Artigos de revistas sobre o tema "Teleological change process"

Almost six years have passed since Zolitūde tragedy and more than five years – since the new construction regulations have come into force, but the process of responsibility definition in construction is still topical. The supervision of construction process. requires checking.The aim of paper is to summarize and analyse information about how supervision of the construction process works now and how it is going to change or is necessary to be to changed.The methods of historical, teleological, systematic text condensation, analysis and comparative analysis of research, information analysis and summarising about how supervision of the construction process works now and how it is going to change or is necessary to be changed are used.The main conclusion shows that the construction process norms of supervision should be laid down in a single normative act in order to avoid duplication and partial interpretation, because the normative acts contain contradictions between the norms of different legal force and also in one norm.

The hyper-competitive global business environment of the information age has challenged many companies to transform their business models and organizational forms. Drawing from the theoretical models of Van de Ven and Poole, we propose a process theory of organizational transition that incorporates two generative mechanisms, or ‘motors’. At the individual level, we employ a teleological motor, which captures the managerial actions undertaken to promote transformation. At the organizational level, we employ a dialectic motor, which captures forces both promoting and opposing change. The model consists of three sequential phases of transition: creation, destruction, and unification. The model is grounded in an empirical study of a large company undergoing a major transition in business model and organization structure during the decade of the 1990s.

Change Management is a term which is omnipresent in nowadays discussions of all areas, be it politically or economically motivated. This article discusses different scientific process theories of Change Management, such as Teleological theories, Dialectical theories, Life cycle theories and Evolutionary theories, that all regard change as involving a number of events, decisions and actions that are connected in some sort of sequences, but distinguish themselves when understanding change as a structured process. Moreover, the linkage of the interconnected fields of Change Management and Strategy Management are seized. Lastly, the importance and different role of Leadership and Management are discussed before reviewing the historic evolvement of the German automotive industry, as well as its current challenges. It is concluded why Change Management in this industry is nowadays more important than ever due to fierce global competition, regulatory requirements and different technological developments all ending up in distinct client requirements and expectations.

The new Construction Law and others Construction Regulations come into force more than four years ago, but there is still actual process of definition of responsibility in construction.The aim of paper is to summarize and analyse information about how responsibility in construction has changed and are going to change to define it distinctly.There are used methods of historical, teleological, systematic text condensation, analysis and comparative analysis for research, analyse and summarize information about how responsibility in construction has changed and are going to change to define it in normative acts.The main conclusion shows that now there is not clearness about responsibility of every person in construction, but there are made legislative amendments of Construction Law and General Construction Regulations to define responsibility more distinctly. From 01.01.2020. there will be in force new Law of administrative responsibility what will allow to inflict penalty for longer time.

During late Old and Middle English, the distribution of short and long vowels in stressed syllables was profoundly altered. The changes involved have traditionally been understood as conspiring to optimize syllable quantity according to the position of the syllable in the word. However, Minkova's reformulation of so-called Middle English Open Syllable Lengthening (MEOSL) as a purely compensatory process appears difficult to reconcile with the traditional approach, which has recently been further compromised by suggestions that Trisyllabic Shortening was not a genuine historical sound change. In this article, Minkova's analysis is supported with new evidence of phonological conditioning behind the irregular lengthening of unapocopated disyllabic stems (e.g. raven vs heaven, body, gannet). I propose solutions to Riad's ‘data problem’ and ‘analytical problem’. Optimality Theory allows Minkova's revised statement of MEOSL to be integrated into a broader, non-teleological account of late Old and Middle English quantitative developments, including coverage of processes of lexical change such as borrowing and diffusion.

Abstract Throughout the history of Western music, musicians have almost invariably discussed the keyboard fugue and other extreme forms of polyphony as signs of something that transcends human subjectivity. Despite the persistence of this critical topos, musicians shifted their approach to it around the beginning of the nineteenth century. The shift involved both a change in the technique of counterpoint and a change in the way counterpoint was interpreted. Composers sought to invest the fugue with a new dramatic and teleological thrust suitable to modern times, and critically minded musicians changed their interpretive method so as to emphasize the passage of time. Whereas musicians of the early eighteenth century read counterpoint and the fugue allegorically and annulled time through the conceptual precision of the allegorical image, musicians of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries read the fugue symbolically and worked time into their interpretive process. In both eras, the practice of interpretation coincided with and affected the reading of the genre's temporality.

Purpose – In this paper the authors explore the managerial processes involved in deep, purposeful organizational change. The authors investigate change towards a goal-directed end state and the managerial actions involved in reaching it. The purpose of this paper is to identify patterns of organizational change by analysing how variations occurred in a firm’s resources and capabilities at a time of high internal and external uncertainty. Design/methodology/approach – The authors use a longitudinal in-depth case study on the airline Spanair. The authors analyse the change process this airline engaged in between 2007 and 2012, which was considered the most turbulent period in aviation history. The authors followed the grounded theory approach to induce a strategic capability pattern model from secondary data. Findings – The authors identify a capability pattern with four dynamic capabilities: adding, transferring, integrating and shedding; and two higher-order capabilities: goal development and change orchestration. The authors show how the higher-order capability processes are performed by two levels of decision makers, where one creates a goal-directed path, and the other performs a central role in orchestrating change. Originality/value – Using the teleological approach the authors identify how top management orchestrate change arising from the dynamic capability process outcomes in a top-down and bottom-up manner. As such the authors show how the role of management becomes fundamental in adjusting the capabilities required to meet the goals set, particularly in times of heightened internal and external environmental turbulence. The authors also emphasize the importance of providing bottom-up advice to goal directors.

Latin American and Latina women's sexualities have often been represented, and theorized, along the terms of sexual morality, restraint and emancipation. In this article, I explore how sexual norms have changed for women in queer spaces in Mexico City over the past two decades. I suggest that sexual practices that were characterized as transgressive in 2000 became normalized in lesbian circles in the following decade, in the 2010s. Ten years of public discussions on sexual education, abortion, anti-discrimination laws, same-sex unions, and in lesbian circles on polyamory had taken place transforming gender and sexual subjectivities. Ultimately, as I reflect on change regarding gender and sexualities, I caution against the tendency of depicting social transformations in a linear process, which risks drawing on teleological narratives of progress.

Evolutionary theorising has a long history in social scientists' attempts to interrogate processes of change. However, for many years evolutionary theory has been damaged by its association with teleological and reductionist reasoning. Nevertheless in the past two decades, a new breed of neo-evolutionary perspective has emerged within a variety of social science sub-disciplines. This recent literature has attempted to revise the theory in order to emphasise that change is a contingent process which can take multiple paths and is underpinned by a constant interplay between agents and their environment. Although much of this literature has failed largely to impact upon the work of political scientists, recent years have also seen various attempts to apply an evolutionary conception of change to both the state and political change in general. This review article examines some of the key themes to have emerged from the renewed interest in evolutionary theorising, whilst particular attention is paid to attempts to develop the concept of political evolution.

This article examines agricultural labour contracts and household-based production in Dedza District, Malawi. Deepening impoverishment seemingly creates conditions for profound social changes. In agriculture, small-scale contracts rather than big work parties mobilise the bulk of ‘extra-domestic’ labour. Although labourers are paid in cash or in kind, they are most often the recruiter's relatives or affines. The pattern fits, therefore, uneasily with the ideas of labour as a commodity and persons as mutually independent individuals. Claims about changing values must be accompanied by careful analyses of personhood. Among Dedza villagers the notion of the self in the idioms of morality discloses social relations as the origins of a person's interests. By recruiting labour, wealthy villagers make their valued relationships visible. These observations caution against viewing ‘agrarian change’ as a uniform and teleological process in which the buying and selling of labour necessarily entail individualism. As an example of how, in any case, moral sentiments are historical phenomena the article examines the predicament of landless refugees in Dedza District. Under conditions of social and material alienation, agricultural labour contracts became exploitation.

The landscape of youth religious participation is an underengaged area across both the humanities and social science. While the humanities lack empirical data on the changing religious life worlds of youths, existing empirical work in the social sciences suggests that institutional religion buffers criminality and delinquency—a brand of engagement the authors refer to as “buffering transgression.” This is a process that both conceives and privileges religion as an institutional and a moral force responsible for creating prosocial behavior. While empirical studies on youths and religion keep religion arrested to institutional and moral functions, scholars in the humanities work hard to legitimate youth cultural forms, such as hip hop, by conflating its rugged dimensions with a quest (and hope) for democratic sensibilities—a motif the authors suggest is rooted in ideologies of teleological progress. Using the tropes progress, peril, and change, this article explores the utility (and limitations) of empirical work and the often misguided efforts to moralize religion. Here the authors raise queries regarding youth cultural change and religion and quantitatively model youth religious change over 16 years. The implications of these theoretical and empirical interventions point toward future work at the social scientific intersections of religion in culture.

The article shows that market reforms in Ukraine are based on methodology inappropriate for these purposes. After all, it was this methodology that defined the logic of the construction and operation of the command-administrative system in the past. This is indicated by the fact that the theory and practice of reforms is based on the collectivist system of values of equality and justice, as well as by the directive nature of reforms, in which the pace, scale and forms of changes in the system of economic relations are defined centrally. The teleological vision of social order nature and the interpretation of them as the result of purposeful human activity are at the heart of this methodology. In this case reforms are carried out on the principles of “social engineering”. “Social engineering” cannot be called a scientific method, since it is practically impossible to formulate objective criteria for choosing goals or assessing ways to achieve them. That is, their effects and effectiveness cannot be predicted or substantiated theoretically. Within this approach only those who have an influence on the process of forming decisions, or who owns the right of their practical implementation, has a crucial role. The result of the teleological thinking dominance in the practice of Ukraine's market transformation is that trends and forms of economic development are determined by the ideas and knowledge of a narrow circle of politicians, officials and scholars. According to the theory of dispersed knowledge, market and competition of Friedrich von Hayek, no scholar or official, any collegial body from among them, in fact, is not able to acquire the required amount of knowledge that would allow to determine the optimal ways of development and solving of local and global economic problems. This is only possible if the space is released to realize the knowledge and initiative of millions of people. This requires a change in the paradigm of reforms from teleological to evolutionary. That is, the essence of the reforms is not to be limited to the definition of specific areas and forms of economic development, but to the creation of prerequisites for evolutionary development on the basis of the freedom to realize individual interest and competition. The article offers the main directions of implementation of an alternative evolutionary approach: restriction and decentralization of state power, ensuring freedom of entrepreneurship, demonopolization of the economy and reduction of the level ownership concentration. In particular, it is emphasized that for the development of rural areas, it is especially important to take effective preventive measures to avoid concentration of land tenure.

Purpose This paper examines the rhetorical strategies of two Indian microfinance organizations as they transformed from non-profit to commercial format. They shifted forms at a time (year 2010), when commercialization had been criticized severely. The purpose of this paper is to understand “How does a microfinance organization justify its action of transformation to retain legitimacy?” Design/methodology/approach The paper adopts a qualitative case study method to understand the phenomena. Interview, archival documents, and field observations are the major source of data for the study. Data analysis is carried out through coding method. Findings Drawing from Suddaby and Greenwood’s (2005) work on rhetorical strategies, the paper suggests that these organizations have used two types of rhetorical strategies – cosmological and teleological. These strategies operate in a performative role and link deviant practices with routines. It focuses on institutional maintenance rather than change. Research limitations/implications The paper acknowledges two important limitations. First, the rhetorical focus may be influenced by the history of organization. So depending on organization selected, the focus may vary. Second, the paper is constricted by the low-documentation practices prevailing in many civil society organizations. Originality/value The paper contributes to the literature on hybrid organization by unpacking the process of sense making in a hybrid form. The paper also reinforces the argument that language operates in a performative role. The paper provides a new context (India) to understand the process of rhetorical strategies.

Abstract High quality is organizations’ competitive advantage. It is beneficial to base this on professional approach, and basic concepts and definitions with scientific foundation. The necessary main concepts consist of quality, quality management, quality improvement and quality assurance. Organizations’ top management is responsible of the quality management decisions and implementations. The present practical situation is fragmented and the implementations are most often based on the instrumental means of the different methodological schools, which is confusing and detrimental to the understanding and usefulness of the concept of quality management. It is not beneficial to build a special system for quality management by only following the requirements of the general standard. This cannot ensure competitive business advantage. In this article, we present an alternative approach that is a natural practical way to realize quality management as the teleological solution, Quality Integration, in which the general and specific quality concepts, principles and methodology are embedded within the normal business management activities. Our Quality Integration is based on the thinking of organizational learning. Its framework covers both running the current business and improving the overall business performance. This model has been used as the thinking framework in practical organizational cases since 1990’s. As the business circumstances change constantly, the organization must be constantly ready to renew through both small and radical changes. This change also receives resistance, and the development takes place according to a multi-phase process towards the new integration and requires a proper recognition and decisions. Principles of the organizational learning can help organizations in a consistent way. Evaluation of the overall organizational performance is an important quality management practice and should take into account performance enablers (processes) and also the results obtained thereof. In our approach, the evaluation criteria emphasize organizational learning and integration. The external context of the organization has a crucial role in achieving and developing the business objectives. The organization’s strategy can no longer be based on the value chains but on finding ways to alter them radically through value networking. The organization is influenced by the true and all-inclusive reality, which differs from the apparent reality perceived by the senses, and which is only revealed through consciousness. Understanding this reinforces awareness and trust that are important factors also in quality management and quality assurance.

Eastern Europe has recently received much attention from scholars irrespective of diverse focus and specialization, and the special section of this distinguished journal is yet another proof that the region remains an extraordinarily interesting place for research and analysis. Scholarly interests have, however, often been related to the emergence, establishment and eventual demise of state socialism in this heterogeneous place, the horrors of World War II and the profound transformations that swept through its many old-new countries during recent decades. The predominance of political, social and intellectual history, as well as sociology and political science, and scholarly interpretations of the condition of modernity in Eastern Europe come therefore as little surprise. This methodological apparatus at hand, significant aspects of the region's development during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have sometimes been overlooked, while others appeared teleological. Within the traditions of both Western and Eastern European academia, the region has until recently been perceived as having followed a very distinct, special path to modernity characterized in a variety of ways as arrested development, Sonderweg and backwardness. At the same time, the profound change that occurred in these diverse territories as part of a European and in fact global process of modernization during the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries has often not been given its true significance in relation to its later historical development. An array of recent post-colonialist responses that have fundamentally reshaped the history of the modern ‘Third World’ have touched Eastern Europe only in passing, Hence, an occasional intellectual indecisiveness as to how to analyse the region's development in a greater historical context, as is immediately evident in the diversity of names ascribed to its supposedly different geographical areas – Eastern Europe, East Central Europe, Central Europe, Mitteleuropa and South-East Europe, to name but a few – each with their own political and ideological bias.

The article presents civic consciousness as a crucial component of civic education and the collaboration of a democratic state and civil society. The approaches to the definition of civic consciousness are analyzed. The forms and criteria of the formation of civic consciousness in the process of development of a democratic society are determined. A change of paradigm in scientific image about civic consciousness in various historical and political systems is demonstrated. The problem of civic consciousness forming as a unique quality of the postmodern era is part of the systemically important tasks of Ukrainian statesmanship. Its solution allows realizing the teleological maxim «free man - developed civil society – powerful state». The article states that one of the main goals of national education is to educate competent citizens of a law-governed democratic state, capable of political socialization, respect for rights and freedoms, fulfill the duties of a citizen, and have a civic identity based on national values. The phenomenon of civic consciousness and «civic» categories are components of civil society, operated in political participation (active or passive), and are a problematic area of principles for regulating political relations of society, the individual and the state. Civic consciousness indicates the level of development of democratic consciousness, acceptance by citizens of democratic values, experience of democratic relations, which determines the norms of social and legal collaboration of governmental authorities with civil society institutions and individuals. It is defined as a special property of a socially active, self-sufficient personality, which has a determination by the content of historical, civilizational and socio-cultural development. The process of acquiring civic qualities is considered in the context of a sociocultural context, when the demonstration of individual behavior is shown as a collaboration of subjective and objective factors. It is noted that the ontological existence of citizenship requires the development of qualities associated with political functions, that is, the ability to be included in the system of relations about power, the ability to collaborate with others for the sake of common goals, the ability to subject to personal interests to common.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the education-job match of political science graduates from Slovenia, as well as from selected EU countries, in the context of other disciplines. In the frame of contested theoretical approaches, the implications of matching the knowledge that is acquired during education to the skills that are needed on the job are also examined. Design/methodology/approach – Using the REFlex HEGESCO database, as well as other secondary data, the wider disciplinary and contextual environments are presented. Disciplinary and contextual mapping is followed by binary logistic regression of primary data collected from Slovene political science graduates. Based on the results, the authors determined the validity of certain theoretical premises of human capital, credentialist, and assignment approaches, specifically regarding education-job matching. Findings – In terms of graduate education-job match, the results indicate that the relevance of the sector of employment relates to educational as well as skill match. The results also indicate that matched candidates utilize the skills acquired during the education process to a greater degree, which adds weight to the assignment theory's presumption. The effect of formal credentials is relevant, because graduates with Bologna degrees, despite having attended programs with virtually identical curricula at the same institution, are significantly less matched when compared to non-Bologna graduates. Accordingly, the effect of the change to the structure of the system of higher education (HE), which is amplified by the period effect of the economic crisis, implies a serious change to graduates’ opportunity structure. Practical implications – The study should motivate a re-examination of the teleological purpose of the study by professional associations in the state. It should also motivate the adjustment of the study programs to the new conditions graduates face and strengthen the educator-employer relationship to make the latter cognizant about the study programs and the skills of graduates. In addition, the study should provide grounds for a critical discussion about the implications of governmental austerity measures on the public sector. Originality/value – The paper provides new insights into the early careers of political scientists and social scientists at large. It also offers early evidence on the effect of the Bologna's HE reform and indications about the early career achievements in a crisis-struck post-communist country.

In Romania, early education is undergoing an intense process of curricular reform which began during the school-year of 2005-2006, when the first attempts had been implemented by the Minister of Education at the time, university professor dr. Mircea Miclea (with the support from the World Bank, UNICEF, universities and NGOs), continued in the following years through the implementation of two projects (PETI and PRET, with the support of UNICEF), and culminated with the publication of The Ordinance by the Ministry of Education no. 4.694 of 2nd August 2019 regarding the approval of the curriculum for early education. It was by this ordinance that the Educational Plan as well as the Teaching Methodology and the Teaching Programme for early education were enacted. Thus, new objectives were established for the early educational system, capable of reflecting the changes in our society, the recent contributions from the learning psychology, as applicable to preschool education, and able to conform to the reform and the general principles of the Romanian educational system, to the contemporary orientations regarding the educational objectives, and, last but not least, build rapport with the specific objectives of the other levels of education, and with the international educational legislation and practices.

AbstractMost scholars are inclined to assume that the diplomatic practices of the European Union's member states remain fundamentally unchanged. The EU's Council of Ministers is accordingly seen as a setting where sovereign states speak with one another. Yet if state interaction in the EU is only viewed from this perspective, a number of important qualitative changes will remain underexposed. This article argues that leading political forces in the European states have come to view their nations as anchored so deeply within the supranational institutions of the EU that their diplomats merge the promotion of national interests with those of the Union. In this late sovereign phase of diplomacy, political and legal authorities overlap, territorial exclusivity is replaced with functional boundaries, and states begin to speak with one voice. The article explores three interlinked aspects of late sovereign diplomacy: the teleological interpretation of the EC and EU treaties; the intense socialization of state representatives; and the negotiation process, which promotes national positions as part of a European cause, thereby delocalizing the national interest. While the EU has not rendered national diplomacy obsolete, it has profoundly changed its meaning and consequences.

Once we grasp Bergson’s new conception of an intuitive metaphysics premised on a distance from action, it seems unlikely that a connection could be found between this metaphysics and an activist philosophy of war. In this essay I shall revisit Bergson’s metaphysics to see how they could have been understood to provide support for war. I discuss how Bergson’s metaphysics by way of its number theoretical understanding of oneness was thought to mirror or express the limit experience of war that attracted many intellectuals hungry for a shattering of conventional limits on what held up as reality. Finally I suggest that Bergson subtly changed his understanding of the élan vital in the course of the Great War, compromising in the process its initially non-teleological character in order to ensure that his doctrines would only be implicated in international peace, not jingoistic war propaganda.

Survey evidence shows a deontological ethical ideology remains dominant in global journalism, underpinned by a cultural value of detachment. This article opens by considering the strain imposed on these precepts in US corporate media while covering the Trump White House—ultimately to breaking point with the defeated president’s campaign to overturn the result, attempting to co-opt news organisations in the process. Feedback loops of cause and effect have, in any case, been exposed in today’s extended media, making the involvement of journalism in stories—through influence on audience responses and source behaviours—impossible to overlook. At the same time, new journalisms are emerging and growing, which adhere instead to a teleological ethical ideology. They openly identify themselves with external goals, and appeal for funds from donors and supporters on that basis. The article then goes on to present original data from analysing statements of aims and purpose put out by 12 news organisations working in four of these new fields: Peace Journalism; Solutions Journalism; Engaged, or Participatory Journalism; and Investigative Journalism, respectively. These represent a growing edge in journalism, it is argued, since they are positioned to respond positively to the changed conditions brought about by political and technological forces, which were illustrated by the Trump crisis. The study points to the changes in institutional arrangements now needed, if the structural foundations for their survival and success are to be strengthened.

AbstractConverging data from different disciplines are showing the role of classical conditioning processes in the elaboration of human and animal behavior to be larger than previously supposed. Restricted views of classically conditioned responses as merely secretory, reflexive, or emotional are giving way to a broader conception that includes problem-solving, and other rule-governed behavior thought to be the exclusive province of either operant conditiońing or cognitive psychology. These new views have been accompanied by changes in the way conditioning is conducted and evaluated. Data from a number of seemingly unrelated phenomena such as relapse to drug abuse by postaddicts, the placebo effect, and the immune response appear to involve classical conditioning processes. Classical conditioning, moreover, has been found to occur in simpler and simpler organisms and recently even demonstrated in brain slices and in utero. This target article will integrate the several research areas that have used the classical conditioning process as an explanatory model; it will challenge teleological interpretations of the classically conditioned CR and offer some basic principles for testing conditioning in diverse areas.

Introduction. When viewed against the background of large-scale technological changes in recent years, there is a demonstrable fiasco in traditional legal tools as regards the regulation of innovative objects and mechanisms. The article examines the issues of the correlation of innovative objects of law with the mechanisms (technologies) of law. The purpose of the research is to analyse innovative objects, attempt to qualify them, determine their common essential interdisciplinary nature, and to develop recommendations for the formation of a new system of objects adequate to the realities of the sixth technological order. Materials and Methods. Factual materials that characterise the process of the formation of a new system of objects, empirical, systemic, analytical and teleological research methods were used. The approach was as follows. Corporate relations are currently one of the main types of civil law relations, and a new system of objects and (or) mechanisms (technologies) of law is being built within them. Thus, not only innovative objects (mechanisms) must fit into the existing legal system, but the system itself should be changed under the influence of new objects (mechanisms). Results. The most important trends in the development of innovative objects and (or) mechanisms are analysed. Problems in the development of innovative objects and (or) mechanisms in an interdisciplinary aspect are identified, and recommendations for the formation of a new system of objects of law are given. Such a system should be formed outside the traditional branches of law. Discussion and Conclusion. The authors came to the following conclusions. Innovative objects and innovative mechanisms require a fundamental development on the basis of an interdisciplinary approach. To achieve the goals of modern economic turnover, innovative objects should be expressed in new legal formats. Innovative objects should be considered outside the framework of traditional branches of law and given a special status.

In the first article it was attempted to provide insight into the corporate nature of being called to ministry. The article also tried to discern what the specifics of the ministry of the public pastoral leader were. Equally important what I call in this article the teleological core of theological education. I want to build upon the concepts established in the first article. I explore the contributions of a number of well-known scholars who devoted much of their research to this field: Schner , Farley, Wood, Hough and Cobb, Heitink, Van der Ven and others. The ultimate issue is that there is some consensus about the telos of theological education. It is phrased differently and the different dimensions are indeed complementary. Concepts like ‘vision and discernment’, ‘critical reflection’ ‘reflective practitioner’, ‘hermeneutical-communicative competence’ and others are being discussed as it relate to the core research problem as described in article number 1. In this article I also explore the implications of the departure points for the praxis of recruiting, screening and training of future public pastoral leaders. The article points towards necessary changes that need to take place to get the local church involved in recruitment and screening - taking it serious that ‘we’ are all in the ministry. It also describes how a few churches are managing the process. In doing this, the place of the denominational community of churches is also emphasized and described.

The law-making role of judges has always been the subject of much controversy. For a good many a year and especially during the apartheid regime, the approach to statutory interpretation that dominated the South African courts was the orthodox textual position. According to the textualists, as they were referred to, the position that was adopted was that legislation was to be interpreted within the framework of the words used by the legislature. The courts were not empowered to make any modifications, alterations or additions to the legislative text, as this function was solely the responsibility of the legislature. The paradigmatic shift in emphasis since 1994 from a system of parliamentary sovereignty to constitutional supremacy changed this position significantly. The key consideration of statutory interpretation was that the aim and purpose of legislation was to be considered with the values of the Constitution forming the over-arching principle in the process of interpretation. The courts were enjoined to reconcile the purpose of the legislation with the provisions of the Constitution, and in particular, the Bill of Rights. The emerging view in support of the purposive or the teleological theory has been that judges do indeed have a law-making function in the process of interpretation. Since the early 1990's, it has been observed that the judiciary has been able to assert its influence on the development of the law and the emerging jurisprudence, as a result of the powers derived from the Constitution, and in particular section 39(2). The article examines the extent to which the judiciary can use this power in a post-democratic constitutional era, in South Africa, to achieve justice. From the repository of cases, which forms the basis of the discussion, the article proposes a set of factors that ought to be heeded by our courts in the application of section 39(2).

Democracy was in the margins both as an idea and as a political force in the eighteenth century. Even in the 1790s, ‘democracy’ was hardly the defining notion of the revolutionaries’ political visions. The small states as much as the large states perceived democracy as an outmoded legacy of antiquity leading to anarchy and despotism, inapplicable not least because it was undesirable in the modern world in which commerce was a rising force. This article tells the story of how this changed, how the understanding of ‘democracy’ was transformed during the French Revolution to represent a viable transition mechanism to a state of widespread and durable liberty. To avoid a teleological approach in the process of this analysis, this article examines the works of Condorcet on modern democracy in the context of the predicaments of the eighteenth century and the French revolutionary decade: how to avert at the same time despotism, military government and popular anarchy; and how to establish a free and stable state on the basis of modern commercial society? The history of the French Revolution is hereby placed in dialogue with that of eighteenth-century political and intellectual history. The effect is that a fresh picture of the entirety of Condorcet’s political vision emerges as his idea of democracy is studied from the viewpoint of his historical sensitivity, political economy, constitutional theory and international thoughts. In the end, Condorcet was the thinker who most significantly and prominently contributed to the post-1789 emergence of the concept of ‘democracy’ – which had thitherto been considered as the political form inevitably leading to destructive anarchy and despotic Caesarism – as a viable pathway to stability and prosperity.

AbstractHuman capital represents for Moldova the basic resource for long-term development. The quality of human resources is largely ensured by the education system. The lack of a systemic approach to changes in education is identified in the National Development Strategy “Moldova 2030” as a causal factor in guaranteeing quality education for all. Artificial separation of training (teaching of academic content) from education is still ongoing. In the context of sustainable development, current topics are taught rather mechanically than practiced. Extensively new and often optional curricula are added, instead of integrating these topics into core disciplines and used as a basis for reviewing barriers between disciplines and applied strategies, so that they become more interactive and more targeted. towards the development of transversal competences.There are imperative models / projects of education oriented towards the attainment of the transdisciplinary and transversal competences, oriented towards a graduate endowed with transdisciplinary competences, formed through the prism of all the studied school disciplines and that allow him the active participation in the social and economic life. Promoting curricular approaches through one-day cross-disciplinary activities (recommended in the national curriculum) requires the extension of the competence of the teachers in the field of interdisciplinary learning. Required: collaborative planning (between teachers from different disciplines / curricular areas / domains), models of educational approach that use Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics (STEAM) as access points for guidance in the learning process, in the context of real life, through transdisciplinarity.In the article are: (a) described the practices of integrating the arts in STEAM education in the USA, (b) identified the prospects for integrating the school disciplines in the curricular arts area into the STEAM education in the primary education level in the Republic of Moldova. STEAM education is an innovative initiative in learning, which supports the development and practice of the skills of students and young people of the century. XXI, considered one of the main trends in world education, practiced in the US and over 10 countries in the EU. The integration of STEAM education models into the Moldovan education system (starting with early education and primary education) can contribute to the effective implementation of educational policies through the regulatory function (targeted by the teleological component) and the strategic function targeted by the content and process components.

The relevance of the problem covered is explained by the essence of goal-setting of any activity, which determines its final result and procedural structure. The direction of actions of state bodies in responding to crimes depends on it, as well as the arsenal of means provided for this to the law enforcement officer. The Criminal Procedure Code of the Russian Federation does not have a norm directly formulating the goal and objectives of criminal judicial proceedings. The legislator has applied such a non-standard category as “purpose”, which replaced the customary provisions that existed for more than 40 years on the tasks of criminal proceedings, enshrined in the previously existing code. Since the procedural law does not name the goals and objectives of the criminal process, the analysis of the target settings of modern criminal justice, the essence of the categories “purpose”, “goal”, “task”, their correlation and meaning is of particular importance. The Author analyzes the points of view of the processors of the pre-revolutionary and modern periods. The conclusion about the differentiation of the given concepts is made. Unlike the views of most scholars, the Author believes that purpose and goal are identical concepts, since they determine the final result of procedural activities. The goal is seen as the end result of the activity, and the task is determined by the goal and is considered as the result of its separate stage. Therefore, the Author conditionally correlates these categories as general (goal) and particular (task). There can be many tasks, and they are subject to changes under certain conditions, and the goal is always the same. The goal of any criminal process is determined by the need to streamline the dispute between the parties arising from the crime committed. The absence of clearly formulated elements of goal-setting prevents the assessment of the effectiveness of activities to resolve a criminal-legal conflict. The flaws in the legal structure of teleological norms of the current Criminal Procedure Code of the Russian Federation are noted. On the basis of a comparison of the views of procedural scholars, analysis of regulatory legal acts, the author came to the conclusion that the result of the criminal process should be the protection of the rights and legitimate interests of individuals, organizations, society and the state from criminal encroachments; protection of the individual from illegal and unjustified accusations, convictions, restrictions on his rights and freedoms. The tasks, despite their uncertainty from the point of view of legal regulation, constitute an established formula: quick and complete disclosure of a crime, the appointment of a just punishment to the guilty, education and prevention. The Author believes that the current structure of norms on the appointment of criminal proceedings does not reflect the absolute need to protect the interests of society and the state, and also does not define specific tasks as a guideline for the law enforcement officer to fulfill them in each criminal case in order to achieve this goal. Therefore, we propose our own legal structure of the norm on the tasks of legal proceedings, complementing the current provisions.

Straipsnyje analizuojami filosofo ir antropologo Edmundo Gendrolio (1938–1994) filosofiniai ntropologiniai samprotavimai apie žmogaus savivokos, save suvokiančio mąstymo raidą. Gendrolis nuosekliai rėmėsi socialinės ir kultūrinės antropologijos teorijomis, empiriniais paleoantropologijos tyrinėjimais, etologijos prielaidomis. Straipsnio tikslas yra parodyti Gendrolio filosofinių antropologinių samprotavimų pecifiškumą, išskiriant jo bendruomeninės abstraktaus mąstymo kilmės teoriją, pabrėžiant solidarumo ir kultūros tvermės formų svarbą žmogaus raidai nuo seniausių Homo erectus laikų. Straipsnyje parodoma, kad Gendrolis nuosaikiai kritikavo marksistinę darbo teoriją, zoologinį individualizmą, linijinį evoliucionizmą, filosofinės antropologijos spekuliatyvumą, ir tvirtinama, kad jis savitai, dialektiškai plėtojo neoevoliucionizmo teorijas, papildytas F. Boaso teorinėmis prielaidomis. Gendrolis atskirai išskyrė istoriškumo bei evoliucijos daugialinijiškumo teorijas, tokiu būdu siekdamas suformuoti savitą sociokultūrinės antropologijos metodologiją ir pasipriešinti unifikaciniam europocentrizmui bei kolonializmui. Pagrindiniai žodžiai: filosofinė antropologija, sociokultūrinė antropologija, neoevoliucionizmas, bendruomeniškumas, darbas, zoologinis individualizmas.E. Gendrolis’ Theory of Communitarian Development of the Human BeingGintautas Mažeikis SummaryConsiderations of philosopher and social anthropologists Edmundas Gendrolis (1938–1994) about selfimagination and self-understanding of human beings from the point of social and cultural anthropology and paleoanthropology are analyzed. Gendrolis supported his considerations by theories and ethodologies, researches of social and cultural anthropology, paleoanthropology, ethology, Marxist philosophy. The aim of the article is to show the specificity of his philosophical anthropological considerations, especially of theory of communitarian ideation, development of conscious solidarity, cultural continuity from the time of Homo erectus. The article shows that Gendrolis moderately criticized the Marxist theory of work, zoological individualism, linear evolutionarism, Eurocentrism, racism and cultural segregation. He tried to resist the colonial and neocolonial tendencies in anthropological discourses and to support common po stcolonial attitudes to the history of tribes and small nations. On the contrary, he developed ideas of F. Boas, multilinear cultural Evolutionarism, ideas of L. A. White, M. Sahlins, E. R. Service and the dialectical approach to the complexity of issues of the human being. Such issues are morphological changes of paleoanthropos and neoanthropos, domestic life and household, exogamy and taboo, totems and early forms of faith, tools of the work and art pictures. He tried to develop the humanistic approach to the Homo erectus and Neanderthals as the basis for the future humanistic interpretation of traditional tribes and small nations. Such considerations corresponded to the Lithuanian world conception and to the attempts to liberate themselves from the Soviet occupation and Soviet cultural hegemony. He maintained the main subject of self-comprehending thinking to be community and its skills of cooperation and ideation. Ideation is the process of forming and relating ideas, images and ideals. The process of ideation, the making of abstract solutions and conceptual memory depends on community network, trust, solidarity that could be supported by common rituals, games, art, by the process of education of children. Ideation influenced the skills of hunters, pickers, formed wedding rules, trade among the modern Homini sapiens. And vice versa: all human activities supported and developed the process of abstract thinking and collective ideation. The integral approach to the issues of human being and the theory of multilinear evolution of them became the basis for criticism of Marxist anthropology. He criticized Marxism as well as social Darwinism and any other evolutionism as too much teleological, deterministic and dogmatic theories. His other critical point is about zoological individualism which accumulates a lot of negative interpretations of savages and provides cultural aggression. However, Gendrolis stayed alone from the European social or cultural anthropological movement, and his very large and quite deep considerations didn’t become the beginning of the institutional development of social or cultural anthropological studines in Lithuania. He developed a very little dialog with local ethnologists, and it was the reason for narrow interpretations of his theories. However, his books, articles and ideas are interesting and actual for modern social and philosophical anthropologists.

Abstract This article interprets the historiography of two modern Chinese historians, Fu Sinian and Chen Yinke, who both have been labeled the Chinese Ranke. Both historians have in recent years attracted a lot of attention in China, due to their prominent and very different concepts of national history. In this article Axel Schneider brings out the characteristics of their approaches to history by, first, situating modern historiography within the context of the philosophical crisis of modernity. By "modernity" he refers to the process of historicization and, hence, relativization of norms and values once conceived as timeless and universal. In Europe, this process has been characterized by a decline of metaphysical and theological assumptions on the structure of the world and a concomitant decline of traditional assertions of ontological and epistemological coherence. In China, this process challenged the inherited, very prominent status of traditional historiography as a core field for political and philosophical debates. Second, he interprets Chen Yinke's and Fu Sinian's writings against the background of an understanding of Ranke's historiography that acknowledges the dual nature of Ranke's approach as consisting of both, the widely known text-critical, objectivist methodology and a less known, hermeneutic methodology of empathetic understanding that is based on Ranke's belief in divine providence underlying the particular manifestations of history. Axel Schneider comes to the conclusion that neither Fu nor Chen can be labeled the Chinese Ranke. Fu was mainly oriented towards the positivist sciences. He advocated a view of history as determined by factors comparable to laws in the sciences. He envisions history as characterized by universal progress towards a rational, scientific mode of thought. He argues against any kind of interpretation, and formulates the task of the historian as consisting of the verification and organization of the material, allowing the bare facts contained in the material to speak for themselves. He thus subordinates China's history to universal laws and tries to establish a Chinese identity by fitting China into world history as determined by characteristics that are universal, but in fact are of Western origin. Given this methodology, it is not unlikely that in spite of the fact that Fu only referred once to Ranke, he equated his approach with that of Ranke. However, his Ranke clearly was the empiricist Ranke. Chen Yinke, in contrast to Fu, stressed cultural particularity assuming that all cultures are of equal status, thus implying a universalist perspective. His research was based on the assumption that Chinese history is characterized by the gradual development of its particular "national spirit". What guarded him against relativism was the notion of "the universality of abstract ideals". He recovers the lost universal by assuming the formal universality of human attachment to "abstract ideals" that do vary from culture to culture, but have to be protected in order to safeguard the identity of the respective cultures. The ideals and their corresponding cultures can not be integrated into world history by general schemes of evolution or by means of universal norms. It is Chinese history that speaks to Chen who thereby wants to establish an identity that can only be integrated into the larger world through respect for each culture's commitment to its specific ideals. Accordingly, the historian has to adopt a historicist, hermeneutic methodology. His research should aim at the "empathetic understanding" of the historical manifestations of the national spirit. Although Chen never referred to Ranke, later historians claimed to know of such an influence. Chen's position surely was closer to the hermeneutic Ranke who struggled with the problem of the relationship between the individual and the universal and who opposed any notion of teleological progress. However, while Ranke had lived in a Christian world still comparatively at peace with its theological assumption of a divine providence, Chen could not fall back on a Christian God for solace. He was - far more than Ranke - confronted with far-reaching changes, bringing about the rapid decline of his Confucian world.

Research problem and degree of the research. Protecting the rights of the child is one of the most important issues today, both nationally and internationally. The situation is particularly complicated when it comes to international adoption. The adoption institute transcends all cultures and has long since existed, having played different functions over time. This institute has come to reflect social changes relating to how society faces a child’s needs, the way of exercising parental responsibilities and the needs of birth parents and adoptive parents. This is a subject increasingly relevant within the phenomenon of globalization and the urgency given to children and their rights in contemporary society. This is a subject for today and for the future. The adoptive child, due to his or her subjective characteristics, is unable to exercise his or her rights properly. This obligation must be exercised by the child’s parents or the State and its authorities. Although the Constitution of the Republic of Lithuania guarantees that every child has the right to grow up in a family, many children do not have a family and are forced to grow up in foster care. In this situation, an adoption institute emerges, which, at least from dallies, gives the child a chance to live in a family. In Portugal, the strong connection between the principle of the child´s best interest, major principle of family law, deeply influences the entire legal institute and, specially, the matter of international adoption. The placing of children in a foreign family is a subsidiary option, in great deal due to the difficulties that they will find from the moment they exit their country of origin. Difficulties such as differences in culture, language, religion, habits, among others that may result in children´s cultural uprooting and affect their cultural identity, beyond the cut with their biological family, implied in any adoption. Subject of the article: protection of the rights of the child and problems in cross-border adoption. Aim of the work: to analyse whether the rights of the child in the case of international adoption are violated. Research methods: teleological, historical, comparative analysis of legislation, generalization, analysis, and synthesis of scientific literature, descriptive, comparative, analytical methods. The right of the child to grow up in a family is enshrined in the basic international instruments. It is in the family that the life and socialization of each child begins. It creates an atmosphere for the child to grow, develop and explore the world. The child should grow as much as possible to feel the love, care, and responsibility of his parents. Adoption is a significant process in many states. The main international instrument governing adoption is the Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Cooperation in respect of Intercountry Adoption. States, in accordance with both their national and international legislation on adoption, seek to enable the child to grow up in a new family, while ensuring that such adoption best protects the rights and interests of the child. In Portugal, the child’s best interest is a fundamental concept in this matter, for a true concept of individual rights is one in which the child is considered a subject of rights, and not object of them. This principle is the guiding principle for the exercise of private responsibilities in relation to children, as well as public ones, and should be considered both in state and judicial decisions and actions. The child’s best interest is an indeterminate legal concept, varying with the customs of each society, taking into evolutionary and dynamic nature, and depending on case-by-case evaluation. This continues to be a divisive issue in Portugal and Law No. 2/2016, of 29 February eliminates discrimination against persons of the same sex who live in a de facto union or are married, in access to adoption, civil sponsorship and other family legal relationships, making all the legal changes. Key words: child, adoption, child’s right to grow up in a family, international adoption.

Entrepreneurs’ decision-making process is one of the main research topics in entrepreneurship studies. This research aims to conceptualize the antecedents of new venture creation decision in Iranian high tech industries. The research utilizes an innovative non-teleological approach in order to take into account the specific regional context of Iran. Most research into entrepreneurial decision making utilizes teleological approaches; however, these models could not adequately explain the phenomena within the Iranian context. This qualitative study utilized event- based interviews with 20 nascent entrepreneurs. Results from coding, categorizing and validating the research findings, revealed 3 main categories as antecedents of new venture creation decision. Accordingly, concepts of entrepreneurial meta-cognition; primary actions and receiving feedback; and positive attitude toward change, constitute the main antecedents of new venture creation decision in this context. The findings also reveal the non-teleological nature of entrepreneurial decision-making, and adoption of some effectuation logics in the studied decision-making process.

AbstractThe paper returns to the complex question of the sociolinguistic history of Italy during the Renaissance. The traditional historiography of the Italian language adopts a teleological perspective, often defining the codification of Italian in 1525 with the publication of Pietro Bembo’s Prose della volgar lingua. This approach means that less attention has been devoted to other processes of language change, as well as less focus on areas outside Tuscany. Using the major historical grammars of Italian, I highlight cases of variation which emphasize the non-uniformitarian nature of the standard. One major process while the standard was evolving was the formation of a koine or ‘common language’. This was the main feature of language change throughout much of north Italy. Recent research into the histories of non-Italo Romance varieties have suggested that standardization and koineization are not mutually exclusive processes. Rather, they are best characterised by a ‘top-down’ vs. ‘bottom-up’ approach respectively, with many points of intersection. The paper transposes these notions onto the sociolinguistic landscape of Renaissance Italy, allowing for further insight into how Italian was codified in particular, and the relationship between standards and koines more generally.

AbstractAlthough literary critics continue to make programmatic claims about not only describing but also explaining literary change, and numerous textbooks and individual studies in literary history insinuate or claim to explain literary change, explanations of literary change are as of yet insufficiently reflected in the field’s methodology. Is it at all possible to provide explanations in literary history, where no strict laws have been discovered yet? If yes, what do these explanations look like and in which circumstances are they valid? Understanding literary change as the variance in a specific genre’s instantiation over time, this paper works from the point of departure of explanatory pluralism, the assumption that scientific explanations are to a certain degree discipline-specific and that various different types of explanations exist. The paper aims at an interpenetration of theory and practice and therefore analyzes different types of explanations through a concrete example of literary change. In particular, it focuses on the boom of fictional essay writing that occurred during the first third of the 20th century in German-speaking countries, thus analyzing the two trends of the fictionalization of the essay and the insertion of essayistic passages into fictional texts (e. g., the essayistic novel). The paper examines causal, statistical, intentional, functional, teleological and structur­al explanations for this literary change.Causal explanations, it is argued, cannot be employed as long as no general laws for literary change have been identified. However, it is possible to identify certain causal factors for literary change through the interplay of biographic and intertextual studies, which can be further validated by statistical approaches. Intentional explanations of literary change can generally be created through the time-consuming process of collecting explanations for the writing of single works, but they face the problem that author’s intentions, as reported in self-commen­taries or poetological texts, are often too unspecific or too specific for the work being explained. Functional explanations face two difficulties. First, literature rarely solves social problems, and therefore the benefit that functional explanations presuppose can usually only consist in the thematization of social problems. Second, the causal feedback mechanism that underlies functional explanations presupposes a mechanism for social selection amongst works of literature that promotes works that have social benefit. However, only a very idealized literature market could provide for social selection along these lines. Teleological explanations, which ascribe inherent development trends to genres, are not only dubious from the perspective of the philosophy of science, but fail to explain why these trends manifest themselves in specific historical situations. Structural explana­tions identify underlying ›deep structures‹ of text corpora that might correspond to social or ideational structures. These explanations, however, are also question­able, because they usually don’t provide information about the causal mechanisms that may lead to this correspondence.Two consequences, this paper argues, can be drawn from the analysis of various types of explanation of literary change. Concluding that full-fledged explanations of literary change are either very time-consuming and laborious (statistical and additive intentional explanations), or only employable under specific conditions and idealizing background assumptions (functional explanations), it suggests the follow­ing. First, literary scholars could revise their practice of answering ›why‹ questions in literary history and abstain from explaining literary change except in those cases when they elaborated full-fledged explanations. Second, alternatively, they could continue their existing practice but refrain from describing it as ›explaining‹ literary change. Instead, they could describe their activity in less demanding terms, e. g. as ›the search for overarching narratives‹, which nevertheless is of value in terms of didactics, knowledge synthesis, or the reduction of complexity.

Changes in educational systems are necessary and hey, in fact, represent an attempt to overcome a crisis. They have common or similar causes and thus also common actions and they are immanent to the development of every society. In the classification of such shangcs one can use different approaches, for example: time, systematic approach, structural changes, teleological approach and thus we obtain different classificatory models. Tendencies in the educational development in Yugoslavia go in the direction of raising the quality of the educational activities (which is one of the characteristics of all reforms). Then towards the metamophosis of the pedagogical process with inner changes in the schools, development of society with the so - called outer changes. The dialectics of social changes determine the educational ones as permanent processes.

Abstract Interorganizational collaboration is often at the crux of making decisions that impact and are impacted by inherent tensions of the human experience. Many theoretical models and literature reviews conceptualize collaboration through a teleological lens where being "good" is tied to accomplishing the collaboration's goals. In this essay, we broaden the understanding of collaboration problematizing what is meant by a good outcome. We propose collaboration is a principled activity with associated processes and outcomes and advance three arguments. First, that collaboration when viewed as a principled activity changes our understanding of collaborative processes and the way we might evaluate collaborative outcomes. Second, that dialogue operates as "ethical practice" and is woven through communication in collaboration that facilitates principles such as legitimacy, accountability, and shared power. Third, a principled lens of collaboration further develops the principled negotiation process, problematizing so-called objective criteria for decision making. This essay begins by attending to certain principles associated with collaboration processes. We review the experience of communication in collaboration as being oriented toward dialogue, interests, conflict, consensus, and solutions. Building on the ways in which communication is oriented to in collaboration, we use an empirical example to posit the importance of conceptualizing and evaluating collaboration as principled. By directing attention to principles as an important component of collaboration, scholars are positioned to recognize useful responses and the implications of those responses for collaborating.

Information Systems (IS) projects are found to be complex, unpredictable, and prone to time and cost overruns. Perhaps that is why organisations put a strong focus on IS controls during the planning and execution of such projects.IS control literature in the past has focussed on dyadic control relationships during an outsourced IS development project and relatively little is known about such controls during a complex enterprise systems project. Existing studies usually take a static view of IS controls and do not investigate how controls evolve during different phases of the system lifecycle, as well as across projects. This study presents a processual view of IS controls in the enterprise systems lifecycle in a national blood processing organisation. Traditional research in a blood banking context has focussed on optimising the process of blood collection, inventory management, and distribution with relatively limited attention to the implementation of the supporting information systems. This research focusses on the evolution of control based on a study of three enterprise system implementation projects in the case organisation. The study demonstrates that while all five control modes (input, outcome, behaviour, clan, and self-control) are applied across the phases of enterprise systems projects, the nature and extent of control mechanisms changes across the phases of the enterprise system lifecycle. The findings also suggest a teleological evolution of a project’s control portfolio in which the portfolio evolves based on adaptive learning processes from earlier projects. Finally, by exhibiting the influence of institutional and market context, this study also underlines the multi-stakeholder and contextual nature of enterprise systems implementation and associated controls in health service organisations.

Imagine this historical scene, if you will. It is 1892, and you are up in the gallery at Her Majesty’s Theatre in Sydney, taking in an English burlesque. The people around you have just found out that Alice Leamar will not be performing her famed turn in Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay tonight, a high-kicking Can-Canesque number, very much the dance du jour. Your fellow audience members are none too pleased about this – they are shouting, and stamping the heels of their boots so loudly the whole theatre resounds with the noise. Most people in the expensive seats below look up in the direction of the gallery with a familiar blend of fear and loathing. The rough ‘gods’ up there are nearly always restless, more this time than usual. The uproar fulfils its purpose, though, because tomorrow night, Leamar’s act will be reinstated: the ‘gods’ will have their way (Bulletin, 1 October 1892). Another scene now, this time at the Newtown Bridge Theatre in Sydney, shortly after the turn of the twentieth century. A comedian is trying a new routine for the crowd, but no one seems much impressed so far. A few discontented rumbles begin at first – ‘I want to go home’, says one wag, and then another – and soon these gain momentum, so that almost everyone is caught up in an ecstasy of roisterous abuse. A burly ‘chucker out’ appears, trying to eject some of the loudest hecklers, and a fully-fledged punch-up ensues (Djubal 19, 23; Cheshire 86). Eventually, one or two men are made to leave – but so too is the hapless comedian, evicted by derisive howls from the stage. The scenes I have just described show that audience interaction was a key feature in late-nineteenth century popular theatre, and in some cases even persisted into the following century. Obviously, there was no formal voting mechanism used during these performances à la contemporary shows like Idol. But rowdy practises amounted to a kind of audience ‘vote’ nonetheless, through which people decided those entertainers they wanted to see and those they emphatically did not. In this paper, I intend to use these bald parallels between Victorian audience practices and new-millennium viewer-voting to investigate claims about the links between democracy and plebiscitary entertainment. The rise of voting for pleasure in televised contests and online polls is widely attended by debate about democracy (e.g. Andrejevic; Coleman; Hartley, “Reality”). The most hyped commentary on this count evokes a teleological assumption – that western history is inexorably moving towards direct democracy. This view becomes hard to sustain when we consider the extent to which the direct expression of audience views was a feature of Victorian popular entertainment, and that these participatory practices were largely suppressed by the turn of the twentieth century. Old audience practices also allow us to question some of the uses of the term ‘direct democracy’ in new media commentary. Descriptions of voting for pleasure as part of a growth towards direct democracy are often made to celebrate rather than investigate plebiscitary forms. They elide the fact that direct democracy is a vexed political ideal. And they limit our discussion of voting for leisure and fun. Ultimately, arguing back and forth about whether viewer-voting is democratic stops us from more interesting explorations of this emerging cultural phenomenon. ‘To a degree that would be unimaginable to theatregoers today’, says historian Robert Allen, ‘early nineteenth-century audiences controlled what went on at the theatre’. The so-called ‘shirt-sleeve’ crowd in the cheapest seats of theatrical venues were habitually given to hissing, shouting, and even throwing objects in order to evict performers during the course of a show. The control exerted by the peanut-chomping gallery was certainly apparent in the mid-century burlesques Allen writes about (55). It was also apparent in minstrel, variety and music hall productions until around the turn of the century. Audience members in the galleries of variety theatres and music halls regularly engaged in the pleasure of voicing their aesthetic preferences. Sometimes comic interjectors from among them even drew more laughs than the performers on stage. ‘We went there not as spectators but as performers’, as an English music-hall habitué put it (Bailey 154). In more downmarket venues such as Sydney’s Newtown Bridge Theatre, these participatory practices continued into the early 1900s. Boisterous audience practices came under sustained attack in the late-Victorian era. A series of measures were taken by authorities, theatre managers and social commentators to wrest the control of popular performances from those in theatre pits and galleries. These included restricting the sale of alcohol in theatre venues, employing brawn in the form of ‘chuckers out’, and darkening auditoriums, so that only the stage was illuminated and the audience thus de-emphasised (Allen 51–61; Bailey 157–68; Waterhouse 127, 138–43). They also included a relentless public critique of those engaging in heckling behaviours, thus displaying their ‘littleness of mind’ (Age, 6 Sep. 1876). The intensity of attacks on rowdy audience participation suggests that symbolic factors were at play in late-Victorian attempts to enforce decorous conduct at the theatre. The last half of the century was, after all, an era of intense debate about the qualities necessary for democratic citizenship. The suffrage was being dramatically expanded during this time, so that it encompassed the vast majority of white men – and by the early twentieth century, many white women as well. In Australia, the prelude to federation also involved debate about the type of democracy to be adopted. Should it be republican? Should it enfranchise all men and women; all people, or only white ones? At stake in these debates were the characteristics and subjectivities one needed to possess before being deemed capable of enfranchisement. To be worthy of the vote, as of other democratic privileges, one needed to be what Toby Miller has called a ‘well-tempered’ subject at the turn of the twentieth century (Miller; Joyce 4). One needed to be carefully deliberative and self-watching, to avoid being ‘savage’, ‘uncivilised’, emotive – all qualities which riotous audience members (like black people and women) were thought not to possess (Lake). This is why the growing respectability of popular theatre is so often considered a key feature of the modernisation of popular culture. Civil and respectful audience behaviours went hand in hand with liberal-democratic concepts of the well-tempered citizen. Working-class culture in late nineteenth-century England has famously (and notoriously) been described as a ‘culture of consolation’: an escapist desire for fun based on a fatalistic acceptance of under-privilege and social discrimination (Jones). This idea does not do justice to the range of hopes and efforts to create a better society among workingpeople at the time. But it still captures the motivation behind most unruly audience behaviours: a gleeful kind of resistance or ‘culture jamming’ which viewed disruption and uproar as ends in themselves, without the hope that they would be productive of improved social conditions. Whether or not theatrical rowdiness served a solely consolatory purpose for the shirt-sleeve crowd, it certainly evoked a sharp fear of disorderly exuberance in mainstream society. Anxieties about violent working-class uprisings leading to the institution of mob rule were a characteristic of the late-nineteenth century, often making their way into fiction (Brantlinger). Roisterous behaviours in popular theatres resonated with the concerns expressed in works such as Caesar’s Column (Donnelly), feeding on a long association between the theatre and misrule. These fears obviously stand in stark contrast to the ebullient commentary surrounding interactive entertainment today. Over-oxygenated rhetoric about the democratic potential of cyberspace was of course a feature of new media commentary at the beginning of the 1990s (for a critique of such rhetoric see Meikle 33–42; Grossman). Current helium-giddy claims about digital technologies as ‘democratising’ reprise this cyberhype (Andrejevic 12–15, 23–8; Jenkins and Thornburn). One recent example of upbeat talk about plebiscitary formats as direct democracy is John Hartley’s contribution to the edited collection, Politicotainment (Hartley, “Reality”). There are now a range of TV shows and online formats, he says, which offer audiences the opportunity to directly express their views. The development of these entertainment forms are part of a movement towards a ‘direct open network’ in global media culture (3). They are also part of a macro historical shift: a movement ‘down the value chain of meaning’ which has taken place over the past few centuries (Hartley, “Value Chain”). Hartley’s notion of a ‘value chain of meaning’ is an application of business analysis to media and cultural studies. In business, a value chain is what links the producer/originator, via commodity/distribution, to the consumer. In the same way, Hartley says, one might speak of a symbolic value chain moving from an author/producer, via the text, to the audience/consumer. Much of western history may indeed be understood as a movement along this chain. In pre-modern times, meaning resided in the author. The Divine Author, God, was regarded as the source of all meaning. In the modern period, ‘after Milton and Johnson’, meaning was located in texts. Experts observed the properties of a text or other object, and by this means discovered its meaning. In ‘the contemporary period’, however – the period roughly following the Second World War – meaning has overwhelming come to be located with audiences or consumers (Hartley, “Value Chain” 131–35). It is in this context, Hartley tells us, that the plebiscite is coming to the fore. As a means of allowing audiences to directly represent their own choices, the plebiscite is part of a new paradigm taking shape, as global culture moves away from the modern epoch and its text-dominated paradigm (Hartley, “Reality” 1–3). Talk of a symbolic value chain is a self-conscious example of the logic of business/cultural partnership currently circulating in neo-liberal discourse. It is also an example of a teleological understanding of history, through which the past few centuries are presented as part of a linear progression towards direct democracy. This teleology works well with the up-tempo talk of television as ‘democratainment’ in Hartley’s earlier work (Hartley, Uses of Television). Western history is essentially a triumphant progression, he implies, from the Dark Ages, to representative democracy, to the enlightened and direct ‘consumer democracy’ unfolding around us today (Hartley, “Reality” 47). Teleological assumptions are always suspect from an historical point of view. For a start, casting the modern period as one in which meaning resided overwhelmingly in the text fails to consider the culture of popular performance flourishing before the twentieth century. Popular theatrical forms were far more significant to ordinary people of the nineteenth century than the notions of empirical or textual analysis cultivated in elite circles. Burlesques, minstrel-shows, music hall and variety productions all took a playful approach to their texts, altering their tone and content in line with audience expectations (Chevalier 40). Before the commercialisation of popular theatre in the late-nineteenth century, many theatricals also worked in a relatively open-ended way. At concert saloons or ‘free-and-easies’ (pubs where musical performances were offered), amateur singers volunteered their services, stepping out from the audience to perform an act or two and then disappearing into it again (Joyce 206). As a precursor to TV talent contests and ‘open mic’ comedy sessions today, many theatrical managers held amateur nights in which would-be professionals tried their luck before a restless crowd, with a contract awarded to performers drawing the loudest applause (Watson 5). Each of these considerations challenge the view that open participatory networks are the expression of an historical process through which meaning has only recently come to reside with audiences and consumers. Another reason for suspecting teleological notions about democracy is that it proceeds as if Foucauldian analysis did not exist. Characterising history as a process of democratisation tends to equate democracy with openness and freedom in an uncritical way. It glosses over the fact that representative democracy involved the repression of directly participatory practices and unruly social groups. More pertinently, it ignores critiques of direct democracy. Even if there are positive aspects to the re-emergence of participatory practices among audiences today, there are still real problems with direct democracy as a political ideal. It would be fairly easy to make the case that rowdy Victorian audiences engaged in ‘direct democratic’ practices during the course of a variety show or burlesque. The ‘gods’ in Victorian galleries exulted in expressing their preferences: evicting lack-lustre comics and demanding more of other performers. It would also be easy to valorise these practices as examples of the kind of culture-jamming I referred to earlier – as forms of resistance to the tyranny of well-tempered citizenship gaining sway at the time. Given the often hysterical attacks directed at unruly audiences, there is an obvious satisfaction to be had from observing the reinstatement of Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay at Her Majesty’s Theatre, or in the pleasure that working-class audiences derived from ‘calling the tune’. The same kind of satisfaction is not to be had, however, when observing direct democracy in action on YouTube, or during a season of Dancing with the Stars, or some other kind of plebiscitary TV. The expression of audience preferences in this context hardly carries the subversive connotations of informal evictions during a late-Victorian music-hall show. Viewer-voting today is indeed dominated by a rhetoric of partnership which centres on audience participation, rather than a notion of opposition between producers and audiences (Jenkins). The terrain of plebiscitary entertainment is very different now from the terrain of popular culture described by Stuart Hall in the 1980s – let alone as it stood in the 1890s, during Alice Leamar’s tour. Most commentary on plebiscitary TV avoids talk of ‘cultural struggle’ (Hall 235) and instead adopts a language of collaboration and of people ‘having a ball’ (Neville; Hartley, “Reality” 3). The extent to which contemporary plebiscites are managed by what Hartley calls the ‘plebiscitary industries’ evokes one of the most powerful criticisms made against direct democracy. That is, it evokes the view that direct democracy allows commercial interests to set the terms of public participation in decision-making, and thus to influence its outcomes (Barber 36; Moore 55–56). There is obviously big money to be made from plebiscitary TV. The advertising blitz which takes place during viewer-voting programs, and the vote-rigging scandals so often surrounding them make this clear. These considerations highlight the fact that public involvement in a plebiscitary process is not something to make a song and dance about unless broad involvement first takes place in deciding the issues open for determination by plebiscite, and the way in which these issues are framed. In the absence of this kind of broad participation, engagement in plebiscitary forms serves a solely consolatory function, offering the pleasures of viewer-voting as a substitute for substantive involvement in cultural creation and political change. Another critique sometimes made against direct democracy is that it makes an easy vehicle for prejudice (Barber 36–7). This was certainly the case in Victorian theatres, where it was common for Anglo gallery-members to heckle female and non-white performers in an intimidatory way. A group of American vaudeville performers called the Cherry Sisters certainly experienced this phenomenon in the early 1900s. The Cherry Sisters were defiantly unglamorous middle-aged women in a period when female performers were increasingly expected to display scantily-clad youthful figures on stage. As a consequence, they were embroiled in a number of near-riots in which male audience members hurled abuse and heavy objects from the galleries, and in some cases chased them into the street to physically assault them there (Pittinger 76–77). Such incidents give us a glimpse of the dark face of direct democracy. In some cases, the direct expression of popular views becomes an attack on diversity, leading to the kind of violent mêlée experienced either by the Cherry Sisters or the Middle Eastern people attacked on Sydney’s Cronulla Beach at the end of 2005. ‘Democracy’ is always an obviously politically loaded term when used in debates about new media. It is frequently used to imply that particular cultural or technological forms are inherently liberatory and inclusive. As Graeme Turner points out, reality TV has been celebrated as ‘democratic’ in this way. Only rarely, however, is there an attempt to argue why this is the case – to show how viewer-voting formats actually serve a democratic agenda. It was for this reason that Turner argued that the inclusion of ordinary people on reality TV should be understood as demotic rather than democratic (Turner, Understanding Celebrity 82–5; Turner, “Mass Production”). Ultimately, however, it is immaterial whether one uses the term ‘demotic’ or ‘direct democratic’ to describe the growth of plebiscitary entertainment. What is important is that we avoid making inflated claims about the direct expression of audience views, using the term ‘democratic’ to give an unduly celebratory spin to the political complexities involved. People may indeed be having a ball as they take part in online polls or choose what they want to watch on YouTube or shout at the TV during an episode of Idol. The ‘participatory enthusiasm’ that fans feel watching a show like Big Brother may also have lessons for those interested in making parliamentary process more responsive to people’s interests and needs (Coleman 458). But the development of plebiscitary forms is not inherently democratic in the sense that Turner suggests the term should be used – that is, it does not of itself serve a liberatory or socially inclusive agenda. Nor does it lead to substantive participation in cultural and political processes. In the end, it seems to me that we need to move beyond the discussion of plebiscitary entertainment in terms of democracy. The whole concept of democracy as the yardstick against which new media should be measured is highly problematic. Not only is direct democracy a vexed political ideal to start off with – it also leads commentators to take predictable positions when debating its relationship to new technologies and cultural forms. Some turn to hype, others to critique, and the result often appears as a mere restatement of the commentators’ political inclinations rather than a useful investigation of the developments at hand. Some of the most intriguing aspects of plebiscitary entertainments are left unexplored if we remain preoccupied with democracy. One might well investigate the re-introduction of studio audiences and participatory audience practices, for example, as a nostalgia for the interactivity experienced in live theatres such as the Newtown Bridge in the early twentieth century. It certainly seems to me that a retro impulse informs some of the developments in televised stand-up comedy in recent years. This was obviously the case for Paul McDermott’s The Side Show on Australian television in 2007, with its nod to the late-Victorian or early twentieth-century fairground and its live-theatrical vibe. More relevantly here, it also seems to be the case for American viewer-voting programs such as Last Comic Standing and the Comedy Channel’s Open Mic Fight. Further, reviews of programs such as Idol sometimes emphasise the emotional engagement arising out of their combination of viewer-voting and live performance as a harking-back to the good old days when entertainment was about being real (Neville). One misses this nostalgia associated with plebiscitary entertainments if bound to a teleological assumption that they form part of an ineluctable progression towards the New and the Free. Perhaps, then, it is time to pay more attention to the historical roots of viewer-voting formats, to think about the way that new media is sometimes about a re-invention of the old, trying to escape the recurrent back-and-forthing of debate about their relationship to progress and democracy. References Allen, Robert C. Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture .Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Andrejevic, Mark. Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2004. Bailey, Peter. Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the Contest for Control, 1830–1885. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978. Barber, Benjamin R. Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. ———. “Which Technology and Which Democracy?” Democracy and New Media. Eds. Henry Jenkins and David Thorburn. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2003. 33–48. Brantlinger, Patrick, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1988. Cheshire, D. F. Music Hall in Britain. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1974. Chevalier, Albert. Before I Forget: The Autobiography of a Chevalier d’Industrie. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1901. Coleman, Stephen. “How the Other Half Votes: Big Brother Viewers and the 2005 General Election”. International Journal of Cultural Studies 9.4 (2006): 457–79. Djubal, Clay. “From Minstrel Tenor to Vaudeville Showman: Harry Clay, ‘A Friend of the Australian Performer’”. Australasian Drama Studies 34 (April 1999): 10–24. Donnelly, Ignatius. Caesar’s Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century. London: Sampson Low, Marston and Co., 1891. Grossman, Lawrence. The Electronic Republic: Reshaping Democracy in the Information Age. New York: Penguin, 1995. Hall, Stuart. “Notes on Deconstructing the ‘Popular’”. People’s History and Socialist Theory. Ed. Raphael Samuel. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. 227–49. Hartley, John, The Uses of Television. London: Routledge, 1999. ———. “‘Reality’ and the Plebiscite”. Politoctainment: Television’s Take on the Real. Ed. Kristina Riegert. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2006. http://www.cci.edu.au/hartley/downloads/Plebiscite%20(Riegert%20chapter) %20revised%20FINAL%20%5BFeb%2014%5D.pdf. ———. “The ‘Value-Chain of Meaning’ and the New Economy”. International Journal of Cultural Studies 7.1 (2004): 129–41. Jenkins, Henry. “The Cultural Logic of Media Convergence”. International Journal of Cultural Studies 7.1 (2004): 33–43. ———, and David Thornburn. “Introduction: The Digital Revolution, the Informed Citizen, and the Culture of Democracy”. Democracy and New Media. Eds. Henry Jenkins and David Thorburn. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003. 1–20. Jones, Gareth Stedman. ‘Working-Class Culture and Working-Class Politics in London, 1870-1900: Notes on the Remaking of a Working Class’. Languages of Class: Studies in English Working-Class History, 1832–1982. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. 179–238. Joyce, Patrick. The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City. London: Verso, 2003. Lake, Marilyn. “White Man’s Country: The Trans-National History of a National Project”. Australian Historical Studies 122 ( 2003): 346–63. Meikle, Graham. Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet. London: Routledge, 2002. Miller, Toby. The Well-Tempered Self: Citizenship, Culture and the Postmodern Subject. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1993. Moore, Richard K. “Democracy and Cyberspace”. Digital Democracy: Discourse and Decision Making in the Information Age. Eds. Barry Hague and Brian D. Loader. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. 39–59. Neville, Richard. “Crass, Corny, But Still a Woodstock Moment for a New Generation”. Sydney Morning Herald, 23 November 2004. Pittinger, Peach R. “The Cherry Sisters in Early Vaudeville: Performing a Failed Femininity”. Theatre History Studies 24 (2004): 73–97. Turner, Graeme. Understanding Celebrity. London: Sage, 2004. ———. “The Mass Production of Celebrity: ‘Celetoids’, Reality TV and the ‘Demotic Turn’”. International Journal of Cultural Studies 9.2 (2006): 153–165. Waterhouse, Richard. From Minstrel Show to Vaudeville: The Australian Popular Stage, 1788–1914. Sydney: New South Wales University Press, 1990. Watson, Bobby. Fifty Years Behind the Scenes. Sydney: Slater, 1924.

Imagine this historical scene, if you will. It is 1892, and you are up in the gallery at Her Majesty’s Theatre in Sydney, taking in an English burlesque. The people around you have just found out that Alice Leamar will not be performing her famed turn in Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay tonight, a high-kicking Can-Canesque number, very much the dance du jour. Your fellow audience members are none too pleased about this – they are shouting, and stamping the heels of their boots so loudly the whole theatre resounds with the noise. Most people in the expensive seats below look up in the direction of the gallery with a familiar blend of fear and loathing. The rough ‘gods’ up there are nearly always restless, more this time than usual. The uproar fulfils its purpose, though, because tomorrow night, Leamar’s act will be reinstated: the ‘gods’ will have their way (Bulletin, 1 October 1892). Another scene now, this time at the Newtown Bridge Theatre in Sydney, shortly after the turn of the twentieth century. A comedian is trying a new routine for the crowd, but no one seems much impressed so far. A few discontented rumbles begin at first – ‘I want to go home’, says one wag, and then another – and soon these gain momentum, so that almost everyone is caught up in an ecstasy of roisterous abuse. A burly ‘chucker out’ appears, trying to eject some of the loudest hecklers, and a fully-fledged punch-up ensues (Djubal 19, 23; Cheshire 86). Eventually, one or two men are made to leave – but so too is the hapless comedian, evicted by derisive howls from the stage. The scenes I have just described show that audience interaction was a key feature in late-nineteenth century popular theatre, and in some cases even persisted into the following century. Obviously, there was no formal voting mechanism used during these performances à la contemporary shows like Idol. But rowdy practises amounted to a kind of audience ‘vote’ nonetheless, through which people decided those entertainers they wanted to see and those they emphatically did not. In this paper, I intend to use these bald parallels between Victorian audience practices and new-millennium viewer-voting to investigate claims about the links between democracy and plebiscitary entertainment. The rise of voting for pleasure in televised contests and online polls is widely attended by debate about democracy (e.g. Andrejevic; Coleman; Hartley, “Reality”). The most hyped commentary on this count evokes a teleological assumption – that western history is inexorably moving towards direct democracy. This view becomes hard to sustain when we consider the extent to which the direct expression of audience views was a feature of Victorian popular entertainment, and that these participatory practices were largely suppressed by the turn of the twentieth century. Old audience practices also allow us to question some of the uses of the term ‘direct democracy’ in new media commentary. Descriptions of voting for pleasure as part of a growth towards direct democracy are often made to celebrate rather than investigate plebiscitary forms. They elide the fact that direct democracy is a vexed political ideal. And they limit our discussion of voting for leisure and fun. Ultimately, arguing back and forth about whether viewer-voting is democratic stops us from more interesting explorations of this emerging cultural phenomenon. ‘To a degree that would be unimaginable to theatregoers today’, says historian Robert Allen, ‘early nineteenth-century audiences controlled what went on at the theatre’. The so-called ‘shirt-sleeve’ crowd in the cheapest seats of theatrical venues were habitually given to hissing, shouting, and even throwing objects in order to evict performers during the course of a show. The control exerted by the peanut-chomping gallery was certainly apparent in the mid-century burlesques Allen writes about (55). It was also apparent in minstrel, variety and music hall productions until around the turn of the century. Audience members in the galleries of variety theatres and music halls regularly engaged in the pleasure of voicing their aesthetic preferences. Sometimes comic interjectors from among them even drew more laughs than the performers on stage. ‘We went there not as spectators but as performers’, as an English music-hall habitué put it (Bailey 154). In more downmarket venues such as Sydney’s Newtown Bridge Theatre, these participatory practices continued into the early 1900s. Boisterous audience practices came under sustained attack in the late-Victorian era. A series of measures were taken by authorities, theatre managers and social commentators to wrest the control of popular performances from those in theatre pits and galleries. These included restricting the sale of alcohol in theatre venues, employing brawn in the form of ‘chuckers out’, and darkening auditoriums, so that only the stage was illuminated and the audience thus de-emphasised (Allen 51–61; Bailey 157–68; Waterhouse 127, 138–43). They also included a relentless public critique of those engaging in heckling behaviours, thus displaying their ‘littleness of mind’ (Age, 6 Sep. 1876). The intensity of attacks on rowdy audience participation suggests that symbolic factors were at play in late-Victorian attempts to enforce decorous conduct at the theatre. The last half of the century was, after all, an era of intense debate about the qualities necessary for democratic citizenship. The suffrage was being dramatically expanded during this time, so that it encompassed the vast majority of white men – and by the early twentieth century, many white women as well. In Australia, the prelude to federation also involved debate about the type of democracy to be adopted. Should it be republican? Should it enfranchise all men and women; all people, or only white ones? At stake in these debates were the characteristics and subjectivities one needed to possess before being deemed capable of enfranchisement. To be worthy of the vote, as of other democratic privileges, one needed to be what Toby Miller has called a ‘well-tempered’ subject at the turn of the twentieth century (Miller; Joyce 4). One needed to be carefully deliberative and self-watching, to avoid being ‘savage’, ‘uncivilised’, emotive – all qualities which riotous audience members (like black people and women) were thought not to possess (Lake). This is why the growing respectability of popular theatre is so often considered a key feature of the modernisation of popular culture. Civil and respectful audience behaviours went hand in hand with liberal-democratic concepts of the well-tempered citizen. Working-class culture in late nineteenth-century England has famously (and notoriously) been described as a ‘culture of consolation’: an escapist desire for fun based on a fatalistic acceptance of under-privilege and social discrimination (Jones). This idea does not do justice to the range of hopes and efforts to create a better society among workingpeople at the time. But it still captures the motivation behind most unruly audience behaviours: a gleeful kind of resistance or ‘culture jamming’ which viewed disruption and uproar as ends in themselves, without the hope that they would be productive of improved social conditions. Whether or not theatrical rowdiness served a solely consolatory purpose for the shirt-sleeve crowd, it certainly evoked a sharp fear of disorderly exuberance in mainstream society. Anxieties about violent working-class uprisings leading to the institution of mob rule were a characteristic of the late-nineteenth century, often making their way into fiction (Brantlinger). Roisterous behaviours in popular theatres resonated with the concerns expressed in works such as Caesar’s Column (Donnelly), feeding on a long association between the theatre and misrule. These fears obviously stand in stark contrast to the ebullient commentary surrounding interactive entertainment today. Over-oxygenated rhetoric about the democratic potential of cyberspace was of course a feature of new media commentary at the beginning of the 1990s (for a critique of such rhetoric see Meikle 33–42; Grossman). Current helium-giddy claims about digital technologies as ‘democratising’ reprise this cyberhype (Andrejevic 12–15, 23–8; Jenkins and Thornburn). One recent example of upbeat talk about plebiscitary formats as direct democracy is John Hartley’s contribution to the edited collection, Politicotainment (Hartley, “Reality”). There are now a range of TV shows and online formats, he says, which offer audiences the opportunity to directly express their views. The development of these entertainment forms are part of a movement towards a ‘direct open network’ in global media culture (3). They are also part of a macro historical shift: a movement ‘down the value chain of meaning’ which has taken place over the past few centuries (Hartley, “Value Chain”). Hartley’s notion of a ‘value chain of meaning’ is an application of business analysis to media and cultural studies. In business, a value chain is what links the producer/originator, via commodity/distribution, to the consumer. In the same way, Hartley says, one might speak of a symbolic value chain moving from an author/producer, via the text, to the audience/consumer. Much of western history may indeed be understood as a movement along this chain. In pre-modern times, meaning resided in the author. The Divine Author, God, was regarded as the source of all meaning. In the modern period, ‘after Milton and Johnson’, meaning was located in texts. Experts observed the properties of a text or other object, and by this means discovered its meaning. In ‘the contemporary period’, however – the period roughly following the Second World War – meaning has overwhelming come to be located with audiences or consumers (Hartley, “Value Chain” 131–35). It is in this context, Hartley tells us, that the plebiscite is coming to the fore. As a means of allowing audiences to directly represent their own choices, the plebiscite is part of a new paradigm taking shape, as global culture moves away from the modern epoch and its text-dominated paradigm (Hartley, “Reality” 1–3). Talk of a symbolic value chain is a self-conscious example of the logic of business/cultural partnership currently circulating in neo-liberal discourse. It is also an example of a teleological understanding of history, through which the past few centuries are presented as part of a linear progression towards direct democracy. This teleology works well with the up-tempo talk of television as ‘democratainment’ in Hartley’s earlier work (Hartley, Uses of Television). Western history is essentially a triumphant progression, he implies, from the Dark Ages, to representative democracy, to the enlightened and direct ‘consumer democracy’ unfolding around us today (Hartley, “Reality” 47). Teleological assumptions are always suspect from an historical point of view. For a start, casting the modern period as one in which meaning resided overwhelmingly in the text fails to consider the culture of popular performance flourishing before the twentieth century. Popular theatrical forms were far more significant to ordinary people of the nineteenth century than the notions of empirical or textual analysis cultivated in elite circles. Burlesques, minstrel-shows, music hall and variety productions all took a playful approach to their texts, altering their tone and content in line with audience expectations (Chevalier 40). Before the commercialisation of popular theatre in the late-nineteenth century, many theatricals also worked in a relatively open-ended way. At concert saloons or ‘free-and-easies’ (pubs where musical performances were offered), amateur singers volunteered their services, stepping out from the audience to perform an act or two and then disappearing into it again (Joyce 206). As a precursor to TV talent contests and ‘open mic’ comedy sessions today, many theatrical managers held amateur nights in which would-be professionals tried their luck before a restless crowd, with a contract awarded to performers drawing the loudest applause (Watson 5). Each of these considerations challenge the view that open participatory networks are the expression of an historical process through which meaning has only recently come to reside with audiences and consumers. Another reason for suspecting teleological notions about democracy is that it proceeds as if Foucauldian analysis did not exist. Characterising history as a process of democratisation tends to equate democracy with openness and freedom in an uncritical way. It glosses over the fact that representative democracy involved the repression of directly participatory practices and unruly social groups. More pertinently, it ignores critiques of direct democracy. Even if there are positive aspects to the re-emergence of participatory practices among audiences today, there are still real problems with direct democracy as a political ideal. It would be fairly easy to make the case that rowdy Victorian audiences engaged in ‘direct democratic’ practices during the course of a variety show or burlesque. The ‘gods’ in Victorian galleries exulted in expressing their preferences: evicting lack-lustre comics and demanding more of other performers. It would also be easy to valorise these practices as examples of the kind of culture-jamming I referred to earlier – as forms of resistance to the tyranny of well-tempered citizenship gaining sway at the time. Given the often hysterical attacks directed at unruly audiences, there is an obvious satisfaction to be had from observing the reinstatement of Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay at Her Majesty’s Theatre, or in the pleasure that working-class audiences derived from ‘calling the tune’. The same kind of satisfaction is not to be had, however, when observing direct democracy in action on YouTube, or during a season of Dancing with the Stars, or some other kind of plebiscitary TV. The expression of audience preferences in this context hardly carries the subversive connotations of informal evictions during a late-Victorian music-hall show. Viewer-voting today is indeed dominated by a rhetoric of partnership which centres on audience participation, rather than a notion of opposition between producers and audiences (Jenkins). The terrain of plebiscitary entertainment is very different now from the terrain of popular culture described by Stuart Hall in the 1980s – let alone as it stood in the 1890s, during Alice Leamar’s tour. Most commentary on plebiscitary TV avoids talk of ‘cultural struggle’ (Hall 235) and instead adopts a language of collaboration and of people ‘having a ball’ (Neville; Hartley, “Reality” 3). The extent to which contemporary plebiscites are managed by what Hartley calls the ‘plebiscitary industries’ evokes one of the most powerful criticisms made against direct democracy. That is, it evokes the view that direct democracy allows commercial interests to set the terms of public participation in decision-making, and thus to influence its outcomes (Barber 36; Moore 55–56). There is obviously big money to be made from plebiscitary TV. The advertising blitz which takes place during viewer-voting programs, and the vote-rigging scandals so often surrounding them make this clear. These considerations highlight the fact that public involvement in a plebiscitary process is not something to make a song and dance about unless broad involvement first takes place in deciding the issues open for determination by plebiscite, and the way in which these issues are framed. In the absence of this kind of broad participation, engagement in plebiscitary forms serves a solely consolatory function, offering the pleasures of viewer-voting as a substitute for substantive involvement in cultural creation and political change. Another critique sometimes made against direct democracy is that it makes an easy vehicle for prejudice (Barber 36–7). This was certainly the case in Victorian theatres, where it was common for Anglo gallery-members to heckle female and non-white performers in an intimidatory way. A group of American vaudeville performers called the Cherry Sisters certainly experienced this phenomenon in the early 1900s. The Cherry Sisters were defiantly unglamorous middle-aged women in a period when female performers were increasingly expected to display scantily-clad youthful figures on stage. As a consequence, they were embroiled in a number of near-riots in which male audience members hurled abuse and heavy objects from the galleries, and in some cases chased them into the street to physically assault them there (Pittinger 76–77). Such incidents give us a glimpse of the dark face of direct democracy. In some cases, the direct expression of popular views becomes an attack on diversity, leading to the kind of violent mêlée experienced either by the Cherry Sisters or the Middle Eastern people attacked on Sydney’s Cronulla Beach at the end of 2005. ‘Democracy’ is always an obviously politically loaded term when used in debates about new media. It is frequently used to imply that particular cultural or technological forms are inherently liberatory and inclusive. As Graeme Turner points out, reality TV has been celebrated as ‘democratic’ in this way. Only rarely, however, is there an attempt to argue why this is the case – to show how viewer-voting formats actually serve a democratic agenda. It was for this reason that Turner argued that the inclusion of ordinary people on reality TV should be understood as demotic rather than democratic (Turner, Understanding Celebrity 82–5; Turner, “Mass Production”). Ultimately, however, it is immaterial whether one uses the term ‘demotic’ or ‘direct democratic’ to describe the growth of plebiscitary entertainment. What is important is that we avoid making inflated claims about the direct expression of audience views, using the term ‘democratic’ to give an unduly celebratory spin to the political complexities involved. People may indeed be having a ball as they take part in online polls or choose what they want to watch on YouTube or shout at the TV during an episode of Idol. The ‘participatory enthusiasm’ that fans feel watching a show like Big Brother may also have lessons for those interested in making parliamentary process more responsive to people’s interests and needs (Coleman 458). But the development of plebiscitary forms is not inherently democratic in the sense that Turner suggests the term should be used – that is, it does not of itself serve a liberatory or socially inclusive agenda. Nor does it lead to substantive participation in cultural and political processes. In the end, it seems to me that we need to move beyond the discussion of plebiscitary entertainment in terms of democracy. The whole concept of democracy as the yardstick against which new media should be measured is highly problematic. Not only is direct democracy a vexed political ideal to start off with – it also leads commentators to take predictable positions when debating its relationship to new technologies and cultural forms. Some turn to hype, others to critique, and the result often appears as a mere restatement of the commentators’ political inclinations rather than a useful investigation of the developments at hand. Some of the most intriguing aspects of plebiscitary entertainments are left unexplored if we remain preoccupied with democracy. One might well investigate the re-introduction of studio audiences and participatory audience practices, for example, as a nostalgia for the interactivity experienced in live theatres such as the Newtown Bridge in the early twentieth century. It certainly seems to me that a retro impulse informs some of the developments in televised stand-up comedy in recent years. This was obviously the case for Paul McDermott’s The Side Show on Australian television in 2007, with its nod to the late-Victorian or early twentieth-century fairground and its live-theatrical vibe. More relevantly here, it also seems to be the case for American viewer-voting programs such as Last Comic Standing and the Comedy Channel’s Open Mic Fight. Further, reviews of programs such as Idol sometimes emphasise the emotional engagement arising out of their combination of viewer-voting and live performance as a harking-back to the good old days when entertainment was about being real (Neville). One misses this nostalgia associated with plebiscitary entertainments if bound to a teleological assumption that they form part of an ineluctable progression towards the New and the Free. Perhaps, then, it is time to pay more attention to the historical roots of viewer-voting formats, to think about the way that new media is sometimes about a re-invention of the old, trying to escape the recurrent back-and-forthing of debate about their relationship to progress and democracy. References Allen, Robert C. Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture .Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Andrejevic, Mark. Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2004. Bailey, Peter. Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the Contest for Control, 1830–1885. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978. Barber, Benjamin R. Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. ———. “Which Technology and Which Democracy?” Democracy and New Media. Eds. Henry Jenkins and David Thorburn. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2003. 33–48. Brantlinger, Patrick, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1988. Cheshire, D. F. Music Hall in Britain. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1974. Chevalier, Albert. Before I Forget: The Autobiography of a Chevalier d’Industrie. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1901. Coleman, Stephen. “How the Other Half Votes: Big Brother Viewers and the 2005 General Election”. International Journal of Cultural Studies 9.4 (2006): 457–79. Djubal, Clay. “From Minstrel Tenor to Vaudeville Showman: Harry Clay, ‘A Friend of the Australian Performer’”. Australasian Drama Studies 34 (April 1999): 10–24. Donnelly, Ignatius. Caesar’s Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century. London: Sampson Low, Marston and Co., 1891. Grossman, Lawrence. The Electronic Republic: Reshaping Democracy in the Information Age. New York: Penguin, 1995. Hall, Stuart. “Notes on Deconstructing the ‘Popular’”. People’s History and Socialist Theory. Ed. Raphael Samuel. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. 227–49. Hartley, John, The Uses of Television. London: Routledge, 1999. ———. “‘Reality’ and the Plebiscite”. Politoctainment: Television’s Take on the Real. Ed. Kristina Riegert. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2006. http://www.cci.edu.au/hartley/downloads/Plebiscite%20(Riegert%20chapter) %20revised%20FINAL%20%5BFeb%2014%5D.pdf. ———. “The ‘Value-Chain of Meaning’ and the New Economy”. International Journal of Cultural Studies 7.1 (2004): 129–41. Jenkins, Henry. “The Cultural Logic of Media Convergence”. International Journal of Cultural Studies 7.1 (2004): 33–43. ———, and David Thornburn. “Introduction: The Digital Revolution, the Informed Citizen, and the Culture of Democracy”. Democracy and New Media. Eds. Henry Jenkins and David Thorburn. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003. 1–20. Jones, Gareth Stedman. ‘Working-Class Culture and Working-Class Politics in London, 1870-1900: Notes on the Remaking of a Working Class’. Languages of Class: Studies in English Working-Class History, 1832–1982. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. 179–238. Joyce, Patrick. The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City. London: Verso, 2003. Lake, Marilyn. “White Man’s Country: The Trans-National History of a National Project”. Australian Historical Studies 122 ( 2003): 346–63. Meikle, Graham. Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet. London: Routledge, 2002. Miller, Toby. The Well-Tempered Self: Citizenship, Culture and the Postmodern Subject. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1993. Moore, Richard K. “Democracy and Cyberspace”. Digital Democracy: Discourse and Decision Making in the Information Age. Eds. Barry Hague and Brian D. Loader. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. 39–59. Neville, Richard. “Crass, Corny, But Still a Woodstock Moment for a New Generation”. Sydney Morning Herald, 23 November 2004. Pittinger, Peach R. “The Cherry Sisters in Early Vaudeville: Performing a Failed Femininity”. Theatre History Studies 24 (2004): 73–97. Turner, Graeme. Understanding Celebrity. London: Sage, 2004. ———. “The Mass Production of Celebrity: ‘Celetoids’, Reality TV and the ‘Demotic Turn’”. International Journal of Cultural Studies 9.2 (2006): 153–165. Waterhouse, Richard. From Minstrel Show to Vaudeville: The Australian Popular Stage, 1788–1914. Sydney: New South Wales University Press, 1990. Watson, Bobby. Fifty Years Behind the Scenes. Sydney: Slater, 1924. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Bellanta, Melissa. "Voting for Pleasure, Or a View from a Victorian Theatre Gallery." M/C Journal 10.6/11.1 (2008). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/02-bellanta.php>. APA Style Bellanta, M. (Apr. 2008) "Voting for Pleasure, Or a View from a Victorian Theatre Gallery," M/C Journal, 10(6)/11(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/02-bellanta.php>.

By most accounts, “resilience” is a pretty resilient concept. Or policy instrument. Or heuristic tool. It’s this last that really concerns us here: resilience not as a politics, but rather as a descriptive device for attempts in the humanities—particularly in rhetoric and cultural studies—to adequately describe a discursive event. Or rather, to adequately describe a class of discursive events: those that involve rhetorical resistance by victimised subjects. I’ve argued elsewhere (Munro, Descriptive; Reading) that Peircean semiosis, inflected by a rhetorical postulate of genre, equips us well to closely describe a discursive event. Here, I want briefly to suggest that resilience—“discursive” resilience, to coin a term—might usefully supplement these hypotheses, at least from time to time. To support this suggestion, I’ll signal some uses of resilience before turning briefly to a case study: a sensational Argentine homicide case, which occurred in October 2002, and came to be known as the caso Belsunce. At the time, Argentina was wracked by economic crises and political instability. The imposition of severe restrictions on cash withdrawals from bank deposits had provoked major civil unrest. Between 21 December 2001 and 2 January 2002, Argentines witnessed a succession of five presidents. “Resilient” is a term that readily comes to mind to describe many of those who endured this catastrophic period. To describe the caso Belsunce, however—to describe its constitution and import as a discursive event—we might appeal to some more disciplinary-specific understandings of resilience. Glossing Peircean semiosis as a teleological process, Short notes that “one and the same thing […] may be many different signs at once” (106). Any given sign, in other words, admits of multiple interpretants or uptakes. And so it is with resilience, which is both a keyword in academic disciplines ranging from psychology to ecology and political science, and a buzzword in several corporate domains and spheres of governmental activity. It’s particularly prevalent in the discourses of highly networked post-9/11 Anglophone societies. So what, pray tell, is resilience? To the American Psychological Association, resilience comprises “the process of adapting well in the face of adversity.” To the Resilience Solutions Group at Arizona State University, resilience is “the capacity to recover fully from acute stressors, to carry on in the face of chronic difficulties: to regain one’s balance after losing it.” To the Stockholm Resilience Centre, resilience amounts to the “capacity of a system to continually change and adapt yet remain within critical thresholds,” while to the Resilience Alliance, resilience is similarly “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and still retain its basic function and structure” (Walker and Salt xiii). The adjective “resilient” is thus predicated of those entities, individuals or collectivities, which exhibit “resilience”. A “resilient Australia,” for example, is one “where all Australians are better able to adapt to change, where we have reduced exposure to risks, and where we are all better able to bounce back from disaster” (Australian Government). It’s tempting here to synthesise these statements with a sense of “ordinary language” usage to derive a definitional distillate: “resilience” is a capacity attributed to an entity which recovers intact from major injury. This capacity is evidenced in a reaction or uptake: a “resilient” entity is one which suffers some insult or disturbance, but whose integrity is held to have been maintained, or even enhanced, by its resistive or adaptive response. A conjecturally “resilient” entity is thus one which would presumably evince resilience if faced with an unrealised aversive event. However, such abstractions ignore how definitional claims do rhetorical work. On any given occasion, how “resilience” and its cognates are construed and what they connote are a function, at least in part, of the purposes of rhetorical agents and the protocols and objects of the disciplines or genres in which these agents put these terms to work. In disciplines operating within the same form of life or sphere of activity—disciplines sharing general conventions and broad objects of inquiry, such as the capacious ecological sciences or the contiguous fields of study within the ambit of applied psychology—resilience acts, at least at times, as a something of a “boundary object” (Star and Griesemer). Correlatively, across more diverse and distant fields of inquiry, resilience can work in more seemingly exclusive or contradictory ways (see Handmer and Dovers). Rhetorical aims and disciplinary objects similarly determine the originary tales we are inclined to tell. In the social sciences, the advent of resilience is often attributed to applied psychology, indebted, in turn, to epidemiology (see Seery, Holman and Cohen Silver). In environmental science, by contrast, resilience is typically taken to be a theory born in ecology (indebted to engineering and to the physical sciences, in particular to complex systems theory [see Janssen, Schoon, Ke and Börner]). Having no foundational claim to stake and, moreover, having different purposes and taking different objects, some more recent uptakes of resilience, in, for instance, securitisation studies, allow for its multidisciplinary roots (see Bourbeau; Kaufmann). But if resilience is many things to many people, a couple of commonalities in its range of translations should be drawn out. First, irrespective of its discipline or sphere of activity, talk of resilience typically entails construing an object of inquiry qua system, be that system an individual, a community of circumstance, a state, a socio-ecological unit or some differently delimited entity. This bounded system suffers some insult with no resulting loss of structural, relational, functional or other integrity. Second, resilience is usually marshalled to promote a politics. Resilience talk often consorts with discourses of meliorative action and of readily quantifiable practical effects. When the environmental sciences take the “Earth system” and the dynamics of global change as their objects of inquiry, a postulate of resilience is key to the elaboration and implementation of natural resource management policy. Proponents of socio-ecological resilience see the resilience hypothesis as enabling a demonstrably more enlightened stewardship of the biosphere (see Folke et al.; Holling; Walker and Salt). When applied psychology takes the anomalous situation of disadvantaged, at-risk individuals triumphing over trauma as its declared object of inquiry, a postulate of resilience is key to the positing and identification of personal and environmental resources or protective factors which would enable the overcoming of adversity. Proponents of psychosocial resilience see this concept as enabling the elaboration and implementation of interventions to foster individual and collective wellbeing (see Goldstein and Brooks; Ungar). Similarly, when policy think-tanks and government departments and agencies take the apprehension of particular threats to the social fabric as their object of inquiry, a postulate of resilience—or of a lack thereof—is critical to the elaboration and implementation of urban infrastructure, emergency planning and disaster management policies (see Drury et al.; Handmer and Dovers). However, despite its often positive connotations, resilience is well understood as a “normatively open” (Bourbeau 11) concept. This openness is apparent in some theories and practices of resilience. In limnological modelling, for example, eutrophication can result in a lake’s being in an undesirable, albeit resilient, turbid-water state (see Carpenter et al.; Walker and Meyers). But perhaps the negative connotations or indeed perverse effects of resilience are most apparent in some of its political uptakes. Certainly, governmental operationalisations of resilience are coming under increased scrutiny. Chief among the criticisms levelled at the “muddled politics” (Grove 147) of and around resilience is that its mobilisation works to constitute a particular neoliberal subjectivity (see Joseph; Neocleous). By enabling a conservative focus on individual responsibility, preparedness and adaptability, the topos of resilience contributes critically to the development of neoliberal governmentality (Joseph). In a practical sense, this deployment of resilience silences resistance: “building resilient subjects,” observe Evans and Reid (85), “involves the deliberate disabling of political habits. […] Resilient subjects are subjects that have accepted the imperative not to resist or secure themselves from the difficulties they are faced with but instead adapt to their enabling conditions.” It’s this prospect of practical acquiescence that sees resistance at times opposed to resilience (Neocleous). “Good intentions not withstanding,” notes Grove (146), “the effect of resilience initiatives is often to defend and strengthen the political economic status quo.” There’s much to commend in these analyses of how neoliberal uses of resilience constitute citizens as highly accommodating of capital and the state. But such critiques pertain to the governmental mobilisation of resilience in the contemporary “advanced liberal” settings of “various Anglo-Saxon countries” (Joseph 47). There are, of course, other instances—other events in other times and places—in which resilience indisputably sorts with resistance. Such an event is the caso Belsunce, in which a rhetorically resilient journalistic community pushed back, resisting some of the excesses of a corrupt neoliberal Argentine regime. I’ll turn briefly to this infamous case to suggest that a notion of “discursive resilience” might afford us some purchase when it comes to describing discursive events. To be clear: we’re considering resilience here not as an anticipatory politics, but rather as an analytic device to supplement the descriptive tools of Peircean semiosis and a rhetorical postulate of genre. As such, it’s more an instrument than an answer: a program, perhaps, for ongoing work. Although drawing on different disciplinary construals of the term, this use of resilience would be particularly indebted to the resilience thinking developed in ecology (see Carpenter el al.; Folke et al.; Holling; Walker et al.; Walker and Salt). Things would, of course, be lost in translation (see Adger; Gallopín): in taking a discursive event, rather than the dynamics of a socio-ecological system, as our object of inquiry, we’d retain some topological analogies while dispensing with, for example, Holling’s four-phase adaptive cycle (see Carpenter et al.; Folke; Gunderson; Gunderson and Holling; Walker et al.). For our purposes, it’s unlikely that descriptions of ecosystem succession need to be carried across. However, the general postulates of ecological resilience thinking—that a system is a complex series of dynamic relations and functions located at any given time within a basin of attraction (or stability domain or system regime) delimited by thresholds; that it is subject to multiple attractors and follows trajectories describable over varying scales of time and space; that these trajectories are inflected by exogenous and endogenous perturbations to which the system is subject; that the system either proves itself resilient to these perturbations in its adaptive or resistive response, or transforms, flipping from one domain (or basin) to another may well prove useful to some descriptive projects in the humanities. Resilience is fundamentally a question of uptake or response. Hence, when examining resilience in socio-ecological systems, Gallopín notes that it’s useful to consider “not only the resilience of the system (maintenance within a basin) but also coping with impacts produced and taking advantage of opportunities” (300). Argentine society in the early-to-mid 2000s was one such socio-political system, and the caso Belsunce was both one such impact and one such opportunity. Well-connected in the world of finance, 57-year-old former stockbroker Carlos Alberto Carrascosa lived with his 50-year-old sociologist turned charity worker wife, María Marta García Belsunce, close to their relatives in the exclusive gated community of Carmel Country Club, Pilar, Provincia de Buenos Aires, Argentina. At 7:07 pm on Sunday 27 October 2002, Carrascosa called ambulance emergencies, claiming that his wife had slipped and knocked her head while drawing a bath alone that rainy Sunday afternoon. At the time of his call, it transpired, Carrascosa was at home in the presence of intimates. Blood was pooled on the bathroom floor and smeared and spattered on its walls and adjoining areas. María Marta lay lifeless, brain matter oozing from several holes in her left parietal and temporal lobes. This was the moment when Carrascosa, calm and coherent, called emergency services, but didn’t advert the police. Someone, he told the operator, had slipped in the bath and bumped her head. Carrascosa described María Marta as breathing, with a faint pulse, but somehow failed to mention the holes in her head. “A knock with a tap,” a police source told journalist Horacio Cecchi, “really doesn’t compare with the five shots to the head, the spillage of brain matter and the loss of about half a litre of blood suffered by the victim” (Cecchi and Kollmann). Rather than a bathroom tap, María Marta’s head had met with five bullets discharged from a .32-calibre revolver. In effect, reported Cecchi, María Marta had died twice. “While perhaps a common conceit in fiction,” notes Cecchi, “in reality, dying twice is, by definition, impossible. María Marta’s two obscure endings seem to unsettle this certainty.” Her cadaver was eventually subjected to an autopsy, and what had been a tale of clumsiness and happenstance was rewritten, reinscribed under the Argentine Penal Code. The autopsy was conducted 36 days after the burial of María Marta; nine days later, she was mentioned for the second time in the mainstream Argentine press. Her reappearance, however, was marked by a shift in rubrics: from a short death notice in La Nación, María Marta was translated to the crime section of Argentina’s dailies. Until his wife’s mediatic reapparition, Carroscosa and other relatives had persisted with their “accident” hypothesis. Indeed, they’d taken a range of measures to preclude the sorts of uptakes that might ordinarily be expected to flow, under functioning liberal democratic regimes, from the discovery of a corpse with five projectiles lodged in its head. Subsequently recited as part of Carrascosa’s indictment, these measures were extensively reiterated in media coverage of the case. One of the more notorious actions involved the disposal of the sixth bullet, which was found lying under María Marta. In the course of moving the body of his half-sister, John Hurtig retrieved a small metallic object. This discovery was discussed by a number of family members, including Carrascosa, who had received ballistics training during his four years of naval instruction at the Escuela Nacional de Náutica de la Armada. They determined that the object was a lug or connector rod (“pituto”) used in library shelving: nothing, in any case, to indicate a homicide. With this determination made, the “pituto” was duly wrapped in lavatory paper and flushed down the toilet. This episode occasioned a range of outraged articles in Argentine dailies examining the topoi of privilege, power, corruption and impunity. “Distinguished persons,” notes Viau pointedly, “are so disposed […] that in the midst of all that chaos, they can locate a small, hard, steely object, wrap it in lavatory paper and flush it down the toilet, for that must be how they usually dispose of […] all that rubbish that no longer fits under the carpet.” Most often, though, critical comment was conducted by translating the reporting of the case to the genres of crime fiction. In an article entitled Someone Call Agatha Christie, Quick!, H.A.T. writes that “[s]omething smells rotten in the Carmel Country; a whole pile of rubbish seems to have been swept under its plush carpets.” An exemplary intervention in this vein was the work of journalist and novelist Vicente Battista, for whom the case (María Marta) “synthesizes the best of both traditions of crime fiction: the murder mystery and the hard-boiled novels.” “The crime,” Battista (¿Hubo Otra Mujer?) has Rodolfo observe in the first of his speculative dialogues on the case, “seems to be lifted from an Agatha Christie novel, but the criminal turns out to be a copy of the savage killers that Jim Thompson usually depicts.” Later, in an interview in which he correctly predicted the verdict, Battista expanded on these remarks: This familiar plot brings together the English murder mystery and the American hard-boiled novels. The murder mystery because it has all the elements: the crime takes place in a sealed room. In this instance, sealed not only because it occurred in a house, but also in a country, a sealed place of privilege. The victim was a society lady. Burglary is not the motive. In classic murder mystery novels, it was a bit unseemly that one should kill in order to rob. One killed either for a juicy sum of money, or for revenge, or out of passion. In those novels there were neither corrupt judges nor fugitive lawyers. Once Sherlock Holmes […] or Hercule Poirot […] said ‘this is the murderer’, that was that. That’s to say, once fingered in the climactic living room scene, with everyone gathered around the hearth, the perpetrator wouldn’t resist at all. And everyone would be happy because the judges were thought to be upright persons, at least in fiction. […] The violence of the crime of María Marta is part of the hard-boiled novel, and the sealed location in which it takes place, part of the murder mystery (Alarcón). I’ve argued elsewhere (Munro, Belsunce) that the translation of the case to the genres of crime fiction and their metaanalysis was a means by which a victimised Argentine public, represented by a disempowered and marginalised fourth estate, sought some rhetorical recompense. The postulate of resilience, however, might help further to describe and contextualise this notorious discursive event. A disaffected Argentine press finds itself in a stability domain with multiple attractors: on the one hand, an acquiescence to ever-increasing politico-juridical corruption, malfeasance and elitist impunity; on the other, an attractor of increasing contestation, democratisation, accountability and transparency. A discursive event like the caso Belsunce further perturbs Argentine society, threatening to displace it from its democratising trajectory. Unable to enforce due process, Argentina’s fourth estate adapts, doing what, in the circumstances, amounts to the next best thing: it denounces the proceedings by translating the case to the genres of crime fiction. In so doing, it engages a venerable reception history in which the co-constitution of true crime fiction and investigative journalism is exemplified by the figure of Rodolfo Walsh, whose denunciatory works mark a “politicisation of crime” (see Amar Sánchez Juegos; El sueño). Put otherwise, a section of Argentina’s fourth estate bounced back: by making poetics do rhetorical work, it resisted the pull towards what ecology calls an undesirable basin of attraction. Through a show of discursive resilience, these journalists worked to keep Argentine society on a democratising track. 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The labyrinth is probably the most universal trope of complexity. Deriving from pre-Greek labyrinthos, a word denoting “maze, large building with intricate underground passages”, and possibly related to Lydian labrys, which signifies “double-edged axe,” symbol of royal power, the notion of the labyrinth primarily evokes the Minoan Palace in Crete and the myth of the Minotaur. According to this myth, the Minotaur, a monster with the body of a man and the head of a bull, was born to Pesiphae, king Minos’s wife, who mated with a bull when the king of Crete was besieging Athens. Upon his return, Minos commanded the artist Daedalus to construct a monumental building of inter-connected rooms and passages, at the center of which the King sought to imprison the monstrous sign of his disgrace. The Minotaur required human sacrifice every couple of years, until it was defeated by the Athenian prince Theuseus, who managed to extricate himself from the maze by means of a clue of thread, given to him by Minos’s enamored daughter, Ariadne (Parandowski 238-43). If the Cretan myth establishes the labyrinth as a trope of complexity, this very complexity associates labyrinthine design not only with disorientation but also with superb artistry. As pointed out by Penelope Reed Doob, the labyrinth is an inherently ambiguous construct (39-63). It presumes a double perspective: those imprisoned inside, whose vision ahead and behind is severely constricted, are disoriented and terrified; whereas those who view it from outside or from above – as a diagram – admire its structural sophistication. Labyrinths thus simultaneously embody order and chaos, clarity and confusion, unity (a single structure) and multiplicity (many paths). Whereas the modern, reductive view equates the maze with confusion and disorientation, the labyrinth is actually a signifier with two contradictory signifieds. Not only are all labyrinths intrinsically double, they also fall into two distinct, though related, types. The paradigm represented by the Cretan maze is mainly derived from literature and myth. It is a multicursal model, consisting of a series of forking paths, each bifurcation requiring new choice. The second type is the unicursal maze. Found mainly in the visual arts, such as rock carvings or coin ornamentation, its structural basis is a single path, twisting and turning, but entailing no bifurcations. Although not equally bewildering, both paradigms are equally threatening: in the multicursal construct the maze-walker may be entrapped in a repetitious pattern of wrong choices, whereas in the unicursal model the traveler may die of exhaustion before reaching the desired end, the heart of the labyrinth. In spite of their differences, the basic similarities between the two paradigms may explain why they were both included in the same linguistic category. The labyrinth represents a road-model, and as such it is essentially teleological. Most labyrinths of antiquity and of the Middle Ages were designed with the thought of reaching the center. But the fact that each labyrinth has a center does not necessarily mean that the maze-walker is aware of its existence. Moreover, reaching the center is not always to be desired (in case it conceals a lurking Minotaur), and once the center is reached, the maze-walker may never find the way back. Besides signifying complexity and ambiguity, labyrinths thus also symbolically evoke the danger of eternal imprisonment, of inextricability. This sinister aspect is intensified by the recursive aspect of labyrinthine design, by the mirroring effect of the paths. In reflecting on the etymology of the word ‘maze’ (rather than the Greek/Latin labyrinthos/labyrinthus), Irwin observes that it derives from the Swedish masa, signifying “to dream, to muse,” and suggests that the inherent recursion of labyrinthine design offers an apt metaphor for the uniquely human faculty of self-reflexitivity, of thought turning upon itself (95). Because of its intriguing aspect and wealth of potential implications, the labyrinth has become a category that is not only formal, but also conceptual and symbolic. The ambiguity of the maze, its conflation of overt complexity with underlying order and simplicity, was explored in ideological systems rooted in a dualistic world-view. In the early Christian era, the labyrinth was traditionally presented as a metaphor for the universe: divine creation based on a perfect design, perceived as chaotic due to the shortcomings of human comprehension. In the Middle-Ages, the labyrinthine attributes of imprisonment and limited perception were reflected in the view of life as a journey inside a moral maze, in which man’s vision was constricted because of his fallen nature (Cazenave 348-350). The maze was equally conceptualized in dynamic terms and used as a metaphor for mental processes. More specifically, the labyrinth has come to signify intellectual confusion, and has therefore become most pertinent in literary contexts that valorize rational thought. And the rationalistic genre par excellence is detective fiction. The labyrinth may serve as an apt metaphor for the world of detective fiction because it accurately conveys the tacit assumptions of the genre – the belief in the existence of order, causality and reason underneath the chaos of perceived phenomena. Such optimistic belief is ardently espoused by the putative detective in Paul Auster’s metafictional novella City of Glass: He had always imagined that the key to good detective work was a close observation of details. The more accurate the scrutiny, the more successful the results. The implication was that human behavior could be understood, that beneath the infinite façade of gestures, tics and silences there was finally a coherence, an order, a source of motivation. (67) In this brief but eloquent passage Auster conveys, through the mind of his sleuth, the central tenets of classical detective fiction. These tenets are both ontological and epistemological. The ontological aspect is subsumed in man’s hopeful reliance on “a coherence, an order, a source of motivation” underlying the messiness and blood of the violent deed. The epistemological aspect is aptly formulated by Michael Holquist, who argues that the fictional world of detective stories is rooted in the Scholastic principle of adequatio rei et intellectus, the adequation of mind to things (157). And if both human reality and phenomenal reality are governed by reason, the mind, given enough time, can understand everything. The mind’s representative is the detective. He is the embodiment of inquisitive intellect, and his superior powers of observation and deduction transform an apparent mystery into an incontestable solution. The detective sifts through the evidence, assesses the relevance of data and the reliability of witnesses. But, first of foremost, he follows clues – and the clue, the most salient element of the detective story, links the genre with the myth of the Cretan labyrinth. For in its now obsolete spelling, the word ‘clew’ denotes a ball of thread, and thus foregrounds the similarity between the mental process of unraveling a crime mystery and the traveler’s progress inside the maze (Irwin 179). The chief attributes of the maze – circuitousness, enclosure, and inextricability – associate it with another convention of detective fiction, the trope of the locked room. This convention, introduced in Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” a text traditionally regarded as the first analytic detective story, establishes the locked room as the ultimate affront to reason: a hermetically sealed space which no one could have penetrated or exited and in which a brutal crime has nevertheless been committed. But the affront to reason is only apparent. In Poe’s ur-text of the genre, the violent deed is committed by an orangutan, a brutal and abused beast that enters and escapes from the seemingly locked room through a half-closed window. As accurately observed by Holquist, in the world of detective fiction “there are no mysteries, there is only incorrect reasoning” (157). And the correct reasoning, dubbed by Poe “ratiocination”, is the process of logical deduction. Deduction is an enchainment of syllogisms, in which a conclusion inevitably follows from two valid premises; as Dupin elegantly puts it, “the deductions are the sole proper ones and … the suspicion arises inevitably from them as a single result” (Poe 89). Applying this rigorous mental process, the detective re-arranges the pieces of the puzzle into a coherent and meaningful sequence of events. In other words – he creates a narrative. This brings us back to Irwin’s observation about the recursive aspect of the maze. Like the labyrinth, detective fiction is self-reflexive. It is a narrative form which foregrounds narrativity, for the construction of a meaningful narrative is the protagonist’s and the reader’s principal task. Logical deduction, the main activity of the fictional sleuth, does not allow for ambiguity. In classical detective fiction, the labyrinth is associated with the messiness and violence of crime and contrasted with the clarity of the solution (the inverse is true of postmodernist detective mysteries). The heart of the labyrinth is the solution, the vision of truth. This is perhaps the most important aspect of the detective genre: the premise that truth exists and that it can be known. In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the initially insoluble puzzle is eventually transformed into a coherent narrative, in which a frantic orangutan runs into the street escaping the abuse of its master, climbs a rod and seeks refuge in a room inhabited by two women, brutally slashes them in confusion, and then flees the room in the same way he penetrated it. The sequence of events reconstructed by Dupin is linear, unequivocal, and logically satisfying. This is not the case with the ‘hard boiled’, American variant of the detective genre, which influenced the inception of film noir. Although the novels of Hammett, Chandler or Cain are structured around crime mysteries, these works problematize most of the tacit premises of analytic detective fiction and re-define its narrative form. For one, ‘hard boiled’ fiction obliterates the dualism between overt chaos and underlying order, between the perceived messiness of crime and its underlying logic. Chaos becomes all-encompassing, engulfing the sleuth as well as the reader. No longer the epitome of a superior, detached intellect, the detective becomes implicated in the mystery he investigates, enmeshed in a labyrinthine sequence of events whose unraveling does not necessarily produce meaning. As accurately observed by Telotte, “whether [the] characters are trying to manipulate others, or simply hoping to figure out how their plans went wrong, they invariably find that things do not make sense” (7). Both ‘hard-boiled’ fiction and its cinematic progeny implicitly portray the dissolution of social order. In film noir, this thematic pursuit finds a formal equivalent in the disruption of traditional narrative paradigm. As noted by Bordwell and Telotte, among others, the paradigm underpinning classical Hollywood cinema in the years 1917-1960 is characterized by a seemingly objective point of view, adherence to cause-effect logic, use of goal-oriented characters and a progression toward narrative closure (Bordwell 157, Telotte 3). In noir films, on the other hand, the devices of flashback and voice-over implicitly challenge conventionally linear narratives, while the use of the subjective camera shatters the illusion of objective truth (Telotte 3, 20). To revert to the central concern of the present paper, in noir cinema the form coincides with the content. The fictional worlds projected by the ‘hard boiled’ genre and its noir cinematic descendent offer no hidden realm of meaning underneath the chaos of perceived phenomena, and the trope of the labyrinth is stripped of its transcendental, comforting dimension. The labyrinth is the controlling visual metaphor of the Coen Brothers’ neo-noir film The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001). The film’s title refers to its main protagonist: a poker-faced, taciturn barber, by the name of Ed Crane. The entire film is narrated by Ed, incarcerated in a prison cell. He is writing his life story, at the commission of a men’s magazine whose editor wants to probe the feelings of a convict facing death. Ed says he is not unhappy to die. Exonerated of a crime he committed and convicted of a crime he did not, Ed feels his life is a labyrinth. He does not understand it, but he hopes that death will provide the answer. Ed’s final vision of life as a bewildering maze, and his hope of seeing the master-plan after death, ostensibly refer to the inherent dualism of the labyrinth, the notion of underlying order manifest through overt chaos. They offer the flicker of an optimistic closure, which subscribes to the traditional Christian view of the universe as a perfect design, perceived as chaos due to the shortcomings of human comprehension. But this interpretation is belied by the film’s final scene. Shot in blindingly white light, suggesting the protagonist’s revelation, the screen is perfectly empty, except for the electric chair in the center. And when Ed slowly walks towards the site of his execution, he has a sudden fantasy of the overhead lights as the round saucers of UFOs. The film’s visual metaphors ironically subvert Ed’s metaphysical optimism. They cast a view of human life as a maze of emptiness, to borrow the title of one of Borges’s best-known stories. The only center of this maze is death, the electric chair; the only transcendence, faith in God and in after life, makes as much sense as the belief in flying saucers. The Coen Brothers thus simultaneously construct and deconstruct the traditional symbolism of the labyrinth, evoking (through Ed’s innocent hope) its promise of underlying order, and subverting this promise through the images that dominate the screen. The transcendental dimension of the trope of the labyrinth, its promise of a hidden realm of meaning and value, is consistently subverted throughout the film. On the level of plot, the film presents a crisscrossed pattern of misguided intentions and tragi-comic misinterpretations. The film’s protagonist, Ed Crane, is estranged from his own life; neither content nor unhappy, he is passive, taking things as they come. Thus he condones Doris’s, his wife’s, affair with her employer, Big Dave, reacting only when he perceives an opportunity to profit from their liason. This opportunity presents itself in the form of Creighton Tolliver, a garrulous client, who shares with Ed his fail-proof scheme of making big money from the new invention of dry cleaning. All he needs to carry out his plan, confesses Creighton, is an investment of ten thousand dollars. The barber decides to take advantage of this accidental encounter in order to change his life. He writes an anonymous extortion letter to Big Dave, threatening to expose his romance with Doris and wreck his marriage and his financial position (Dave’s wife, a rich heiress, owns the store that Dave runs). Dave confides in Ed about the letter; he suspects the blackmailer is a con man that tried to engage him in a dry-cleaning scheme. Although reluctant to part with the money, which he has been saving to open a new store to be managed by Doris, Big Dave eventually gives in. Obviously, although unbeknownst to Big Dave, it is Ed who collects the money and passes it to Creighton, so as to become a silent partner in the dry cleaning enterprise. But things do not work out as planned. Big Dave, who believes Creighton to be his blackmailer, follows him to his apartment in an effort to retrieve the ten thousand dollars. A fight ensues, in which Creighton gets killed, not before revealing to Dave Ed’s implication in his dry-cleaning scheme. Furious, Dave summons Ed, confronts him with Creighton’s story and physically attacks him. Ed grabs a knife that is lying about and accidentally kills Big Dave. The following day, two policemen arrive at the barbershop. Ed is certain they came to arrest him, but they have come to arrest Doris. The police have discovered that she has been embezzling from Dave’s store (Doris is an accountant), and they suspect her of Dave’s murder. Ed hires Freddy Riedenschneider, the best and most expensive criminal attorney, to defend his wife. The attorney is not interested in truth; he is looking for a version that will introduce a reasonable doubt in the minds of the jury. At some point, Ed confesses that it is he who killed Dave, but Riedenschneider dismisses his confession as an inadequate attempt to save Doris’s neck. He concocts a version of his own, but does not get the chance to win the trial; the case is dismissed, as Doris is found hanged in her cell. After his wife’s death, Ed gets lonely. He takes interest in Birdy, the young daughter of the town lawyer (whom he initially approached for Doris’s defense). Birdy plays the piano; Ed believes she is a prodigy, and wants to become her agent. He takes her for an audition to a French master pianist, who decides that the girl is nothing special. Disenchanted, they drive back home. Birdy tells Ed, not for the first time, that she doesn’t really want to be a pianist. She hasn’t been thinking of a career; if at all, she would like to be a vet. But she is very grateful. As a token of her gratitude, she tries to perform oral sex on Ed. The car veers; they have an accident. When he comes to, Ed faces two policemen, who tell him he is arrested for the murder of Creighton Tolliver. The philosophical purport of the labyrinth metaphor is suggested in a scene preceding Doris’s trial, in which her cocky attorney justifies his defense strategy. To support his argument, he has recourse to the theory of some German scientist, called either Fritz or Werner, who claimed that truth changes with the eye of the beholder. Science has determined that there is no objective truth, says Riedenschneider; consequently, the question of what really happened is irrelevant. All a good attorney can do, he concludes, is present a plausible narrative to the jury. Freddy Riedenschneider’s seemingly nonchalant exposition is a tongue-in-cheek reference to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Succinctly put, the principle postulates that the more precisely the position of a subatomic particle is determined, the less precisely its momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa. What follows is that concepts such as orbits of electrons do not exist in nature unless and until we measure them; or, in Heisenberg’s words, “the ‘path’ comes into existence only when we observe it” (qtd. in Cassidy). Heisenberg’s discovery had momentous scientific and philosophical implications. For one, it challenged the notion of causality in nature. The law of causality assumes that if we know the present exactly, we can calculate the future; in this formulation, suggests Heisenberg, “it is not the conclusion that is wrong, but the premises” (qtd. in Cassidy). In other words, we can never know the present exactly, and on the basis of this exact knowledge, predict the future. More importantly, the uncertainty principle seems to collapse the distinction between subjective and objective reality, between consciousness and the world of phenomena, suggesting that the act of perception changes the reality perceived (Hofstadter 239). In spite of its light tone, the attorney’s confused allusion to quantum theory conveys the film’s central theme: the precarious nature of truth. In terms of plot, this theme is suggested by the characters’ constant misinterpretation: Big Dave believes he is blackmailed by Creighton Tolliver; Ed thinks Birdy is a genius, Birdy thinks that Ed expects sex from her, and Ann, Dave’s wife, puts her faith in UFOs. When the characters do not misjudge their reality, they lie about it: Big Dave bluffs about his war exploits, Doris cheats on Ed and Big Dave cheats on his wife and embezzles from her. And when the characters are honest and tell the truth, they are neither believed nor rewarded: Ed confesses his crime, but his confession is impatiently dismissed, Doris keeps her accounts straight but is framed for fraud and murder; Ed’s brother in law and partner loyally supports him, and as a result, goes bankrupt. If truth cannot be known, or does not exist, neither does justice. Throughout the film, the wires of innocence and guilt are constantly crossed; the innocent are punished (Doris, Creighton Tolliver), the guilty are exonerated of crimes they committed (Ed of killing Dave) and convicted of crimes they did not (Ed of killing Tolliver). In this world devoid of a metaphysical dimension, the mindless processes of nature constitute the only reality. They are represented by the incessant, pointless growth of hair. Ed is a barber; he deals with hair and is fascinated by hair. He wonders how hair is a part of us and we throw it to dust; he is amazed by the fact that hair continues to grow even after death. At the beginning of the film we see him docilely shave his wife’s legs. In a mirroring scene towards the end, the camera zooms in on Ed’s own legs, shaved before his electrocution. The leitmotif of hair, the image of the electric chair, the recurring motif of UFOs – all these metaphoric elements convey the Coen Brothers’ view of the human condition and build up to Ed’s final vision of life as a labyrinth. Life is a labyrinth because there is no necessary connection between cause and effect; because crime is dissociated from accountability and punishment; because what happened can never be ascertained and human knowledge consists only of a maze of conflicting, or overlapping, versions. The center of the existential labyrinth is death, and the exit, the belief in an after-life, is no more real than the belief in aliens. The labyrinth is an inherently ambiguous construct. Its structural attributes of doubling, recursion and inextricability yield a wealth of ontological and epistemological implications. Traditionally used as an emblem of overt complexity concealing underlying order and symmetry, the maze may aptly illustrate the tacit premises of the analytic detective genre. But this purport of the maze symbolism is ironically inverted in noir and neo-noir films. As suggested by its title, the Coen Brothers’ movie is marked by absence, and the absence of the man who wasn’t there evokes a more disturbing void. That void is the center of the existential labyrinth. References Auster, Paul. City of Glass. The New York Trilogy. London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1990. 1-132. Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: Wisconsin UP, 1985. Cassidy, David. “Quantum Mechanics, 1925-1927.” Werner Heisenberg (1901-1978). American Institute of Physics, 1998. 5 June 2007 http://www.aip.org/history/heisenberg/p08c.htm>. Cazenave, Michel, ed. Encyclopédie des Symboles. Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1996. Coen, Joel, and Ethan Coen, dirs. The Man Who Wasn’t There. 2001. Doob, Penelope Reed. The Idea of the Labyrinth. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992. Hofstadter, Douglas. I Am a Strange Loop. New York: Basic Books, 2007. Holquist, Michael. “Whodunit and Other Questions: Metaphysical Detective Stories in Post-War Fiction.” The Poetics of Murder. Eds. Glenn W. Most and William W. Stowe. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. 149-174. Irwin, John T. The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges and the Analytic Detective Story. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994. Parandowski, Jan. Mitologia. Warszawa: Czytelnik, 1960. Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Edgar Allan Poe: The Complete Illustrated Stories and Poems. London: Chancellor Press, 1994. 103-114. Telotte, J.P. Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir. Urbana: Illinois UP, 1989. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Shiloh, Ilana. "A Vision of Complex Symmetry: The Labyrinth in The Man Who Wasn’t There." M/C Journal 10.3 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/09-shiloh.php>. APA Style Shiloh, I. (Jun. 2007) "A Vision of Complex Symmetry: The Labyrinth in The Man Who Wasn’t There," M/C Journal, 10(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/09-shiloh.php>.

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

For once I want to be the car crash, Not always just the traffic jam. Hit me hard enough to wake me, And lead me wild to your dark roads. (Snow Patrol: “Headlights on Dark Roads”, Eyes Open, 2006) I didn’t know about the online dating site rsvp.com.au until a woman who I was dating at the time showed me her online profile. Apparently ‘everyone does rsvp’. Well, ‘everyone’ except me. (Before things ended I never did ask her why she listed herself as ‘single’ on her profile…) Forming relationships in our era of post-institutional modes of sociality is problematic. Some probably find such ‘romantically’ orientated ‘meet up’ sites to be a more efficient option for sampling what is available. Perhaps others want some loving on the side. In some ways these sites transform romance into the online equivalent of the logistics dock at your local shopping centre. ‘Just-in-time’ relationships rely less on social support structures of traditional institutions such as the family, workplace, and so on, including ‘love’ itself, and more on a hit and miss style of dating, organised like a series of car crashes and perhaps even commodified through an eBay-style online catalogue (see Crawford 83-88). Instead of image-commodities there are image-people and the spectacle of post-romance romance as a debauched demolition derby. Is romance still possible if it is no longer the naïve and fatalistic realisation of complementary souls? I watched Paul Thomas Anderson’s third film Punch-Drunk Love with the above rsvp.com.au woman. She interpreted it in a completely different manner to me. I shall argue (as I did with her) that the film captures some sense of romance in a post-romance world. The film was billed as a comedy/romance or comedy/drama, but I did not laugh either with or at the film. The story covers the trials of two people ‘falling in love’. Lena Leonard (Emma Watson) orchestrates an encounter with Barry Egan (Adam Sandler) after seeing a picture of him with his seven sisters. The trajectory of the romance is defined less by the meeting of two people, than the violence of contingency and of the world arrayed by the event of love. Contingency is central to complexity theory. Contingency is not pure chance, rather it exists as part of the processual material time of the event that defines events or a series of events as problematic (Deleuze, The Logic of Sense 52-53). To problematise events and recognise the contingencies they inculcate is to refuse the tendency to colonise the future through actuarial practices, such as ‘risk management’ and insurance or the probabilistic ‘Perfect Match’ success of internet dating sites (mirroring ‘Dexter’ from the 1980s dating television game show). Therefore, through Punch-Drunk Love I shall problematise the event of love so as to resuscitate the contingencies of post-romance romance. It is not surprising Punch-Drunk Love opens with a car crash for the film takes romance on a veritable post-Crash detour. Crash – novel and film – serves as an exploration of surfaces and desire in a world at the intersection of the accident. Jean Baudrillard, in his infamous essay on Crash (novel), dwells on the repositioning of the accident: [It] is no longer at the margin, it is at the heart. It is no longer the exception to a triumphal rationality, it has become the Rule, it has devoured the Rule. … Everything is reversed. It is the Accident that gives form to life, it is the Accident, the insane, that is the sex of life. (113) After the SUV rolls over in Punch-Drunk Love’s opening scene, a taxi van pauses long enough for an occupant to drop off a harmonium. A harmonium is a cross between an organ and a piano, but much smaller than both. It is a harmony machine. It breathes and wheezes to gather potentiality consonant sound waves of heterogeneous frequencies to produce a unique musicality of multiplicative resonance. No reason is given for the harmonium in the workings of the film’s plot. Another accident without any explanation, like the SUV crash, but this time it is an accidental harmony-machine. The SUV accident is a disorganising eruption of excess force, while the accidental harmony-machine is a synthesising organisation of force. One produces abolition, while the other produces a multiplicative affirmation. These are two tendencies that follow two different relations to the heterogeneous materialism of contingency. Punch-Drunk Love captures the contingency at the heart of post-romance romance. Instead of the layers of expectation habituated into institutional engagements of two subjects meeting, there is the accident of the event of love within which various parties are arrayed with various affects and desires. I shall follow Alain Badiou’s definition of the event of love, but only to the point where I shall shift the perspective from love to romance. Badiou defines love by initially offering a series of negative definitions. Firstly, love is not a fusional concept, the ‘two’ that is ‘one’. That is because, as Badiou writes, “an ecstatic One can only be supposed beyond the Two as a suppression of the multiple” (“What Is Love?” 38). Secondly, nor is love the “prostration of the Same on the alter of the Other.” Badiou argues that it is not an experience of the Other, but an “experience of the world [i.e. multiple], or of the situation, under the post-evental condition that there were Two” (“What Is Love?” 39). Lastly, the rejection of the ‘superstructural’ or illusory conception of love, that is, to the base of desire and sexual jealously (Badiou, “What Is Love?” 39). For Badiou love is the production of truth. The truth is that the Two, and not only the One, are at work in the situation. However, from the perspective of romance, there is no post-evental truth procedure for love as such. In Deleuze’s terminology, from the perspective of post-romance the Two serves an important role as the ‘quasi-cause’ of love (The Logic of Sense 33), or for Badiou it is the “noemenal possibility [virtualite]” (“What Is Love?” 51). The event of the Two, and, therefore, of love, is immanent to itself. However, this does not capture the romantic functioning of love swept up in the quasi-cause of the Two. Romance is the differential repetition of the event of love to-come and thus the repetition of the intrinsic irreducible wonder at the heart of the event. The wonder at love’s heart is the excess of potentiality, the excitement, the multiplicity, the stultifying surprise. To resuscitate the functioning of love is to disagree with Badiou’s axiom that there is an absolute disjunction between the (nominalist) Two. The Two do actually share a common dimension and that is the radical contingency at the heart of love. Love is not as a teleological destiny of the eternal quasi-cause, but the fantastic impossibility of its contingent evental site. From Badiou’s line of argument, romance is precisely the passage of this “aleatory enquiry” (“What is Love?” 45), of “the world from the point of view of the Two, and not an enquiry of each term of the Two about the other” (49). Romance is the insinuation of desire into this dynamic of enquiry. Therefore, the functioning of romance is to produce a virtual architecture of wonder hewn from seeming impossibility of contingency. It is not the contingency in itself that is impossible (the ‘chaosmos’ is a manifold of wonderless-contingency), but that contingency might be repeated as part of a material practice that produces love as an effect of differentiating wonder. Or, again, not that the encounter of love has happened, but that precisely it might happen again and again. Romance is the material and embodied practice of producing wonder. The materiality of romance needs to be properly outlined and to do this I turn to another of Badiou’s texts and the film itself. To explicate the materialism of romance is to begin outlining the problematic of romance where the material force of Lena and Barry’s harmony resonates in the virtuosic co-production of new potentialities. The practice of romance is evidenced in the scene where Lena and Barry are in Hawaii and Lena is speaking to Barry’s sister while Barry is watching her. A sense of wonder is produced not in the other person but of the world as multiplicity produced free from the burden of Barry’s sister, hence altering the material conditions of the differential repetition of contingency. The materialism in effect here is, to borrow from Michel Foucault, an ‘incorporeal materialism’ (169), and pertains to the virtual evental dimension of love. In his Handbook of Inaesthetics, Badiou sets up dance and theatre as metaphors for thought. “The essence of dance,” writes Badiou, “is virtual, rather than actual movement” (Handbook of Inaesthetics 61), while theatre is an “assemblage” (72) which in part is “the circulation of desire between the sexes” (71). If romance is the deliberate care for the event of love and its (im)possible contingency, then the dance of love requires the theatre of romance. To include music with dance is to malign Badiou’s conception of dance by polluting it with some elements of what he calls ‘theatre’. To return to the Hawaii scene, Barry is arrayed as an example of what Badiou calls the ‘public’ of theatre because he is watching Lena lie to his sister about his whereabouts, and therefore completes the ‘idea’ of theatre-romance as a constituent element (Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics 74). There is an incorporeal (virtual) movement here of pure love in the theatre of romance that repotentialises the conditions of the event of love by producing a repeated and yet different contingency of the world. Wonder triggered by a lie manifest of a truth to-come. According to Badiou, the history of dance is “governed by the perpetual renewal of the relation between vertigo and exactitude. What will remain virtual, what will be actualized, and precisely how is the restraint going to free the infinite?” (Handbook of Inaesthetics 70). Importantly, Badiou suggests that theatrical production “is often the reasoned trial of chances” (Handbook of Inaesthetics 74). Another way to think the materiality of romance is as the event of love, but without Badiou’s necessary declaration of love (“What Is Love?” 45). Even though the ‘truth’ of the Two acts as quasi-cause, love as such remains a pure (‘incorporeal’) Virtuality. As a process, there is no “absolute disappearance or eclipse” that belongs to the love-encounter (“What Is Love?” 45), thus instead producing a rhythmic or, better, melodic heterogeneous tension between the love-dance and romance-theatre. The rhythm-melody of the virtual-actual cascade is distributed around aleatory contingencies as the event of love is differentially repeated and is therefore continually repotentialised and exhausted at the same time. A careful or graceful balance needs to be found between potentiality and exhaustion. The film contains many examples of this (re)potentialising tension, including when Lena achieves the wonder of the ‘encounter’ by orchestrating a meeting. Similarly, Barry feigns a ‘business trip’ to Hawaii to meet up with Lena. This is proceeded by the increased urgency of Barry’s manipulation of the frequent flyer miles reward to meet with up with Lena. The tension is affective – both anxious and exciting – and belongs to the lived duration of contingency. In the same way as an actual material dance floor (or ‘theatre’ here) is repeated across multiple incorporeal dimensions of music’s virtuality through the repotentialisation of the dancer’s body, the multiple dimensions of love are repeated across the virtuality of the lovers’ actions through the repotentialisation of the conditions of the event of love. Punch-Drunk Love frames this problematic of romance by way of a second movement that follows the trajectory of the main character Barry. Barry is a depressive with an affect regulation problem. He flies into a rage whenever a childhood incident is mentioned and becomes anxious or ‘scared’ (as one sister described him) when in proximity to Lena. He tries to escape from the oppressive intimacy of his family. He plays with ‘identity’ in a childlike manner by dressing up as a businessman and wearing the blue suit. His small business is organised around selling plungers used to unblock toilets to produce flow. Indeed, Barry is defined by the blockages and flows of desire. His seven-sister over-Oedipalised familial unit continually operates as an apparatus of capture, a phone-sex pervert scam seeks to overcode desire in libidinal economy that becomes exploited in circuits of axiomatised shame (like an online dating site?), and a consumer rewards program that offers the dream of a frequent-flyer million-miles (line of) flight out of it all. ‘Oedipal’ in the expanded sense Deleuze and Guattari give the term as a “displaced or internalised limit where desire lets itself be caught. The Oedipal triangle is the personal and private territoriality that corresponds to all of capitalism’s efforts at social reterritorialisation” (266). Barry says he wants to ‘diversify’ his business, which is not the same thing as ‘expanding’ or developing an already established commercial interest. He does not have a clear idea of what domain or type of business he wants to enter into when diversifying. When he speaks to business contacts or service personnel on the phone he attempts to connect with them on a level of intimacy that is uncomfortably inappropriate for impersonal phone conversations. The inappropriate intimacy comes back to haunt him, of course, when a low-level crook attempts to extort money from him after Barry calls a phone sex line. The romance between Lena and Barry develops through a series of accident-contingencies that to a certain extent ‘unblocks’ Barry and allows him to connect with Lena (who also changes). Apparent contingencies that are not actually contingencies need to be explained as such (‘dropping car off’, ‘beat up bathrooms’, ‘no actual business in Hawaii’, ‘phone sex line’, etc.). Upon their first proper conversation a forklift in Barry’s business crashes into boxes. Barry calls the phone sex line randomly and this leads to the severe car crash towards the end of the film. The interference of Barry’s sisters occurs in an apparently random unexpected manner – either directly or indirectly through the retelling of the ‘gayboy’ story. Lastly, the climatic meeting in Hawaii where the two soon-to-be-lovers are framed by silhouette, their bodies meet not in an embrace but a collision. They emerge as if emitted from the throngs of the passing crowd. Barry has his hand extended as if they were going to shake and there is an audible grunt when their bodies collide in an embrace. To love is to endure the violence of a creative temporality, such as the production of harmony from heterogeneity. As Badiou argues, love cannot be a fusional relation between the two to make the one, nor can it be the relation of the Same to the Other, this is because the differential repetition of the conditions of love through the material practice of romance already effaces such distinctions. This is the crux of the matter: The maximum violence in the plot of Punch-Drunk Love is not born by Lena, even though she ends up in hospital, but by Barry. (Is this merely a masculinist reading of traditional male on male violence? Maybe, and perhaps why rsvp.com.au woman read it different to me.) What I am trying to get at is the positive or creative violence of the two movements within the plot – of the romance and of Barry’s depressive social incompetence – intersect in such a way to force Barry to renew himself as himself. Barry’s explosive fury belongs to the paradox of trying to ‘mind his own business’ while at the same time ‘diversifying’. The moments of violence directed against the world and the ‘glass enclosures’ of his subjectivity are transversal actualisations of the violence of love (on function of ‘glass’ in the film see King). (This raises the question, perhaps irrelevant, regarding the scale of Badiou’s conception of truth-events. After Foucault and Deleuze, why isn’t ‘life’ itself a ‘truth’ event (for Badiou’s position see Briefings on Existence 66-68)? For example, are not the singularities of Barry’s life also the singularities of the event of love? Is the post-evental ‘decision’ supposed to always axiomatically subtract the singular truth-supplement from the stream of singularities of life? Why…?) The violence of love is given literal expression in the film in the ‘pillow talk’ dialogue between Barry and Lena: Barry: I’m sorry, I forgot to shave. Lena: Your face is so adorable. Your skin and your cheek… I want to bite it. I want to bite on your cheek and chew on it, you’re so fucking cute. Barry: I’m looking at your face and I just wanna smash it. I just wanna fucking smash it with a sledgehammer and squeeze you, you’re so pretty… Lena: I wanna chew your face off and scoop out your eyes. I wanna eat them and chew them and suck on them… Barry: [nodding] Ok…yes, that’s funny… Lena: Yeah… Barry: [still nodding] This’s nice. What dismayed or perhaps intrigued Baudrillard about Crash was its mixing of bodies and technologies in a kind of violent eroticism where “everything becomes a hole to offer itself to the discharge reflex” (112). On the surface this exchange between Barry and Lena is apparently an example of such violent eroticism. For Baudrillard the accident is a product of the violence of technology in the logistics of bodies and signs which intervene in relations in such a way to render perversity impossible (as a threshold structuration of the Symbolic) because ‘everything’ becomes perverse. However, writer and director of Punch-Drunk Love, Paul Anderson, produces a sense of the wondrous (‘Punch-Drunk’) violence that is at the heart of love. This is not because of the actual violence of individual characters; in the film this only serves as a canvas of action to illustrate the intrinsic violence of contingency. Lena and Barry’s ‘pillow talk’ not so much as a dance but a case of the necessary theatre capturing the violence and restraint of love’s virtual dance. ‘Violence’ (in the sense it is used above) also describes the harmonic marshalling of the heterogeneous materiality of sound affected by the harmonium. The ‘violence’ of the harmonium is decisively expressed through the coalescence of the diegetic and nondiegetic soundtracks at the end of the film when Barry plays the harmonium concurrently with Jon Brion’s score for the film. King notes, the “diegetic and nondiegetic music playing together is a moment of cinematic harmony; Barry, Lena, and the harmonium are now in sync” (par. 19). The notes of music connect different diegetic and nondiegetic series which pivot around new possibilities. As Deleuze writes about the notes played at a concert, they are “pure Virtualities that are actualized in the origins [of playing], but also pure Possibilities that are attained in vibrations or flux [of sound]” (The Fold 91). Following Deleuze further (The Fold 146-157), the horizontal melodic movement of romance forms a diagonal or transversal line with the differentially repeated ‘harmonic’ higher unity of love. The unity is literally ‘higher’ to the extent it escapes the diegetic confines of the film itself. For Deleuze “harmonic unity is not that of infinity, but that which allows the existent to be thought of as deriving from infinity” (The Fold 147, ital. added). While Barry is playing the harmonium in this scene Lena announces, “So here we go.” These are the final words of the film. In Badiou’s philosophy this is a declaration of the truth of love. Like the ‘higher’ non/diegetic harmony of the harmonium, the truth of love “composes, compounds itself to infinity. It is thus never presented integrally. All knowledge [of romance] relative to this truth [of the Two, as quasi-cause] thus disposes itself as an anticipation” (“What is Love?” 49). Romance is therefore lived as a vertiginous state of anticipation of love’s harmony. The materiality of romance does not simply consist of two people coming together and falling in love. The ‘fall’ functions as a fatalistic myth used to inscribe bodies within the eschatological libidinal economies of ‘romantic comedies’. To anneal Baudrillard’s lament, perversity obviously still has a positive Symbolic function on the internet, especially online dating sites where anticipation can be modulated through the probabilistic manipulation of signs. In post-romance, the ‘encounter’ of love necessarily remains, but it is the contingency of this encounter that matters. The main characters in Punch-Drunk Love are continually arrayed through the contingencies of love. I have linked this to Badiou’s notion of the event of love, but have focused on what I have called the materiality of romance. The materiality of romance requires more than a ‘fall’ induced by a probabilistic encounter, and yet it is not the declaration of a truth. The post-evental truth procedure of love is impossible in post-romance romance because there is no ‘after’ or ‘supplement’ to an event of love; there is only the continual rhythm of romance and anticipation of the impossible. It is not a coincidence that the Snow Patrol lyrics that serve above as an epigraph resonate with Deleuze’s comment that a change in the situation of Leibnizian monads has occurred “between the former model, the closed chapel with imperceptible openings… [to] the new model invoked by Tony Smith [of] the sealed car speeding down the dark highway” (The Fold 157). Post-Crash post-romance romance unfolds like the driving-monad in an aleatory pursuit of accidents. That is, to care for the event of love is not to announce the truth of the Two, but to pursue the differential repetition of the conditions of love’s (im)possible contingency. This exquisite and beautiful care is required for the contingency of love to be maintained. Hence, the post-romance problematic of romance thus posited as the material practice of repeating the wonder at the heart of love. References Badiou, Alain. Briefings on Existence: A Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology. Trans. Norman Madrasz. Albany, New York: State U of New York P, 2006. ———. Handbook of Inaesthetics. Trans. Alberto Toscano. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford UP, 2005. ———. “What Is Love?” Umbr(a) 1 (1996): 37-53. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994. Crawford, Kate. Adult Themes: Rewriting the Rules of Adulthood. Sydney: Macmillan, 2006. Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. ———. The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Laster and Charles Stivale. European Perspectives. Ed. Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia UP, 1990. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. Foucault, Michel. “Theatricum Philosophicum.” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ed. D. F. Bouchard. New York: Cornell UP, 1977. 165-96. King, Cubie. “Punch Drunk Love: The Budding of an Auteur.” Senses of Cinema 35 (2005). Citation reference for this article MLA Style Fuller, Glen. "Punch-Drunk Love: A Post-Romance Romance." M/C Journal 10.3 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/03-fuller.php>. APA Style Fuller, G. (Jun. 2007) "Punch-Drunk Love: A Post-Romance Romance," M/C Journal, 10(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/03-fuller.php>.

Introduction: Bubbles and Sport The ephemeral materiality of bubbles – beautiful, spectacular, and distracting but ultimately fragile – when applied to protect or conserve in the interests of sport-media profit, creates conditions that exacerbate existing inequalities in sport and society. Bubbles are usually something to watch, admire, and chase after in their brief yet shiny lives. There is supposed to be, technically, nothing inside them other than one or more gasses, and yet we constantly refer to people and objects being inside bubbles. The metaphor of the bubble has been used to describe the life of celebrities, politicians in purpose-built capital cities like Canberra, and even leftist, environmentally activist urban dwellers. The metaphorical and material qualities of bubbles are aligned—they cannot be easily captured and are liable to change at any time. In this article we address the metaphorical sporting bubble, which is often evoked in describing life in professional sport. This is a vernacular term used to capture and condemn the conditions of life of elite sportspeople (usually men), most commonly after there has been a sport-related scandal, especially of a sexual nature (Rowe). It is frequently paired with connotatively loaded adjectives like pampered and indulged. The sporting bubble is rarely interrogated in academic literature, the concept largely being left to the media and moral entrepreneurs. It is represented as involving a highly privileged but also pressurised life for those who live inside it. A sporting bubble is a world constructed for its most prized inhabitants that enables them to be protected from insurgents and to set the terms of their encounters with others, especially sport fans and disciplinary agents of the state. The Covid-19 pandemic both reinforced and reconfigured the operational concept of the bubble, re-arranging tensions between safety (protecting athletes) and fragility (short careers, risks of injury, etc.) for those within, while safeguarding those without from bubble contagion. Privilege and Precarity Bubble-induced social isolation, critics argue, encourages a loss of perspective among those under its protection, an entitled disconnection from the usual rules and responsibilities of everyday life. For this reason, the denizens of the sporting bubble are seen as being at risk to themselves and, more troublingly, to those allowed temporarily to penetrate it, especially young women who are first exploited by and then ejected from it (Benedict). There are many well-documented cases of professional male athletes “behaving badly” and trying to rely on institutional status and various versions of the sporting bubble for shelter (Flood and Dyson; Reel and Crouch; Wade). In the age of mobile and social media, it is increasingly difficult to keep misbehaviour in-house, resulting in a slew of media stories about, for example, drunkenness and sexual misconduct, such as when then-Sydney Roosters co-captain Mitchell Pearce was suspended and fined in 2016 after being filmed trying to force an unwanted kiss on a woman and then simulating a lewd act with her dog while drunk. There is contestation between those who condemn such behaviour as aberrant and those who regard it as the conventional expression of youthful masculinity as part of the familiar “boys will be boys” dictum. The latter naturalise an inequitable gender order, frequently treating sportsmen as victims of predatory women, and ignoring asymmetries of power between men and women, especially in homosocial environments (Toffoletti). For those in the sporting bubble (predominantly elite sportsmen and highly paid executives, also mostly men, with an array of service staff of both sexes moving in and out of it), life is reflected for those being protected via an array of screens (small screens in homes and indoor places of entertainment, and even smaller screens on theirs and others’ phones, as well as huge screens at sport events). These male sport stars are paid handsomely to use their skill and strength to perform for the sporting codes, their every facial expression and bodily action watched by the media and relayed to audiences. This is often a precarious existence, the usually brief career of an athlete worker being dependent on health, luck, age, successful competition with rivals, networks, and club and coach preferences. There is a large, aspirational reserve army of athletes vying to play at the elite level, despite risks of injury and invasive, life-changing medical interventions. Responsibility for avoiding performance and image enhancing drugs (PIEDs) also weighs heavily on their shoulders (Connor). Professional sportspeople, in their more reflective moments, know that their time in the limelight will soon be up, meaning that getting a ticket to the sporting bubble, even for a short time, can make all the difference to their post-sport lives and those of their families. The most vulnerable of the small minority of participants in sport who make a good, short-term living from it are those for whom, in the absence of quality education and prior social status, it is their sole likely means of upward social mobility (Spaaij). Elite sport performers are surrounded by minders, doctors, fitness instructors, therapists, coaches, advisors and other service personnel, all supporting athletes to stay focussed on and maximise performance quality to satisfy co-present crowds, broadcasters, sponsors, sports bodies and mass media audiences. The shield offered by the sporting bubble supports the teleological win-at-all-costs mentality of professional sport. The stakes are high, with athlete and executive salaries, sponsorships and broadcasting deals entangled in a complex web of investments in keeping the “talent” pivotal to the “attention economy” (Davenport and Beck)—the players that provide the content for sale—in top form. Yet, the bubble cannot be entirely secured and poor behaviour or performance can have devastating effects, including permanent injury or disability, mental illness and loss of reputation (Rowe, “Scandals and Sport”). Given this fragile materiality of the sporting bubble, it is striking that, in response to the sudden shutdown following the economic and health crisis caused by the 2020 global pandemic, the leaders of professional sport decided to create more of them and seek to seal the metaphorical and material space with unprecedented efficiency. The outcome was a multi-sided tale of mobility, confinement, capital, labour, and the gendering of sport and society. The Covid-19 Gilded Cage Sociologists such as Zygmunt Bauman and John Urry have analysed the socio-politics of mobilities, whereby some people in the world, such as tourists, can traverse the globe at their leisure, while others remain fixed in geographical space because they lack the means to be mobile or, in contrast, are involuntarily displaced by war, so-called “ethnic cleansing”, famine, poverty or environmental degradation. The Covid-19 global pandemic re-framed these matters of mobilities (Rowe, “Subjecting Pandemic Sport”), with conventional moving around—between houses, businesses, cities, regions and countries—suddenly subjected to the imperative to be static and, in perniciously unreflective technocratic discourse, “socially distanced” (when what was actually meant was to be “physically distanced”). The late-twentieth century analysis of the “risk society” by Ulrich Beck, in which the mysterious consequences of humans’ predation on their environment are visited upon them with terrifying force, was dramatically realised with the coming of Covid-19. In another iteration of the metaphor, it burst the bubble of twenty-first century global sport. What we today call sport was formed through the process of sportisation (Maguire), whereby hyper-local, folk physical play was reconfigured as multi-spatial industrialised sport in modernity, becoming increasingly reliant on individual athletes and teams travelling across the landscape and well over the horizon. Co-present crowds were, in turn, overshadowed in the sport economy when sport events were taken to much larger, dispersed audiences via the media, especially in broadcast mode (Nicholson, Kerr, and Sherwood). This lucrative mediation of professional sport, though, came with an unforgiving obligation to generate an uninterrupted supply of spectacular live sport content. The pandemic closed down most sports events and those that did take place lacked the crucial participation of the co-present crowd to provide the requisite event atmosphere demanded by those viewers accustomed to a sense of occasion. Instead, they received a strange spectacle of sport performers operating in empty “cathedrals”, often with a “faked” crowd presence. The mediated sport spectacle under the pandemic involved cardboard cut-out and sex doll spectators, Zoom images of fans on large screens, and sampled sounds of the crowd recycled from sport video games. Confected co-presence produced simulacra of the “real” as Baudrillardian visions came to life. The sporting bubble had become even more remote. For elite sportspeople routinely isolated from the “common people”, the live sport encounter offered some sensory experience of the social – the sounds, sights and even smells of the crowd. Now the sporting bubble closed in on an already insulated and insular existence. It exposed the irony of the bubble as a sign of both privileged mobility and incarcerated athlete work, both refuge and prison. Its logic of contagion also turned a structure intended to protect those inside from those outside into, as already observed, a mechanism to manage the threat of insiders to outsiders. In Australia, as in many other countries, the populace was enjoined by governments and health authorities to help prevent the spread of Covid-19 through isolation and immobility. There were various exceptions, principally those classified as essential workers, a heterogeneous cohort ranging from supermarket shelf stackers to pharmacists. People in the cultural, leisure and sports industries, including musicians, actors, and athletes, were not counted among this crucial labour force. Indeed, the performing arts (including dance, theatre and music) were put on ice with quite devastating effects on the livelihoods and wellbeing of those involved. So, with all major sports shut down (the exception being horse racing, which received the benefit both of government subsidies and expanding online gambling revenue), sport organisations began to represent themselves as essential services that could help sustain collective mental and even spiritual wellbeing. This case was made most aggressively by Australian Rugby League Commission Chairman, Peter V’landys, in contending that “an Australia without rugby league is not Australia”. In similar vein, prominent sport and media figure Phil Gould insisted, when describing rugby league fans in Western Sydney’s Penrith, “they’re lost, because the football’s not on … . It holds their families together. People don’t understand that … . Their life begins in the second week of March, and it ends in October”. Despite misgivings about public safety and equality before the pandemic regime, sporting bubbles were allowed to form, re-form and circulate. The indefinite shutdown of the National Rugby League (NRL) on 23 March 2020 was followed after negotiation between multiple entities by its reopening on 28 May 2020. The competition included a team from another nation-state (the Warriors from Aotearoa/New Zealand) in creating an international sporting bubble on the Central Coast of New South Wales, separating them from their families and friends across the Tasman Sea. Appeals to the mental health of fans and the importance of the NRL to myths of “Australianness” notwithstanding, the league had not prudently maintained a financial reserve and so could not afford to shut down for long. Significant gambling revenue for leagues like the NRL and Australian Football League (AFL) also influenced the push to return to sport business as usual. Sport contests were needed in order to exploit the gambling opportunities – especially online and mobile – stimulated by home “confinement”. During the coronavirus lockdowns, Australians’ weekly spending on gambling went up by 142 per cent, and the NRL earned significantly more than usual from gambling revenue—potentially $10 million above forecasts for 2020. Despite the clear financial imperative at play, including heavy reliance on gambling, sporting bubble-making involved special licence. The state of Queensland, which had pursued a hard-line approach by closing its borders for most of those wishing to cross them for biographical landmark events like family funerals and even for medical treatment in border communities, became “the nation's sporting hub”. Queensland became the home of most teams of the men’s AFL (notably the women’s AFLW season having been cancelled) following a large Covid-19 second wave in Melbourne. The women’s National Netball League was based exclusively in Queensland. This state, which for the first time hosted the AFL Grand Final, deployed sport as a tool in both national sports tourism marketing and internal pre-election politics, sponsoring a documentary, The Sporting Bubble 2020, via its Tourism and Events arm. While Queensland became the larger bubble incorporating many other sporting bubbles, both the AFL and the NRL had versions of the “fly in, fly out” labour rhythms conventionally associated with the mining industry in remote and regional areas. In this instance, though, the bubble experience did not involve long stays in miners’ camps or even the one-night hotel stopovers familiar to the popular music and sport industries. Here, the bubble moved, usually by plane, to fulfil the requirements of a live sport “gig”, whereupon it was immediately returned to its more solid bubble hub or to domestic self-isolation. In the space created between disciplined expectation and deplored non-compliance, the sporting bubble inevitably became the scrutinised object and subject of scandal. Sporting Bubble Scandals While people with a very low risk of spreading Covid-19 (coming from areas with no active cases) were denied entry to Queensland for even the most serious of reasons (for example, the death of a child), images of AFL players and their families socialising and enjoying swimming at the Royal Pines Resort sporting bubble crossed our screens. Yet, despite their (players’, officials’ and families’) relative privilege and freedom of movement under the AFL Covid-Safe Plan, some players and others inside the bubble were involved in “scandals”. Most notable was the case of a drunken brawl outside a Gold Coast strip club which led to two Richmond players being “banished”, suspended for 10 matches, and the club fined $100,000. But it was not only players who breached Covid-19 bubble protocols: Collingwood coaches Nathan Buckley and Brenton Sanderson paid the $50,000 fine imposed on the club for playing tennis in Perth outside their bubble, while Richmond was fined $45,000 after Brooke Cotchin, wife of team captain Trent, posted an image to Instagram of a Gold Coast day spa that she had visited outside the “hub” (the institutionally preferred term for bubble). She was subsequently distressed after being trolled. Also of concern was the lack of physical distancing, and the range of people allowed into the sporting bubble, including babysitters, grandparents, and swimming coaches (for children). There were other cases of players being caught leaving the bubble to attend parties and sharing videos of their “antics” on social media. Biosecurity breaches of bubbles by players occurred relatively frequently, with stern words from both the AFL and NRL leaders (and their clubs) and fines accumulating in the thousands of dollars. Some people were also caught sneaking into bubbles, with Lekahni Pearce, the girlfriend of Swans player Elijah Taylor, stating that it was easy in Perth, “no security, I didn’t see a security guard” (in Barron, Stevens, and Zaczek) (a month later, outside the bubble, they had broken up and he pled guilty to unlawfully assaulting her; Ramsey). Flouting the rules, despite stern threats from government, did not lead to any bubble being popped. The sport-media machine powering sporting bubbles continued to run, the attendant emotional or health risks accepted in the name of national cultural therapy, while sponsorship, advertising and gambling revenue continued to accumulate mostly for the benefit of men. Gendering Sporting Bubbles Designed as biosecurity structures to maintain the supply of media-sport content, keep players and other vital cogs of the machine running smoothly, and to exclude Covid-19, sporting bubbles were, in their most advanced form, exclusive luxury camps that illuminated the elevated socio-cultural status of sportsmen. The ongoing inequalities between men’s and women’s sport in Australia and around the world were clearly in evidence, as well as the politics of gender whereby women are obliged to “care” and men are enabled to be “careless” – or at least to manage carefully their “duty of care”. In Australia, the only sport for women that continued during the height of the Covid-19 lockdown was netball, which operated in a bubble that was one of sacrifice rather than privilege. With minimum salaries of only $30,000 – significantly less than the lowest-paid “rookies” in the AFL – and some being mothers of small children and/or with professional jobs juggled alongside their netball careers, these elite sportswomen wanted to continue to play despite the personal inconvenience or cost (Pavlidis). Not one breach of the netballers out of the bubble was reported, indicating that they took their responsibilities with appropriate seriousness and, perhaps, were subjected to less scrutiny than the sportsmen accustomed to attracting front-page headlines. National Netball League (also known after its Queensland-based naming rights sponsor as Suncorp Super Netball) players could be regarded as fortunate to have the opportunity to be in a bubble and to participate in their competition. The NRL Women’s (NRLW) Premiership season was also completed, but only involved four teams subject to fly in, fly out and bubble arrangements, and being played in so-called curtain-raiser games for the NRL. As noted earlier, the AFLW season was truncated, despite all the prior training and sacrifice required of its players. Similarly, because of their resource advantages, the UK men’s and boy’s top six tiers of association football were allowed to continue during lockdown, compared to only two for women and girls. In the United States, inequalities between men’s and women’s sports were clearly demonstrated by the conditions afforded to those elite sportswomen inside the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) sport bubble in the IMG Academy in Florida. Players shared photos of rodent traps in their rooms, insect traps under their mattresses, inedible food and blocked plumbing in their bubble accommodation. These conditions were a far cry from the luxury usually afforded elite sportsmen, including in Florida’s Walt Disney World for the men’s NBA, and is just one of the many instances of how gendered inequality was both reproduced and exacerbated by Covid-19. Bursting the Bubble As we have seen, governments and corporate leaders in sport were able to create material and metaphorical bubbles during the Covid-19 lockdown in order to transmit stadium sport contests into home spaces. The rationale was the importance of sport to national identity, belonging and the routines and rhythms of life. But for whom? Many women, who still carry the major responsibilities of “care”, found that Covid-19 intensified the affective relations and gendered inequities of “home” as a leisure site (Fullagar and Pavlidis). Rates of domestic violence surged, and many women experienced significant anxiety and depression related to the stress of home confinement and home schooling. During the pandemic, women were also more likely to experience the stress and trauma of being first responders, witnessing virus-related sickness and death as the majority of nurses and care workers. They also bore the brunt of much of the economic and employment loss during this time. Also, as noted above, livelihoods in the arts and cultural sector did not receive the benefits of the “bubble”, despite having a comparable claim to sport in contributing significantly to societal wellbeing. This sector’s workforce is substantially female, although men dominate its senior roles. Despite these inequalities, after the late March to May hiatus, many elite male sportsmen – and some sportswomen - operated in a bubble. Moving in and out of them was not easy. Life inside could be mentally stressful (especially in long stays of up to 150 days in sports like cricket), and tabloid and social media troll punishment awaited those who were caught going “over the fence”. But, life in the sporting bubble was generally preferable to the daily realities of those afflicted by the trauma arising from forced home confinement, and for whom watching moving sports images was scant compensation for compulsory immobility. The ethical foundation of the sparkly, ephemeral fantasy of the sporting bubble is questionable when it is placed in the service of a voracious “media sports cultural complex” (Rowe, Global Media Sport) that consumes sport labour power and rolls back progress in gender relations as a default response to a global pandemic. Covid-19 dramatically highlighted social inequalities in many areas of life, including medical care, work, and sport. For the small minority of people involved in sport who are elite professionals, the only thing worse than being in a sporting bubble during the pandemic was not being in one, as being outside precluded their participation. Being inside the bubble was a privilege, albeit a dubious one. But, as in wider society, not all sporting bubbles are created equal. Some are more opulent than others, and the experiences of the supporting and the supported can be very different. The surface of the sporting bubble may be impermanent, but when its interior is opened up to scrutiny, it reveals some very durable structures of inequality. Bubbles are made to burst. They are, by nature, temporary, translucent structures created as spectacles. As a form of luminosity, bubbles “allow a thing or object to exist only as a flash, sparkle or shimmer” (Deleuze, 52). In echoing Deleuze, Angela McRobbie (54) argues that luminosity “softens and disguises the regulative dynamics of neoliberal society”. The sporting bubble was designed to discharge that function for those millions rendered immobile by home confinement legislation in Australia and around the world, who were having to deal with the associated trauma, risk and disadvantage. 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IntroductionWithin social media visibility campaigns, selfie captions usually work to produce coherent identity categories, linking disparate selfies together through hashtags. Furthering visibility politics, such selfie captions claim that authentic identities can be made visible through selfies and can be described and defined by these captions. However, selfie captions by the trans artist Alok Vaid-Menon challenge the assumption that selfies and their captions can make authentic identity legible. Through hashtags, emojis, and punning text, Vaid-Menon’s selfie captions interrogate visibility politics from within one of visibility politics most popular contemporary tools, demonstrating how social media can be used to theorize representation. Coherence, Visibility, and Authenticity through HashtagsMobilising and organising identitarian counterpublics through hashtags—from #DisabledAndCute (Wade) to #GirlsLikeUs (Jackson, Bailey, and Welles 2)—these captions operate as hyperlinks that lead users to collections of all the images similarly tagged or captioned. This draws attention to certain aspects of the images, and produces coherence and similarity, despite the actual diversity of the individuals participating in these projects of visibility. These captions also question the over-determination of visibility with authenticity in dominant discourse, and the assumption that visibility can guarantee authenticity. For example, this is apparent in the Human Rights Campaign’s 2014 publication Transgender Visibility: A Guide to Being You, which offers visibility as a critical strategy for “living as authentically as possible” (quoted in David 28).Further, as images that seem to enable direct, unmediated, and hence “authentic,” self-expression (Lorbinger and Brantner 1848), selfies are described as ideally designed for visibility politics (Duguay 4). Visibility politics relies on aesthetic representation to expand the boundaries of commonsense to include those who were previously excluded—all without challenging the underlying logic that produces the inclusion of some through the exclusion of others (Rancière 141–3). In social media visibility campaigns, selfie captions are therefore a critical tool, for they not only use hashtags to create webs of interconnected selfies that produce a coherent, visible identity category, but through doing so, they reinforce the illusion that selfies—as photographs—exhibit an unmediated relationship between sign and signified, offering a visual authentication of identity. Thus, social media visibility campaigns presume that the authentic self can be made legible through selfies and their captions, reiterating, as C. Riley Snorton writes, the “popular, long-held myth—that both the truth of race and the truth of sex are obvious, transparent, and written on the body” (3).Because visible markers of gender and race are assumed to offer access to the “truth” of identity (Rightler-McDaniels and Hendrickson 178), visibility politics are usually heavily invested in this idea of visible authenticity—they also, ultimately, provide a critical avenue for commodification, branding, and consumerism (Banet-Weiser 35; David 30). However, in direct contrast to this, the trans artist Alok Vaid-Menon—a non-binary South Asian performance artist whose pronouns are they/them—uses selfie captions to expose and explode the insufficiency of visibility politics, albeit while promoting their personal brand.Vaid-Menon: Captions, Hashtags, and Intersectional IdentitiesIn Instagram posts that include both still and video selfies, their punning captions undermine any direct relationship between sign and signified, and use playful language to challenge the logic that selfies can transparently communicate authentic identity. Instead of producing coherence, Vaid-Menon uses hashtags to insert charged, political posts within supposedly apolitical series, disrupting any claims to similarity. For example, although Vaid-Menon’s selfie captions draw attention to particular elements within the image, they highlight those aspects of the visual field that make it impossible to identify a single, unified identity.It is also worth discussing here how this plays out in a specifically visual medium such as Instagram. Drawing on the resources of this platform, these selfie captions include emojis, thereby doubling the elements of the visual field within the space of the caption, and emphasising the symbolic function of cultural signifiers of identity. Thus, Vaid-Menon’s selfie captions demonstrate that social media platforms are not merely conduits for visibility politics, but instead offer rich resources for interrogating and contesting the politics of representation.Throughout Vaid-Menon’s Instagram selfies, punning captions appear—examples include “beach the change you want to see in the world” and “fifty shades of gay.” In these captions, puns not only draw attention to the texture and flexibility of language—a linguistic playfulness that is always already present in social media platforms through ludic hashtags (Rightler-McDaniels and Hendrickson 187)—but also highlight elements within the image that put pressure on the idea of coherent and unified identity. By doing this, these captions explicitly declare that identity work is self-consciously performative, producing identities that are not a question of authenticity—even within the framework of “branded authenticity” (Banet-Weiser 11)—but that might instead be read through the more ambivalent notion of “sincerity” (Jackson 15).An example of this can be seen accompanying a slow-motion video selfie of Vaid-Menon in a blonde wig (AlokVMenon, 9 January 2016a). The significance of body hair for South Asian women and femmes is a reoccurring theme throughout Vaid-Menon’s selfie captions. They are vocal about the political significance of body hair, and use hashtags and text captions to address how body hair complicates their ability to communicate the truth(s) of their identity. In the video, brightly painted lips parted, Vaid-Menon twirls the blonde curls around their fingers, while the slow-motion effect emphasises the movement of each lock of hair. Simultaneously, Vaid-Menon’s dark body hair is prominent and visible, including chest hair, the shadow of a beard, and thick eyebrows.The image is accompanied by a caption which asserts punningly “gender is racial construct: blondes have more funding”, thereby transforming the gender studies dogma that “gender is a social construct” and the popular culture slogan that “blondes have more fun.” The caption uses this wording to point out that the gendering of body hair as masculine delimits femininity as whiteness, and also privileges white (cis) femininity within capitalism. Like the caption, the image also reveals how “gender is a racial construct,” staging the tensions between Vaid-Menon’s “natural” dark body hair (gendered masculine) and the bright, blonde wig they wear (gendered feminine, but racialised as white). Further, within late capitalism, the caption “blondes have more funding” lays claim to a possibility that the image forecloses—because “gender is a racial construct,” this increased funding is likely to be out of reach for brown trans femmes who look like Vaid-Menon. Together, the caption and the image suggest that hair is both the solution and the problem for Vaid-Menon—although “blondes have more funding,” the blondes who get funded are white, and definitely not covered in thick, dark body hair.Posting selfies that show off their body hair, Vaid-Menon regularly captions these images with the hashtag #TGIF (AlokVMenon, 19 August 2016) thereby taking advantage of the cross-platform utility and democratising function of hashtags (Rightler-McDaniels and Hendrickson 176) to insert these images into a space that is not usually one of critical race and gender analysis. Popular on Fridays, the hashtag #TGIF usually stands for “thank God it’s Friday,” but Vaid-Menon uses the ubiquitous hashtag to mean “thank goddess I’m femme.” As a result, the “thank god it’s Friday” hashtag introduces unsuspecting users to Vaid-Menon’s #TGIF selfies and their interrogation of the racialised politics of hair. Through inserting critical analysis of race and gender within such a light-hearted, non-serious hashtag, that is, by capitalising on the popularity of #TGIF, Vaid-Menon appears to defy the norms of discursive consistency within social media discourse (Rightler-McDaniels and Hendrickson 187) while simultaneously enhancing their personal brand (Banet-Weiser 59). Beyond hashtags, Vaid-Menon’s captions elaborate on the distinct pressures they experience around body hair, discussing how their body hair simultaneously obscures their ability to be recognised as femme and makes their race hyper-visible. In the caption on one #TGIF post, Vaid-Menon writes that, when they began shaving at age 13, it was an attempt at “becoming white.” Now, they write, they face pressure to authenticate their transfemininity by shaving, noting that, in this case, authenticity requires “invisibilization” (AlokVMenon, 15 November 2016).Vaid-Menon continues this theme in another selfie post, again problematising the supposedly direct relationship between authenticity and visibility. This example—in which Vaid-Menon poses against a violet background wearing a curly, blonde wig (AlokVMenon, 9 January 2016 b) their thick, dark hair contrasting strongly with the wig’s light gold—aims to critique the signifying power of the blonde wig.From the hyper-saturated colours, to the bright gold nose rings, to Vaid-Menon’s body hair, the selfie combines—and emphasises—markers of artifice and authenticity, femininity and masculinity. Reinforcing these contradictions, the caption interrogates the relationship between authenticity and visibility, stating “authenticity is a fraught project in a world that ritualizes your invisibilization.” Bringing together weighty concepts that occur in time, the caption speaks of ritual, the project of authenticity, and the process of invisibilisation, yet the selfie itself is a frozen instant, with nothing in the post clarifying what point of these processes, if any, it captures. In the selfie, the hyper-saturated colours highlight the wealth of information that the visual field makes available, but the image itself cannot answer the question of what visible markers, if any, communicate the truth of Vaid-Menon’s authentic identity. As the caption states, also foreclosing any answers, “authenticity is a fraught project,” and, moreover, that authenticity is threatened by what is not visible. While authenticity discourse presumes that the visual field offers the firmest epistemological grounds for assessing and legitimating identity, the visible may not convey the full reality of identity nor experience (Jackson 159). Furthermore, within selfie conventions, visual imperfection usually signifies authenticity (Lobinger and Brantner 1849), but this selfie has characteristics of professional photography, including the studio background, further marking it as a hybrid of authenticity and artifice.Through the intersection of the caption and the selfie, Vaid-Menon therefore casts into question the ability of the visual to successfully signify authentic identity. Thus, the caption reinforces and extends the work that the selfie does to trouble the coherence of Vaid-Menon’s identity. It should be noted, however, that this caption simultaneously participates in the production of Vaid-Menon’s personal brand, investing in a distinct mode of authenticity that Sarah Banet-Weiser has dubbed “AuthenticityTM,” an authenticity that is available to artists precisely through their creative and performative rejection of social norms (119–20). Refusing such normative assumptions about the relationship between hair, race, and gender, the caption and the selfie therefore position the blonde wig as simultaneously artificial and authentic.The tension between artifice and authenticity is explored further by Vaid-Menon in a set of two videos exploring the symbolism of the blonde wig, both captioned with an emoji of a blonde, white woman (AlokVMenon, 11 January 2016; 12 January 2016). By doubling the image of blonde hair within the caption—through the emoji that operates, rebus-like, as a substitute for language—these two captions shift the function of the blonde wig from a tactile, experiential object to an abstracted symbol of white womanhood. In the videos, Vaid-Menon, in character as “Becky” (Kelly) plays with the wig while delivering a monologue full of stereotypes about white women, a monologue that is summed up by the static, cartoonish emoji. As the visual spreads from the photograph into the space of the caption, the caption emphasises the symbolic—as opposed to the tactile or realist—function of the photographed wig.Across the series with the blonde wig, this shift from experiential object to abstract symbol happens primarily through the captions, although it also extends to the images. For example, accompanying the slow-motion video, the first caption puns “blondes have more funding” as the slow-motion video shows Vaid-Menon enjoying the physical sensation of the blonde curls. The slow-motion video creates an endless, looping present as its 7-second runtime repeats over and over, drawing our attention to the materiality of time and touch through the slow-motion effect. In the close, frontal framing of the video, the viewer does not see the pleasure of Vaid-Menon’s hand touching the wig itself, but rather its effect, as the curls fall slowly against Vaid-Menon’s cheek. Meanwhile, the punning caption is also concerned with texture, experience, and effect, drawing the viewer in to the texture of language. While the video stages an intimate, haptic pleasure, the selfie, posted later that same day, displays the wig, stressing what it might represent, rather than how it moves or how it feels. In the selfie, Vaid-Menon poses with one hand raised, caught in the act of twirling a curl, and the caption moves away from the pleasures of wordplay to a more overt political stance—“authenticity is fraught.” Here, their hand seems to pull the hair away from Vaid-Menon’s face, interrupting the sensuous intimacy of curls against their face.These selfie captions assert not only that cultural constructs make authentic visibility fraught for minoritised subjects, but, through the “transparent and economical” emoji (Bloom 248), these selfie videos and their emoji captions also serve to mediate blonde, white womanhood. As the image of the blonde wig proliferates, moving into the space of the caption, the final video selfie also introduces a second character, a white woman, presumably cisgender, wearing a different blonde wig, who appears suddenly behind Vaid-Menon.This tall, skinny woman with corkscrew blonde curls approaches the viewer with curiosity, swaying her body as she walks forward, with her eyes fixed on the camera. Pursing her lips, she produces the facial expression commonly described as “duckface,” a feminised facial expression that is common in selfies and marks the performative—rather than unmediated—self-expression they make possible. As she approaches Vaid-Menon and the camera, she ends up half-in and half-out of frame, lingering at the edge of our vision. Her presence has a disquieting and jarring effect, as Vaid-Menon continues their monologue without acknowledging her, despite the fact that she must be visible to Vaid-Menon on their cell phone screen. Then, because the video is a loop, the monologue ends abruptly, and the video restarts. As Vaid-Menon performs the role of Becky, the white woman who hovers eerily behind Vaid-Menon in the final video is pushed to the edge of the frame and ultimately vanishes at the moment of the loop. The structure of the loop is a provocative approach to questions of visibility, given that visibility politics asserts that visibility is teleologically directed toward future change, while in fact visibility politics reproduces the status quo that it makes visible (Keeling 33). Here, since Vaid-Menon only manages to displace “Becky” by enacting her (over and over), the final result is not (yet) an uncomplicated or uncompromised brown trans femme visibility.By staging the incoherence of claims to visible authenticity, Vaid-Menon’s selfie captions foreclose the possibility of successfully “passing” into coherent identity categories. In the series of posts with the blonde wig, Vaid-Menon never succeeds in seamlessly embodying any single identity category, and these tensions appear within the images as well as in the relationship between image and caption. This failure to “pass” is political, and as J. Jack Halberstam writes, there is a queer art to failure, for “under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world” (2–3).Failure is also a critical aesthetic element in social media humour, with the hashtag #fail curating posts that ironically celebrate mistakes and failures (Zappavigna 152). In selfies and selfie captions, Vaid-Menon revels in the queer art of social media failure. For example, in a selfie posted on 23 December 2016, Vaid-Menon stares solemnly past the camera, wearing vibrant, contrasting colours, including a bobbed purple wig, bright yellow lipstick, and a dress covered with bright, multi-coloured polka dots. The caption on this colourful, clearly queer, photograph proclaims that Vaid-Menon is “str8 acting looking for same #discrete” (AlokVMenon, 23 December 2016).Everything in the caption operates as a promise that will never be fulfilled, as even the hashtag—#discrete—fails to connect the selfie to other, similar images, as this hashtag is populated by a wildly heterogenous mix of images ranging from sexual images, to landscape photography, to images of fashionable, modern homes. Here, Vaid-Menon participates in a common social media practice, subverting the utility of hashtags and using them as paratextual commentary rather than as tools for networked cataloguing. In this post, Vaid-Menon’s failure to conform to the standards of homonormativity—which would require Vaid-Menon to appear “straight-acting” and to be able to promise discretion to a lover—is pushed to excess, producing a glorious rainbow of queer failure. Similarly, in the series of posts featuring the blonde wig, Vaid-Menon’s campy, parodic version of blonde, white womanhood does not simply demonstrate soberly that the standards imposed by white supremacy and heterocispatriarchy are unreachable. Instead, the series produces this attempt to pass into acceptable white femininity as a strange, delirious failure, accompanied by brilliant colours, strobing slow-motion, and punning, incisive captions.ConclusionIn Vaid-Menon’s Instagram posts, selfies and their captions interrogate and challenge the assumption that authentic identity can transparently be made legible through selfies. Through hashtags, Vaid-Menon’s captions draw upon the resources of the social media platform to connect their selfies to a network of other—not necessarily similar—images, inserting their “thank goddess I’m femme” selfies amid the wealth of “thank god it’s Friday” Instagram posts. And, by using emojis as captions, Vaid-Menon undermines the ability of the caption to anchor the visual to coherent meaning by substituting images for language.Through images and captions, Vaid-Menon’s Instagram selfies restage the act of direct, immediate self-expression as a complicated negotiation of the mediating pressures of language, social media platforms, digital photography, and, ultimately, culture. Furthermore, although selfies are celebrated in popular culture and online activism for the “visibility” they seem to make possible, Vaid-Menon’s selfie captions indicate that social media can do far more than simply promulgate visibility politics. This is necessary, for, despite its compelling lure, visibility politics not only neglects to imagine alternative futures, but actually limits future possibilities through its focus on the present, which is inevitably shaped by the past (Keeling 23). Instead, while building their personal brand on Instagram, Vaid-Menon simultaneously uses selfies and selfie captions to interrogate visibility politics from within one of its most popular contemporary tools, exposing the limitations and compromises of “visibility.” Rather than merely a tool for representation, Vaid-Menon’s work demonstrates how selfies and selfie captions can produce theories of, and about, representation.ReferencesAlokVMenon. Instagram post. 9 January 2016 a. <https://www.instagram.com/p/BAVG-Q3Olqs>.AlokVMenon. Instagram post. 9 January 2016 b. <https://www.instagram.com/p/BAVSkAoOlmF>.AlokVMenon. Instagram post. 11 January 2016. <https://www.instagram.com/p/BAa-CXnOlla>.AlokVMenon. 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