet-based work available at:http://turbulence.org/Works/eclipse/) The digital is often associated with the clean transmission of information, as packets of data move from a server, over fibre optic cables, to be unpacked and re-presented on a computer's screen. Likewise, the photographs displayed in Eclipse are quite often of an unspoilt nature, containing no errors in their exposure or focus (most probably because these wilderness photographs were taken with digital cameras). As the photographs are overlaid with information garnered from air quality levels, the “unspoilt” photograph is directly related to pollution in the natural environment. In Eclipse the background noise of “wilderness,” the pollution in the air, is reframed as foreground. “We breathe background noise…Background noise is the ground of our perception, absolutely uninterrupted, it is our perennial sustenance, the element of the software of all our logic” (Serres, Genesis 7). Noise is activated in Eclipse in a similar way to Serres’s description, as an indication of the wider milieu in which communication takes place (Crocker). Noise links the photograph and its transmission not only to the medium of the internet and the glitches that arise as information is circulated, but also to the air in the originally photographed location. In addition to noise, there are parallels between the original photographs of nature gleaned from photo sharing sites and Serres’s concept of a history that somehow stands itself apart from the effects of ongoing environmental processes. By compartmentalising the natural and cultural worlds, both the historiography that Serres argues against and the wilderness photograph produces a concept of nature that is somehow outside, behind, or above human activities and the associated matter of noise. Eclipse, by altering photographs using real-time data, puts the still image into contact with the processes and informational outputs of nature. Air quality sensors detect pollution in the atmosphere and code these atmospheric processes into computer readable information. The photograph is no longer static but is now open to continual recreation and degeneration, dependent on the coded value of the atmosphere in a given location. A similar materiality is given to air in a public work undertaken by Preemptive Media, titled Areas Immediate Reading (AIR) (fig. 2). In this project, Preemptive Media, made up of Beatriz da Costa, Jamie Schulte and Brooke Singer, equip participants with instruments for measuring air quality as they walked around New York City. The devices monitor the carbon monoxide (CO), nitrogen oxides (NOx) or ground level ozone (O3) levels that are being breathed in by the carrier. As Michael Dieter has pointed out in his reading of the work, the application of sensing technology by Preemptive Media is in distinct contrast to the conventional application of air quality monitoring, which usually takes the form of extremely high resolution located devices spread over great distances. These larger air monitoring networks tend to present the value garnered from a large expanse of the atmosphere that covers individual cities or states. The AIR project, in contrast, by using small mobile sensors, attempts to put people in informational contact with the air that they are breathing in their local and immediate time and place, and allows them to monitor the small parcels of atmosphere that surround other users in other locations (Dieter). It thus presents many small and mobile spheres of atmosphere, inhabited by individuals as they move through the city. In AIR we see the experimental application of an already developed technology in order to put people on the street in contact with the atmospheres that they are moving through. It gives a new informational form to the “vast but invisible ocean of air that surrounds us and permeates us” (Ihde 3), which in this case is given voice by a technological apparatus that converts the air into information. The atmosphere as information becomes less of a vague background and more of a measurable entity that ingresses into the lives and movements of human users. The air is conditioned by information; the turbulent and noisy atmosphere has been converted via technology into readable information (Connor 186-88). Figure 2: Preemptive Media, Areas Immediate Reading (AIR) (close up of device), 2011 Throughout his career Serres has developed a philosophy of information and communication that may help us to reframe the relationship between the natural and cultural worlds (see Brown). Conventionally, the natural world is understood as made up of energy and matter, with exchanges of energy and the flows of biomass through food webs binding ecosystems together (DeLanda 120-1). However, the tendencies and structures of natural systems, like cultural systems, are also dependent on the communication of information. It is here that Serres provides us with a way to view natural and cultural systems as connected by a flow of energy and information. He points out that in the wake of Claude Shannon’s famous Mathematical Theory of Communication it has been possible to consider the relationship between information and thermodynamics, at least in Shannon’s explanation of noise as entropy (Serres, Hermes74). For Serres, an ecosystem can be conceptualised as an informational and energetic system: “it receives, stores, exchanges, and gives off both energy and information in all forms, from the light of the sun to the flow of matter which passes through it (food, oxygen, heat, signals)” (Serres, Hermes 74). Just as we are related to the natural world based on flows of energy— as sunlight is converted into energy by plants, which we in turn convert into food— we are also bound together by flows of information. The task is to find new ways to sense this information, to actualise the information, and imagine nature as more than a welter of data and the air as more than background. If we think of information in broad ranging terms as “coded values of the output of a process” (Losee 254), then we see that information and the environment—as a setting that is produced by continual and energetic processes—are in constant contact. After all, humans sense information from the environment all the time; we constantly decode the coded values of environmental processes transmitted via the atmosphere. I smell a flower, I hear bird songs, and I see the red glow of a sunset. The process of the singing bird is coded as vibrations of air particles that knock against my ear drum. The flower is coded as molecules in the atmosphere enter my nose and bind to cilia. The red glow is coded as wavelengths from the sun are dispersed in the Earth’s atmosphere and arrive at my eye. Information, of course, does not actually exist as information until some observing system constructs it (Clarke, “Information” 157-159). This observing system as we see the sunset, hear the birds, or smell the flower involves the atmosphere as a medium, along with our sense organs and cognitive and non-cognitive processes. The molecules in the atmosphere exist independently of our sense of them, but they do not actualise as information until they are operationalised by the observational system. Prior to this, information can be thought of as noise circulating within the atmosphere. Heinz Von Foester, one of the key figures of cybernetics, states “The environment contains no information. The environment is as it is” (Von Foester in Clarke, “Information” 157). Information, in this model, actualises only when something in the world causes a change to the observational system, as a difference that makes a difference (Bateson 448-466). Air expelled from a bird’s lungs and out its beak causes air molecules to vibrate, introducing difference into the atmosphere, which is then picked up by my ear and registered as sound, informing me that a bird is nearby. One bird song is picked up as information amid the swirling noise of nature and a difference in the air makes a difference to the observational system. It may be useful to think of the purpose of information as to control action and that this is necessary “whenever the people concerned, controllers as well as controlled, belong to an organised social group whose collective purpose is to survive and prosper” (Scarrott 262). Information in this sense operates the organisation of groups. Using this definition rooted in cybernetics, we see that information allows groups, which are dependent on certain control structures based on the sending and receiving of messages through media, to thrive and defines the boundaries of these groups. We see this in a flock of birds, for instance, which forms based on the information that one bird garners from the movements of the other birds in proximity. Extrapolating from this, if we are to live included in an ecological system capable of survival, the transmission of information is vital. But the form of the information is also important. To communicate, for example, one entity first needs to recognise that the other is speaking and differentiate this information from the noise in the air. Following Clarke and Von Foester, an observing system needs to be operational. An art project that gives aesthetic form to environmental processes in this vein—and one that is particularly concerned with the co-agentive relation between humans and nature—is Reiko Goto and Tim Collin’s Plein Air (2010) (fig. 3), an element in their ongoing Eden 3 project. In this work a technological apparatus is wired to a tree. This apparatus, which references the box easels most famously used by the Impressionists to paint ‘en plein air’, uses sensing technology to detect the tree’s responses to the varying CO2 levels in the atmosphere. An algorithm then translates this into real time piano compositions. The tree’s biological processes are coded into the voice of a piano and sensed by listeners as aesthetic information. What is at stake in this work is a new understanding of atmospheres as a site for the exchange of information, and an attempt to resituate the interdependence of human and non-human entities within an experimental aesthetic system. As we breathe out carbon dioxide—both through our physiological process of breathing and our cultural processes of polluting—trees breath it in. By translating these biological processes into a musical form, Collins and Gotto’s work signals a movement from a process of atmospheric exchange to a digital process of sensing and coding, the output of which is then transmitted through the atmosphere as sound. It must be mentioned that within this movement from atmospheric gas to atmospheric music we are not listening to the tree alone. We are listening to a much more complex polyphony involving the components of the digital sensing technology, the tree, the gases in the atmosphere, and the biological (breathing) and cultural processes (cars, factories and coal fired power stations) that produce these gases. Figure 3: Reiko Goto and Tim Collins, Plein Air, 2010 As both Don Ihde and Steven Connor have pointed out, the air that we breathe is not neutral. It is, on the contrary, given its significance in technology, sound, and voice. Taking this further, we might understand sensing technology as conditioning the air with information. This type of air conditioning—as information alters the condition of air—occurs as technology picks up, detects, and makes sensible phenomena in the atmosphere. While communication media such as the telegraph and other electronic information distribution systems may have distanced information from nature, the sensing technology experimentally applied by EcoArtTech, Preeemptive Media, and Goto and Collins, may remind us of the materiality of air. These technologies allow us to connect to the atmosphere; they reformulate it, converting it to information, giving new form to the coded processes in nature.AcknowledgmentAll images reproduced with the kind permission of the artists. References Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972. Briggs, Asa, and Peter Burke. A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet. Maden: Polity Press, 2009. Brown, Steve. “Michel Serres: Science, Translation and the Logic of the Parasite.” Theory, Culture and Society 19.1 (2002): 1-27. Clarke, Bruce. “Communication.” Critical Terms for Media Studies. Eds. Mark B. N. Hansen and W. J. T. Mitchell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. 131-45 -----. “Information.” Critical Terms for Media Studies. Eds. Mark B. N. Hansen and W. J. T. Mitchell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. 157-71 Crocker, Stephen. “Noise and Exceptions: Pure Mediality in Serres and Agamben.” CTheory: 1000 Days of Theory. (2007). 7 June 2012 ‹http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=574› Connor, Stephen. The Matter of Air: Science and the Art of the Etheral. London: Reaktion, 2010. Cubitt, Sean. EcoMedia. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005 Deiter, Michael. “Processes, Issues, AIR: Toward Reticular Politics.” Australian Humanities Review 46 (2009). 9 June 2012 ‹http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-May-2009/dieter.htm› DeLanda, Manuel. Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. London and New York: Continuum, 2002. Fuller, Matthew. Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005 Harman, Graham. Guerilla Metaphysics. Illinois: Open Court, 2005. Ihde, Don. Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound. Albany: State University of New York, 2007. Innis, Harold. Empire and Communication. Toronto: Voyageur Classics, 1950/2007. Losee, Robert M. “A Discipline Independent Definition of Information.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science 48.3 (1997): 254–69. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Sphere Books, 1964/1967. Morton, Timothy. Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. Murray, Robin, and Heumann, Joseph. Ecology and Popular Film: Cinema on the Edge. Albany: State University of New York, 2009 Scarrott, G.C. “The Nature of Information.” The Computer Journal 32.3 (1989): 261-66 Serres, Michel. Hermes: Literature, Science Philosophy. Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press, 1982. -----. The Natural Contract. Trans. Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1992/1995. -----. Genesis. Trans. Genevieve James and James Nielson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1982/1995. -----. “A Return to the Natural Contract.” Making Peace with the Earth. Ed. Jerome Binde. Oxford: UNESCO and Berghahn Books, 2007. Strate, Lance. Echoes and Reflections: On Media Ecology as a Field of Study. New York: Hampton Press, 2006 Wallen, Ruth. “Ecological Art: A Call for Intervention in a Time of Crisis.” Leonardo 45.3 (2012): 234-42.


 
 
 Perhaps the supreme quality of print is one that is lost on us, since it has so casual and obvious an existence (McLuhan 160). Print Machine (Thad Donovan, 1995) In the introduction to his book on 9/11, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, Slavoj Zizek uses an analogy of letter writing to emphasize the contingency of post-9/11 reality. In the example, Zizek discusses the efforts of writers to escape the eyes of governmental censors and a system that used blue ink to indicate a message was true, red ink to indicate it was false. The story ends with an individual receiving a letter from the censored country stating that the writer could not find any red ink. The ambiguity and the duplicity of writing, suggested in Zizek’s tale of colored inks, is a condition of the contemporary world, even if we are unaware of it. We exist in an age in which print—the economization of writing—has an increasingly significant and precarious role in our lives. We turn to the Internet chat room for textual interventions in our sexual, political and aesthetic lives. We burn satanic Harry Potter books and issue fatwas against writers like Salman Rushdie. We narrate our lives using pictures, fonts of varying typeface and color, and sound on our personalized homepages. We throw out our printed books and buy audio ones so we can listen to our favorite authors in the car. We place trust of our life savings, personal numbers, and digital identity in the hands of unseen individuals behind computer screens. Decisively, we are a print people, but our very nature of being dependent on the technologies of print in our public and private lives leads to our inability to consider the epistemological, social and existential effects of print on us. In this article, I focus on the current manifestations of print—what I call “newprint”—including their relationships to consumerism, identity formation and the politics of the state. I will then consider the democratic possibilities of print, suggested by the personalization of print through the Internet and home publishing, and conclude with the implications of the end of print that include the possibility of a post-print language and the middle voice. In order to understand the significance of our current print culture, it is important to situate print in the context of the history of communication. In earlier times, writing had magical associations (Harris 10), and commonly these underpinnings led to the stratification of communities. Writing functioned as a type of black box, “the mysterious technology by which any message [could] be concealed from its illiterate bearer” (Harris 16). Plato and Socrates warned against the negative effects of writing on the mind, including the erosion of memory (Ong 81). Though it once supplemented the communicational bases of orality, the written word soon supplanted it and created a dramatic existential shift in people—a separation of “the knower from the known” (Ong 43-44). As writing moved from the inconvenience of illuminated manuscripts and hand-copied texts, it became systemized in Gutenberg print, and writing then took on the signature of the state—messages between people were codified in the technology of print. With the advent of computer technologies in the 1990s, including personal computers, word processing programs, printers, and the Internet, the age of newprint begins. Newprint includes the electronic language of the Internet and other examples of the public alphabet, including billboards, signage and the language of advertising. As much as members of consumer society are led to believe that newprint is the harbinger of positive identity construction and individualism, closer analysis of the mechanisms of newprint leads to a different conclusion. An important context of new print is found in the space of the home computer. The home computer is the workstation of the contemporary discursive culture—people send and receive emails, do their shopping on the Internet, meet friends and even spouses through dating services, conceal their identity on MUDs and MOOs, and produce state-of-the-art publishing projects, even books. The ubiquity of print in the space of the personal computer leads to the vital illusion that this newprint is emancipatory. Some theorists have argued that the Internet exhibits the spirit of communicative action addressed by Juergen Habermas, but such thinkers have neglected the fact that the foundations of newprint, just like those of Gutenberg print, are the state and the corporation. Recent advertising of Hewlett-Packard and other computer companies illustrates this point. One advertisement suggested that consumers could “invent themselves” through HP computer and printer technology: by using the varied media available to them, consumers can make everything from personalized greeting cards to full-fledged books. As Friedrich Kittler illustrates, we should resist the urge to separate the practices of writing from the technologies of their production, what Jay David Bolter (41) denotes as the “writing space”. For as much as we long for new means of democratic and individualistic expression, we should not succumb to the urge to accept newprint because of its immediacy, novelty or efficiency. Doing so will relegate us to a mechanistic existence, what is referenced metaphorically in Thad Donovan’s “print machine.” In multiple contexts, newprint extends the corporate state’s propaganda industry by turning the written word into artifice. Even before newprint, the individual was confronted with the hegemony of writing. Writing creates “context-free language” or “autonomous discourse,” which means an individual cannot directly confront the language or speaker as one could in oral cultures (Ong 78). This further division of the individual from the communicational world is emphasized in newprint’s focus on the aesthetics of the typeface. In word processing programs like Microsoft Word, and specialized ones like TwistType, the consumer can take a word or a sentence and transform it into an aesthetic formation. On the word processing program that is producing this text, I can choose from Blinking Background, Las Vegas Lights, Marching Red or Black Ants, Shimmer, and Sparkle Text. On my campus email system I am confronted with pictorial backgrounds, font selection and animation as an intimate aspect of the communicational system of my college. On my cell phone I can receive text messages, and I can choose to use emoticons (iconic characters and messages) on the Internet. As Walter Ong wrote, “print situates words in space more relentlessly than writing ever did … control of position is everything in print” (Ong 121). In the case of the new culture of print, the control over more functions of the printed page, specifically its presentation, leads some consumers to believe that choice and individuality are the outcomes. Newprint does not free the writer from the constraints imposed by the means of traditional print—the printing press—rather, it furthers them as the individual operates by the logos of a predetermined and programmed electronic print. The capacity to spell and write grammatically correct sentences is abated by the availability of spell- and grammar-checking functions in word processing software. In many ways, the aura of writing is lost in newprint in the same way in which art lost its organic nature as it moved into the age of reproducibility (Benjamin). Just as filters in imaging programs like Photoshop reduce the aesthetic functions of the user to the determinations of the software programmer, the use of automated print technologies—whether spell-checking or fanciful page layout software like QuarkXpress or Page Maker—will further dilute the voice of the writer. Additionally, the new forms of print can lead to a fracturing of community, the opposite intent of Habermas’ communicative action. An example is the recent growth of specialized languages on the Internet. Some of the newer forms of such languages use combinations of alphanumeric characters to create a language that can only be read by those with the code. As Internet print becomes more specialized, a tribal effect may be felt within our communities. Since email began a few years ago, I have noticed that the nature of the emails I receive has been dramatically altered. Today’s emails tend to be short and commonly include short hands (“LOL” = “laugh out loud”), including the elimination of capitalization and punctuation. In surveying students on the reasons behind such alterations of language in email, I am told that these short hands allow for more efficient forms of communication. In my mind, this is the key issue that is at stake in both print and newprint culture—for as long as we rely on print and other communicational systems as a form of efficiency, we are doomed to send and receive inaccurate and potentially dangerous messages. Benedict Anderson and Hannah Arendt addressed the connections of print to nationalistic and fascist urges (Anderson; Arendt), and such tendencies are seen in the post-9/11 discursive formations within the United States. Bumper stickers and Presidential addresses conveyed the same simplistic printed messages: “Either You are with Us or You are with the Terrorists.” Whether dropping leaflets from airplanes or in scrolling text messages on the bottom of the television news screen, the state is dependent on the efficiency of print to maintain control of the citizen. A feature of this efficiency is that newprint be rhetorically immediate in its results, widely available in different forms of technology, and dominated by the notion of individuality and democracy that is envisioned in HP’s “invent yourself” advertsiements. As Marshall McLuhan’s epigram suggests, we have an ambiguous relationship to print. We depend on printed language in our daily lives, for education and for the economic transactions that underpin our consumer world, yet we are unable to confront the rhetoric of the state and mass media that are consequences of the immediacy and magic of both print and new print. Print extends the domination of our consciousness by forms of discourse that privilege representation over experience and the subject over the object. As we look to new means of communicating with one another and of expressing our intimate lives, we must consider altering the discursive foundations of our communication, such as looking to the middle voice. The middle voice erases the distinctions between subjects and objects and instead emphasizes the writer being in the midst of things, as a part of the world as opposed to dominating it (Barthes; Tyler). A few months prior to writing this article, I spent the fall quarter teaching in London. One day I received an email that changed my life. My partner of nearly six years announced that she was leaving me. I was gripped with the fact of my being unable to discuss the situation with her as we were thousands of miles apart and I struggled to understand how such a significant and personal circumstance could be communicated with the printed word of email. Welcome to new print! References Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991. Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1976. Barthes, Roland. “To Write: An Intransitive Verb?” The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy. Ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1970. 134-56. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version.” Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935-1938. Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard, 2002. Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991. Habermas, Jürgen. The Theory of Communicative Action. Vol. I. Boston: Beacon Press, 1985. Harris, Roy. The Origin of Writing. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1986. Kittler, Friedrich A. Discourse Networks 1800/1900. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge: MIT P, 1994. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge, 1991. Tyler, Stephen A. “The Middle Voice: The Influence of Post-Modernism on Empirical Research in Anthropology.” Post-modernism and Anthropology. Eds. K. Geuijen, D. Raven, and J. de Wolf. Assen, The Neatherlands: Van Gorcum, 1995. Zizek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. London: Verso, 2002. 
 
 
 
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