Journal articles: 'Reflexive modernity. eng' – Grafiati (2025)

Abstract:

A current trend in sociology characterises the end of the twentieth century as obsessed with risk. Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens are perhaps the leading expositors of this theme. Both emphasise a break with the past as the last millennium approached its conclusion, whereby changes in patterns of work, technological developments and the demise of traditional social forms have ushered in a new modernity. In their view, social organisations became more reflexive in their assessments of the circumstances of daily life, at a time when new technologies created the possibility of damage on a global scale. The result in the new social world is a society focused on risk. Some aspects of this assessment are uncontroversial. New technologies have emerged, whilst the role of the nation state has changed since its apogee in the nineteenth century. Other aspects of this new vision are, however, empirically more problematic. Furthermore, the degree to which social changes actually had the effects identified by Beck and Giddens remains an open question. Using the early twentieth-century regulation of mental defectives as a case study, this paper will interrogate this ‘discontinuist’ vision, exploring whether and how our understanding of risk has changed.

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This paper proposes a model of the cognitive mechanisms underlying the transition to behavioural and cognitive modernity in the Upper Palaeolithic using autocatalytic networks. These networks have been used to model life’s origins. More recently, they have been applied to the emergence of cognitive structure capable of undergoing cultural evolution. Mental representations of knowledge and experiences play the role of catalytic molecules, the interactions among them (e.g. the forging of new associations or affordances) play the role of reactions, and thought processes are modelled as chains of these interactions. We posit that one or more genetic mutations may have allowed thought to be spontaneously tailored to the situation by modulating the degree of (i) divergence (versus convergence), (ii) abstractness (versus concreteness), and (iii) context specificity. This culminated in persistent, unified autocatalytic semantic networks that bridged previously compartmentalized knowledge and experience. We explain the model using one of the oldest-known uncontested examples of figurative art: the carving of the Hohlenstein–Stadel Löwenmensch, or lion man. The approach keeps track of where in a cultural lineage each innovation appears, and models cumulative change step by step. It paves the way for a broad scientific framework for the origins of both biological and cultural evolutionary processes.

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This article explores the imagery and notions of personhood underlying the willingness to undertake extreme work among creative knowledge workers. The core argument is that extreme work is informed by pervasive win-win fantasies which can be recognized in a number of current organizational trends, ranging from New Public Management, over corporate culture, to project work. Each of these trends claims to transcend paradoxes by making contradictory extremes enhance each other rather than hamper each other. This is partly made possible by an increasing immateriality of both money and labor, I argue. Drawing on empirical data from creative knowledge industries, this article illustrates how ‘win-win’ workers subscribe to a set of norms promising that extreme work is a ticket to Never-Never Land. These norms are progression, passion, indispensability, and individual agency. The empirical analysis shows that win-win fantasies imprison us in ‘irreflexive modernity’, unable to escape the dream. In the end, the article discusses avenues for finding our way back into reflexive modernity through moderation, prioritization, and paying critical attention to the deferral between gain and cost practiced in win-win games.

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This essay deals with the intellectual transformation of the late Syrian intellectual Yasin al-Hafiz, and more precisely with his historicist blurring of the distinction between liberalism and socialism in the aftermath of the defeat of 1967. Even though this ideology was not a textbook liberalism, al-Hafiz's later rehabilitation of it is one of the many components of a genealogy of Arab liberalism, one that is marked by the end of the hopes of the postcolonial state. Through this reading of al-Hafiz's intellectual project, the essay addresses the broader question of travelling theories, and, more precisely, the question of how to study the modernist traditions in the non-Western world. In doing so, the goal is to set the basis for a rethinking of contemporary intellectual history in the Arab postcolonial era and to uncover its reflexive streak.

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Making peoples: a history of the New Zealanders from Polynesian settlement to the end of the nineteenth century. By James Belich. London: Penguin, 2001. Pp. 497. ISBN 0-14-100639-0. £9.99.Paradise reforged: a history of the New Zealanders from the 1880s to the year 2000. By James Belich. London: Allen Lane, 2002. Pp. 606. ISBN 0-7139-9172-0. £25.00.The Enlightenment and the origins of European Australia. By John Gascoigne. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xviii+233. ISBN 0-521-80343-80. £45.00.Australian ways of death: a social and cultural history, 1840–1918. By Pat Jalland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002. Pp. vi+378. ISBN 0-19-550754-1. £15.99.White flour, white power: from rations to citizenship in central Australia. By Tim Rowse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xiii+255. ISBN 0-521-62457-6. £40.00.The five books covered here might seem a random sample: antipodean oddments from the edge of a review editor's desk. Their subject matter – from ‘ways of death’ in Australia to rationing policies for indigenous Australians – is diverse, as are their approaches: a scholarly assessment of the influence of Enlightenment ideas in the Australian colonies through to a massive two-volume general history of New Zealand to 2000. Yet even in this eclectic mix there are common themes, reflecting current interests and models in the writing of history in both countries. For some time, Australia and New Zealand have been productively positioned in relation to European social change as ‘born modern’ experiments, or at least as colonies which forced or anticipated aspects of the modernity shaping metropolitan centres. There have been several phases of historiography advancing this thesis, each reflecting a desire on the part of historians ‘down under’ to relate their account to wider dynamics, or to incorporate models that redress or refute the ‘isolation’ of their history by exploring categories extending beyond the national chronicle. More recently, historians of post-colonialism have returned the interest. They have traced in the extension of colonialism many of the crucial factors shaping core elements of nineteenth-century European nationalism, even the concept of Europe itself. In complex patterns of interdependence within ‘empire’, these historians have also identified several themes of ‘modernity’: reflexive approaches to ‘self’ and identity; discursive matrices of liberal government; the application and testing of the Enlightenment project of ‘reason’ and the ‘disenchantment’ of scientific knowledge and classification.

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The First Century of Sociology - and the Next Sociology got many of its first institutions just one century ago - important and still existing journals and departments of sociology were founded in the last de¬cade of the 19th Century. Sociology of the early 20th Century - the period after the classics - was occupied by the origins and rise of capitalism and its evolution and progress. It is important to notice, that all three fundamental conceptions of classical sociology could be, and were, by the classical protagonists themselves, given different meanings and expressed with different accents. The social world was, above all, a world in evolution, a world historically evolved. In this per¬spective, the origins of things socially had an absolutely central place of inte¬rest. The conditions for social relations and how to create and maintain social solidarity were crucial issues among the first generations of sociologists. It was the dynamic of the modernisation pro¬cesses which concerned sociology while its focus was primarily around the soci¬al space of nation-states - its institutions as well as its theoretical approaches were tuned by nationality and were state-bounded. This contrasts strongly with today´s sociology which is globally focusing on variability and communication. By the end of the present century strategy and contingency have replaced evolution and progress as the dominant concepts of sociology. Undestanding and discour¬se seem to be the predominant models of cognition in contemporary sociology. It is in this perspective that social labelling, as a way of grasping and conveying the sense of contemporary world, becomes so central to sociologists of prime-time aspirations. Are we living in post-mo¬dernity, or in reflexive modernity, or perhaps in a second modernity. The repertoire of possible sense-making labels is an indefinite quantity. In this context we would need a critical sociology of bad sociology, and of other bad academic out¬puts, analyzing sloppiness and shallow¬ness as institutional effects, rather than as individual deficiences. Spatially, the practice of sociology has a three-dimensional location - the in¬stitutional space, the stage of performan¬ce and its space of imagination and inve¬stigation. Sociology of this century has been national and European in its approach to the social and society. A global sociology has to turn away from its euro¬centric past and present and to focus mo¬re on global issues such as information technology, capital and social move¬ments analysed in cross-continental perspectives. The paper concludes in a rather optimistic mood emphasizing the huge accummulation of sociological knowledge which has taken place du¬ring its first century. Here can be mentio¬ned recent work on identities - it may be ethnic, sexual or national - studies of in¬stitutionalisation in making political sy¬stems, and new knowledge concerning the dynamics of collective actions and the gendering of social systems as im¬portant achievements which were large¬ly unstated a century ago.

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Free-form satire, emancipated from strictly Horatian / Juvenalian models, and organized around a poetic “I”, distant, critical or even indignant before a changing world, played an important role in the emergence of news writing in Early Modernity, leading to the onset of the periodical press in the 17th century. In order to reflect on the connection between Early Modern information media, and satirical or militant writing, the idiom “fake news”, while seemingly incongruous at first, is in fact particularly useful, as it helps establish a connection with our contemporary practices, such as incorrect news, ideologically-oriented publications, clickbaits, and ironic parodies. By comparing these apparently heterogeneous phenomena, it becomes possible to think, in a coordinated way, about three aspects of the exchanges and hybridization that took place between Early Modern “occasionnels” (short, topical brochures) and “libelles” (satirical or libellous tracts). Like contemporary “fake news”, a term often used by purveyors of equally debatable reports to decry doubtful information produced by the opposing camp, libelles were always entangled in a network of other libelles, ever expending due to the indignation caused by the enemy’s lies. Libelles imitated news writing, feeding on rumors, and led to demystifications that often doubled as critiques of the codes of topicality found in the occasionnels. In certain ways, such criticism contributed to the creation of these codes, by pushing back against them. The forms taken by this satire of ideologically-oriented, or militant news writing went beyond partisan intent; it was sometimes difficult, as it is nowadays on certain satirical websites or social media accounts, to distinguish between activist creative writings, and playful games of wit. At a deeper level, satirical esthetics, whether grotesque (referring to the whole period) or burlesque (referring to its end), could instigate a global exercise of incredulity or unbelief towards the religious and political foundations of the Ancien Régime. On account of such a meta-reflexive dimension, of its great diversity linked to its hybridization of news writings, of its oscillation between partisan and playful humour, depending on the readership’s liking and the publishing industry’s interests, libelle referred to changeable forms quite similar to the fickle realities the moniker fake news refers to nowadays. Conversely, the libelle invites us not to hastily reject one aspect or another of the current network, which might be more homogeneous than it seems at first sight.

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Introduction. The article presents the results of reflection on the readiness of the education system to respond to the transformational challenges of digital economy through the formation of relevant human resources. It identifies an imbalance in the response of the education system to the demand of society and business for training human resources with digital competences. The imbalance makes it difficult to implement new in-demand educational trajectories based on the principle of individualization of employee’s professional and personal self-realization. The purpose of the study is to identify the potential of enhancing teachers' digital competence in accordance with the needs of education diversification within digital transformation. Materials and Methods. The methodological basis for the study consists of reflexive modernity concepts (E. Giddens, W. Beck), reflecting qualitative changes of the social world in the context of digitalization; digital sociology of changes in social relations influenced by digital technologies (V. F. Nitsevich), mediating ordinary social contacts in everyday communication and creating new digital opportunities and risks. Existing and required digital competences of teachers were identified on the basis of desk research of teachers’ digital skills and competences models and empirical research on technical university teachers' opinions (survey method). Statistical methods were used to analyze and interpret the research data. Results. The study has identified the potential of the education system to adjust to the challenges of educational and career transformations. It is emphasized that the ways of potential realization can vary from ‘soft’ ones which imply gradual mastering based on several program versions and formats to the so called stress-options of forced competence mastering within a limited period of time. The necessity of introducing regulating measures for the transition to a new role of a teacher in the digital model of education is justified (e.g. teacher as a manager, teacher as a facilitator of the educational process). Conclusions. The article concludes that differentiation based on the level of digital competences and the degree of readiness to master digital technologies limits the speed of relevant response of the education system to the transformational demands of society. The need for content elaboration and teaching health-saving technologies within the digital culture is highlighted. Since the level of digital competencies of teaching staff is the basis for the development of educational institutions and the competitiveness of the country, measures are to be taken in order to facilitate the development of digital competencies.

Abstract:

O presente artigo, inspirado na realização do Encontro e Diálogos com a Educação Ambiental, trata de ser uma reflexão teórica sobre o conceito de Encontro e como este pode vir a nutrir-se das características da ética transdisciplinar. Para tanto, o texto transita por reflexões no âmbito dos fundamentos da Educação Ambiental e dos aportes do Pensamento Complexo. Em seu desenvolvimento estão explicitados sobre os deslocamentos que a ética sofreu na modernidade e quais são as características que compreendem uma ética transdisciplinar. Ao final, o valor da diversidade é tratado como a grande riqueza que se produz nos encontros e que deve ser mantida a fim de evocar a potência da ética transdisciplinar. This article, inspired by the Encounter and Dialogues with Environmental Education, tries to be a theoretical reflection on the concept of Encounter and how it can nourish itself with the characteristics of transdisciplinary ethics. For that, the text goes through reflections within the ambit of Environmental Education and the contributions of Complex Thought. In its development there are explicit about the dislocations that the ethics suffered in the modernity and what are the characteristics that refers to a transdisciplinary ethics. In the end, the value of diversity is treated as the great richness that occurs in encounters and must be maintained in to evoke the potency of transdisciplinary ethics. El presente artículo, inspirado en la realización del Encuentro y Diálogos con la Educación Ambiental, trata de ser una reflexión teórica sobre el concepto de Encuentro y cómo éste puede venir a nutrirse de las características de la ética transdisciplinaria. Para esto, el texto transita por reflexiones en el marco de los fundamentos de la Educación Ambiental y de los aportes del Pensamiento Complejo. En su desarrollo están explicitados sobre los desplazamientos que la ética sufrió en la modernidad y cuáles son las características que comprenden una ética transdisciplinaria. Al final, el valor de la diversidad es tratado como la gran riqueza que se produce en los encuentros y que debe mantenerse a fin de evocar la potencia de la ética transdisciplinaria.

Abstract:

Resumo: O presente estudo comporta uma análise do pensamento jurídico crítico do autor mexicano Jesús Antonio De La Torre Rangel na sua contribuição para a temática dos Direitos Humanos como evolução conceitual sócio histórico fundamentada pela perspectiva filosófica da libertação latino-americana. Assim, a delimitação é embasada na concepção de juridicidade libertadora, categoria que serve de abertura para a noção jurídica totalizada – calcada na ideia positivada –. Dessa forma, objetiva-se aproximar o Direito do sentido de justo que nasce do povo na sua práxis de libertação e, por essa razão dotando-o de uma compreensão política. A problemática da pesquisa perpassa pela existência ou não de uma fundamentação latino-americana para a compreensão dos Direitos Humanos. Com isso, a hipótese que permeia o trabalho é que os Direitos Humanos devem ser resgatados na experiência e evolução conceitual encoberta pela modernidade, recuperando uma tradição ibero-latino-americana, olvidada no espaço geopolítico e epistêmico colonizado. Portanto, o estudo irá permear três dimensões no pensamento jurídico crítico dos Direitos Humanos do jurista mexicano, estabelecendo um panorama reflexivo que pretende demonstrar ao final uma proposta crítica de juridicidade libertadora.Abstract: The present study includes an analysis of the critical legal thinking of Mexican author Jesús Antonio de La Torre Rangel in his contribution to the theme of Human Rights as a socio-historical conceptual evolution based on the philosophical perspective of Latin American liberation. Thus, the delimitation is based on the conception of liberating juridicity, a category that serves as an opening for the totalized juridical notion - based on the positive idea -. In this way, the objective is to approximate the Right of the sense of the righteous that is born of the people in their praxis of liberation and, therefore, endowing it with a political understanding. The research problematic pervades the existence or not of a Latin American foundation for the understanding of Human Rights. With this, the hypothesis that permeates the work is that Human Rights must be rescued in the experience and conceptual evolution concealed by modernity, recovering an Ibero-Latin American tradition, forgotten in colonized geopolitical and epistemic space. Therefore, the study will permeate three dimensions in the critical legal thinking of the human rights of the Mexican jurist, establishing a reflective panorama that intends to demonstrate at the end a critical proposal of liberating juridicity.

Abstract:

O presente trabalho busca compreender quais os fundamentos da Educação em Direitos Humanos (EDH) na América Latina, identificando as possíveis rupturas e continuidades com o projeto social delineado na Modernidade. O artigo parte da ideia que a sociabilidade moderna formou as bases das práticas educativas contemporâneas latino-americanas, que têm como elementos a emancipação humana através da produção racional e universal do conhecimento, economia capitalista e Estado centralizado. No percurso investigativo realizado, entende-se que por não serem monolíticos, o conjunto de ideias, valores e crenças que formam a Modernidade apresentam tensões e conflitos internos, os quais não impediram o surgimento de um pensamento homogêneo e a colonização de múltiplos interesses sociais locais pela satisfação dos interesses econômicos globais. Em seguida, abordam-se os efeitos da adoção desse projeto na América Latina, marcado pela dominação direta dos colonizadores europeus, extermínio dos povos originários e sucessivos governos autoritários, emergindo práticas educativas que impedem o diálogo com o conhecimento local e a formação de cidadãos participativos. Por meio de uma abordagem qualitativa e revisão de literatura, é possível identificar que a EDH na América Latina se fundamenta na reflexão social crítica, que tem raízes nos preceitos da educação popular e movimentos sociais pró-democráticos, que buscam a ampliação da participação política popular. É possível concluir que o diálogo e a democracia são a um só tempo pré-condição e fim da prática da educação comprometida com a emancipação humana e a participação inclusiva. O desafio à manutenção de um programa permanente de EDH é a neutralização ou esvaziamento por interesses econômicos, antidemocráticos e de negação dos saberes locais. La educación en derechos humanos en América Latina: bases para una práctica educativa democrática El presente trabajo busca comprender los fundamentos de la Educación en Derechos Humanos (EDH) en América Latina, identificando las posibles rupturas y continuidades con el proyecto social perfilado en la Modernidad. El artículo parte de la idea de que la sociabilidad moderna fue la base de las prácticas educativas latinoamericanas contemporáneas, cuyos elementos son la emancipación humana a través de la producción racional y universal del conocimiento, la economía capitalista y el estado centralizado. En el camino investigativo tomado, se entiende que por no ser monolíticos, el conjunto de ideas, valores y creencias que conforman la Modernidad presenta tensiones y conflictos internos, que no impidieron el surgimiento de un pensamiento homogéneo y la colonización de múltiples intereses sociales y culturales. para la satisfacción de los intereses económicos globales. Luego, se abordan los efectos de la adopción de este proyecto en América Latina, marcado por la dominación directa de los colonizadores europeos, el exterminio de los pueblos originarios y sucesivos gobiernos autoritarios, prácticas educativas emergentes que impiden el diálogo con los saberes locales y la formación de ciudadanos participativos. A través de un enfoque cualitativo y revisión de la literatura, es posible identificar que EDH en América Latina parte de una reflexión social crítica, que tiene sus raíces en los preceptos de la educación popular, defensora del diálogo con los saberes locales y movimientos sociales prodemocráticos. , que buscan ampliar la participación popular. Es posible concluir que el diálogo y la democracia son a la vez condición previa y fin de la práctica de una educación comprometida con la emancipación humana y la participación inclusiva, y es un desafío mantener un programa permanente que no se neutralice ni se vacíe. Palabras clave: Educación en derechos humanos. América Latina. Fundamentos sociohistóricos. Democracia. Justicia social. Human rights education in Latin America: foundations for a democratic educational practice The present work seeks to understand the fundamentals of Human Rights Education (HRE) in Latin America, identifying the possible ruptures and continuities with the social project outlined in Modernity. The article starts from the idea that modern sociability formed the basis of contemporary Latin American educational practices, whose elements are human emancipation through the rational and universal production of knowledge, capitalist economy and centralized state. In the investigative path taken, it is understood that because they are not monolithic, the set of ideas, values and beliefs that make up Modernity present internal tensions and conflicts, which did not prevent the emergence of homogeneous thinking and the colonization of multiple social and cultural interests by the satisfaction of global economic interests. Then, the effects of the adoption of this project in Latin America are approached, marked by the direct domination of European colonizers, the extermination of the original peoples and successive authoritarian governments, emerging educational practices that prevent dialogue with local knowledge and the formation of participatory citizens. Through a qualitative approach and literature review, it is possible to identify that HRE in Latin America starts from a critical social reflection, which has its roots in the precepts of popular education and pro-democratic social movements, which seek to expand popular political participation. It is possible to conclude that dialogue and democracy are both a precondition and an end to the practice of education committed to human emancipation and inclusive participation. The challenge for maintaining a permanent HRE program is its neutralization or emptying due to economic, anti-democratic interests and the denial of local knowledge. Keywords: Human rights education. Latin America. Socio-historical foundations. Democracy. Social justice.

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AbstractAcademic research into the cultural changes that took place in Europe between 1400 and 1650 is notoriously fraught with terminological difficulties. With regard to the place of paganism and polytheism in Western culture, three questions in particular stand in the foreground: Most generally, is it adequate to isolate a period as "Renaissance" or "early modernity" and what is gained by doing so? Is the period called "Renaissance" characterized by a continuity of pagan and polytheistic elements or do we have to address the presence of pagan semantics as reception, revival, or, rather, invention? And finally, in terms of concepts of "religion", is the presence of pagan deities in public spheres an expression of "lived religion" or of a Renaissance "dream" of a pagan past that is syncretistically built into Christian "religion"?After a survey of influential contributions to this discussion, the article approaches the problem of Renaissance polytheism and paganism from a different point of view. Under the headline of material and visual culture, cultural studies have recently broken grounds for a new understanding of religious dynamics in public spheres. Major contributions to medieval and early modern visual culture are presented and subsequently applied to examples of what can be called a Renaissance pagan discourse. Arguing mainly methodologically, the article aims at introducing visual and material aspects into the study of Western esotericism and reflecting on the underlying discourses of inclusion and exclusion that so often have characterized academic study of religion.Focusing on the visual presence of pagan deities challenges common notions of a "Christian occident" with a monotheistic creed that in late antiquity won the upper hand over a pagan past. This narrative is dependent on a conceptualization of "religion" that is based on "faith", inner states of mind, belief-systems, and (holy) texts. On a deeper level of analysis, these conceptualizations correspond to two strong currents in the academic study of religion: a religionist conviction and a philological orientation. It is argued that both currents reflect strategies of distancing or even purgation and exorcism. If we take seriously the notion that religious ideas, convictions, and traditions are "acted out" in the public sphere, that they form part of people's identities in a unity of image, message, and body, and that the materiality of religion is something to move to the center of scrutiny, we will perhaps arrive at a better understanding of the status of paganism in post-ancient Europe. From the perspective of visual culture, the pagan gods are not a "dream", nor do they belong to a system outside "religion". They form a crucial element of people's identities. It is precisely the strategies of distancing, singularization, and exorcism that academic study of religion has to engage. Die wissenschaftliche Erforschung der kulturellen Veränderungen in Europa zwischen 1400 und 1650 ist bekanntermaßen mit terminologischen Schwierigkeiten behaftet. Was den Ort von Paganismus und Polytheismus in der westlichen Kultur betrifft, kommt drei Fragen besondere Bedeutung zu: Ist es überhaupt angemessen, eine Periode als ,,Renaissance" oder ,,Frühe Neuzeit" zu isolieren, und was ist damit gewonnen? Ist die Epoche der ,,Renaissance" durch eine Kontinuität paganer und polytheistischer Elemente gekennzeichnet oder ist die Präsenz paganer Semantiken als Rezeption, Revitalisierung oder gar als Erfindung anzusprechen? Und schließlich lässt sich im Hinblick auf den wissenschaftlichen Religionsbegriff fragen, ob die Präsenz paganer Gottheiten im öffentlichen Raum Ausdruck einer ,,lebenden Religion" ist oder eines ,,Traums" von einer paganen Vergangenheit, den die Renaissance synkretistisch in die christliche ,,Religion" integrierte?Nach einer Übersicht über einflussreiche Beiträge zu dieser Diskussion bringt der Artikel eine neue Sicht auf das Problem von Polytheismus und Paganismus in der Renaissance ins Spiel. Unter den Stichworten Materialität und Visualität haben die Kulturwissenschaften in jüngster Zeit neue Analyseinstrumente zum Verständnis religiöser Dynamiken im öffentlichen Raum entwickelt. Wichtige Deutungsansätze mittelalterlicher und frühneuzeitlicher visueller Kultur werden vorgestellt und anschließend auf Beispiele für einen ,,paganen Diskurs" der Renaissance angewandt. Die Ausrichtung des Artikels ist in erster Linie methodisch: er möchte die Elemente Visualität und Materialität in die Esoterikforschung einführen; damit ist eine kritische Reflexion auf die Diskurse von Inklusion und Exklusion verbunden, die über lange Zeit die Religionswissenschaft geprägt haben.Die methodische Ausrichtung auf die visuelle Präsenz paganer Gottheiten stellt überkommene Auffassungen eines ,,Christlichen Abendlands" in Frage, mit einer monotheistischen Überzeugung, die in der Spätantike die pagane Vergangenheit überwunden habe. Ein solches Narrativ ist eng verbunden mit einem Religionskonzept, welches auf ,,Glauben", inneren Bewusstseinszuständen und (heiligen) Texten beruht. Hinter solchen Konzepten stehen wiederum zwei einflussreiche Tendenzen der Religionswissenschaft: eine religionistische Überzeugung und eine philologische Orientierung. Der Beitrag argumentiert, dass beide Strömungen Ausdruck von Strategien der Distanzierung oder gar der Purifizierung und des Exorzismus sind. Wenn wir jedoch davon ausgehen, dass religiöse Ideen, Überzeugungen und Traditionen im öffentlichen Raum ,,ausagiert" und kommuniziert werden, dass sie Ausdruck von Identitäten in einer Einheit von Bild, Botschaft und Körper sind, und dass die Materialität von Religion vom Rand ins Zentrum der Aufmerksamkeit zu rücken ist, werden wir den Status des Paganismus im nachantiken Europa besser bestimmen können. Aus Sicht von visual culture sind die paganen Gottheiten weder ein ,,Traum", noch gehören sie einem System jenseits der ,,Religion" an. Sie sind ein zentrales Element von Identitäten. Es ist die Aufgabe der Religionswissenschaft, eben jene Strategien der Distanzierung, der Singularisierung und des Exorzismus zum Gegenstand ihrer Analyse zu machen.

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If sociologists are to be trusted, reflexivity, focused on itself and devoid of any religious or at least ideological framework, leads to the weakening of control mechanisms. Such changes are accompanied by the polarization of social classes and by the exclusion of the so-called underclass (which certainly includes a vast majority of criminals) from the civil society. In the doctrine of criminal law of “mature modernism”, within the framework of a liberal-democratic state, the civil society, together with the idea of communication, is supposed to constitute a central reference point in the research on criminal liability. Reflexivity brings up new problems. New citizen-oriented criminal law is being shaped, based upon mediation and communication (e.g. restorative justice, Expressive Theory). The civil society does not include the area of politics or political nature of things, where the problem is not the justification of the punishment but the effectiveness of mere spatial isolation. In this sense, it is difficult to talk about the merits of the emancipation of an individual from the limitations imposed by the society. The weakening of any external authority and of political duties owed to the state is replaced by self-control proper to reflexive modernity only in cases where the individuals have adequate intellectual and ethical predispositions. Disappearance of the influence of external rules and values together with the mechanism of exclusion from the civil society results in the weakening of self-control and in selfish care only about one’s own perspective (but also in repressive subordination by the state). Such a state of affairs creates favourable conditions for objectifying criminal liability, abandoning the concept of guilt, and for attempts to provide an ethical justification of penalty – which are concepts taken from the “world of citizens”.

Abstract:

Anthony Giddens and a number of other social theorists and commentators see reflexivity as the guiding principle of modern self-identity (Giddens 1992; Beck). According to this thesis, reflexivity brings, at least potentially, a new level of knowledgeability, control and orderliness to one's experience of self. It ushers in a demystified world, geared towards calculability. In Giddens' own words, "....reflexivity refers to a world increasingly constituted by information rather than pre-modern modes of conduct. It is how we live after the retreat of tradition and nature, because of having to take so many forward-orientated decisions" (Giddens & Pierson 115). Reflexivity involves "the routine incorporation of new knowledge or information into environments of action that are thereby reconstituted or reorganised" (Giddens 1991 243). Life is characterised by planning and goal-orientation. In Giddens' terminology it is a "project", involving "the strategic adoption of lifestyle options, organised in terms of the individual's projected lifespan" (1991 243). The future is "colonised", knowledge is "reappropriated", and the self is a "trajectory". Relationships are increasingly transparent and democratic, always open to negotiation. These sentiments are repeated often, and lie at the heart of neo-liberal analyses of the contemporary self. While such accounts undoubtedly reflect certain aspects of self-identity in the modern world, it also neglects many areas of experience relevant to the contemporary self - tradition, culture and concepts of fate, the unconscious and emotions - for example, and our experience of our own self is far less clear-cut than Giddens and others suggest. Selfhood as a vehicle for grasping the world in relation to itself is experienced far more ambiguously, during both the more mundane passages of daily life, and in the more "fateful moments" of one's life. It is characterised as much by a lack of definition and precision as it is by a calculable boundary and trajectory. Giddens & the Reflexive Self Giddens ends up with a rationalist caricature of the processes that make up self-identity. His comments on the formation of values, reproduced here, are a case in point: It wouldn't be true to say we have values that are separate from the increasingly reflexive nature of the world - values are directly involved in it, because we live in a world where we have to decide what values to hold, as individuals, and in a democracy, collectively - essentially through reflexive discourse. In more traditional cultures those values are more given (Giddens & Pierson 219). Are the values we hold really the result of nothing more than rational "decisions"? Most people, if asked, would probably have only a vague idea about the origins of their values. One would be mistaken in attempting to trace them back to a purely rational decision making process. It is certainly hard to conceive of values, and maintain a meaningful sense of the word, if they are reduced to the result of "reflexive discourse" alone. This picture of the world is again far too tidy. People do not go through life choosing from and storing a range of values which they then apply methodically to their understanding of the world. What we value is bound up with all the factors I have just mentioned - culture, emotion and so on. In the same way, self-identity can no more easily be reduced to a number of options from which we choose objectively and transparently. This is apparent in a number of interrelated factors which impinge upon self-identity, largely overlooked in the championing of choice, self-disclosure and reflexivity. How we experience ourselves, how we want to see ourselves and others to see us - all the things that constitute self-identity - is open to contradiction. Giddens too easily constructs the reflexive self as a functional whole, all units - reflexivity, practical consciousness and the unconscious - working for the overall benefit of the self. Such a view of selfhood is easily complicated. I want to argue that most individuals are defined as much by the conflict of intentions, or by their actions contradicting their intentions. People are often unsure of what they want to happen - of their 'trajectory' - except when they indulge in fantasy. How one experiences one's self changes from day to day, moment to moment. A clear understanding of the self as a "reflexive narrative" is, in this context, a rare event. Individuals may be capable of reflexivity, but it is against a wider backdrop of ambiguity. In a recent analysis Giddens draws from a contemporary work of fiction to illustrate the exhaustive application of reflexivity in everyday life. The novel, Nicholas Baker's The Mezzanine, "deals with no more than a few moments in the day of a person who actively reflects, in detail, upon the minutiae of his life's surroundings and his reactions to them" (Giddens 1994a 60). Giddens goes on to quote a lengthy description, in which Baker's character reflects on an ice-cube tray he has just picked up. The extensive consideration of the changes in ice-cube trays and a detailed understanding of them represents, for Giddens, "profound processes of the reformation of daily life" (1994a 60). Everything is opened up to inspection, from a post-traditional vantage point. Even the more mundane elements of life are part of a series of "everyday experiments", in which the outcomes are no longer certain. In Giddens's analysis, "we are all in a sense, self-pioneers" (Tucker 206). Alternative Fictions Fictional accounts of selfhood, and the self's relation to others and the outside world, are likely to be pretty reflexive affairs. "Narratives of the self" are in fictional accounts, a prime concern. It may not always be helpful to draw upon fictional accounts to suggest the reflexivity of the modern world. This problem aside, fictional accounts can also be used to problematise the notion of reflexivity, and suggest a more ambiguous selfhood. In Tim Lott's recent novel, White City Blue he documents such an understanding throughout. Take this description of the development of the main character's relationship with his future wife: Not so long ago, me and Veronica would only see each other at weekends - that's Friday, Saturday and Sunday night - and on other night in the week; a ratio of freedom to commitment of 3:4. That's reasonable I think.... But as the marriage approaches, the F:C ratio is slipping badly. She's round here most nights now, and the ratio is moving towards more like 2:5 or even 1:6. I don't mind, I suppose. Processes like these aren't really stoppable anyway. It's organic, inevitable. Nobody decides, nobody really wants it to happen. But it happens anyway. I go out with my mates a few nights a week, she goes out with hers, but somehow or other, without any particular arrangement having been made, we both usually end up here (34-35; my emphasis). In this example, albeit fictional, the protagonist, far from reflexively understanding the passage of his life, only has a vague grasp of the cause of events. Reflexivity is only apparent in the retrospective illustration of those events for the reader. The fictional account of modern selfhood documented above is mirrored in a recent critique of Giddens's definition of reflexivity by Nicos Mouzelis, summarised in the following extract: the reflexive individuals' relation to their inner and outer worlds is conceptualised in ultra-activistic, instrumental terms: subjects are portrayed as constantly involved in means-ends situations, constantly trying reflexively and rationally to choose their broad goals as well as the means of their realisation; they are also constantly monitoring or revising their projects in the light of new information and of the already achieved results (85). Mouzelis does not suggest that the concept of reflexivity itself be abandoned. Instead he argues that Giddens's version of reflexive awareness is "culture-specific, or more precisely, western-specific". He argues that reflexivity needs to be re-conceptualised, to overcome Giddens's "over-activistic" tendencies, and accommodate other ways of being reflexive. Mouzelis signifies what alternative reflexivities might look like when he suggests what is missing from Giddens's concept. Giddens's understanding, he argues, "entails a type of reflexivity that excludes more contemplative, more 'easy-going', less cognitive ways of navigating reflexively in a world full of choices and individual challenges" (85). Mouzelis seeks an alternative formulation of reflexivity, which challenges Giddens's activistic version: Is it perhaps possible to resort to [a] reflexive attitude that does not seek (via rational choices) actively to construct life orientations, but rather allows in indirect, passive manner life orientations and other broad goals to emerge .... a kind of existence where instead of actively and instrumentally trying to master the complexity of growing choices, one chooses (to use Pierre-August Renoir's expression) to float as a cork in the ocean of post-traditional reality? (85-86). The main character in White City Blue would probably agree. An 'easy-going' attitude towards one's beliefs is displayed in this dialogue from the same novel: You were going to say that friends are the most important thing in life. I suppose so. I'm not sure. I suppose so. I don't know that I believe it though. Why would you say it if you didn't believe it? A good question. But isn't it what everyone does? You don't have to believe what you say. How are you meant to know what you believe? Sometimes - most of the time you just have to guess. You have to say something, after all. I don't know. Sometimes you just pick up opinions. Like fluff on your jacket. Uh-huh. And you don't always know where you picked up the fluff. But there it is all the same. In this extract the main character is disclaiming reflexive capabilities. The comparison between the fictional world evoked here and that in Giddens' example suggest two different views of modern self-identity. Reflexivity, as commonly understood in contemporary accounts, does not and cannot embrace the whole range of experiences which make up self-identity in each concrete moment, particularly the rationally ambiguous nature of everyday life, indicated here. There is more to self-experience than rational understanding – "no matter how skilled and knowledgeable the agent, miscommunication can arise because of emotional, cultural and other non-cognitive factors that are part of the process of communicating through language" (Mestrovic 46). As with communication with others, so with self-consciousness - communication with the self, and, as Halton suggests: "being human involves feeling, dreaming, experiencing, remembering and forgetting, and not simply knowing" (Halton 273). These other elements of experience contextualise reflexive awareness, and ground its transformative capabilities in the need to acknowledge the complexities of self-identity. Contemporary self-identity is characterised as much by a lack of definition and precision as it is by a calculable boundary and trajectory. It may, then, be possible to think of alternative ways of constructing identity which rely less upon rational-cognitive models of self-awareness. Alternative Selves The anti-religious philosophy of Krishnamurti is one example of an alternative formulation of self-identity incorporating a form of reflexivity (Mouzelis, Krishnamurti 1970). Krishnamurti"s texts demand that individuals give up on almost all forms of rational thinking in ordering their existence meaningfully. Furthermore: "Beliefs, divine revelations, sacred texts, as well as rationalistically derived moral codes, are not only quite irrelevant in the search for a spiritual, meaningful existence today, but they actually constitute serious obstacles to such a search" (Mouzelis 88). Krishnamurti"s belief is that genuine self-awareness comes about only when rationalised schemes and projects for the self are abandoned; "when ratiocination, planning and cognitively constructed means-end schemata are peripheralised" (Mouzelis 88). He argues "the fundamental understanding of oneself does not come through knowledge or through the cultivation of experiences" (Krishnamurti, 1970 25). To exist authentically, one has to explore one"s own self through "silent and continuous gazing inwards" (Mouzelis 89). From this state, "a tranquility that is not a product of the mind, a tranquility that is neither imagined nor cultivated" is possible (Krishnamurti 1970 28). Adorno is similarly critical of dominant formulations of emancipation, which, he argues, focus upon "the conception of unfettered activity, of uninterrupted procreation, chubby insatiability, of freedom as frantic bustle". (156). He imagines a world where "lying on water and looking peacefully at the sky, being, nothing else, without any further definition and fulfilment, might take the place of process, act, satisfaction" (157). I have not sought to explore Krishnamurti"s perspective in any detail here, nor indeed Adorno"s, Halton"s Mouzelis"s, or many other peripheral accounts of self, only indicates that alternative formulations of reflexivity are possible, where goal-oriented thought processes take a back seat to a more contemplative and tranquil awareness of self. In pursuing these alternatives, a more complex and representative understanding of reflexivity and self-identity may be generated. At the same time, alternative discourses may further illustrate and problematise the one-sidedness of neo-liberal accounts of the reflexive self. References Adorno, T. Minima Moralia. London: Verso, 1974. Baker, N. The Mezzanine. London: Harper Collins, 1990. Giddens, A. The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990. ---. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991. ---. The Transformation of Intimacy. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992. ---. "Living in a Post-Traditional Society". U. Beck, A. Giddens and S. Lash, Reflexive Modernization 1994. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994. Giddens, A & C. Pierson. Conversations with Anthony Giddens: Making Sense of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998. Halton, E "The Modern Error: Or, the Unbearable Enlightenment of Being". Featherstone, Lash & Robertson (eds.) Global Modernities. Sage: London, 1995. Krishnamurti. The Krishnamurti Reader. London: Arkana, 1970. ---. The Impossible Question. London: Penguin, 1978. Lott, T. White City Blue. London: Penguin, 1999. Mestrovic, S.G. Anthony Giddens: The Last Modernist. London: Routledge, 1998. Mouzelis, N. "Exploring post-traditional orders: Individual Reflexivity, 'pure relations' and duality of structure". O'Brien, Penna & Hay (eds.) (1999) Theorising Modernity. London: Longman. Tucker, K.H. Anthony Giddens and Modern Social Theory. London: Sage, 1998. Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Adams, Matthew. "Ambiguity" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.5 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Adams.html &gt. Chicago Style Adams, Matthew, "Ambiguity" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 5 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Adams.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Adams, Matthew. (2002) Ambiguity. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(5). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Adams.php> ([your date of access]).

Abstract:

IntroductionThis article explores the work of lists in mediating the materiality and complexity of everyday life. In contemporary cultural contexts the endless proliferation of listing forms and practices takes on a “self-reflexivity” that signals their functional and productive role in negotiating the everyday. Grocery lists, to do lists, and other fragmentary notes work as personal tools for ordering and managing daily needs and activities. But what do these fragments tell us about the work of lists? Do they “merely” describe or provide analytical insight into the everyday? To address these questions we explore the issues and anxieties raised by everyday consumption drawing on theories of everyday life. These concerns, which are examined in detail in the second part of the paper, lie at the heart of French writer Georges Perec’s interest in the “infra-ordinary”—that which resides within the everyday. In the parts of his writing that he designated in retrospect as “sociological,” Perec takes the form and function of lists as a starting point for a range of literary experiments that work as tools of discovery and invention capable in their seeming banality of both mapping and disrupting everyday life. Les Choses (Things) and Je Me Souviens (I Remember), for example, take the form of endless and repetitious lists of things, places, people, and memories, collections of fragments that aim to achieve a new kind of sociology of everyday life. While this project may be contentious in terms of its “representativeness,” as a discursive method or mode of ethnographic practice (Becker) it points to the generative power of lists as both of the everyday and as an analytical tool of discovery for understanding the everyday. Perec’s sociology of the everyday is not, we argue, articulated as a form of a cohesive or generalizable characterisation of social institutions, but rather emerges as an “invent-ory” of the rich texture and disjunctures that populated his everyday spaces, personal encounters, and memories. Lists and the EverydayTo see lists as tools of common use, to paraphrase Spufford (2), is to place the list squarely within the realm of the everyday. A particular feature of the everyday—its “special quality,” as Highmore puts it—is that it is characterised by “the unnoticed, the inconspicuous, the unobtrusive” (Highmore 1). The everyday is enigmatic, elusive, difficult to grasp, and important because of this. In Maurice Blanchot’s famous formulation, “whatever its other aspects, the everyday has this essential trait: it allows no hold. It escapes” (14). Its pervasiveness renders it as platitude, but, as Blanchot adds, “this banality is also what is most important, if it brings us back to existence in its very spontaneity and as it is lived” (13). This tension poses special challenges for critics of the everyday who must register it as a part of, as inhering in, “manifold lived experience” without it “dissolving” into “statistics, properties, data” when it is “made the object of study” (Sheringham 360). In short, as Fran Martin (2) points out, “even though it surrounds us completely and takes up the vast majority of our time, the everyday is extremely difficult to pin down.” It is a predicament that is made all the more difficult in light of the complicated entanglement of the everyday and consumer capitalism (Jagose; Lury; Schor and Holt). This close relationship between consumer objects—things—and everyday life (along with other historical factors), has profoundly shifted critical understanding of the processes of subject formation and identity performance. One influential formulation of these transformations, associated most strongly with the work of Giddens and Beck, is captured in the notion of “reflexive modernity.” This refers to the understanding that, increasingly, at a broader societal level, “the very idea of controllability, certainty or security” is being challenged (Beck, World Risk Society 2)—developments that impact directly on how self-identity is formed (Giddens), reformed and performed (Hall). Faced with such upheavals, it is suggested that the individual increasingly “must produce, stage and cobble together their biographies themselves” (Beck, “Reinvention” 13), they must self-reflexively “invent” themselves. As Slater puts it, individuals, by force of circumstance, are required to “choose, construct, interpret, negotiate, display who they are to be seen as” (84) using a wide array of resources, both material and symbolic. Consumerism, it is widely argued, proffers its goods as solutions to these problems of identity (Slater 85). For instance, Adam Arvidsson notes how goods are used in the construction of “social relations, shared emotions, personal identity or forms of community” (18). This is particularly the case in relation to lifestyle consumption, which for Chaney (11) functions as a response to the loss of meaning in modern life following the sorts of larger societal upheavals described by Giddens and Beck and others. The general implication of lifestyle consumption across its various forms is that “‘every choice’ […] all acts of purchase or consumption, […] ‘are decisions not only about how to act but who to be’” (Warde in Slater 85). It is here that we can place the contemporary work of lists and the proliferation of list forms and practices. Lists figure in vital ways within this context of consumer-based everyday life. At a general level, lists assist us in making sense of the activities, objects, and experiences that feed and constitute daily life. In this sense, the list is a crucial mediating device, a means of organising things and bringing the mundanities and the exigencies of the everyday under control:The list categorises the ongoing chores of everyday life: organising and managing shopping, work, laundry, meetings, parking fines, and body management. (Crewe 33)In relation to lifestyle consumption, lists and inventories constitute one key way in which “we attempt to organise and order consumption” (Crewe 29). In this sense, lists are, for Louise Crewe, important “scripting devices that help us to manage the mundanity and weighty materiality of consumption” (Crewe 29). The use of the phrase “scripting device” is important here insofar as it suggests a double-movement in which lists simultaneously serve as “devices for regulating and disciplining the consuming body” (that is, lists as “prompts” that encourage us to follow the “script” of consumer culture) and work productively to “narrate practice and desire” (part of the “scripting” of self-identity and performance) (Crewe 30).In developing and illustrating these ideas, Crewe draws on Bill Keaggy’s found shopping lists project. Originally a blog, and subsequently a book entitled Milk Eggs Vodka, Keaggy gathers (and offers humorous commentary on) a wide array of discarded shopping lists that range from the mundane, to the bizarre, to the profound, each, in their own way, surprisingly rich and revealing of the scribes who penned them. Individually, the lists relay, through object names, places, actions, and prompts, the mundane landscape of everyday consumption. For example: Zip lockIceBeerFruit (Keaggy 42) SunglassesShoesBeer$Food (Keaggy 205)Keaggy’s collection comes to life, however, through his own careful organisation of these personal fragments into meaningful categories delineated by various playful and humorous characteristics. This listing of lists performs a certain transformation that works only in accumulation, in the book’s organisation, and through Keaggy’s humorous annotations. That is, Keaggy’s deliberate organisation of the lists into categories that highlight certain features over others, and his own annotations, introduces an element of invention and play, and delivers up many unexpected insights into their anonymous compilers’ lives. This dual process of utilising the list form as a creative and a critical tool for understanding the everyday also lies at the heart of Georges Perec’s literary and sociological project. Georges Perec: Towards an Invent-ory of Everyday LifeThe work of the French experimental writer Georges Perec is particularly instructive in understanding the generative potential of the act of listing. Perec was especially attuned to the effectiveness and significance of lists in revealing what is important in the mundane and quotidian—what he calls the “infra-ordinary” or “endotic” (as opposed to the “extraordinary” and “exotic”). As shall be detailed below, Perec’s creative recuperation of the list form as a textual device and critical tool leads us to a fuller appreciation of how, in Crewe’s words, “the most mundane, ordinary, invisible, and seemingly uninteresting things can be as significant and revealing as the most dramatic” (44).Across Perec’s diverse literary output, lists figure repeatedly in ways that speak directly to their ability to shed light on the inner workings of the everyday—their ability to make the familiar strange (Highmore 12)—and to reveal the entangled interactions between everyday consumption and personal identity. It is in this second sense that lists operate in his novel Things: A Story of the Sixties (Les Choses, 1965), a book that the French philosopher Alain Badiou (20, note 1) describes as a “rigorous literary version of the Marxist theme of alienation—especially the prevalence of things over existence.” Things tells of the endeavours of Sylvie and Jérôme, a young Parisian couple who, in Bourdieu’s terms, attempt to improve their social position in part through the cultural capital resources they see as invested in consumer objects, in the “things” that they acquire and desire. Perec’s telling of this narrative is heavily populated with lists of these semiotically loaded objects of consumer desire, taste, and distinction. The book opens, for example, with a descriptive listing of the kinds of decorative elements that visitors would encounter in the entrance hall of an idealised, imagined Paris apartment the couple longed for:Your eye, first of all, would glide over the grey fitted carpet in the narrow, long and high-ceilinged corridor. Its walls would be cupboards, in light-coloured wood, with fittings of gleaming brass. Three prints, depicting, respectively, the Derby winner Thunderbird, a paddle-steamer named Ville-de-Montereau, and a Stephenson locomotive, would lead to a leather curtain hanging on thick, black, grainy wooden rings which would slide back at the merest touch. (Perec, Things 21) This (and other detailed) listing of idealised objects—which, as the book progresses, are set in stark opposition to their present lived reality—tells the reader a great deal about the two protagonists’ wants and desires (“they both possessed, alas, but a single passion, the passion for a higher standard of living, and it exhausted them”—Perec, Things 35), and wider collective identification with these desires. Indeed, such identifications clearly had wide social resonance in France (and elsewhere) with Things collecting the Prix Renaudot. The ability of lists to speak to collective social (not just individual) experience was also explored by Perec in Je me souviens (1978), a book modelled on a project by Joe Brainard and which comprised a series of personal recollections of largely unremarkable events, which, nevertheless, at the time, had gained some form of purchase within the collective psyche of the French people—in Perec’s words, a random list of “little fragments of the everyday, things which, in such and such a year, everyone more or less the same age has seen, or lived, or share, and which have subsequently disappeared or been forgotten” (cited in Adair 178). For example:(item 57) I remember that Christian Jacque divorced Renée Faure in order to marry Martine Carol.(item 247) I remember that De Gaulle had a brother named Paul who was director of the Foire de Paris. (cited in Adair 179)Both these texts are component parts in a larger project of Perec’s to develop “an anthropology of everyday life” (Perec, “Notes” 142 note §). Howard Becker has offered a challenging, though also somewhat ambivalent, critique of Perec’s “sociological” method in these and other texts, contrasting Perec’s descriptive ethnography with the work that social scientists do. Becker takes aim at the way Perec’s detailed listing of objects, people, events, and memories eschews narrative and sociological design, referring to Perec’s method as “proto-ethnography,” or “detailed ‘raw description’” (73). Yet Becker is also drawn in by the end products of that method: “As you read Perec’s descriptions, you increasingly succumb to the feeling (at least I do, and I think others do as well) that this is important, though you can’t say how” (71). Ultimately, his criticism decries Perec’s failure to impose an explicit order on his lists and fragments, perhaps missing the significance of the way they are always bounded and underpinned by a conceptual principle: “It does not seem to have the kind of cohesion, at least not obviously, that social scientists like to ascribe to a culture, a similarity or interlocking or affinity of the parts to one another…” (74). That is, Perec’s lists stand as fragments, but fragments that do add up to something, as Becker admits: “The whole is more than the parts” (69). This ambivalence points to the analytical potential Perec found within those fragments, the “raw description,” that can only be understood through the end product. It could be argued that his lists defy the very possibility of presenting the everyday as a cohesive whole, and promote instead the everyday in its rich texture, as repetition and disjuncture. This project presents itself, in short, as a sociology of the everyday, whilst subverting the functionalist traditions of sociological observation and classification (Boyne). As Perec asks of the habitual, “How are we to speak of [...] ‘common things,’ how to track them down rather, flush them out, wrest them from the dross in which they remain mired, how to give them a meaning, a tongue [...]?” (Perec, “Approaches” 210). Lists (alongside other forms of description) play a vital role in this project and provide a partial answer to the above questions, and this is why Perec’s lists actively seek out the banal or quotidian. In addition to the examples cited above, fascination with enumeration of this kind is most strikingly realised in his essay, “Attempt at an Inventory of the Liquid and Solid Foodstuffs Ingurgitated by Me in the Course of the Year Nineteen Hundred and Seventy-Four” (Реrес, “Attempt” 244-249), and his later radio broadcast, “An Attempt at а Description of Things Seen at Mabillon Junction on 19 Мау 1978” (Bellos 640). At very least, Perec’s experiments serve as testimony to his ability to transform the trivial into the poetic—list-making as “invent-ory”. Importantly, however, Perec makes the shift from the inventory as a pragmatic listing form, “presenting a simple series of units,” “collected by a conceptual principle” (Belknap 2, 3), to a more transformative or analytical discursive practice. In all the above cases, Perec’s “accumulation is used in conjunction with other forms, devices, and intentions” (Bellos 670), such as, for instance, in the deployment of the list (the “invent-ory”) as an effective lever with which to pry open for inspection the seemingly inscrutable inner workings of everyday spaces, things, memories, in order that they might “speak of what is [and] of what we are” (Perec, “Approaches” 210).In this way, Perec’s use of lists (and various forms of categorisation) can be understood as a critique of the very possibility of stable method applied to classificatory ordering systems. In its place he promotes a set of practices that are oriented towards, and appropriate to, investigations of the everyday, rather than establishing scientific universals. At points in his work Perec expresses discomfort or even anxiety in taking the act of classification as a “method.” He begins his essay “Think/Classify,” for instance, by lamenting the “discursive deficiency” of his own use of classification in grasping the everyday, which at the same time calls “the thinkable and the classifiable into question” (189). And, yet, the act of listing, situated as it is for Perec firmly within the material contexts of particular activities and spaces, ultimately offers a productive means by which to understand, and negotiate, the everyday.ConclusionIn this paper we have examined the everyday work of lists and the functions that they serve in mediating the materiality and complexity of everyday life. In the first section of the paper, following Crewe, we explored the dual function of lists as scripting devices in simultaneously “disciplining” us as consumers as well and as a means of controlling the everyday in ways that also feed our sense of self-identity. In this sense lists are complex devices. Perec was especially attuned to the layers of complexity that attend our engagement with lists. In particular, as we explored in the second part of the paper, Perec saw lists as a critical and productive tool (an invent-ory) and used them to scrutinise common things in the hope that they might “speak of what is [and] of what we are” (Perec, “Approaches” 210). Lists remain, in this sense, an accessible discursive technology often surprising for their subtle revelations about the everyday even while they maintain adherence to an inherently recognisable form.In setting out the importance of his own “project,” and the need to question the habitual, Perec provides a set of instructions (his “pedagogic strategy”—Adair 177), presented as an approach (if not a method), and which signals his desire to critique the traditions of social science as a method of material and social ordering and analysis. Perec’s appropriation of this approach, this discursive technology, also works as a provocation, as a “project” that others might adopt. He prompts his readers to “make an inventory of your pockets, your bag. Ask yourself about the provenance, the use, what will become of each of the objects you take out” (Perec, “Approaches” 210). This is a challenge that was built upon in different ways by a number of writers inspired by the esprit of Perec’s approach to the everyday, associated also with “a wider cultural shift from systems and structures to practices and performances” (Sherringham 292). Sherringham, for instance, traces the “redirection of ethnographic scrutiny from the far to the near” in the work of Augé, Ernaux, Maspero and Réda amongst others (292-359). Perec’s lists thus serve as a series of provocations which still hold critical purchase, and the full implications of which are still to be realised.ReferencesAdair, Gilbert. “The Eleventh Day: Perec and the Infra-ordinary.” The Review of Contemporary Fiction XXIX.1 (2009): 176-88.Arvidsson, Adam. Brands: Meaning and Value in Media Culture. London: Routledge, 2006.Badiou, Alain. The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings. Trans. Gregory Elliott. London: Verso, 2012.Beck, Ulrich. “The Reinvention of Politics: Towards a Theory of Reflexive Modernization.” Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order. Eds. Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash. Cambridge: Polity, 1994. 1-55.---. World Risk Society. Malden, MA: Polity, 1999.Becker, Howard. “Georges Perec’s Experiments in Social Description.” Ethnography 2.1 (2001): 63-76.Bellos, David. Georges Perec: A Life in Words. London: Harvill, 1999.Blanchot, Maurice. “Everyday Speech.” Trans. Susan Hanson. Yale French Studies 73 (1987): 12-20.Boyne, Roy. “Classification.” Theory, Culture and Society 23.2-3 (2006): 21-30.Chaney, David. Lifestyles. London: Routledge, 1996.Crewe, Louise. “Life Itemised: Lists, Loss, Unexpected Significance, and the Enduring Geographies of Discard.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29 (2011): 27-46. Hall, Stuart. “The Question of Cultural Identity.” Modernity and Its Futures. Ed. Stuart Hall and Tony McGrew. Cambridge: Polity, 1992. 274-316.Highmore, Ben. Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction. London: Routledge, 2002.Jagose, Annamarie. “The Invention of Lifestyle.” Interpreting Everyday Culture. Ed. Fran Martin. London: Hodder Arnold, 2003. 109-23.Keaggy, Bill. Milk Eggs Vodka: Grocery Lists Lost and Found. Cincinnati: How Books, 2007. Lury, Celia. Consumer Culture. Oxford: Polity Press, 1996. Martin, Fran. “Introduction.” Interpreting Everyday Culture. Ed. Fran Martin. London: Hodder Arnold, 2003. 1-10.Perec, Georges. “Approaches to What?” Species of Spaces. 209-11.---. “Attempt at an Inventory of the Liquid and Solid Foodstuffs Ingurgitated by Me in the Course of the Year Nineteen Hundred and Seventy-Four.” Species of Spaces. 244-49.---. “Notes on What I’m Looking For.” Species of Spaces. 141-43.---. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. Ed. and trans. John Sturrock. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1997.---. Things: A Story of the Sixties. Trans. David Bellos. London: Harvill, 1990.---. “Think/Classify.” Species of Spaces. 188-205.Schor, Juliet and Holt, Douglas B., eds. The Consumer Society Reader. New York: The New Press, 2011.Slater, Don. Consumer Culture and Modernity. Cambridge: Polity, 1997.

Abstract:

Drift: An IntroductionEntering into Drift is akin to entering—or becoming ensnared by—a hum. Projected across one wall, the work uses abstract visual forms to draw visitors into its meditational folds. Quadraphonic sound circulates in smooth, heavy pulses, like the steady rumble of a train running over deep-set tracks. A succession of vibrating lines occupy the screen, much like the horizontal static of a poorly-tuned television. Gradually, the ambient timbre darkens, the hum becomes more persistent and atmospheric undulations more frequent, until room and body expand with intensity. Throbbing vibrations connect ground to feet, roll along skin, finding their way into deep interiors until organs and sinew become subsumed by Drift’s thick, heart-gripping drone. The installation’s tight, affective grasp only becomes apparent upon the sudden release of this tension; the room lightens and hum eases as the screen whitens with faint patterns, like a window opening from a darkened room. Drift, by German artist Ulf Langheinrich, appeared in White Noise, an exhibition dedicated to abstract moving image art at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne (ACMI). At the time of this exhibition in 2005, I was undertaking a seven month study of ACMI’s Screen Gallery, also documenting the preceding exhibition, World without End. My research used the Gallery as a site to examine the shifting relationship between visitor experience, digital art and museums, as the space compelled unusual modalities of visitor interaction. Most notable were states of complete stillness. I aimed to investigate how art and technology might mediate visitor agency through such experiences; not only to understand how museum visitation is transforming in new and significant ways, but to also extrapolate a substantial account of an individual’s agency within this era of what Beck, Giddens and Lash have termed ‘reflexive modernisation’. However, existing studies of museum visitation are rarely informed by the subjective modalities of visitor encounter, but rather, detail how experiences are shaped by institutional practices (Bourdieu; Luhmann; Silverman; Falk; Falk and Dierking) or governmental agendas (Bennett; Hooper-Greenhill). A notable exception is Megan Hick’s phenomenological study of Sydney’s Powerhouse museum. Following this example, I developed a phenomenology of museum visitation that could privilege the visitor’s enunciation of experience, whilst also exploring how expressions of agency may be highly subjective, multifarious and nuanced. I used qualitative ethnographic techniques to gather phenomenological material. Firstly, I attended the Gallery on a fortnightly basis to conduct longitudinal participant observations. However, as observation offered no means to interpret quiet faces and still bodies I also undertook visitor interviews. I approached visitors immediately after their visitation, and attempted to capture a wide cross-sample of responses by recruiting on the basis of age, gender and reason for visitation. I undertook ten 45 minute interviews, enquiring into the factors influencing impressions of the Gallery, prior familiarity with museums, and opinions about media art and technology. This ethnographic material was central to my study, as the voices of visitors guided its thematic direction and ensuing analysis. As the first in-depth, qualitative analysis of visitation to the Screen Gallery, my study therefore makes an empirical contribution to existing visitor research by offering an original means of exploring issues of museum visitation and agency, and movement and stillness.For example, visitors often received Drift with complete stillness, lulled into a focused state of attention by the shiftings of light and sound. As interviewee Colleen reveals, this concentration arose because Drift resonated intimately, akin to a meditative encounter:There wasn’t any other emotion or feeling behind it other than feeling relieved and comfortable, and relaxed. It was almost meditative … I was actually trying not to think about anything! … I didn’t want it to be influenced by the morning’s happenings … I just thought ‘this is relaxing’.Colleen has described how stillness and movement are therefore modalities within a broad vocabulary of interaction. While theorists have long noted how the transition from painting to film marked a shift from still to more ‘active’ forms of contemplation (Benjamin), an unanticipated finding of my study reasserted stillness as a dominant modality of active reception. In this article I therefore ask how agency finds expression within states of stillness.I propose that stillness mediates a distinctive form of agency as it is laden with what Brian Massumi calls ‘potential movement.’ I explore this concept with reference to visitors’ experiences of History of a Day, a work in World Without End. I then draw upon Henri Lefebvre’s description of ‘eurrhythmic’ congruence to describe how stillness is characterised by a focused state of attention, reflecting a highly subjective form of agency. I conclude by describing how this spatial awareness enables individuals to realise their own creativity, and inspire new praxes for daily living.1. Stillness: A State of Potential MovementBy dedicating its exhibition space to time-based art, ACMI’s Screen Gallery has cultivated a new temporal paradigm for visitor participation. It mediates both stillness and movement. Visitors described how the task of negotiating multiple time-based screens in a singular space loosened the temporal boundaries of engagement. Visitors were frequently compelled to pause and wait, as there was an absence of ‘entry’ or ‘exit’ points for viewing a piece. This raises questions as to how slower, or ‘still’, forms of participation in the Gallery may elicit agency. If considering stillness as a state that exists as an inverse of movement, rather than a state lacking in movement, it becomes possible to locate agency within the process of maintaining stillness, and as a result, engender what Brian Massumi describes as ‘potential movement’.In his account of architect Lars Spuybroek’s wetGRID design, Massumi describes how Spuybroek compares the experience of viewing images with the spatial experience of moving through buildings. Spuybroek drew from the premise that while movement can be understood as “the actual content of architecture” (322), it is more difficult to draw correlations between the properties of movement and perception of still images. He developed the idea of potential movement to breach a commonality between the two, as paraphrased by Massumi: “potentials for movement are extracted from actual movement, then fed back into it via architecture. We normally think of abstraction as a distancing from the actual, but here potentials are being ‘abstracted into it’” (323). Spuybroek therefore inscribed the idea of ‘tendency’ in his work, an ‘affordance’ that manifests as “a possibility of convergence that unconsciously exerts a pull, drawing the body forward into a movement the body already feels itself performing before it actually stirs” (Gibson in Massumi 324). This idea suggests that the act of sitting and viewing an image, can be reconceived as a state laden with potential movement. As Massumi describes, “sitting still is the performance of a tendency towards movement … It is the pre-performance, in potential, of the movement and its function … It is in intensity” (324).Sitting can therefore be regarded an 'active' state, where 'tendency'—indeed intensity—charges stillness with a potential for movement, actualisation and change. Conventions that invite still forms of participation in an interactive museum are an opportunity to express one’s agency, as one cannot feel the full momentum of tendency if not having at first remained still. At one level, the process of waiting for a work to begin or end generates a potential for movement, as visitors must decide when they will move towards another work. However, the potential for agency is also articulated within a less performative, ‘internal’ shift that arises within stillness, when visitors eschew reflexive forms of interaction to maintain a focused state of attention.2. Focusing Attention in StillnessVisitors’ interaction with Simon Carrol and Martin Friedel's History of a Day (2004) demonstrated how such a focused attention arises. This work comprises five screens arranged in a pentagonal shape. Visitors engage with this work whilst moving or still, seating themselves on an ottoman set within the pentagon or viewing the work while walking around its outside perimeter. The work came to mediate a number of different types of still and playful encounters, as described by Sean:I was aware that there was other stuff going on around the gallery … could see that out the corner of your eye because there’s spaces in-between screens, but at the same time I wasn’t hurried … And Luke who was with me, he sat down and watched one particular screen, whereas I sort of moved around. When I got to the edge I could see two or three screens at once, so I was just trying to work out what the story was. On one hand, the ‘gaps’ between these screens could fragment visitors’ attention and mediate reflexive forms of perception. Sean described how he “moved around”, as he was drawn to these ‘gaps’ as he exchanged peripheries and centres of focus. However, the close arrangement of the five screens also created a veiled, intimate space that confined visitors’ attention within the spatial parameters of the work. Unlike Sean, Luke remained seated. His experience was conditioned by stillness. He sat observing a single screen and maintained a focused state of attention. By focusing their attention in this way, visitors become more receptive towards the affective experience of viewing art. For example, History of a Day flutters with time-lapse images, a soothing rhythm of night turning to day and to night again. On one hand, each screen has been allocated its own narrative, a temporal illustration of a day’s passing within natural and human-made landscapes. A fairground, for example, was shot at night and showed crowds arriving, swarming, alighting rides and departing. However, it is possible to yield to the projection’s visual and aural rhythm, and in doing so abstract the figurative signifier of each scene. Narrative logic recedes as the senses become flooded, and in turn slows the pace of reflexive perception. Without the imposition of a linear narrative the work’s images begin to unfold with a new slowness. The main ride comes to resemble the slowly beating wings of a moth in lamplight, arms lifting, rotating and dropping in the fairground floodlights. People, rides and the dark sky blend into a meditation on colour, rhythm and sound, a palette comprising the many moments that emerge and pass at a night carnival.This form of perception elicits an agency of complex, affective awareness. Sound artist Brian Eno’s account of the role of silence in ambient music provides a close analogy as to how experiences of stillness in the Screen Gallery become dynamic with enhanced affective awareness. He describes how silences—a ‘stillness’ in sound—actually draw attention to the aural experience that preceded it, as the “‘rests’ are invariably filled in by ‘echoes’ of previously heard fragments” (in Tamm 134). In other words, the experience of listening is heightened by silences, for they create a space of reflection that resonates with the impressions of sound passed. The Gallery is an ambient chamber that echoes with affective forms of experiential encounter rather than echoes of sound. The echoes of visitors’ encounters are also intensified by stillness. Stillness focuses attention, so visitors garner an affective awareness of their spatial environment. This awareness constitutes a distinctive form of agency within the museum, for it enables visitors to locate what Henri Lefebvre describes as a ‘rhythmic’ congruence between their subjective experience and conditions of external environment.3. Awareness of Rhythmic CongruenceIn his theory of rhythmnanalysis, Henri Lefebvre (16) describes how an awareness of ‘rhythmic’ congruity and incongruity can be used to inform a politics in daily life. He argues that practices of self-observation and spatial awareness can reveal how our internal and environmental rhythms are a part of a rhythmic landscape, and can be used as a political means for change. Lefebvre (20) delineates between ‘eurhythmia’ and ‘arrhythmia’ as the forms of rhythmic logic that describe states of congruity:What is certain is that harmony sometimes (often) exists: eurhythmia. The eu-rhythmic body, composed of diverse rhythms – each organ, each function, having its own – keeps them in a metastable equilibrium, which is always understood and often recovered, with the exception of disturbances (arrhythmia) that sooner of later becomes illness (the pathological state). But the surroundings of bodies, be they in nature or a social setting, are also bundles, bouquets, garlands of rhythms, to which it is necessary to listen in order to grasp the natural or produced ensembles. While Lefebvre uses these definitions to develop a Marxist critique of modernity, they also show how within the flexible temporal boundaries of stillness, visitors can express a form of agency by using their heightened affective awareness to locate eurhythmic and arrhythmic experiences. By becoming aware of the way we are conditioned by rhythms, we can begin to imprint new rhythms upon the patterns that govern cultural and social practices. Within the Screen Gallery, this rhythmic observation manifests as an attentiveness towards the temporal relationship between internal sensation and external environment.Congruence between internal and external rhythms was often described by visitors as a feeling of relaxation, even meditation. For example, Sean drew comparisons between still encounters with time-based art and his impression of quiet environments: “It’s like having background music while you’re falling asleep, or you turn the radio on so you haven’t caught the start of a song but you catch the end of it”. These associations imply a close environmental relationship between sound and body, where the rich aesthetic presence of art overrides the expectation of narrative continuity. Perhaps most telling is Sean’s analogy of falling asleep to background music, as it suggests that time-based art can maintain an ambient presence while not intruding upon natural bodily ‘rhythms’. It seems that a harmony between body and art environment allows a pull towards a state of relaxation akin to the drift of sleep, which, notably, is a point where both internal and external rhythms synchronise. Falling asleep is a crossing of thresholds into a space dominated by the activities of the unconscious. Occupying the Gallery and surrendering to a state of relaxation can therefore also be understood as crossing a threshold into a deeper, more internal realm of interaction with art.Affective awareness therefore enables visitors to cultivate a greater sensitivity towards their sensory responses. This is a highly-subjective agency, as it arises when visitors develop a keen awareness of the eurrhythmic alignment between the rhythm of external space, and their own, internal rhythm. Stillness therefore draws attention to the complexity of our own subjective experience, and the different ways we are conditioned by our environments. Yet most importantly, these experiences also generated self-reflection and a desire to creatively transform their circumstances. Matthew described how his encounter with art aroused creative inspiration: “I go there to experience something new. I would love to be able to do something like that… Maybe it’s something for me, where I wish I was doing something else in terms of my occupation.” Paul noted how expressive potential could be expanded by considering oneself an artist: “you can do it yourself as well, and I suppose that’s what draws people in to the whole thing”. Katrina suggested that aesthetic forms of interaction can challenge the conventional ways of thinking about and responding to our environment: “if it gets somebody to do something different, or, gets someone to do something in a different way maybe, expand their minds in that way, maybe that’s a use for it as well … give them something to think about, and they can see it again in a different light”. These comments show how stillness can enable a realisation of one’s own subjective, creative potential by countering the reflexive speed of the everyday.ConclusionMy study of ACMI’s Screen Gallery has shown how agency finds expression in stillness. The temporal elasticity created by artwork and institution allows visitors to appropriate time and space in a way that slows the pace of movement and focuses attention, in turn enhancing a visitor’s awareness of their presence and spatial environment. Stillness therefore heightens visitors’ awareness of sensation, sentience, the body’s occupation of time and space. This form of encounter elicits a feeling of congruence and awakens the spirit. This transformation was the mainstay of the political project set by Lefebvre, a statement on mobilising individuals to affect change by becoming more attentive towards incongruities between self and environment. In the Gallery it became possible, through immersion in an aesthetic, ambient space, for visitors to cultivate an intuition towards their own rhythms and those of surrounding environments. An important claim is to be staked on creating spaces for stillness in daily life, as opportunities for stillness are becoming increasingly scarce within the dynamics of spatial and temporal compression that characterise this era of globalisation and informationalisation. As Heidi describes, these moments given to daydreaming and reflection can become powerful conduits for realising one’s own potential:[It] gives you a new lease on life. And all the dreams you have – it’s possible … Sometimes you think ‘it’s all a bit out of reach, it’s too difficult,’ whereas you go and see something like that, and … it makes everything clear. And makes everything possible.ReferencesBeck, Ulrich, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash. Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1994.Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Great Britain: Fontana/Collins, 1977. 219-253.Bennett, Tony. “Museums and 'the People'.” The Museum Time-Machine: Putting Cultures on Display. London: Routledge, 1988. 63-85.———. “Putting Policy into Cultural Studies.” Cultural Studies. London: Routledge. 1992, 23-37.———. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. London: Routledge, 1995.———. “Consuming Culture, Measuring Access and Audience Development”. Culture and Policy 8.1 (1997): 89-113.———. “Culture and Policy” Culture:a Reformer's Science, St. Leonard's, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1998. 189-213.———. “Culture and Governmentality.” In J.Z. Bratich, J. Packer & C. McCarthy, eds. Foucault, Cultural Studies and Governmentality. Albany: State U of New York P, 2003. 47-64.Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Economy of Practices.” Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1984. 97-256.———. The Love of Art, Stanford: Stanford U P, 1991.Falk, John. “Museum Recollections.” Visitor Studies - 1988: Theory, Research and Practice. Jacksonville: Center for Social Design, 1988. 60-65.Falk, John, and Lynn Dierking. The Museum Experience. Washington, D.C.: Whalebooks, 1992.Hicks, Megan. "'A Whole New World': The Young Person's Experience of Visiting the Sydney Technological Museum." Museum and Society 3.2 (2005): 66-80. Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean. Museum and Gallery Education. London: Leicester U P, 1991.Lefebvre, Henri. “The Critique of the Thing.” Rhythmnanalysis: Space Time and Everyday Life. London: Continuum, 2004. 5-18.———. “The Rhythmanalyst: A Previsionary Project.” Rhythmanalysis: Space Time and Everyday Life. London: Continuum, 2004. 19-26.Luhmann, Niklas. Art as a Social System, Trans. Eva Knodt. Stanford: U of Stanford P, 2000.Massumi, Brian. “Building Experience: The Architecture of Perception.” NOX: Machining Architecture. London: Thames and Hudson, 2004. 322-331.Silverman, Lois. “Visitor Meaning Making in Museums for a New Age.” Curator 38 (1995): 161-170.Tamm, Eric. “The Ambient Sound.” Brian Eno: His Music and the Vertical Color of Sound. Boston: Faber and Faber, 1989. 131-150.

Abstract:

Introduction When a text is said to be re-appropriated, it is at times unclear to what extent this appropriation is secondary, repeated, new; certainly, the difference between a reiteration and an iteration has more to do with emphasis than any (re)duplication. And at a moment in the development of crime fiction in France when the retranslation of now apparently dated French translations of the works of classic American hardboiled novels (especially those of authors like Dashiell Hammett, whose novels were published in Marcel Duhamel’s Série Noire at Gallimard in the decades following the end of the Second World War) is being undertaken with the ostensible aim of taking the French reader back (closer) to the American original, one may well ask where the emphasis now lies. In what ways, for example, is this new form of re-production, of re-imagining the text, more intimately bound to the original, and thus in itself less ‘original’ than its translated predecessors? Or again, is this more reactionary ‘re-’ in fact really that different from those more radical uses that cleaved the translation from its original text in those early, foundational years of twentieth-century French crime fiction? (Re-)Reading: Critical Theory and Originality My juxtaposition of the terms ‘reactionary’ and ‘radical’, and the attempted play on the auto-antonymy of the verb ‘to cleave’, are designed to prompt a re(-)read of the analysis that so famously took the text away from the author in the late-1960s through to the 1990s, which is to say the critical theory of poststructuralism and deconstruction. Roland Barthes’s work (especially 69–77) appropriated the familiar terms of literary analysis and reversed them, making of them perhaps a re-appropriation in the sense of taking them into new territory: the text, formerly a paper-based platform for the written word, was now a virtual interface between the word and its reader, the new locus of the production of meaning; the work, on the other hand, which had previously pertained to the collective creative imaginings of the author, was now synonymous with the physical writing passed on by the author to the reader. And by ‘passed on’ was meant ‘passed over’, achevé (perfected, terminated, put to death)—completed, then, but only insofar as its finite sequence of words was set; for its meaning was henceforth dependent on its end user. The new textual life that surged from the ‘death of the author’ was therefore always already an afterlife, a ‘living on’, to use Jacques Derrida’s term (Bloom et al. 75–176). It is in this context that the re-reading encouraged by Barthes has always appeared to mark a rupture a teasing of ‘reading’ away from the original series of words and the ‘Meaning’ as intended by the author, if any coherence of intention is possible across the finite sequence of words that constitute the written work. The reader must learn to re-read, Barthes implored, or otherwise be condemned to read the same text everywhere. In this sense, the ‘re-’ prefix marks an active engagement with the text, a reflexivity of the act of reading as an act of transformation. The reader whose consumption of the text is passive, merely digestive, will not transform the words (into meaning); and crucially, that reader will not herself be transformed. For this is the power of reflexive reading—when one reads text as text (and not ‘losing oneself’ in the story) one reconstitutes oneself (or, perhaps, loses control of oneself more fully, more productively); not to do so, is to take an unchanged constant (oneself) into every textual encounter and thus to produce sameness in ostensible difference. One who rereads a text and discovers the same story twice will therefore reread even when reading a text for the first time. The hyphen of the re-read, on the other hand, distances the reader from the text; but it also, of course, conjoins. It marks the virtual space where reading occurs, between the physical text and the reading subject; and at the same time, it links all texts in an intertextual arena, such that the reading experience of any one text is informed by the reading of all texts (whether they be works read by an individual reader or works as yet unencountered). Such a theory of reading appears to shift originality so far from the author’s work as almost to render the term obsolete. But the thing about reflexivity is that it depends on the text itself, to which it always returns. As Barbara Johnson has noted, the critical difference marked by Barthes’s understandings of the text, and his calls to re-read it, is not what differentiates it from other texts—the universality of the intertext and the reading space underlines this; instead, it is what differentiates the text from itself (“Critical Difference” 175). And while Barthes’s work packages this differentiation as a rupture, a wrenching of ownership away from the author to a new owner, the work and text appear less violently opposed in the works of the Yale School deconstructionists. In such works as J. Hillis Miller’s “The Critic as Host” (1977), the hyphenation of the re-read is less marked, with re-reading, as a divergence from the text as something self-founding, self-coinciding, emerging as something inherent in the original text. The cleaving of one from and back into the other takes on, in Miller’s essay, the guise of parasitism: the host, a term that etymologically refers to the owner who invites and the guest who is invited, offers a figure for critical reading that reveals the potential for creative readings of ‘meaning’ (what Miller calls the nihilistic text) inside the transparent ‘Meaning’ of the text, by which we recognise one nonetheless autonomous text from another (the metaphysical text). Framed in such terms, reading is a reaction to text, but also an action of text. I should argue then that any engagement with the original is re-actionary—my caveat being that this hyphenation is a marker of auto-antonymy, a link between the text and otherness. Translation and Originality Questions of a translator’s status and the originality of the translated text remain vexed. For scholars of translation studies like Brian Nelson, the product of literary translation can legitimately be said to have been authored by its translator, its status as literary text being equal to that of the original (3; see also Wilson and Gerber). Such questions are no more or less vexed today, however, than they were in the days when criticism was grappling with translation through the lens of deconstruction. To refer again to the remarkable work of Johnson, Derrida’s theorisation of textual ‘living on’—the way in which text, at its inception, primes itself for re-imagining, by dint of the fundamental différance of the chains of signification that are its DNA—bears all the trappings of self-translation. Johnson uses the term ‘self-différance’ (“Taking Fidelity” 146–47) in this respect and notes how Derrida took on board, and discussed with him, the difficulties that he was causing for his translator even as he was writing the ‘original’ text of his essay. If translation, in this framework, is rendered impossible because of the original’s failure to coincide with itself in a transparently meaningful way, then its practice “releases within each text the subversive forces of its own foreignness” (Johnson, “Taking Fidelity” 148), thereby highlighting the debt owed by Derrida’s notion of textual ‘living on’—in (re-)reading—to Walter Benjamin’s understanding of translation as a mode, its translatability, the way in which it primes itself for translation virtually, irrespective of whether or not it is actually translated (70). In this way, translation is a privileged site of textual auto-differentiation, and translated text can, accordingly, be considered every bit as ‘original’ as its source text—simply more reflexive, more aware of its role as a conduit between the words on the page and the re-imagining that they undergo, by which they come to mean, when they are re-activated by the reader. Emily Apter—albeit in a context that has more specifically to do with the possibilities of comparative literature and the real-world challenges of language in war zones—describes the auto-differentiating nature of translation as “a means of repositioning the subject in the world and in history; a means of rendering self-knowledge foreign to itself; a way of denaturalizing citizens, taking them out of the comfort zone of national space, daily ritual, and pre-given domestic arrangements” (6). In this way, translation is “a significant medium of subject re-formation and political change” (Apter 6). Thus, translation lends itself to crime fiction; for both function as highly reflexive sites of transformation: both provide a reader with a heightened sense of the transformation that she is enacting on the text and that she herself embodies as a reading subject, a subject changed by reading. Crime Fiction, Auto-Differention and Translation As has been noted elsewhere (Rolls), Fredric Jameson made an enigmatic reference to crime fiction’s perceived role as the new Realism as part of his plenary lecture at “Telling Truths: Crime Fiction and National Allegory”, a conference held at the University of Wollongong on 6–8 December 2012. He suggested, notably, that one might imagine an author of Scandi-Noir writing in tandem with her translator. While obvious questions of the massive international marketing machine deployed around this contemporary phenomenon come to mind, and I suspect that this is how Jameson’s comment was generally understood, it is tempting to consider this Scandinavian writing scenario in terms of Derrida’s proleptic considerations of his own translator. In this way, crime fiction’s most telling role, as one of the most widely read contemporary literary forms, is its translatability; its haunting descriptions of place (readers, we tend, perhaps precipitously, to assume, love crime fiction for its national, regional or local situatedness) are thus tensely primed for re-location, for Apter’s ‘subject re-formation’. The idea of ‘the new Realism’ of crime, and especially detective, fiction is predicated on the tightly (self-)policed rules according to which crime fiction operates. The reader appears to enter into an investigation alongside the detective, co-authoring the crime text in real (reading) time, only for authorial power to be asserted in the unveiling scene of the denouement. What masquerades as the ultimately writerly text, in Barthes’s terms, turns out to be the ultimate in transparently meaningful literature when the solution is set in stone by the detective. As such, the crime novel is far more dependent on descriptions of the minutiae of everyday life (in a given place in time) than other forms of fiction, as these provide the clues on which its intricate plot hinges. According to this understanding, crime fiction records history and transcribes national allegories. This is not only a convincing way of understanding crime fiction, but it is also an extremely powerful way of harnessing it for the purposes of cultural history. Claire Gorrara, for example, uses the development of French crime fiction plots over the course of the second half of the twentieth century to map France’s coming to terms with the legacy of the Second World War. This is the national allegory written in real time, as the nation heals and moves on, and this is crime fiction as a reaction to national allegory. My contention here, on the other hand, is that crime fiction, like translation, has at its core an inherent, and reflexive, tendency towards otherness. Indeed, this is because crime fiction, whose origins in transnational (and especially Franco-American) literary exchange have been amply mapped but not, I should argue, extrapolated to their fullest extent, is forged in translation. It is widely considered that when Edgar Allan Poe produced his seminal text “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) he created modern crime fiction. And yet, this was made possible because the text was translated into French by Charles Baudelaire and met with great success in France, far more so indeed than in its original place of authorship. Its original setting, however, was not America but Paris; its translatability as French text preceded, even summoned, its actualisation in the form of Baudelaire’s translation. Furthermore, the birth of the great armchair detective, the exponent of pure, objective deduction, in the form of C. Auguste Dupin, is itself turned on its head, a priori, because Dupin, in this first Parisian short story, always already off-sets objectivity with subjectivity, ratiocination with a tactile apprehension of the scene of the crime. He even goes as far as to accuse the Parisian Prefect of Police of one-dimensional objectivity. (Dupin undoes himself, debunking the myth of his own characterisation, even as he takes to the stage.) In this way, Poe founded his crime fiction on a fundamental tension; and this tension called out to its translator so powerfully that Baudelaire claimed to be translating his own thoughts, as expressed by Poe, even before he had had a chance to think them (see Rolls and Sitbon). Thus, Poe was Parisian avant la lettre, his crime fiction a model for Baudelaire’s own prose poetry, the new voice of critical modernity in the mid-nineteenth century. If Baudelaire went on to write Paris in the form of Paris Spleen (1869), his famous collection of “little prose poems”, both as it is represented (timelessly, poetically) and as it presents itself (in real time, prosaically) at the same time, it was not only because he was spontaneously creating a new national allegory for France based on its cleaving of itself in the wake of Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s massive programme of urbanisation in Paris in the 1800s; it was also because he was translating Poe’s fictionalisation of Paris in his new crime fiction. Crime fiction was born therefore not only simultaneously in France and America but also in the translation zone between the two, in the self-différance of translation. In this way, while a strong claim can be made that modern French crime fiction is predicated on, and reacts to, the auto-differentiation (of critical modernity, of Paris versus Paris) articulated in Baudelaire’s prose poems and therefore tells the national allegory, it is also the case, and it is this aspect that is all too often overlooked, that crime fiction’s birth in Franco-American translation founded the new French national allegory. Re-imagining America in (French) Crime Fiction Pierre Bayard has done more than any other critic in recent years to debunk the authorial power of the detective in crime fiction, beginning with his re-imagining of the solution to Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and continuing with that of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1998 and 2008, respectively). And yet, even as he has engaged with poststructuralist re-readings of these texts, he has put in place his own solutions, elevating them away from his own initial premise of writerly engagement towards a new metaphysics of “Meaning”, be it ironically or because he has fallen prey himself to the seduction of detectival truth. This reactionary turn, or sting-lessness in the tail, reaches new heights (of irony) in the essay in which he imagines the consequences of liberating novels from their traditional owners and coupling them with new authors (Bayard, Et si les œuvres changeaient d’auteur?). Throughout this essay Bayard systematically prefers the terms “work” and “author” to “text” and “reader”, liberating the text not only from the shackles of traditional notions of authorship but also from the terminological reshuffling of his and others’ critical theory, while at the same time clinging to the necessity for textual meaning to stem from authorship and repackaging what is, in all but terminology, Barthes et al.’s critical theory. Caught up in the bluff and double-bluff of Bayard’s authorial redeployments is a chapter on what is generally considered the greatest work of parody of twentieth-century French crime fiction—Boris Vian’s pseudo-translation of black American author Vernon Sullivan’s novel J’irai cracher sur vos tombes (1946, I Shall Spit on Your Graves). The novel was a best seller in France in 1946, outstripping by far the novels of the Série Noire, whose fame and marketability were predicated on their status as “Translations from the American” and of which it appeared a brazen parody. Bayard’s decision to give credibility to Sullivan as author is at once perverse, because it is clear that he did not exist, and reactionary, because it marks a return to Vian’s original conceit. And yet, it passes for innovative, not (or at least not only) because of Bayard’s brilliance but because of the literary qualities of the original text, which, Bayard argues, must have been written in “American” in order to produce such a powerful description of American society at the time. Bayard’s analysis overlooks (or highlights, if we couch his entire project in a hermeneutics of inversion, based on the deliberate, and ironic, re-reversal of the terms “work” and “text”) two key elements of post-war French crime fiction: the novels of the Série Noire that preceded J’irai cracher sur vos tombes in late 1945 and early 1946 were all written by authors posing as Americans (Peter Cheyney and James Hadley Chase were in fact English) and the translations were deliberately unfaithful both to the original text, which was drastically domesticated, and to any realistic depiction of America. While Anglo-Saxon French Studies has tended to overlook the latter aspect, Frank Lhomeau has highlighted the fact that the America that held sway in the French imaginary (from Liberation through to the 1960s and beyond) was a myth rather than a reality. To take this reasoning one logical, reflexive step further, or in fact less far, the object of Vian’s (highly reflexive) novel, which may better be considered a satire than a parody, can be considered not to be race relations in the United States but the French crime fiction scene in 1946, of which its pseudo-translation (which is to say, a novel not written by an American and not translated) is metonymic (see Vuaille-Barcan, Sitbon and Rolls). (For Isabelle Collombat, “pseudo-translation functions as a mise en abyme of a particular genre” [146, my translation]; this reinforces the idea of a conjunction of translation and crime fiction under the sign of reflexivity.) Re-imagined beneath this wave of colourful translations of would-be American crime novels is a new national allegory for a France emerging from the ruins of German occupation and Allied liberation. The re-imagining of France in the years immediately following the Second World War is therefore not mapped, or imagined again, by crime fiction; rather, the combination of translation and American crime fiction provide the perfect storm for re-creating a national sense of self through the filter of the Other. For what goes for the translator, goes equally for the reader. Conclusion As Johnson notes, “through the foreign language we renew our love-hate intimacy with our mother tongue”; and as such, “in the process of translation from one language to another, the scene of linguistic castration […] is played on center stage, evoking fear and pity and the illusion that all would perhaps have been well if we could simply have stayed at home” (144). This, of course, is just what had happened one hundred years earlier when Baudelaire created a new prose poetics for a new Paris. In order to re-present (both present and represent) Paris, he focused so close on it as to erase it from objective view. And in the same instance of supreme literary creativity, he masked the origins of his own translation praxis: his Paris was also Poe’s, which is to say, an American vision of Paris translated into French by an author who considered his American alter ego to have had his own thoughts in an act of what Bayard would consider anticipatory plagiarism. In this light, his decision to entitle one of the prose poems “Any where out of the world”—in English in the original—can be considered a Derridean reflection on the translation inherent in any original act of literary re-imagination. Paris, crime fiction and translation can thus all be considered privileged sites of re-imagination, which is to say, embodiments of self-différance and “original” acts of re-reading. References Apter, Emily. The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006. Barthes, Roland. Le Bruissement de la langue. Paris: Seuil, 1971. Baudelaire, Charles. Le Spleen de Paris. Trans. Louise Varèse. New York: New Directions, 1970 [1869]. Bayard, Pierre. Qui a tué Roger Ackroyd? Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1998. ———. L’Affaire du chien des Baskerville. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2008. ———. Et si les œuvres changeaient d’auteur? Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2010. Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator.” Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1968. 69–82. Bloom, Harold, et al. Deconstruction and Criticism. New York: The Seabury Press, 1979. Collombat, Isabelle. “Pseudo-traduction: la mise en scène de l’altérité.” Le Langage et l’Homme 38.1 (2003): 145–56. Gorrara, Claire. French Crime Fiction and the Second World War: Past Crimes, Present Memories. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2012. Johnson, Barbara. “Taking Fidelity Philosophically.” Difference in Translation. Ed. Joseph F. Graham. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. 142–48. ———. “The Critical Difference.” Critical Essays on Roland Barthes. Ed. Diana Knight. New York: G.K. Hall, 2000. 174–82. Lhomeau, Frank. “Le roman ‘noir’ à l’américaine.” Temps noir 4 (2000): 5–33. Miller, J. Hillis. “The Critic as Host.” Critical Inquiry 3.3 (1977): 439–47. Nelson, Brian. “Preface: Translation Lost and Found.” Australian Journal of French Studies 47.1 (2010): 3–7. Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Vintage Books, [1841]1975. 141–68. Rolls, Alistair. “Editor’s Letter: The Undecidable Lightness of Writing Crime.” The Australasian Journal of Popular Culture 3.1 (2014): 3–8. Rolls, Alistair, and Clara Sitbon. “‘Traduit de l’américain’ from Poe to the Série Noire: Baudelaire’s Greatest Hoax?” Modern and Contemporary France 21.1 (2013): 37–53. Vuaille-Barcan, Marie-Laure, Clara Sitbon, and Alistair Rolls. “Jeux textuels et paratextuels dans J’irai cracher sur vos tombes: au-delà du canular.” Romance Studies 32.1 (2014): 16–26. Wilson, Rita, and Leah Gerber, eds. Creative Constraints: Translation and Authorship. Melbourne: Monash UP, 2012.

Abstract:

The question of colour in architecture offers many potential points of entry. Taking an historical standpoint, one could discuss the use of bright colour in ancient Greek and Roman architecture, the importance of brilliantly coloured mosaic and stained glass to sacred architecture in the Byzantine and medieval periods, and the primacy of colour in non-Western architectural traditions both ancient and modern. It would be possible to trace prohibitions against the use of applied colour, derived from late 18th century notions of architectural morality—ideals demanding authenticity, honesty and directness in the expression of structure, function and materials. This puritan strand could be pursued into the modern movement, to its quasi-pathological attachment to whiteness.1 It would also be possible to note a trend which ran counter to dominant modernist attitudes to colour, in the eclectic 'neon historicism' of so-called 'post-modernist' architecture. But while it would be remiss of me not to acknowledge the history of colour in architecture in passing, it has been well addressed elsewhere, and is in any case outside the scope of this paper.2 What is significant is that this history is marked throughout by many of the same, largely unspoken, prohibitions against colour that can be traced across other cultural realms—that which David Batchelor has described as a history of 'chromophobia'. As Batchelor writes; 'Chromophobia manifests itself in the many and varied attempts to purge colour from culture, to diminish its significance, to deny its complexity…. [T]his purging of colour is usually accomplished in one of two ways. In the first, colour is made out to be the property of some 'foreign' body—usually the feminine, the oriental, the primitive, the infantile, the vulgar, the queer or the pathological. In the second, colour is relegated to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential or the cosmetic. In one, colour is regarded as alien and therefore dangerous; in the other it is perceived merely as a secondary quantity of experience, and thus unworthy or serious consideration.'3 Numerous examples of the attempt to 'purge' colour can be identified throughout the history of architecture in the modern period. The mode of chromophobia particular to architecture may be summarised thus: colour in architecture has been associated with illusion and frivolity, and thus with decoration—it has been seen as being excess or supplementary to 'real' architecture.4 Discussions of colour in architecture can never be completely distinguished from discussions of ornament, or of materials and materiality. Colour is not necessarily a problem in itself—it is acceptable, for instance, when it is inherent to the material or to its weathering process, as in the bright green of copper verdigris. It is the application of colour, in the form of paint or stain, that raises questions of authenticity. The importance of surface and colour have been consistently made subordinate to architectural form; and the idea that colour is acceptable in interiors but not exteriors is merely the expression of another hierarchy, linking and demoting the trivial, contingent, feminised interior in favour of universal, masculinized, heroic external form. In the modern period, a work of 'serious' Architecture (as opposed to vernacular, commercial, or 'popular' architecture) has most often either been white, or coloured in the subdued palette afforded by the inherent characteristics of 'natural' materials.5 This is nowhere more true than in institutional architecture generally, and museum architecture in particular. Museums and their stake in the neutral monochrome The museum as an institution has traditionally functioned as a symbol of the establishment and its authority, a symbolic role often expressed in conventionally monumental architecture. This monumentality has, in turn, been reinforced by prestigious materials: much of the dignity and status of institutional architecture is taken from materials valued for their expense, rarity, or durability.6 Museum buildings are required to last, and thus they must not only use enduring materials, but materials which demonstrate their durability by being self-finishing in their natural, apparently neutral, state. The very idea that 'natural' materials are also somehow 'neutral' opens onto another, more ideological investment that the museum has in avoiding colour. Museums have long held a stake in the idea of an objective stance, and maintained the pretence of an unmediated presentation of historical fact. The notion of the museum as 'white cube' embodies all of this—the idea of the white cube, with its aformal form and achromatic colour, signifies purity and transcendence. Just as the whiteness of modern architecture was a continuation of the hygienic whiteness of doctor's coat, bathroom tiles, and hospital walls, the whiteness of the museum signifies clinical objectivity.7 It also, perhaps more significantly, stands for the ideal of the tabula rasa, the clean slate upon which the documentary evidence of art, history, or any other metanarrative could be methodically examined and arranged. For the museum, abandoning the neutrality of its public presentation may also mean a symbolic abandonment of objectivity. It would mean, if not a surrender to partiality, at least the admission of partiality—and the renunciation of universal whiteness for the specificities of colour. In the modern period, applied colour can never be neutral, but is read as mask, disguise, or stain. In the postmodern period, the discourse of the 'new museology' has challenged and discredited many of the ideological complicities of the idea of the museum as 'white box', linked as they are with a suspiciously absolutist rhetoric of abstract purity. Museums have increasingly begun to render explicit their role in the re-presentation of history, and to work at recontextualising ideas and artefacts. But even if a critical and self-reflexive stance is now more common in museological practice, it has taken much longer to begin to inform museum architecture. It would be a very courageous museum indeed that was willing to cash in all of the chips of its cultural authority, of which prestigious monumental architecture is a particularly powerful source. Most museums are still, if not white, at least respectably neutral, inside and out. But not so the National Museum of Australia (NMA). This museum, in its polychromatic formal complexity, could hardly be further from a 'white cube' museum. The National Museum of Australia: flirting with the flippant The NMA is housed in a loud and gregarious building. From its controversial strategy of literally appropriating elements from other canonical modernist works, through the coded messages of the Braille patterns on its surface, to the device of the extruded string and red 'knot' which passes through and around the building's form, it is relentless in its challenge to conventional institutional architecture. This is nowhere more true than in its colouration—there is hardly a neutral tone in sight. For that matter, there is hardly a 'natural' material in sight either—the majority of the building is constructed from pre-formed aluminium panelling in grey, yellow, red and khaki, crossed in places by sweeping calligraphic symbols.8 The dramatic aerial loop at the museum's entry is white and bright orange. There are walls of black dimpled pre-formed concrete, blue painted poles (get it?), a 'Mexican wave' of multicoloured steel sheets, and of course the richly cacophonous Garden of Australia Dreams. There are also some deliberate plays on colour symbolism—Le Corbusier's gleaming white modernist classic, the Villa Savoye, is reversed and reconstituted in black, corrugated steel. The fact that this forms part of the Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies is a hint of the building's clear, even dangerously frank, employment of colour symbolism. Given the architects previous work, we can safely assume that in this case, as elsewhere in the building, the choice of colours is calculated for maximum rhetorical effect. But I am less concerned here with the specific ploys of the architects than with the ways in which the building's reception has been conditioned by its employment of colour, specifically the ways in which it has been construed as populist. The NMA has polarised the architectural community in Australia. While much of the comment directed at the building has centred around its contravention of standards of taste and propriety in civic architecture, I would argue that this is only the symptom of a deeper reaction against its apparent frivolity, as signified most strongly by its colour. This is exemplified in a critique of the building by Stephen Frith, a respected Canberra academic. Concluding a polemical review in the Canberra Times, Frith asks: But why such tongue-lashings and breast-beatings over what has quickly established itself as a happy theme park to mediocrity? Surely its condoning of the ruthless kitsch of petty capitalism in its imagery and finishes provides for some spectre of merit? The problem becomes one of the civic domain in which architecture and its rhetoric is interpreted. For a supposedly public work, the museum is an intensely private building, privately encoded with in-jokes, and in the end hugely un-funny... The confection of cheap cladding and plasterboard is a spurious sideshow of magpie borrowings passing themselves off as cultural reference...9 Everything in this passage decries what Frith reads as the NMA's verisimilitude of popularity - the reference to theme-parks, sideshows, commercialism - a confection constructed with poor quality materials and finishes, which nevertheless flirts 'pretentiously' with the canon of modern architecture. To Frith the building reads not as a cheap and cheerful reflection of the Australian vernacular, but as a demeaning attempt to raise a laugh from the elite at the expense of the uncomprehending masses. His complaint is thus two-fold—that the building has insufficient gravitas, and that this is compounded rather than redeemed by the fact that it is not truly popular at all, but rather 'intensely private'. There is an important distinction to be made here, then, between 'populism' and 'popularity'. Populism has the negative connotation of deliberately seeking popular acceptance at the cost of quality, intellectual rigour, or formal aesthetic value. 'Popularity' still retains its more neutral modern sense, either of actual public involvement, or of things that are socially recognised as popular. In architecture, populism is already hedged about with prohibitions springing from the idea that a deliberately populist architecture is somehow fraudulent. A piece of serious, civic, monumental architecture should neither set out expressly to be popular, nor to look like it is, so the logic goes: if a work of high architecture happens to gain popular acclaim, then that is a happy accident. But there are significant reasons why such popularity must be seen to be incidental to other, more lofty concerns. Given that colour is seen to be 'popular', a highly coloured building is thus assumed to be 'lowering' itself in order to appeal to popular taste. Old systems of thought endure, and both museums and architecture are each subject to an unspoken hierarchy that still sees 'populism', if not actual popularity, as inferior. Conclusions: colour as the sign of a critical engagement But there is another possible reading of the NMA's apparent populism. I would argue that the building in fact presents and problematises the question of popularity in formal architectural terms. This leads to a proposition: that there is a 'look' of populism that exists independently of any intended or actual popularity, or even a connection with popular culture. I would argue that the NMA opens an elaborate play on this 'look' of the popular, and that it does so by manipulating certain key aesthetic devices: literal and figurative elements, visual jokes, non-orthogonal forms, and most significantly, bright and mixed colour. Such devices carry a weight of expectation and association, they cause a building to be read or socially recognised as being populist, largely as a result of pre-existing dichotomies between 'high' and 'low' art. In this conception the NMA, turning the modernist prohibition on its head, uses colour as the deliberately frivolous disguise of a profoundly serious intent. Rather than concealing the absence of meaning, it conceals an overabundance of meaning—a despairing accumulation of piled up allegories, codes and fragments. It is thus deeply ironic that the NMA has been read as a light, flippant, and populist confection, since I would argue that it could hardly be further from being those things. Rather than taking the usual path, of seeking cultural authority through allusion to traditional monumental architecture, the NMA makes perverse references to the seemingly trivial, commercial, and populist. The reasons why the architects might want the building to be (mis)read in this way are complex. But by renouncing the aesthetic trappings of a serious institution, the NMA reveals the very superficiality of such trappings. Furthermore, by renouncing the 'look of authority' in favour of colour, frivolity, and apparent populism, it introduces a note of doubt. Could the building, and thus the institution - a national museum, remember, charged with representing the nation and placed in the national capital - really be as flippant as it seems? Or is there some more subtle game afoot, a subversive questioning of accepted notions of Australian national history and national identity? I would argue that this is so. In the NMA, then, colour is the sign of a critical engagement. It positions the building itself as a discourse or discussion, not only of architectural colour as conferring inferiority and flippancy, but of a lack of colour as conferring authority and legitimacy. Of course, it is precisely because of architecture's history of chromophobia that colour can itself become a tool for subversiveness, provide an invitation to alternative readings, and collapse unspoken hierarchies. In this respect, the colour in and of the NMA provides an emblem of that which has long been marginalised in architecture, and in culture more generally. Notes 1. Mark Wigley writes that the primacy of whiteness in high modernist architecture (particularly the work of Le Corbusier) lies partly in the removal of decoration. '[The] erasure of decoration is portrayed [by Le Corbusier] as the necessary gesture of a civilized society. Indeed, civilization is defined as the elimination of the 'superfluous' in favour of the 'essential' and the paradigm of inessential surplus is decoration. Its removal liberates a new visual order. Echoing an argument at least as old as Western philosophy, Le Corbusier describes civilization as a gradual passage from the sensual to the intellectual, from the tactile to the visual. Decoration's 'caresses of the senses' are progressively abandoned in favour of the visual harmony of proportion.' Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1995, pp. 2-3 2. See for example John Gage's superb and authoritative history of the use and meaning of colour, Colour and Meaning: Art, Science and Symbolism, Thames and Hudson, London, 1999. For a survey of the use of colour in architecture, see Tom Porter, Architectural Colour: A Design Guide to Using Colour on Buildings, Whitney Library of Design, New York, 1982, or the more recent Architectural Design Profile number 120: Colour in Architecture, AD, vol. 66, no 3/4, March/April 1996. These are only a few examples of the available literature. 3. David Batchelor, Chromophobia, Reaktion Books, London, 2000, pp. 22-23. 4. The notable exception to this - the architecture of schools is emblematic in itself: colour is appealing to children, so the logic would go, because they have undeveloped, 'primitive' tastes. 5. William Braham has perceptively examined the allure of 'natural' materials and colours in the modern period. He writes that 'the natural can only be understood as a somewhat flexible category of finishes, not by a single principle of use, manufacture, or appearance. The fact that a family of paint colours neutrals, ochres, and other earth colours fit within the definition of natural is only partly explained by their original manufacture with naturally occurring mineral compounds. Though they are opaque surface coatings, they resemble the tones produced in natural materials by weathering.' He goes on to say that the 'natural/neutral palette' is characterised by 'the difficult pursuit of authenticity', and this question goes indeed to the heart of the issue of colour in architecture. William W. Braham, 'A Wall of Books: The Gender of Natural Colours in Modern Architecture', JAE Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 53. No.1, September 1999, p. 10. 6. But perhaps more important than actual durability in institutional architecture is the appearance of durability, and this appearance is undermined by protective treatments like paint, whether coloured or not. Materials which are seen as flimsy or fragile may as well be coloured, so the logic goes, since they require constant re-painting anyway, and since it fits their low status. 7. Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1995, p. 5. 8. Aluminium panelling is a new technology and a new material one that was unknown in the high modernist period but which is becoming increasingly ubiquitous today. The fact that aluminium panelling is coloured during the manufacturing process opens a new and interesting question: is this colour inherent, or is it simply applied earlier in the building process? Is it, in other words, an 'honest' or a 'dishonest' colour? Given that aluminium does have its own colour, and that it can be lacquered or anodised to retain that colour, it seems that the aluminium panelling of the NMA have been received as 'dishonest'. 9. Frith, 'A monument to lost opportunity', The Canberra Times, 20 March 2001 Citation reference for this article MLA Style Stead, Naomi. "White cubes and red knots" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.3 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0207/whitecubes.php>. Chicago Style Stead, Naomi, "White cubes and red knots" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 3 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0207/whitecubes.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Stead, Naomi. (2002) White cubes and red knots. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(3). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0207/whitecubes.php> ([your date of access]).

Abstract:

A Site for the Study of Ambience Deep in Melbourne’s subterranean belly lies a long, dark space dedicated to screen-based art. Built along disused train platforms, it’s even possible to hear the ghostly rumblings and clatter of trains passing alongside the length of the gallery on quiet days. Upon descending the single staircase leading into this dimly-lit space, visitors encounter a distinctive sensory immersion. A flicker of screens dapple the windowless vastness ahead, perhaps briefly highlighting entrances into smaller rooms or the faintly-outlined profiles of visitors. This space often houses time-based moving image artworks. The optical flicker and aural stirrings of adjacent works distract, luring visitors’ attention towards an elsewhere. Yet on other occasions, this gallery’s art is bounded by walls, private enclosures which absorb perceptions of time into the surrounding darkness. Some works lie dormant awaiting visitors’ intervention, while others rotate on endless loops, cycling by unheeded, at times creating an environment of visual and aural collision. A weak haze of daylight falls from above mid-way through the space, marking the gallery’s only exit – an escalator fitted with low glowing lights. This is a space of thematic and physical reinvention. Movable walls and a retractable mezzanine enable the 110 metre long, 15 metre wide and almost 10 metre high space to be reformed with each exhibition, as evidenced by the many exhibitions that this Screen Gallery has hosted since opening as a part of the Australian for the Moving Image (ACMI) in 2002. ACMI endured controversial beginnings over the public funds dedicated to its gallery, cinemas, public editing and games labs, TV production studio, and screen education programs. As media interrogation of ACMI’s role and purpose intensified, several pressing critical and public policy questions surfaced as to how visitors were engaging with and valuing this institution and its spaces. In this context, I undertook the first, in depth qualitative study of visitation to ACMI, so as to address these issues and also the dearth of supporting literature into museum visitation (beyond broad, quantitative analyses). Of particular interest was ACMI’s Screen Gallery, for it appeared to represent something experientially unique and historically distinctive as compared to museums and galleries of the past. I therefore undertook an ethnographic study of museum visitation to codify the expression of ACMI’s institutional remit in light of the modalities of its visitors’ experiences in the Gallery. This rich empirical material formed the basis of my study and also this article, an ethnography of the Screen Gallery’s ambience. My study was undertaken across two exhibitions, World without End and White Noise (2005). While WWE was thematically linear in its charting of the dawn of time, globalisation and apocalypse, visitor interaction was highly non-linear. The moving image was presented in a variety of forms and spaces, from the isolation of works in rooms, the cohabitation of the very large to very small in the gallery proper, to enclosures created by multiple screens, laser-triggered interactivity and even plastic bowls with which visitors could ‘capture’ projections of light. Where heterogeneity was embraced in WWE, WN offered a smoother and less rapturous environment. It presented works by artists regarded as leaders of recent practices in the abstraction of the moving image. Rather than recreating the free exploratory movement of WWE, the WN visitor was guided along one main corridor. Each work was situated in a room or space situated to the right-hand side of the passageway. This isolation created a deep sense of immersion and intimacy with each work. Low-level white noise was even played across the Gallery so as to absorb the aural ‘bleed’ from neighbouring works. For my study, I used qualitative ethnographic techniques to gather phenomenological material, namely longitudinal participant observation and interviews. The observations were conducted on a fortnightly basis for seven months. I typically spent two to three hours shadowing visitors as they moved through the Gallery, detailing patterns of interaction; from gross physical movement and speech, to the very subtle modalities of encounter: a faint smile, a hesitation, or lapsing into complete stillness. I specifically recruited visitors for interviews immediately after their visit so as to probe further into these phenomenological moments while their effects were still fresh. I also endeavoured to capture a wide cross-sample of responses by recruiting on the basis of age, gender and reason for visitation. Ten in-depth interviews (between 45 minutes and one hour) were undertaken, enquiring into the factors influencing impressions of the Gallery, such as previous museum and art experiences, and opinions about media art and technology. In this article, I particularly draw upon my interviews with Steven, Fleur, Heidi, Sean, Trevor and Mathew. These visitors’ commentaries were selected as they reflect upon the overall ambience of the Gallery–intimate recollections of moving through darkness and projections of light–rather than engagement with individual works. When referring to ambience, I borrow from Brian Eno’s 1978 manifesto of Ambient Music, as it offers a useful analogy for assessing the complexity within subtle aesthetic experiences, and more specifically, in a spatial environment generated by electronic means. An ambience is defined as an atmosphere, or a surrounding influence: a tint…Whereas the extant canned music companies proceed from the basis of regularizing environments by blanketing their acoustic and atmospheric idiosyncrasies, Ambient Music is intended to enhance these. Whereas conventional background music is produced by stripping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty (and thus all genuine interest) from the music, Ambient Music retains these qualities. And whereas their intention is to ‘brighten’ the environment by adding stimulus to it… Ambient Music is intended to induce calm and a space to think…Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting. (Eno, "Ambient Music")While Eno’s definition specifically discusses a listening space, it is comparable to the predominantly digital and visual gallery environment as it elicits similar states of attention, such as calm reflection, or even a peaceful emptying of thoughts. I propose that ACMI’s darkened Screen Gallery creates an exploratory space for such intimate, bodily, subjective experiences. I firstly locate this study within the genealogical context of visitor interaction in museum exhibition environments. We then follow the visitors through the Gallery. As the nuances of their journey are presented, I assess the significance of an alternate model for presenting art which encourages ‘active’ aesthetic experience by privileging ambiguity and subtlety–yet heightened interactivity–and is similar to the systemic complexity Eno accords his Ambient Music. Navigating Museums in the Past The first public museums appeared in the context of the emerging liberal democratic state as both a product and articulation of the early stages of modernity in the nineteenth century. Museum practitioners enforced boundaries by prescribing visitors’ routes architecturally, by presenting museum objects within firm knowledge categories, and by separating visitors from objects with glass cabinets. By making their objects publicly accessible and tightly governing visitors’ parameters of spatial interaction, museums could enforce a pedagogical regulation of moral codes, an expression of ‘governmentality’ which constituted the individual as both a subject and object of knowledge (Bennett "Birth", Culture; Hooper-Greenhill). The advent of high modernism in the mid-twentieth century enforced positivist doctrines through a firm direction of visitor movement, exemplified by Le Corbusier’s Musée à Croissance Illimitée (1939) and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in New York (1959) (Davey 36). In more recent stages of modernity, architecture has attempted to reconcile the singular authority imposed by a building’s design. Robert Venturi, a key theorist of post-modern architecture, argued that the museum’s pedagogical failure to achieve social and political reforms was due to the purist and universalist values expressed within modern architecture. He proposed that post-modern architecture could challenge aesthetic modernism with a playful hybridity which emphasises symbolism and sculptural forms in architecture, and expresses a more diverse set of pluralist ideologies. Examples might include Hans Hollein’s Abteiberg Museum (1972-1982), or the National Museum of Australia in Canberra (2001). Contemporary attempts to design museum interactions reflect the aspirations of the ‘new museum.’ They similarly address a pluralist agenda, but mediate increasingly individualised forms of participation though highly interactive technological interfaces (Message). Commenting about art galleries, Lev Manovich greets this shift with some pessimism. He argues that the high art of the ‘white cube’ gallery is now confronting its ‘ideological enemy’, the ‘black box’, a historically ‘lower’ art form of cinema theatre (10). He claims that the history of spatial experimentation in art galleries is being reversed as much moving image art has been exhibited using a video projection in a darkened room, thereby limiting visitor participation to earlier, static forms of engagement. However, he proposes that new technologies could have an important presence and role in cultural institutions as an ‘augmented space’, in which layers of data overlay physical space. He queries whether this could create new possibilities for spatial interaction, such that cultural institutions might play a progressive role in exploring new futures (14). The Screen Gallery at ACMI embodies the characteristics of the ‘new museum’ as far as it demands multiple modalities of participation in a technological environment. It could perhaps also be regarded an experimental ‘black box’ in that it houses multiple screens, yet, as we shall see, elicits participation unbefitting of a cinema. We therefore turn now to examine visitors’ observations of the Gallery’s design, thereby garnering the experiential significance of passage through a moving image art space. Descending into Darkness Descending the staircase into the Gallery is a process of proceeding into shadows. The blackened cavity (fig. 1) therefore looms ahead as a clear visceral departure from the bustle of Federation Square above (fig. 2), and the clean brightness of ACMI’s foyer (fig. 3). Figure 1: Descent into ACMI's Screen Gallery Figure 2: ACMI at Federation Square, Melbourne Figure 3: ACMI’s foyer One visitor, Fleur, described this passage as a sense of going “deep underground,” where the affective power of darkness overwhelmed other sensory details: “I can’t picture it in my mind – sort of where the gallery finishes… And it’s perfect, it’s dark, and it’s… quiet-ish.” Many visitors found that an entrance softened by shadows added a trace of suspense to the beginnings of their journey. Heidi described how, “because it’s dark and you can’t actually see the people walking about… it’s a little bit more mysterious.” Fleur similarly remarked that “you’re not quite sure what you’re going to meet when you go around. And there’s a certain anticipation.” Steven found that the ambiguity surrounding the conventions of procedure through Gallery was “quite interesting, that experience of being a little bit unsure of where you’re going or not being able to see.” He attributed feelings of disorientation to the way the deep shadows of the Gallery routinely obscured measurement of time: “it’s that darkness that makes it a place where it’s like a time sync… You could spend hours in there… You sort of lose track of time… The darkness kind of contributes to that.” Multiple Pathways The ambiguity of the Gallery compelled visitors to actively engage with the space by developing their own rules for procedure. For example, Sean described how darkness and minimal use of signage generated multiple possibilities for passage: “you kind of need to wander through and guide yourself. It’s fairly dark as well and there aren’t any signs saying ‘Come this way,’ and it was only by sort of accident we found some of the spaces down the very back. Because, it’s very dark… We could very well have missed that.” Katrina similarly explained how she developed a participatory journey through movement: “when you first walk in, it just feels like empty space, and not exactly sure what’s going on and what to look at… and you think nothing is going on, so you have to kind of walk around and get a feel for it.” Steven used this participatory movement to navigate. He remarked that “there’s a kind of basic ‘what’s next?’… When you got down you could see maybe about four works immediately... There’s a kind of choice about ‘this is the one I’ll pay attention to first’, or ‘look, there’s this other one over there – that looks interesting, I might go and come back to this’. So, there’s a kind of charting of the trip through the exhibition.” Therefore while ambiguous rules for procedure undermine traditional forms of interaction in the museum, they prompted visitors to draw upon their sensory perception to construct a self-guided and exploratory path of engagement. However, mystery and ambiguity can also complicate visitors’ sense of self determination. Fleur noted how crossing the threshold into a space without clear conventions for procedure could challenge some visitors: “you have to commit yourself to go into a space like that, and I think the first time, when you’re not sure what’s down there… I think people going there for the first time would probably… find it difficult.” Trevor found this to be the case, objecting that “the part that doesn’t work, is that it doesn’t work as a space that’s easy to get around.” These comments suggest that an ‘unintended consequence’ (Beck) of relaxing contemporary museum conventions to encourage greater visitor autonomy, can be the contrary effect of making navigation more difficult. Visitors struggling to negotiate these conditions may find themselves subject to what Daniel Palmer terms the ‘paradox of user control’, in which contemporary forms of choice prove to be illusory, as they inhibit an individual’s freedom through ‘soft’ forms of domination. The ambiguity created by the Gallery’s darkness therefore brings two disparate – if not contradictory – tendencies together, as concluded by Fleur: “The darkness is – it’s both an advantage and a disadvantage… You can’t sort of see each other as well, but there’s also a bit of freedom in that. In that it sort of goes both ways.” A Journey of Subtle Cues Several strategies to ameliorate disorienting navigation experiences were employed in the Screen Gallery, attempting to create new possibilities for meaningful interaction. Some reflect typical curatorial conventions, such as mounting didactic panels along walls and strategically placing staff as guides. However, visitors frequently eschewed these markers and were instead drawn powerfully to affective conventions, including the shadings of light and sound. Sean noted how small beacons of light at foot level were prominent features, as they illuminated the entrances to rooms and corridors: “That’s your over-whelming impression, because it’s dark and there’s just these feature spotlights… and they’re an interesting device, because they sort of lead your eye through the space as well, and say ‘oh that’s where the next event is, there’s a spotlight over there’.” The luminescence of artworks served a similar purpose, for within “the darkness, the boundaries are less visible, and… you’re drawn to the light, you know, you’re drawn to those screens.” He found that directional sound above artworks also created a comparable effect: “I was aware of the fact that things were quiet until you approached the right spot and obviously it’s where the sound was focussed.” These conventions reflect what Trini Castelli calls ‘soft design’, by which space is made cohesively sensual (Glibb in Mitchell 87-88). The Gallery uses light and sound to fashions this visceral ‘feeling’ of spatial continuity, a seamless ambience. Paul described how this had a pleasurable effect, where the “atmosphere of the space” created “a very nice place to be… Lots of low lighting.” Fleur similarly recalled lasting somatic impressions: “It’s a bit like a cave, I suppose… The atmosphere is so different… it’s warm, I find it quite a relaxing place to be, I find it quite calm…Yeah, it has that feeling of private space to it.” Soft design therefore tempers the spatial severity of museums past through this sensuous ‘participatory environment.’ Interaction with art therefore becomes, as Steven enthused, “an exhibition experience” where “it’s as much (for me) the experience of moving between works as attending to the work itself… That seems really prominent in the experience, that it’s not these kind of isolated, individual works, they’re in relation to each other.” Disruptions to this experiential continuity – what Eno had described as a ‘stimulus’ – were subject to harsh judgement. When asked why he preferred to stand against the back wall of a room, rather than take a seat on the chairs provided, Matthew protested that “the spotlight was on those frigging couches, who wants to sit there? That would’ve been horrible.” Visitors clearly expressed a preference towards a form of spatial interaction in which curatorial conventions heighten, rather than detract from, the immersive dynamic of the museum environment. They showed how the feelings of ambiguity and suspense which absorbed them in the Gallery’s entrance gradually began to dissipate. In their place, a preference arose for conventions which maintained the Gallery’s immersive continuity, and where cues such as focused sound and footlights had a calming effect, and created a cohesive sensual journey through the dark. The Ambience of Art Space Visitors’ comments acquire an additional significance when examined in light of Eno’s earlier definition of what he called Ambient Music. He suggested that even in relative stillness, there exists a capacity for active forms of listening which create a “space to think” and generate a “quiet interest.” In addition, and perhaps most importantly, these active forms of listening are augmented by the “atmospheric idiosyncrasies” which are derived from conditions of uncertainty. As I have shown, the darkened Screen Gallery obscures the rules for visitor participation and consequently elicits doubt and hesitation. Visitors must self-navigate and be guided by sensory perception, responding to the kinaesthetic touch of light on skin and the subtle drifts of sound to constructing a journey through the enveloping darkness. This spatial ambience can therefore be understood as the specific condition which make the Gallery a fertile site for new exchanges between visitors, artworks and curation within the museum. Arjun Mulder defines this kind of dynamism in architectural space as a form of systemic interactivity, the “default state of any living system,” in the way that any system can be considered interactive if it links into, and affects change upon another (Mulder 332). Therefore while museums have historically been spaces for interaction, they have not always been interactive spaces in the sense described by Mulder, where visitor participation and processes of exchange are heightened by the conditions of ambience, and can compel self-determined journeys of visitor enquiry and feelings of relaxation and immersion. ACMI’s Screen Gallery has therefore come to define its practices by heightening these forms of encounter, and elevating the affective possibilities for interacting with art. Traditional museum conventions have been challenged by playing with experiential dynamics. These practices create an ambience which is particular to the gallery, and historically unlike the experiential ecologies of preceding forms of museum, gallery or moving space, be it the white cube or a simple ‘black box’ room for video projections. This perhaps signifies a distinctive moment in the genealogy of the museum, indicating how one instance of an art environment’s ambience can become a rubric for new forms of visitor interaction. References Beck, Ulrich. “The Reinvention of Politics: Towards a Theory of Reflexive Modernization.” Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order. Eds. Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash. Cambridge: Politics, 1994. 1-55. Bennett, Tony. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. London; New York: Routledge. 1995. ———. “Culture and Governmentality.” Foucault, Cultural Studies and Governmentality. Eds. J.Z. Bratich, J. Packer, and C. McCarthy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. 47-64. Davey, Peter. “Museums in an N-Dimensional World.” The Architectural Review 1242 (2000): 36-37. Eno, Brian. “Resonant Complexity.” Whole Earth Review (Summer 1994): 42-43. ———. “Ambient Music.” A Year with Swollen Appendices: The Diary of Brian Eno. London: Faber and Faber, 1996. 293-297. Hooper-Greenhill, Eileen. “Museums and Education for the 21st Century.” Museum and Gallery Education. London: Leicester University Press, 1991. 187-193. Manovich, Lev. “The Poetics of Augmented Space: Learning from Prada.” 27 April 2010 ‹http://creativetechnology.salford.ac.uk/fuchs/modules/creative_technology/architecture/manovich_augmented_space.pdf›. Message, Kylie. “The New Museum.” Theory, Culture and Society: Special Issue on Problematizing Global Knowledge. Eds. Mike Featherstone, Couze Venn, and Ryan Bishop, John Phillips. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2006. 603-606. Mitchell, T. C. Redefining Designing: From Form to Experience. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1993. Mulder, Arjun. “The Object of Interactivity.” NOX: Machining Architecture. London: Thames and Hudson, 2004. 332-340. Palmer, Daniel. “The Paradox of User Control.” Melbourne Digital Art and Culture 2003 Conference Proceedings. Melbourne: RMIT, 2003. 167-172. Venturi, Robert. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966.

Abstract:

This paper is about the relationships between infrastructural, interzonal spaces and the communities and individuals that interact with them. It attempts to describe the politics of their aesthetics and their legitimation as two aspects of the same process of semiological warfare and its governance. For example, think about a street-corner, preferably one in a big city. Consider the processes and operations that occur there, who creates them, legitimates them, and what they mean. For the sake of this paper, the road, the sidewalk, the streetlights with their cabling and electrical grid, the sewers and their gutters, are all infrastructural zones, and they come together and intermix to form the interzone. That is, the complex assemblage of meanings, things, and peoples, that is at once the street-corner and beyond it. Zones are inscribed through codes and conventions to form pragmatic regimes through which we enact our lives and our roles (Thévenot, “Rules and Implements” 9-15; Thévenot, “Pragmatic Regimes” 64–5). Though these zones are integral to our lives, the deterritorialisation of these zones has dispersed them throughout our world, splintering and disintegrating the meanings we can assign to them, thus forcing the perpetual re-creation of new zones and interzones across spaces and times. Through this dispersal, the integrated world capitalism in which we live, allows us to be ignorant of their processes as the experience of the zones are removed from our subjective experiences (Guattari, The Three Ecologies 137). Because our ignorance of and alienation from our infrastructural zones, a subpolitics forms and spawns semiologic warfare for our attention and disattention that causes us to be “zoned out” about the zones in which we live (Beck 35). Instead of zoning out, this paper zones in on infrastructure zones and interzones. An interzone is an interstitial zone of extraterratoriality governed by a broader set of rules, as with international zones such as the infamous Green Zone in Iraq or the international zone of Tangiers made famous by William Burroughs (Thévenot, “Rules and Implements” 9–15; Thévenot, “Pragmatic Regimes” 64–5). Interzones are the territories between zones that we project our subjectivities through. They cut or splinter the empty spaces of the dispersed and fragmented zones of our capitalist realities. Our subjective projection of these interzones creates and requires modes of interpretation and governance that comes into being as we share our knowledge of them. As interzones become reified through our shared interpretations and governance, they become zones themselves, forming a pragmatic regime of codes and conventions that eventually is alienated from our experience. This perpetual passage from zone to interzone based on our spatial subjectivities, requires significant amounts of work—intellectual and other. Without this work, interzones are entropic and temporary; fading from our shared memories. But even as they fade, interzones have changed the zones around them, transforming the necessities of their governance through the vacating of the semiological and social spaces the interzone once occupied with its own processes.This paper confronts these interzones that are frequently within a five-minute walk from anywhere humans inhabit. These interzones contain infrastructures such as sidewalks, roads, sewers, passageways, or in the digital world web servers, routers, and fibre optic cabling. As we pass through these zones and have the opportunity to interact with them, we occasionally intermix them, creating new possibilities of understanding and operating; this is the creation of an interzone. The interzone exists when we make it and share it from the zones we inhabit, transforming their infrastructures through our interaction with them. However, our actions tend to be vitalist and pluralist in that our interactions with infrastructures tend to create a multiplicity of livable interzones existing between the zones as new spaces of autonomy, occupation, and legitimising politics. This plurality combined with our immersion within infrastructural zones provides the living semiological space of self-legitimation in which we deny the existence of the very infrastructural zones it requires: In the “private,” in the “domestic” sphere (and so also in the environment of objects) in which the individual lives as a refuge zone, as an autonomous field of needs and satisfactions, below or beyond social constraints, the individual nevertheless always continues to evince or to claim a legitimacy and to assure it by signs. In the least of behaviors, through the least of objects, he or she translates the immanence of a jurisdiction which in appearance is rejected. (Baudrillard 40) Our objects; our actions within this domestic environment constitute elements of several zones and provide our own subjective system of legitimation within them, and our autonomy within that space is guaranteed by our ignorance of the operation of that system of legitimation. It is only our situatedness through our inscriptions and actions within these spaces that gives us the ability to read the codes that we co-construct through these spaces. (Thévenot, “Rules and Implements” 9–15; Thévenot, “Pragmatic Regimes” 64–5) This situatedness allows us this sense of refuge, safety, and in the end as Baudrillard claims, this refuge zone allows for us to exist socially, if ignorantly within the infrastructures we require. (Baudrillard 40, 49) But even in our ignorance, infrastructural zones still provide us with the background necessities of our everyday lives; eliminating dangers and constituting a significant part of our artifactual world (Star 377-90; Star and Ruhleder 253-64; Hunsinger 277-79). As Paul Edwards says: Infrastructures constitute an artificial environment, channeling and/or reproducing those properties of the natural environment that we find most useful and comfortable; providing others that the natural environment cannot; and eliminating features we find dangerous, uncomfortable, or merely inconvenient. In doing so, they simultaneously constitute our experience of the natural environment, as commodity, object of romantic or pastoralist emotions and aesthetic sensibilities, or occasional impediment. (189) Zones too are artificial environments, performing the same sort of functions as described by Edwards above. Zones operate through their semiological form as desire/seduction and they operate through their borders where their aesthetization is at play. More specifically how we imagine and react to zones and interzones, and who and what occupies their border spaces, defines the interoperation of their interpretation, their aesthetisation, and their governance. Edges and borders define the relations of zones; the screen of the monitor is like a wall with a window that defines our access to cyberinfrastructures beyond, much like the curb or ditch defines the edge of the street or road. These borders and edges are more than spaces of interoperation, they are spaces of politics. It is through these borders, and the actions we can pursue through them, where the operations of legitimacy will be most tested and transgressed. Infrastructural zones operate in and across those borders both as real and phantasmal aesthetics that operate as a becoming system of governance and interpretation. They operate as a cross-ecologic, semiological, and pragmatic regime that is established in relation to production of subjectivity in their cultural milieu. The zones and interzones articulate a form of alienated subjectivity in all cultural milieus. This is an articulation of our acted environment that is assembled through our distributed cognition of zones and interzones, which as part of the politics of legitimation, we inscribe, erase, and re-inscribe in perpetual semiological warfare until the zones fade into the background losing their salience. Edwards agrees with this lack of salience, “The most salient characteristic of technology in the modern (industrial and postindustrial) world is the degree to which most technology is not salient for most people, most of the time” (184). Even without particular salience to most people, infrastructural zones are spaces and aggregations of perceived fixity or normality demarcated by their transgression. The modes of transgression that demarcate them can occur in any part of our experience. Normally the boundaries are constructed in the forms of visibility and knowability centered on questions of expertise and/or professionalism amongst other boundary processes (Star and Griesemer 387–420; Star and Ruhleder 253–64 ; Gieryn 791–2). Plumbers, for instance, confront a reality of certain infrastructures on a daily basis, as do other professionals such as those that work at Internet service providers. As outsiders to these epistemic communities, we are made aware of zones when we transgress in or through them as we are breaking rules or borders that define these communities define and in part communicate to us. It is through our actions and transgressions that we enact and inscribe interzones in our subjective world, but it is through our reactions and transgressions also that they are territorialized and deterritorialized in our social world. Zones, then are constructs of our purported, construed, and communicated phantasmal objectivities and beyond that they are the aesthetization of our shared needs and satisfactions. By recognizing them, we transform them in to actants in our social world, and by communicating our experience of them, we construct them as codes and conventions that add meaning to that social world. One way to imagine these infrastructural manifestations is through thinking about them as substrates. People commonly envision infrastructure as a system of substrates—railroad lines, pipes and plumbing, electrical power plants, and wires. It is by definition invisible, part of the background for other kinds of work. It is ready-to-hand. This image holds up well enough for many purposes—turn on the faucet for a drink of water and you use a vast infrastructure of plumbing and water regulation without usually thinking much about it. (Star 380) As substrates, these infrastructures form a pragmatic regime, or zone through which we pass, which exists underneath the strata that is our everyday life. The faucet is part of the strata of our everyday lives, like the sidewalk, while the pipes and the standards of plumbing form a space of expertise as they do with sidewalks. The operations of expertise cultures on specific sets of infrastructures helps to disperse and fragment the knowledge of the various strata involved, especially the substrates. Experts knowledgeable of these substrates will have come to their knowledge by transgressing the borders, by witnessing and inscribing the objects, the aestheticisations, and the other border processes with meanings that the community of experts share amongst themselves and isolate from the public at large (Illich et al. 15–20). Expertise becomes complicit in the processes of the zone and its interzones. This complicity, if reflexive, will come to question the system of integrated world capitalism in which this zone is established as a form of semiological warfare against other zones and regimes (Guattari, “The Three Ecologies” 1989 137). In other words, experts on infrastructural zones have to come to terms not only with the knowing of the previously unknown, but also the know-how that the unknown plays into the broader culture and capitalist system in which it operates. However, while experts might zone in on infrastructural zones and their contexts, most people continue to be zoned out. Even for experts in infrastructures, some infrastructures get far less investigation than others, and like all zones, they eventually are forgotten and experts become ignorant of them (Hunsinger 277–79). The challenge of knowing or bringing attention to the infrastructural zones and their interzones is a challenge of territorialisation and thus of subjective awareness. Knowingly operating with subjective awareness within them is a form of semiological warfare that we can perpetrate, because by establishing the semiological subjective space, we reconstruct a system of interpreting and governing the territory and thus establishing political importance and awareness of our techno-semiological existence. For the territory to be won, the war and its strategies have to be taken to the public arena and brought forth in political discourse as a purposive politics. We must resist the temptation to forget and remain ignorant, which as Ulrich Beck points out, relegates this political space to corporations and other non-public entities as a form of subpolitics. We need to take back the politics and subpolitics of infrastructure and recognize the choices or lack thereof that we are making across all ecological systems (Beck 38; Beck, Giddens and Lash 24–36). In conclusion, this exposition on zones, interzones, and infrastructures is meant to challenge us to rethink our subjective positions in relation to zones, their aesthetics, and their legitimation as functions of semiological warfare. We need to find new opportunities to make a mess of these spaces, to transgress, and create new spaces of autonomy for ourselves and future participants in the zones. We have to move beyond the appreciation of “this is a street-corner” and into the realm of “this is our street-corner and we know how it works.” This act will create a new interzone, which will be a new space of possibility for our lives. We cannot rely on our everyday experiences to guide us through these zones or the construction of interzones, because they will certainly only reflect our normal, accepted behaviors within the established pragmatic regimes and as such, lead to an ongoing ignorance of the operation of these interzones and infrastructures. Our challenge is to transgress and thus deterritorialise these semiological zones, and perhaps through this transgression transform the interzones into zones better reflecting our aesthetics, our desires, and our satisfactions. References Baudrillard, Jean. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. St. Louis, Missouri: Telos Press, 1981. Beck, Ulrich. Democracy without Enemies. Malden, Mass.: Polity, 1998. Beck, Ulrich, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash. Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1995. Edwards, Paul. N. “Infrastructure and Modernity: Force, Time, and Social Organization in the History of Sociotechnical Systems.” Modernity and Technology. Eds. Thomas J. Misa, Philip Brey, and Andrew Feenberg. Cambridge: MIT P, 2004. Gieryn, Thomas F. “Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists.” American Sociological Review 48.6 (1983): 781–95. Guattari, Felix. “The Three Ecologies.” New Formations 8 (Summer 1989): 131–47. ———. The Three Ecologies. Translated by Gary Genosko. London: Athlone Press, 2000. Hunsinger, Jeremy. “Toward a Transdisciplinary Internet Research.” The Information Society 21.4 (2005): 277–79. Illich, Ivan, et al. Disabling Professions. London: Marion Boyars Publishers, 1977. Star, Susan Leigh. “The Ethnography of Infrastructure.” American Behavioral Scientist 43.3 (1999): 377-91. Star, Susan Leigh, and James R. Griesemer. “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39.” Social Studies of Science 19.3 (1989): 387–420. Star, Susan Leigh, and Karen Ruhleder. “Steps towards an Ecology of Infrastructure: Complex Problems in Design and Access for Large-Scale Collaborative Systems.” Proceedings of the 1994 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Work. North Carolina, 1994. 253–64. Thévenot, Laurent. “Rules and Implements: Investment in Forms.” Social Science Information 23.1 (1984): 1–45. ———. “Pragmatic Regimes Governing the Engagement with the World.” The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. Eds. Theodore R. Schatzki, Karin Knorr Cetina, and Eike von Savigny. New York: Routledge, 2001. 56–73.

Abstract:

About half way through Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s film Home (2009) the narrator describes the fall of the Rapa Nui, the indigenous people of the Easter Islands. The narrator posits that the Rapa Nui culture collapsed due to extensive environmental degradation brought about by large-scale deforestation. The Rapa Nui cut down their massive native forests to clear spaces for agriculture, to heat their dwellings, to build canoes and, most importantly, to move their enormous rock sculptures—the Moai. The disappearance of their forests led to island-wide soil erosion and the gradual disappearance of arable land. Caught in the vice of overpopulation but with rapidly dwindling basic resources and no trees to build canoes, they were trapped on the island and watched helplessly as their society fell into disarray. The sequence ends with the narrator’s biting remark: “The real mystery of the Easter Islands is not how its strange statues got there, we know now; it's why the Rapa Nui didn't react in time.” In their unrelenting desire for development, the Rapa Nui appear to have overlooked the role the environment plays in maintaining a society. The island’s Moai accompanying the sequence appear as memento mori, a lesson in the mortality of human cultures brought about by their own misguided and short-sighted practices. Arthus-Bertrand’s Home, a film composed almost entirely of aerial photographs, bears witness to present-day environmental degradation and climate change, constructing society as a fragile structure built upon and sustained by the environment. Home is a call to recognise how contemporary practices of post-industrial societies have come to shape the environment and how they may impact the habitability of Earth in the near future. Through reflexivity and a ritualised structure the text invites spectators to look at themselves in a new light and remake their self-image in the wake of global environmental risk by embracing new, alternative core practices based on balance and interconnectedness. Arthus-Bertrand frames climate change not as a burden, but as a moment of profound realisation of the potential for change and humans ability to create a desirable future through hope and our innate capacity for renewal. This article examines how Arthus-Bertrand’s ritualised construction of climate change aims to remake viewers’ perception of present-day environmental degradation and investigates Home’s place in contemporary climate change communication discourse. Climate change, in its capacity to affect us globally, is considered a world risk. The most recent peer-reviewed Synthesis Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests that the concentration of atmospheric greenhouse gases has increased markedly since human industrialisation in the 18th century. Moreover, human activities, such as fossil fuel burning and agricultural practices, are “very likely” responsible for the resulting increase in temperature rise (IPPC 37). The increased global temperatures and the subsequent changing weather patterns have a direct and profound impact on the physical and biological systems of our planet, including shrinking glaciers, melting permafrost, coastal erosion, and changes in species distribution and reproduction patterns (Rosenzweig et al. 353). Studies of global security assert that these physiological changes are expected to increase the likelihood of humanitarian disasters, food and water supply shortages, and competition for resources thus resulting in a destabilisation of global safety (Boston et al. 1–2). Human behaviour and dominant practices of modernity are now on a path to materially impact the future habitability of our home, Earth. In contemporary post-industrial societies, however, climate change remains an elusive, intangible threat. Here, the Arctic-bound species forced to adapt to milder climates or the inhabitants of low-lying Pacific islands seeking refuge in mainland cities are removed from the everyday experience of the controlled and regulated environments of homes, offices, and shopping malls. Diverse research into the mediated and mediatised nature of the environment suggests that rather than from first-hand experiences and observations, the majority of our knowledge concerning the environment now comes from its representation in the mass media (Hamilton 4; Stamm et al. 220; Cox 2). Consequently the threat of climate change is communicated and constructed through the news media, entertainment and lifestyle programming, and various documentaries and fiction films. It is therefore the construction (the representation of the risk in various discourses) that shapes people’s perception and experience of the phenomenon, and ultimately influences behaviour and instigates social response (Beck 213). By drawing on and negotiating society’s dominant discourses, environmental mediation defines spectators’ perceptions of the human-nature relationship and subsequently their roles and responsibilities in the face of environmental risks. Maxwell Boykoff asserts that contemporary modern society’s mediatised representations of environmental degradation and climate change depict the phenomena as external to society’s primary social and economic concerns (449). Julia Corbett argues that this is partly because environmental protection and sustainable behaviour are often at odds with the dominant social paradigms of consumerism, economic growth, and materialism (175). Similarly, Rowan Howard-Williams suggests that most media texts, especially news, do not emphasise the link between social practices, such as consumerist behaviour, and their environmental consequences because they contradict dominant social paradigms (41). The demands contemporary post-industrial societies make on the environment to sustain economic growth, consumer culture, and citizens’ comfortable lives in air-conditioned homes and offices are often left unarticulated. While the media coverage of environmental risks may indeed have contributed to “critical misperceptions, misleading debates, and divergent understandings” (Boykoff 450) climate change possesses innate characteristics that amplify its perception in present-day post-industrial societies as a distant and impersonal threat. Climate change is characterised by temporal and spatial de-localisation. The gradual increase in global temperature and its physical and biological consequences are much less prominent than seasonal changes and hence difficult to observe on human time-scales. Moreover, while research points to the increased probability of extreme climatic events such as droughts, wild fires, and changes in weather patterns (IPCC 48), they take place over a wide range of geographical locations and no single event can be ultimately said to be the result of climate change (Maibach and Roser-Renouf 145). In addition to these observational obstacles, political partisanship, vested interests in the current status quo, and general resistance to profound change all play a part in keeping us one step removed from the phenomenon of climate change. The distant and impersonal nature of climate change coupled with the “uncertainty over consequences, diverse and multiple engaged interests, conflicting knowledge claims, and high stakes” (Lorenzoni et al. 65) often result in repression, rejection, and denial, removing the individual’s responsibility to act. Research suggests that, due to its unique observational obstacles in contemporary post-industrial societies, climate change is considered a psychologically distant event (Pawlik 559), one that is not personally salient due to the “perceived distance and remoteness [...] from one’s everyday experience” (O’Neill and Nicholson-Cole 370). In an examination of the barriers to behaviour change in the face of psychologically distant events, Robert Gifford argues that changing individuals’ perceptions of the issue-domain is one of the challenges of countering environmental inertia—the lack of initiative for environmentally sustainable social action (5). To challenge the status quo a radically different construction of the environment and the human-nature relationship is required to transform our perception of global environmental risks and ultimately result in environmentally consequential social action. Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s Home is a ritualised construction of contemporary environmental degradation and climate change which takes spectators on a rite of passage to a newfound understanding of the human-nature relationship. Transformation through re-imagining individuals’ roles, responsibilities, and practices is an intrinsic quality of rituals. A ritual charts a subjects path from one state of consciousness to the next, resulting in a meaningful change of attitudes (Deflem 8). Through a lifelong study of African rituals British cultural ethnographer Victor Turner refined his concept of rituals in a modern social context. Turner observed that rituals conform to a three-phased processural form (The Ritual Process 13–14). First, in the separation stage, the subjects are selected and removed from their fixed position in the social structure. Second, they enter an in-between and ambiguous liminal stage, characterised by a “partial or complete separation of the subject from everyday existence” (Deflem 8). Finally, imbued with a new perspective of the outside world borne out of the experience of reflexivity, liminality, and a cathartic cleansing, subjects are reintegrated into the social reality in a new, stable state. The three distinct stages make the ritual an emotionally charged, highly personal experience that “demarcates the passage from one phase to another in the individual’s life-cycle” (Turner, “Symbols” 488) and actively shapes human attitudes and behaviour. Adhering to the three-staged processural form of the ritual, Arthus-Bertrand guides spectators towards a newfound understanding of their roles and responsibilities in creating a desirable future. In the first stage—the separation—aerial photography of Home alienates viewers from their anthropocentric perspectives of the outside world. This establishes Earth as a body, and unearths spectators’ guilt and shame in relation to contemporary world risks. Aerial photography strips landscapes of their conventional qualities of horizon, scale, and human reference. As fine art photographer Emmet Gowin observes, “when one really sees an awesome, vast place, our sense of wholeness is reorganised [...] and the body seems always to diminish” (qtd. in Reynolds 4). Confronted with a seemingly infinite sublime landscape from above, the spectator’s “body diminishes” as they witness Earth’s body gradually taking shape. Home’s rushing rivers of Indonesia are akin to blood flowing through the veins and the Siberian permafrost seems like the texture of skin in extreme close-up. Arthus-Bertrand establishes a geocentric embodiment to force spectators to perceive and experience the environmental degradation brought about by the dominant social practices of contemporary post-industrial modernity. The film-maker visualises the maltreatment of the environment through suggested abuse of the Earth’s body. Images of industrial agricultural practices in the United States appear to leave scratches and scars on the landscape, and as a ship crosses the Arctic ice sheets of the Northwest Passage the boat glides like the surgeon’s knife cutting through the uppermost layer of the skin. But the deep blue water that’s revealed in the wake of the craft suggests a flesh and body now devoid of life, a suffering Earth in the wake of global climatic change. Arthus-Bertrand’s images become the sublime evidence of human intervention in the environment and the reflection of present-day industrialisation materially altering the face of Earth. The film-maker exploits spectators’ geocentric perspective and sensibility to prompt reflexivity, provide revelations about the self, and unearth the forgotten shame and guilt in having inadvertently caused excessive environmental degradation. Following the sequences establishing Earth as the body of the text Arthus-Bertrand returns spectators to their everyday “natural” environment—the city. Having witnessed and endured the pain and suffering of Earth, spectators now gaze at the skyscrapers standing bold and tall in the cityscape with disillusionment. The pinnacles of modern urban development become symbols of arrogance and exploitation: structures forced upon the landscape. Moreover, the images of contemporary cityscapes in Home serve as triggers for ritual reflexivity, allowing the spectator to “perceive the self [...] as a distanced ‘other’ and hence achieve a partial ‘self-transcendence’” (Beck, Comments 491). Arthus-Bertrand’s aerial photographs of Los Angeles, New York, and Tokyo fold these distinct urban environments into one uniform fusion of glass, metal, and concrete devoid of life. The uniformity of these cultural landscapes prompts spectators to add the missing element: the human. Suddenly, the homes and offices of desolate cityscapes are populated by none other than us, looking at ourselves from a unique vantage point. The geocentric sensibility the film-maker invoked with the images of the suffering Earth now prompt a revelation about the self as spectators see their everyday urban environments in a new light. Their homes and offices become blemishes on the face of the Earth: its inhabitants, including the spectators themselves, complicit in the excessive mistreatment of the planet. The second stage of the ritual allows Arthus-Bertrand to challenge dominant social paradigms of present day post-industrial societies and introduce new, alternative moral directives to govern our habits and attitudes. Following the separation, ritual subjects enter an in-between, threshold stage, one unencumbered by the spatial, temporal, and social boundaries of everyday existence. Turner posits that a subjects passage through this liminal stage is necessary to attain psychic maturation and successful transition to a new, stable state at the end of the ritual (The Ritual Process 97). While this “betwixt and between” (Turner, The Ritual Process 95) state may be a fleeting moment of transition, it makes for a “lived experience [that] transforms human beings cognitively, emotionally, and morally.” (Horvath et al. 3) Through a change of perceptions liminality paves the way toward meaningful social action. Home places spectators in a state of liminality to contrast geocentric and anthropocentric views. Arthus-Bertrand contrasts natural and human-made environments in terms of diversity. The narrator’s description of the “miracle of life” is followed by images of trees seemingly defying gravity, snow-covered summits among mountain ranges, and a whale in the ocean. Grandeur and variety appear to be inherent qualities of biodiversity on Earth, qualities contrasted with images of the endless, uniform rectangular greenhouses of Almeria, Spain. This contrast emphasises the loss of variety in human achievements and the monotony mass-production brings to the landscape. With the image of a fire burning atop a factory chimney, Arthus-Bertrand critiques the change of pace and distortion of time inherent in anthropocentric views, and specifically in contemporary modernity. Here, the flames appear to instantly eat away at resources that have taken millions of years to form, bringing anthropocentric and geocentric temporality into sharp contrast. A sequence showing a night time metropolis underscores this distinction. The glittering cityscape is lit by hundreds of lights in skyscrapers in an effort, it appears, to mimic and surpass daylight and thus upturn the natural rhythm of life. As the narrator remarks, in our present-day environments, “days are now the pale reflections of nights.” Arthus-Bertrand also uses ritual liminality to mark the present as a transitory, threshold moment in human civilisation. The film-maker contrasts the spectre of our past with possible visions of the future to mark the moment of now as a time when humanity is on the threshold of two distinct states of mind. The narrator’s descriptions of contemporary post-industrial society’s reliance on non-renewable resources and lack of environmentally sustainable agricultural practices condemn the past and warn viewers of the consequences of continuing such practices into the future. Exploring the liminal present Arthus-Bertrand proposes distinctive futurescapes for humankind. On the one hand, the narrator’s description of California’s “concentration camp style cattle farming” suggests that humankind will live in a future that feeds from the past, falling back on frames of horrors and past mistakes. On the other hand, the example of Costa Rica, a nation that abolished its military and dedicated the budget to environmental conservation, is recognition of our ability to re-imagine our future in the face of global risk. Home introduces myths to imbue liminality with the alternative dominant social paradigm of ecology. By calling upon deep-seated structures myths “touch the heart of society’s emotional, spiritual and intellectual consciousness” (Killingsworth and Palmer 176) and help us understand and come to terms with complex social, economic, and scientific phenomena. With the capacity to “pattern thought, beliefs and practices,” (Maier 166) myths are ideal tools in communicating ritual liminality and challenging contemporary post-industrial society’s dominant social paradigms. The opening sequence of Home, where the crescent Earth is slowly revealed in the darkness of space, is an allusion to creation: the genesis myth. Accompanied only by a gentle hum our home emerges in brilliant blue, white, and green-brown encompassing most of the screen. It is as if darkness and chaos disintegrated and order, life, and the elements were created right before our eyes. Akin to the Earthrise image taken by the astronauts of Apollo 8, Home’s opening sequence underscores the notion that our home is a unique spot in the blackness of space and is defined and circumscribed by the elements. With the opening sequence Arthus-Bertrand wishes to impart the message of interdependence and reliance on elements—core concepts of ecology. Balance, another key theme in ecology, is introduced with an allusion to the Icarus myth in a sequence depicting Dubai. The story of Icarus’s fall from the sky after flying too close to the sun is a symbolic retelling of hubris—a violent pride and arrogance punishable by nemesis—destruction, which ultimately restores balance by forcing the individual back within the limits transgressed (Littleton 712). In Arthus-Bertrand’s portrayal of Dubai, the camera slowly tilts upwards on the Burj Khalifa tower, the tallest human-made structure ever built. The construction works on the tower explicitly frame humans against the bright blue sky in their attempt to reach ever further, transgressing their limitations much like the ill-fated Icarus. Arthus-Bertrand warns that contemporary modernity does not strive for balance or moderation, and with climate change we may have brought our nemesis upon ourselves. By suggesting new dominant paradigms and providing a critique of current maxims, Home’s retelling of myths ultimately sees spectators through to the final stage of the ritual. The last phase in the rite of passage “celebrates and commemorates transcendent powers,” (Deflem 8) marking subjects’ rebirth to a new status and distinctive perception of the outside world. It is at this stage that Arthus-Bertrand resolves the emotional distress uncovered in the separation phase. The film-maker uses humanity’s innate capacity for creation and renewal as a cathartic cleansing aimed at reconciling spectators’ guilt and shame in having inadvertently exacerbated global environmental degradation. Arthus-Bertrand identifies renewable resources as the key to redeeming technology, human intervention in the landscape, and finally humanity itself. Until now, the film-maker pictured modernity and technology, evidenced in his portrayal of Dubai, as synonymous with excess and disrespect for the interconnectedness and balance of elements on Earth. The final sequence shows a very different face of technology. Here, we see a mechanical sea-snake generating electricity by riding the waves off the coast of Scotland and solar panels turning towards the sun in the Sahara desert. Technology’s redemption is evidenced in its ability to imitate nature—a move towards geocentric consciousness (a lesson learned from the ritual’s liminal stage). Moreover, these human-made structures, unlike the skyscrapers earlier in the film, appear a lot less invasive in the landscape and speak of moderation and union with nature. With the above examples Arthus-Bertrand suggests that humanity can shed the greed that drove it to dig deeper and deeper into the Earth to acquire non-renewable resources such as oil and coal, what the narrator describes as “treasures buried deep.” The incorporation of principles of ecology, such as balance and interconnectedness, into humanity’s behaviour ushers in reconciliation and ritual cleansing in Home. Following the description of the move toward renewable resources, the narrator reveals that “worldwide four children out of five attend school, never has learning been given to so many human beings” marking education, innovation, and creativity as the true inexhaustible resources on Earth. Lastly, the description of Antarctica in Home is the essence of Arthus-Bertrand’s argument for our innate capacity to create, not simply exploit and destroy. Here, the narrator describes the continent as possessing “immense natural resources that no country can claim for itself, a natural reserve devoted to peace and science, a treaty signed by 49 nations has made it a treasure shared by all humanity.” Innovation appears to fuel humankind’s transcendence to a state where it is capable of compassion, unification, sharing, and finally creating treasures. With these examples Arthus-Bertrand suggests that humanity has an innate capacity for creative energy that awaits authentic expression and can turn humankind from destroyer to creator. In recent years various risk communication texts have explicitly addressed climate change, endeavouring to instigate environmentally consequential social action. Home breaks discursive ground among them through its ritualistic construction which seeks to transform spectators’ perception, and in turn roles and responsibilities, in the face of global environmental risks. Unlike recent climate change media texts such as An Inconvenient Truth (2006), The 11th Hour (2007), The Age of Stupid (2009), Carbon Nation (2010) and Earth: The Operator’s Manual (2011), Home eludes simple genre classification. On the threshold of photography and film, documentary and fiction, Arthus-Bertrand’s work is best classified as an advocacy film promoting public debate and engagement with a universal concern—the state of the environment. The film’s website, available in multiple languages, contains educational material, resources to organise public screenings, and a link to GoodPlanet.info: a website dedicated to environmentalism, including legal tools and initiatives to take action. The film-maker’s approach to using Home as a basis for education and raising awareness corresponds to Antonio Lopez’s critique of contemporary mass-media communications of global risks. Lopez rebukes traditional forms of mediatised communication that place emphasis on the imparting of knowledge and instead calls for a participatory, discussion-driven, organic media approach, akin to a communion or a ritual (106). Moreover, while texts often place a great emphasis on the messenger, for instance Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth, Leonardo DiCaprio in The 11th Hour, or geologist Dr. Richard Alley in Earth: The Operator’s Manual, Home’s messenger remains unseen—the narrator is only identified at the very end of the film among the credits. The film-maker’s decision to forego a central human character helps dissociate the message from the personality of the messenger which aids in establishing and maintaining the geocentric sensibility of the text. Finally, the ritual’s invocation and cathartic cleansing of emotional distress enables Home to at once acknowledge our environmentally destructive past habits and point to a hopeful, environmentally sustainable future. While The Age of Stupid mostly focuses on humanity’s present and past failures to respond to an imminent environmental catastrophe, Carbon Nation, with the tagline “A climate change solutions movie that doesn’t even care if you believe in climate change,” only explores the potential future business opportunities in turning towards renewable resources and environmentally sustainable practices. The three-phased processural form of the ritual allows for a balance of backward and forward-looking, establishing the possibility of change and renewal in the face of world risk. The ritual is a transformative experience. As Turner states, rituals “interrupt the flow of social life and force a group to take cognizance of its behaviour in relation to its own values, and even question at times the value of those values” (“Dramatic Ritual” 82). Home, a ritualised media text, is an invitation to look at our world, its dominant social paradigms, and the key element within that world—ourselves—with new eyes. It makes explicit contemporary post-industrial society’s dependence on the environment, highlights our impact on Earth, and reveals our complicity in bringing about a contemporary world risk. The ritual structure and the self-reflexivity allow Arthus-Bertrand to transform climate change into a personally salient issue. This bestows upon the spectator the responsibility to act and to reconcile the spectre of the past with the vision of the future.Acknowledgments The author would like to thank Dr. Angi Buettner whose support, guidance, and supervision has been invaluable in preparing this article. 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New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2008.

Abstract:

What is a machine? As part of his answer to this, historian and philosopher of technology Lewis Mumford cites a classic definition: "a machine is a combination of resistant bodies so arranged that by their means the mechanical forces of nature can be compelled to do work accompanied by certain determinant motions" (Reuleaux [1876], qtd. in Mumford, Technics and Civilisation 9). Mumford's own definition is focussed on machines as part of a technological continuum between human body and automaton: Machines have developed out of a complex of non-organic agents for converting energy, for performing work, for enlarging the mechanical or sensory capacities of the human body, or for reducing to a mensurable order and regularity the processes of life. The automaton is the last step in a process that began with the use of one part or another of the human body as a tool. (9-10) The tool and the machine can be distinguished along this technological continuum, with the tool more dependent on "the skill and motive power of the operator", subject to "manipulation", and potentially more flexible in its uses, whereas the machine lends itself more to "automatic action" of a specialised kind. However, it is difficult to ultimately separate them, since the embodied skill of the tool-user becomes more mechanical and reflexive with practice (Technics and Civilisation 10), while the machine also evolves along increasingly organic lines (367), and there are common examples of hybrid machine-tools like the lathe or drill, which combine "the accuracy of the finest machine ... with the skilled attendance of the workman" (10). A powerfully attractive feature of the computer is that it is an effective hybrid of machine and tool: like a machine it performs many specialised functions at super-human speed and accuracy on command, but like a tool it is flexible and adaptable (through add-on software and plug-in peripherals) to a seemingly endless variety of users and uses. Fascinating Assemblages The automatic machine ... involves the notion of an external source of power, a more or less complicated inter-relation of parts, and a limited kind of activity. From the beginning the machine was a sort of minor organism, designed to perform a single set of functions. (Mumford, Technics and Civilisation 11) The autonomy of the machine is perhaps its most fascinating aspect. That the machine is an assemblage of parts and restricted functions -- a "minor organism" as Mumford puts it -- suggests to us a body. There is something ineluctably erotic about scenes of lubricated pistons moving in and out of cylinders, or greased gear wheels moving around each other, and a masturbatory energy seems to be involved in the machine that repetitively and by itself performs the same limited actions over and over and over. While there are parallels between masculine masturbation and machinic repetition, there are also associations with femininity. As Andreas Huyssen pointed out, the modern machine became associated with a dangerous female sexuality and took the place of the early moderns' untamed Mother Nature as the principal representative of non-human forces with autonomy and agency that could evade human control. But arguably, expressed fears of machinic autonomy are the flip side of a wish for it, arising from masculine reproductive fantasies that have been played out in technoscience by generations of fictional and real-life Frankensteins fanatically seeking to create artificial life in the form of technoscientific brainchildren (who are nevertheless often neglected and left to run wild at birth). At a conscious level, machines express what may be interpreted as anal-sadistic desires for order, regularity and control, but unconsciously there is an element of masochistic pleasure in being passive, in yielding up control to the machine, in letting it set the scene and determine the actions and roles for the humans as well as non-humans (Sofia, "Contested Zones", and "Mythic Machine" 44-8). Machinic Zeal What is the use of conquering nature if we fall a prey to nature in the form of unbridled men? What is the use of equipping mankind with mighty powers to move and build and communicate, if the final result of this secure food supply and this excellent organisation is to enthrone the morbid impulses of a thwarted humanity? (Mumford, Technics and Civilisation 366) With his emphasis on the social context and drives towards technology, Mumford (Technics and Civilisation 364-5) suggests that while some kinds of machines have existed for thousands of years, what we have come to think of as the mechanical age only arose with the widespread adoption of the machine as a way of securing order, regularity and calculability of physical and human resources, coupled with the ideological shift which made the machine into "a goal of desire" and an object of almost obsessive veneration from the mid-18th century to the early 20th century. Now, he said (writing first in the early 1930s) faith in the machine has been somewhat shaken, and it is no longer seen as "the paragon of progress" but as "merely a series of instruments" to be used when useful; yet despite this loss of faith the machine in capitalist contexts continues to be "over-worked, over-enlarged, over-exploited because of the possibility of making money out of it" (Technics and Civilisation 367). Almost seventy years after Mumford was writing, the obsessive zeal for the machine still has not completely disappeared, but has been displaced from giant smoke-puffing steel assemblages, whirling cogs and gearwheels, or the motors driving trains, cars and planes, and onto the silicon, plastic and light of computers (whose machineries of production and assembly are largely hidden off-shore to the bulk of users, thereby producing the illusion of "post-industrial" societies). The computer is now the paragon of progress and has become the "defining technology" of our age (Bolter), its place reinforced by an actively boosterist popular press (e.g. popular computing magazines; regular computer supplements in newspapers). Sociotechnical Not Posthuman Mumford continually makes the point that questions posed by/in technology are never answerable only technologically. It always comes down to human choices, and even when the results of these "are uncontrollable they are not external" to human culture: Choice manifests itself in society in small increments and moment-to-moment decisions as well as in loud dramatic struggles; and he who does not see choice in the development of the machine merely betrays his incapacity to observe cumulative effects until they are bunched together so closely that they seem completely external and impersonal. (Mumford, Technics and Civilisation 6) In a certain way Mumford's perspective anticipates actor-network theory, which looks at artefacts -- including machines -- as parts of sociotechnical networks that involve human decisions, including about the distribution of agency to non-humans. Even in the most automated machine, Mumford argues "there must intervene somewhere, at the beginning and end of the process ... the conscious participation of a human agent" (10). Actor-network studies of the development of scientific and technological artefacts aim in part to critique the sense of the external, impersonal or inevitable in scientific and technical 'progress' by insisting that "things might have been otherwise" (Bijker & Law 3), not just at the beginning and end, but all the way through the process of an artefact's development and use. The artefact is studied as a particular outcome of a set of decisions and performances made in the midst of contingencies affecting human and non-human actors with conflicting goals and contested powers within a dynamic sociotechnical network. Although actor-network theory is very interested in non-human agents, it does not, as do some recent participants in and theorists of cyberculture, celebrate the so-called post-human. There can be no agentic machines without there having been human competencies downloaded into them; there can be no technical order that is not also social and cultural. As Latour argues, the modernist work of purification has tried vainly to impose a separation between the social and technical, denying their mutual inextricability. From this Latourian perspective, the notion of the "post-human" is not, as it appears to be, post modern, but thoroughly modern. It carries through the quintessentially modernist project of denying after the fact the human agency and capacities that have been invested in producing hybrid artefacts which are then proclaimed as extra-human; it denies the cumulative effects of sociotechnical choices and instead represents the machinic imperative as somehow impersonal and external to human affairs. The notion of the posthuman can readily reinforce the pervasive popular cultural myths of technological inevitability and dominance, conveniently for those humans and corporations who actually do profit from decisions they make about developing and marketing machines of increasing autonomy, intelligence and subtlety. Machines and Provision The role of the machine has been overemphasised in histories of technology, according to Mumford. For aside from tools and machines which perform dynamic actions, there are technologies of containment and supply, which he categorizes as utensils (like baskets or pots), apparatus (such as dye vats, brick kilns), utilities (reservoirs, aqueducts, roads, buildings) and the modern power utility (railroad tracks, electric transmission lines). Some of the most effective adaptations of the environment came, not from the invention of machines, but from the equally admirable invention of utensils, apparatus, and utilities. ... But since people's attention is directed most easily to the noisier and more active parts of the environment, the role of the utility and the apparatus has been neglected ... both [tool and utensil] have played an enormous part in the development of the modern environment and at no stage in history can the two means of adaptation be split apart. Every technological complex includes both: not least our modern one. (Technics and Civilisation, 11-2). The development of various utensils and apparatus for storage (urns, granaries) and flow (irrigation, aqueducts) was essential for the emergence of settled agricultural communities in the neolithic period (Mumford, Technics and Human Development 140-1). As I explore in a related article (Sofia, "Container"), Mumford finds a prudish sexism in the relative neglect of technologies evocative of the female organs of storage, nutrition and transformation, compared with the overemphasis on technologies that are extensions of the muscular masculine body (Technics and Human Development, 140). However, the contrast between dynamic, noisy, active and autonomous machines, and passive, quiet, backgrounded containers cannot be sustained. For one the utensil even in its most basic form, has something machinic about it: a container can perform its function autonomously, without needing manipulation like a tool. Further, it is arguable that holding or containing is not simply a property of a shaped space, but a form of action in itself. Moreover in practice there are many hybrids of machine and utensil or utility, for example in domestic technologies like the food processor, a container with a machine-driven blade, or the washing machine, featuring a tub with mechanical agitation and rotary motion. Although Mumford is primarily interested in the machine, he observes that as modern "neotechnics" proceeds to develop ever more sophisticated machinery, so does it evolve more complex technologies of containment, as described in this passage which depicts both machines and utilities as active agents: Behind the façade [of the crisp lines of steel and glass that define the modern built environment] are rows and rows of machines, weaving cotton, transporting coal ... [etc.], machines with steel fingers and lean muscular arms, with perfect reflexes, sometimes even with electric eyes. Alongside them are the new utilities -- the coke oven, the transformer, the dye vats -- chemically cooperating with these mechanical processes, assembling new qualities in chemical compounds and materials. Every effective part in this whole environment represents an effort of the collective mind to widen the province of order and control and provision. (Technics and Civilisation, 356) Another way of getting the over-emphasised machine back into proportion is to look more closely at what it is used for, what purposes it serves. Mumford writes of the machine as part of the effort to produce "order and regularity" into the processes of life (10); to "widen the province of order and control and provision" (356) or to produce a "secure food supply and ... excellent organisation" (366). In other words, the machine is serving the goals typically associated with utensils, utilities and apparatus: smoothing out fluctuations in supply and distributing resources more evenly. Likewise Mumford suggests that in the back of developments of machine and tool is the effort to adapt by extending the body's powers and/or by altering the environment, so that, for example, instead of a physiological adaptation to cold through hair growth or hibernation, "there is an environmental adaptation, such as that made possible by the use of clothes and the erection of shelters" (10). These technologies are not machines, but container technologies, in the province of what philosopher of technology Don Ihde would call "background technics". We can think of the shift in emphasis here in relation to the example of road works. The large machines for bulldozing a path and laying down layers of road surface are very impressive in their size, power and technical capacity. But the road surface could not be laid down without there being technologies (including hybrids of machine and container, like the pick-up truck) for transporting, storing and mixing the materials used. And when it is done, the big machines lumber off elsewhere, and what we have before us is a road, a utility which facilitates orderly communication, transport and the supply of people and materials. In other words, these machines have served the goal of provisioning. The machine can enthral us with its autonomy, its alterity, its thingness, but as Heidegger has claimed, even such a powerful and seemingly stand-alone machine as a plane on a runway ready for take-off is ultimately just a "completely unautonomous" element when considered as part of a global system ordered "to ensure the possibility of transportation" (17). Like other modern machines, its own objectness and machinic resistance is dissolved as it becomes part of the "standing reserve", which can be understood as a macro-technology of provisioning through a matrix of mobilisable human and non-human resources. In the broader project of which this piece is a fragment, I want to investigate more closely the role and relative importance of machines compared to other kinds of equipment, especially for containment, supply or provisioning in contemporary technoculture, on the suspicion that it is apparatus and utilities rather than machines that define our contemporary lifeworld. References Bijker, Wiebe E., and John Law. General Introduction. Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change. Eds. Bijker and Law. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1992. Bolter, Jay David. "The Computer as a Defining Technology." Computers in the Human Context: Information Technology, Production, and People. Ed. Tom Forester. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989. Heidegger, Martin. "The Question Concerning Technology." The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Andreas Huyssen. "The Vamp and the Machine: Technology and Sexuality in Fritz Lang's Metropolis." New German Critique 24-25 (1982), 221-37. Also in Huyssen. After the Great Divide. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986. Ihde, Don. Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1993. Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Civilisation. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1962 [1934]. ---. Technics and Human Development. New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1966. Sofia, Zoë. "Container Technologies." Hypatia, Spring 2000 (forthcoming). ---. "Contested Zones: Futurity and Technological Art." Leonardo: Journal of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology 29.1 (1996): 59-66. ---. "The Mythic Machine: Gendered Irrationalities and Computer Culture." Education/Technology/Power: Educational Computing as a Social Practice. Eds. Hank Bromley and Michael W. Apple. Albany NY: SUNY, 1998. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Zoë Sofoulis. "Machinic Musings with Mumford." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.6 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/mumford.php>. Chicago style: Zoë Sofoulis, "Machinic Musings with Mumford," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 6 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/mumford.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Zoë Sofoulis. (1999) Machinic musings with Mumford. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(6). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/mumford.php> ([your date of access]).

Abstract:

Introduction Darkness is often characterised as something that warrants heightened caution and scrutiny – signifying increased danger and risk. Within settler-colonial settings such as Australia, cautionary and negative connotations of darkness are projected upon Black people and their bodies, forming part of continuing colonial regimes of power (Moreton-Robinson). Negative stereotypes of “dark” continues to racialise all Indigenous peoples. In Australia, Indigenous peoples are both Indigenous and Black regardless of skin colour, and this plays out in a range of ways, some of which will be highlighted within this article. This article demonstrates that for Indigenous peoples, associations of fear and danger are built into the structural mechanisms that shape and maintain colonial understandings of Indigenous peoples and their bodies. It is this embodied form of darkness, and its negative connotations, and responses that we explore further. Figure 1: Megan Cope’s ‘I’m not afraid of the Dark’ t-shirt (Fredericks and Heemsbergen 2021) Responding to the anxieties and fears of settlers that often surround Indigenous peoples, Quandamooka artist and member of the art collective ProppaNow, Megan Cope, has produced a range of t-shirts, one of which declares “I’m not afraid of the Dark” (fig. 1). The wording ‘reflects White Australia’s fear of blackness’ (Dark + Dangerous). Exploring race relations through the theme of “darkness”, we begin by discussing how negative connotations of darkness are represented through everyday lexicons and how efforts to shift prejudicial and racist language are often met with defensiveness and resistance. We then consider how fears towards the dark translate into everyday practices, reinforced by media representations. The article considers how stereotype, conjecture, and prejudice is inflicted upon Indigenous people and reflects white settler fears and anxieties, rooting colonialism in everyday language, action, and norms. The Language of Fear Indigenous people and others with dark skin tones are often presented as having a proclivity towards threatening, aggressive, deceitful, and negative behaviours. This works to inform how Indigenous peoples are “known” and responded to by hegemonic (predominantly white) populations. Negative connotations of Indigenous people are a means of reinforcing and legitimising the falsity that European knowledge systems, norms, and social structures are superior whilst denying the contextual colonial circumstances that have led to white dominance. In Australia, such denial corresponds to the refusal to engage with the unceded sovereignty of Aboriginal peoples or acknowledge Indigenous resistance. Language is integral to the ways in which dominant populations come to “know” and present the so-called “Other”. Such language is reflected in digital media, which both produce and maintain white anxieties towards race and ethnicity. When part of mainstream vernacular, racialised language – and the value judgments associated with it – often remains in what Moreton-Robinson describes as “invisible regimes of power” (75). Everyday social structures, actions, and habits of thought veil oppressive and discriminatory attitudes that exist under the guise of “normality”. Colonisation and the dominance of Eurocentric ways of knowing, being, and doing has fixated itself on creating a normality that associates Indigeneity and darkness with negative and threatening connotations. In doing so, it reinforces power balances that presents an image of white superiority built on the invalidation of Indigeneity and Blackness. White fears and anxieties towards race made explicit through social and digital media are also manifest via subtle but equally pervasive everyday action (Carlson and Frazer; Matamoros-Fernández). Confronting and negotiating such fears becomes a daily reality for many Indigenous people. During the height of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in the United States, which extended to Australia and were linked to deaths in custody and police violence, African American poet Saul Williams reminded his followers of the power of language in constructing racialised fears (saulwilliams). In an Instagram post, Williams draws back the veil of an uncontested normality to ask that we take personal responsibility over the words we use. He writes: here’s a tip: Take the words DARK or BLACK in connection to bad, evil, ominous or scary events out of your vocabulary. We learn the stock market crashed on Black Monday, we read headlines that purport “Dark Days Ahead”. There’s “dark” or “black” humour which implies an undertone of evil, and then there are people like me who grow up with dark skin having to make sense of the English/American lexicon and its history of “fair complexions” – where “fair” can mean “light; blond.” OR “in accordance with rules or standards; legitimate.” We may not be fully responsible for the duplicitous evolution of language and subtle morphing of inherited beliefs into description yet we are in full command of the words we choose even as they reveal the questions we’ve left unasked. Like the work of Moreton-Robinson and other scholars, Williams implores his followers to take a reflexive position to consider the questions often left unasked. In doing so, he calls for the transcendence of anonymity and engagement with the realities of colonisation – no matter how ugly, confronting, and complicit one may be in its continuation. In the Australian context this means confronting how terms such as “dark”, “darkie”, or “darky” were historically used as derogatory and offensive slurs for Aboriginal peoples. Such language continues to be used today and can be found in the comment sections of social media, online news platforms, and other online forums (Carlson “Love and Hate”). Taking the move to execute personal accountability can be difficult. It can destabilise and reframe the ways in which we understand and interact with the world (Rose 22). For some, however, exposing racism and seemingly mundane aspects of society is taken as a personal attack which is often met with reactionary responses where one remains closed to new insights (Whittaker). This feeds into fears and anxieties pertaining to the perceived loss of power. These fears and anxieties continue to surface through conversations and calls for action on issues such as changing the date of Australia Day, the racialised reporting of news (McQuire), removing of plaques and statues known to be racist, and requests to change placenames and the names of products. For example, in 2020, Australian cheese producer Saputo Dairy Australia changed the name of it is popular brand “Coon” to “Cheer Tasty”. The decision followed a lengthy campaign led by Dr Stephen Hagan who called for the rebranding based on the Coon brand having racist connotations (ABC). The term has its racist origins in the United States and has long been used as a slur against people with dark skin, liking them to racoons and their tendency to steal and deceive. The term “Coon” is used in Australia by settlers as a racist term for referring to Aboriginal peoples. Claims that the name change is example of political correctness gone astray fail to acknowledge and empathise with the lived experience of being treated as if one is dirty, lazy, deceitful, or untrustworthy. Other brand names have also historically utilised racist wording along with imagery in their advertising (Conor). Pear’s soap for example is well-known for its historical use of racist words and imagery to legitimise white rule over Indigenous colonies, including in Australia (Jackson). Like most racial epithets, the power of language lies in how the words reflect and translate into actions that dehumanise others. The words we use matter. The everyday “ordinary” world, including online, is deeply politicised (Carlson and Frazer “They Got Filters”) and comes to reflect attitudes and power imbalances that encourage white people to internalise the falsity that they are superior and should have control over Black people (Conor). Decisions to make social change, such as that made by Saputo Dairy Australia, can manifest into further white anxieties via their ability to force the confrontation of the circumstances that continue to contribute to one’s own prosperity. In other words, to unveil the realities of colonialism and ask the questions that are too often left in the dark. Lived Experiences of Darkness Colonial anxieties and fears are driven by the fact that Black populations in many areas of the world are often characterised as criminals, perpetrators, threats, or nuisances, but are rarely seen as victims. In Australia, the repeated lack of police response and receptivity to concerns of Indigenous peoples expressed during the Black Lives Matter campaign saw tens of thousands of people take to the streets to protest. Protestors at the same time called for the end of police brutality towards Indigenous peoples and for an end to Indigenous deaths in custody. The protests were backed by a heavy online presence that sought to mobilise people in hope of lifting the veil that shrouds issues relating to systemic racism. There have been over 450 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to die in custody since the end of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in 1991 (The Guardian). The tragedy of the Indigenous experience gains little attention internationally. The negative implications of being the object of white fear and anxiety are felt by Indigenous and other Black communities daily. The “safety signals” (Daniella Emanuel) adopted by white peoples in response to often irrational perceptions of threat signify how Indigenous and other Black peoples and communities are seen and valued by the hegemony. Memes played out in social media depicting “Karens” – a term that corresponds to caricaturised white women (but equally applicable to men) who exhibit behaviours of entitlement – have increasing been used in media to expose the prevalence of irrational racial fears (also see Wong). Police are commonly called on Indigenous people and other Black people for simply being within spaces such as shopping malls, street corners, parks, or other spaces in which they are considered not to belong (Mohdin). Digital media are also commonly envisioned as a space that is not natural or normal for Indigenous peoples, a notion that maintains narratives of so-called Indigenous primitivity (Carlson and Frazer). Media connotations of darkness as threatening are associated with, and strategically manipulated by, the images that accompany stories about Indigenous peoples and other Black peoples. Digital technologies play significant roles in producing and disseminating the images shown in the media. Moreover, they have a “role in mediating and amplifying old and new forms of abuse, hate, and discrimination” (Matamoros-Fernández and Farkas). Daniels demonstrates how social media sites can be spaces “where race and racism play out in interesting, sometimes disturbing, ways” (702), shaping ongoing colonial fears and anxieties over Black peoples. Prominent footballer Adam Goodes, for example, faced a string of attacks after he publicly condemned racism when he was called an “Ape” by a spectator during a game celebrating Indigenous contributions to the sport (Coram and Hallinan). This was followed by a barrage of personal attacks, criticisms, and booing that spread over the remaining years of his football career. When Goodes performed a traditional war dance as a form of celebration during a game in 2015, many turned to social media to express their outrage over his “confrontational” and “aggressive” behaviour (Robinson). Goodes’s affirmation of his Indigeneity was seen by many as a threat to their own positionality and white sensibility. Social media were therefore used as a mechanism to control settler narratives and maintain colonial power structures by framing the conversation through a white lens (Carlson and Frazer “They Got Filters”). Indigenous peoples in other highly visible fields have faced similar backlash. In 1993, Elaine George was the first Aboriginal person to feature on the cover of Vogue magazine, a decision considered “risky” at the time (Singer). The editor of Vogue later revealed that the cover was criticised by some who believed George’s skin tone was made to appear lighter than it actually was and that it had been digitally altered. The failure to accept a lighter skin colour as “Aboriginal” exposes a neglect to accept ethnicity and Blackness in all its diversity (Carlson and Frazer “They Got Filters”; Carlson “Love and Hate”). Where Adam Goodes was criticised for his overt expression of Blackness, George was critisised for not being “black enough”. It was not until seventeen years later that another Aboriginal model, Samantha Harris, was featured on the cover of Vogue (Marks). While George inspired and pathed the way for those to come, Harris experienced similar discrimination within the industry and amongst the public (Carson and Ky). Singer Jessica Mauboy (in Hornery) also explains how her identity was managed by others. She recalls, I was pretty young when I first received recognition, and for years I felt as though I couldn't show my true identity. What I was saying in public was very dictated by other people who could not handle my sense of culture and identity. They felt they had to take it off my hands. Mauboy’s experience not only demonstrates how Blackness continues to be seen as something to “handle”, but also how power imbalances play out. Scholar Chelsea Watego offers numerous examples of how this occurs in different ways and arenas, for example through relationships between people and within workplaces. Bargallie’s scholarly work also provides an understanding of how Indigenous people experience racism within the Australian public service, and how it is maintained through the structures and systems of power. The media often represents communities with large Indigenous populations as being separatist and not contributing to wider society and problematic (McQuire). Violence, and the threat of violence, is often presented in media as being normalised. Recently there have been calls for an increased police presence in Alice Springs, NT, and other remotes communities due to ongoing threats of “tribal payback” and acts of “lawlessness” (Sky News Australia; Hildebrand). Goldberg uses the phrase “Super/Vision” to describe the ways that Black men and women in Black neighbourhoods are continuously and erroneously supervised and surveilled by police using apparatus such as helicopters and floodlights. Simone Browne demonstrates how contemporary surveillance practices are rooted in anti-black domination and are operationalised through a white gaze. Browne uses the term “racializing surveillance” to describe a ”technology of social control where surveillance practices, policies, and performances concern the production of norms pertaining to race and exercise a ‘power to define what is in or out of place’” (16). The outcome is often discriminatory treatment to those negatively racialised by such surveillance. Narratives that associate Indigenous peoples with darkness and danger fuel colonial fears and uphold the invisible regimes of power by instilling the perception that acts of surveillance and the restrictions imposed on Indigenous peoples’ autonomy are not only necessary but justified. Such myths fail to contextualise the historic colonial factors that drive segregation and enable a forgetting that negates personal accountability and complicity in maintaining colonial power imbalances (Riggs and Augoustinos). Inayatullah and Blaney (165) write that the “myth we construct calls attention to a darker, tragic side of our ethical engagement: the role of colonialism in constituting us as modern actors.” They call for personal accountability whereby one confronts the notion that we are both products and producers of a modernity rooted in a colonialism that maintains the misguided notion of white supremacy (Wolfe; Mignolo; Moreton-Robinson). When Indigenous and other Black peoples enter spaces that white populations don’t traditionally associate as being “natural” or “fitting” for them (whether residential, social, educational, a workplace, online, or otherwise), alienation, discrimination, and criminalisation often occurs (Bargallie; Mohdin; Linhares). Structural barriers are erected, prohibiting career or social advancement while making the space feel unwelcoming (Fredericks; Bargallie). In workplaces, Indigenous employees become the subject of hyper-surveillance through the supervision process (Bargallie), continuing to make them difficult work environments. This is despite businesses and organisations seeking to increase their Indigenous staff numbers, expressing their need to change, and implementing cultural competency training (Fredericks and Bargallie). As Barnwell correctly highlights, confronting white fears and anxieties must be the responsibility of white peoples. When feelings of shock or discomfort arise when in the company of Indigenous peoples, one must reflexively engage with the reasons behind this “fear of the dark” and consider that perhaps it is they who are self-segregating. Mohdin suggests that spaces highly populated by Black peoples are best thought of not as “black spaces” or “black communities”, but rather spaces where white peoples do not want to be. They stand as reminders of a failed colonial regime that sought to deny and dehumanise Indigenous peoples and cultures, as well as the continuation of Black resistance and sovereignty. Conclusion In working towards improving relationships between Black and white populations, the truths of colonisation, and its continuing pervasiveness in local and global settings must first be confronted. In this article we have discussed the association of darkness with instinctual fears and negative responses to the unknown. White populations need to reflexively engage and critique how they think, act, present, address racism, and respond to Indigenous peoples (Bargallie; Moreton-Robinson; Whittaker), cultivating a “decolonising consciousness” (Bradfield) to develop new habits of thinking and relating. To overcome fears of the dark, we must confront that which remains unknown, and the questions left unasked. This means exposing racism and power imbalances, developing meaningful relationships with Indigenous peoples, addressing structural change, and implementing alternative ways of knowing and doing. Only then may we begin to embody Megan Cope’s message, “I’m not afraid of the Dark”. Acknowledgements We thank Dr Debbie Bargallie for her feedback on our article, which strengthened the work. References ABC News. 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Abstract:

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

Abstract:

Let us work backwards from what we know, from personal experience: the photograph of which we have each been the subject. Roland Barthes says of this photograph that it transforms "the subject into object": one begins aping the mask one wants to assume, one begins, in other words, to make oneself conform in appearance to the disguise of an identity (Camera Lucida 11). A quick glance back at your most recent holiday gathering will no doubt confirm his diagnosis. Barthes gives to this subject-object the title of Spectrum in order to neatly join the idea of spectacle with the fearsome spectre, what he calls that "terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead" (Camera Lucida 9). Cathy Davidson points out that in "photocentric culture, we can no longer even see that we see ourselves primarily as seen, imaged, the photograph as the evidential proof of existence"; photocentric culture thus generates "a profound confusion of image and afterlife" (669 672). Andre Bazin announces that the medium "embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption" (242), while Susan Sontag points out that it may "assassinate" (13). What photography mummifies, distorts and murders, among other things, is the sense that the reality of the self resides in the body, the corporeal and temporal boundaries of personhood. The spectral haunting of the photograph is familiar to anyone who has ever looked at snapshots in a family album. How much more present it was to the producers and consumers of early photography who engineered the genre of the memento mori, portraits taken of the dead or in imitation of death. Despite the acknowledged 'eeriness' of our own recorded and vanished pasts, such pictures seem grotesquely morbid to us now -- for what we cannot recover is the absolute novelty of photography in its early days, or the vehicle that it provided in the nineteenth century for a whole set of concerns about selfhood that begin, ironically, with death. Those early photographs bring to mind another death, that of the author. Re-enter Barthes, for it is he who definitively announces the new textual paradigm in which the author disappears. In "Death of the Author," Barthes calls the author tyrannical and adopts liberationist rhetoric in unseating him. But what cult is Barthes actually countering? His essay begins and ends with Balzac, and includes Baudelaire, Van Gogh and Tchaikovsky, while his heroes are Mallarmé, Valéry and Proust. Barthes' notion of the author is implicitly a nineteenth-century construction, to be undone by modernist writing against the grain. And what distinguishes the nineteenth-century author from his predecessors? His portrait, of course. Thanks to the surge of visual and reproductive technologies culminating in the mechanised printing process and photography, the nineteenth-century author is suddenly widely available to readers as an image. The author literally becomes a face hovering above the text; it is this omnipresence that Barthes objects to. Photography gives new momentum to the cult of the author, but this is not mere historical coincidence -- that the photograph is developed at a point in history when authorship is particularly mobile: in between the Romantic individualism that transforms authorship from a craft to a calling, and the modernist interrogation of ontology and representation that explodes such notions from within. However, the opposite is also true. Photography as we know it is a product of the institution of authorship. Photography is founded on and makes available, through the democratisation and dissemination of a certain technology, a concept of public selfhood that hitherto had been reserved for those in charge of textual representation, of themselves as well as of other subjects. Primarily this is because the ideological, technological and material vehicles of the photograph -- identities, characters, scenes, the properties of chemical interaction, the invention of specialised apparatus, poses, props, and photo albums -- were closely related to book culture. How did photography change the notion of the author? It did so by commandeering truth claims -- by serving as the scientific illustration of divinely-ordained natural laws. The art of chemically fixing the image obtained through a camera obscura was perfected in 1839 by Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre and William Fox Talbot, separately, with different techniques.1 Daguerre's method caught on quickly, partly because his daguerreotype recorded such exquisite detail. The daguerreotype surface was reflective and sharply etched; inspection with a magnifying glass disclosed minutiae -- insects, eyelashes, objects in the far distance. The daguerreotype, popularly nicknamed "the pencil of the sun," seemed like a miniaturised and complete mirror of the world, a representation without human intervention.2 In 1839, and throughout the 1840's and '50's, photography transparently supported the notion that the discoveries of science would help reveal God's secrets, not disprove them -- a view that suffered but continued on after the publication of The Origin of the Species in 1859. Its presumed objectivity and comprehensive truthfulness made photography immediately appealing as a scientific and artistic tool. Although it was used to record geologic formations and vegetation, the bulky apparatus of the early photographic methods meant that it was better suited to the indoor studio -- and the portrait, in which the truth of human character could be made visible. It served as a means of defining normality and deviation; it was central to the project of identifying physical characteristics of the insane and the criminal, and of classifying racial features, as in the daguerreotypes made of slaves in the United States by J. T. Zealy in 1850, which the natural scientist Louis Aggasiz used as independent evidence of the natural differences between the races in order to endorse the doctrine of "separate creation" (Trachtenberg 53) So perceptive and penetrating did the photograph seem, it was even deemed capable of revealing vice and virtue, and it was in this way that the photographer moved onto the terrain of the author. The truth-telling properties of photography seemed to corroborate the authorial estimation of character that was a central element of nineteenth-century fiction. In texts where photography is itself on display this property is especially obvious -- in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables, for example, where true and secret characters are only discerned in daguerreotype portraits. But photography did more than divinely and scientifically confirm fictional character; the venerated author's ability to delineate moral qualities made him, or her, an exemplary character as well. The Victorians prized "sincerity," the criterion by which they measured their authors. Especially in the influential pronouncements of Carlyle, the Victorian notion of sincerity "makes man and artist inseparable" (Ball 155). An exemplary moral life was particularly powerful in the form of an author. Indeed, it was through authorship of some kind that such lives could take the public form they needed in order to fulfill their function as models. And so photography appears not just in the text but on its margins, framing and qualifying it: the portrait of the author, already a bibliographic convention, gains additional authority through the objective lens of the camera, in which the author's character is exhibited as a kind of testimony to his or her truth-telling abilities. The frontispiece guarantees the right of the author to moral leadership. As literacy and readership expanded and exceeded former class distinctions, the nineteenth-century author began to need to market himself in order to find and keep an audience. But since the source of the author's authority was sincerity, the commodification of the authorial self presented a dilemma. Some writers, such as Dickens, embraced this role; others withdrew from the task of performing a public self, but their refusal of the public's gaze was itself often dramatised, as for Tennyson, Elizabeth Barret Browning and, after her death, Emily Dickinson. The photograph portrait of the artist, as well as other likenesses of his visage, was a particularly convenient piece of authorial paraphernalia because it sustained the idea of the author as moral exemplar, but in fact it was only one of the many ways in which nineteenth-century readers kept the author before their eyes. Souvenirs such as autographs, original manuscripts and other tokens testifying to the presence of the author's body, as well as gift books and precious editions designed to generate and satisfy fans, were mainstays of Victorian keepsake culture. The photograph as corporeal souvenir signals the point where we must turn around and consider the question of photography and authorship from the other direction: that is, how the institution of authorship constructs photography. Given that photography as an art developed out of the desire to eliminate the human hand, to trace directly from nature, it seems ironic that photography could have an author. And yet it was the notion of a public and visible self, associated primarily with authorship, which accounted for the widespread popularity of photography. When the daguerreotype was introduced in 1839, enterprising amateurs in Europe and the United States transformed it from a tricky chemical procedure into a practical art, a livelihood. Daguerrean saloons appeared in the cities and in rural areas, itinerant daguerreotypists set up temporary headquarters. But every daguerreotype studio had two purposes, whether it was the high-end urban atelier of Southworth and Hawes in Boston or a peddler's rented room: it was the place where one went to have one's picture taken and it was also a public gallery, where the portraits of former customers were displayed. In an urban gallery, those portraits might include the poets, ministers and politicians of the day, but even in a village studio, one could see exhibited the portraits of the local beauties, the town big-wigs. Entering the studio as a customer or a spectator, anyone could imaginatively take his or her place among an assembly of eminent personages. More importantly, the daguerreotype and later forms of photography made portraiture accessible to the middle and working classes for the first time. The studio was a democratic space where one could entertain the fantasy of a different self, and in fact one could literally enact that fantasy through the props and accessories of identity that the studio provided. In borrowed hats and canes, sitting stiffly in chairs or standing against painted backdrops, holding books, flowers, candles, and even other daguerreotypes, the sitter could assume the persona he or she would like others to see. Often the sitter composes an obvious gender performance, other times the sitter exhibits himself as the master of a certain occupation. With the invention of the wet plate collodion process in 1851, which made it possible to reproduce quantities of images from a single negative, the public went in for the carte-de-visite, on which one's very own portrait was imprinted and handed out like a postcard souvenir. The carte-de-visite necessitated a new way of keeping and displaying multiple photographs, and thus the photo album was born. But in fact the paradigm of the book already governed photographic display and the storage of the personal collection. When the Bible was the only book a family might own, it served as the cabinet of memorable dates and events. Other kinds of mementoes were stored in lockets and books: locks of hair, painted miniatures, pressed flowers. Daguerreotypes were kept in small codex-like cases or in hinged lockets. The souvenir and its symbolic connection to the body (one's own or that of a beloved) was of course not limited to the cult of the author but was available as a mode of identity to anybody who read novels. The culture of the souvenir, the keepsake, the personal precious object stored in a book, offered a means of articulating the self that readily accommodated the photograph, and in that context, the photograph took on the properties of a personal talisman. In the wake of photography, the scrapbook, the flower album, the signature album -- all those vehicles for collecting and displaying the ephemera of a lifetime -- flourished. Books were no longer mainly devoted to dense layers of print but could consist of open space to be filled in by their owners, who would thereby become authors of their own works and incidentally of their own identities. The popularity of the album was partly due to developments in printing, which was changing from a text-based industry to one increasingly concerned with images, a shift that culminated in photo-offset printing and photoduplication. But the popularity of the album and other biblioform containers for the personal collection also has something to do with the culture of the souvenir, which prepared the way for the photograph as personal talisman and then accomodated the tremendous expansion photography offered to the self. Via the photograph, a self that was allied with its own mementoes would be transformed: selfhood formerly attached to an object intended for private contemplation was subsequently attached to an object intended for exhibition. Via the photograph, the same publicity attendant on the circulation of the author was incorporated into the stuff of the ordinary subject, who regarded his or her own image and offered it up to history. The reflexive spectacle of visible selfhood brings us back to the return of the dead, that feature of the photograph which seems to persist, and perhaps illuminates the difference between the kind of death it spooks us with now and the kind of 150 years ago. For our ancestors, the photograph was a way to cheat death, to manipulate the strict boundaries of identity, to become memorable, to catch a heady glimpse of absolute truth; but for us it is different. We can see how much we are the creations of photography, and how much we surrender to the public self it burdens us with. Notes 1. The technological history of photography is of course much complicated by issues of competition, technological "prehistory" and intellectual property—for example, there is the matter of the disappearance of Daguerre's partner Niepce. However, Daguerre is generally credited with "inventing" the medium. See Gernsheim, Greenough et al and Newhall. 2. The phrase and others like it were not only popularised by influential critic-practitioners of photography such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Fox Talbot, in The Pencil of Nature, and Marcus Aurelius Root, in The Camera and the Pencil, but were perpetuated in the everyday language of commerce—for example, the portrait studio that advertised its "Sun Drawn Miniatures" (Gernsheim 106). References Ball, Patricia. The Central Self: A Study in Romantic and Victorian Imagination. London: Athlone Press, 1968. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. ---. "The Death of the Author." Image, Music, Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. Bazin, André. "The Ontology of the Photographic Image." Classic Essays on Photography. Ed. Alan Trachtenberg. New Haven, Conn: Leete's Island Books, 1980. 237-244. Davidson, Cathy N. "Photographs of the Dead: Sherman, Daguerre, Hawthorne." South Atlantic Quarterly 89.4 (Fall 1990): 667-701. Gernsheim, Helmut. The Origins of Photography. London: Thames and Hudson, 1982. Greenough, Sarah, Joel Snyder, David Travis and Colin Westerbeck. On the Art of Fixing a Shadow: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Photography. Boston: Little, Brown, 1989. Newhall, Beaumont. The History of Photography, From 1839 to the Present. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1982. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Dell, 1977. Trachtenberg, Alan. Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to the Present. New York: Hill and Wang, 1989. Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Dean, Gabrielle. "Portrait of the Self" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.5 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Dean.html &gt. Chicago Style Dean, Gabrielle, "Portrait of the Self" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 5 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Dean.html &gt ([your date of access]). APA Style Dean, Gabrielle. (2002) Portrait of the Self. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(5). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Dean.html &gt ([your date of access]).

Abstract:

When I think, rarely, about the articulation of the set of traces that I am leaving, I have the immediate apprehension that it is not the real me that’s out there on the Web. I know the times when I have censored myself (oh problematic concept!) and when I have performed actions to complement—and frequently to confound—a trace. […] Taken globally, the set of traces that we leave in the world does without doubt add up to something. It is through operations on sets of traces that I understand an event that I take part in. (Bowker 23) Over the past decade, Facebook has become integrated into the everyday lives of many of its 1.28 billion active users to the point that Facebook can no longer be considered “new media.” The site is driven by the “disclosures” (Stutzman, Gross and Acquisti) users make on the site—by uploading photos, writing status updates, commenting on posts made by others, sharing news items, entering biographical details, and so on. These digital traces of life are archived by default, persisting indefinitely as etches in Facebook’s servers around the world. Especially for young users who have grown up using Facebook, significant parts of their social and cultural lives have been played out on the site. As spaces in which the persona is enacted and made visible, social network sites like Facebook also effectively capture growing up stories through a chronicle of mediated, transitional experiences: birthdays, graduations, the beginning (and end) of relationships, first jobs, travel, and so on. For these reasons, Facebook also comes to serve as a site of memorialisation for users who have passed away. To mark its tenth anniversary (2014), Facebook drew attention to the great depth and wealth of experiences users had traced upon its pages through the release of one-minute “look back“ videos, chronicling the life of individual users over their time on Facebook. These videos have become short manifestations of the personas presented on the site, crafted through an algorithmic selection of critical moments in the user’s life (as shared on the site) to tell that user’s story. To turn Bowker’s musings in the above quote into a question, what do these sets of traces that we leave in the world add up to? In this article, I undertake a critical reading of Facebook’s look back videos to argue that they serve as the strongest reminder yet about the function of Facebook as memory archive. I draw on several sources: my own analysis of the structure of the videos themselves, the Facebook corporate blog describing the roll out of the videos, and the public campaign played out on YouTube by John Berlin to have a look back video generated for his deceased son. I argue that Facebook comes to serve two critical functions for users, as both the site upon which life narratives are performed and organised, and also the site through which the variously public and private disclosures that constitute a persona are recalled and reflected upon. In setting out these arguments, I divide this paper into three parts: first, a description and reflection upon my own experience of the look back video; second, a consideration of critical moments selected for inclusion in the look back videos by algorithm as persona; and third, a discussion of death and memorialisation, as a sharp example of the significance of the digital traces we leave behind. The Look Back Video Gentle piano music rises as the “camera” pans across an assortment of photos. The flute joins the piano, and you are reminded that you started your Facebook journey in 2006. Here is your first profile picture—you with your arm around one of your good mates when you were twenty years old. Faster now, and here are “your first moments,” presented as images you have shared: March 2008, some of your closest friends who you met during your undergraduate studies, standing around sharing a drink; April 2008, a photo of a friend eating a biscuit, mid-conversation (she’d hate this one); and one last photo from April 2008, the biscuit-eating friend’s ex-boyfriend looking coy (you no longer speak to him, but he is still on your Friends list). Now enter the violins, seventeen seconds in. Things are getting nostalgic. Here are “your most liked posts”: July 2012, “thesis submitted for examination, yo” (46 likes); November 2012, “Trust me, I’m a Doctor… of Philosophy” (98 likes); February 2013, a mess of text announcing that you’ve found a job and you’ll be leaving your hometown (106 likes). Thirty-five seconds in now, and the pace of the music changes—look how far you have come. Here are some photos you have shared: December 2008, you at a bowling alley with your arm around one of your best friends who now lives overseas; October 2009, friends trying to sleep on your couch, being disturbed by the flash of your camera; June 2010, a family shot at your mother’s birthday. The pace quickens now, as we move into the final quarter of the video: September 2010, you on the beach with friends visiting from overseas; October 2011, you with some people you met in Canada whose names you don’t recall; (images now moving faster and faster) November 2011, ice skating with friends; March 2012, a wedding in Hawaii where you were the best man; December 2012, celebrating the conferral of your PhD with two colleagues; and finally July 2013, farewelling colleagues at a going away party. In the final ten seconds, the music reaches its crescendo and the camera pans backwards to reveal a bigger collage of photos of you and your nearest and dearest. Facebook’s trademark “thumbs up”/like symbol signals the end of the retrospective, looking back on the critical moments from the last eight and a half years of your life. Underneath the video, as if signing off a card accompanying a birthday present, is “Mark” (Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, in a faux hand-written font) “and the Facebook Team.” Facebook is you, the note seems to imply; for our anniversary, we present you back to yourself (see fig. 1). On 4 February 2014, the look back video feature was made available to all Facebook users. Some 200 million watched their videos, and more than 50% shared them with their networks (Spiridonov and Bandaru). In other words, around 100 million Facebook users held up their own individually generated look back videos as a record of the persona they had crafted through the site, and shared that persona retrospective with their networks. The videos work in the same way that television news programs piece together memorial clips for celebrities who have passed away, blending emotive music with visuals that conjure up memories and reflections. The first point of difference is that Facebook’s look back videos were intended for the living (although this function shifted as I will explain in a case study towards the end of this piece) to reflect on their own personas presented through the site, and then (about half the time) shared with their networks. The second difference is the technical, automated process of piecing together, rendering, storing, and streaming these videos on a large scale. Spiridonov and Bandaru, two Facebook engineers writing on the site’s Engineering Blog, described the rapid development and rollout of the videos. They explain the enormous pool of technical resources and human capital that were brought to bear on the project, including thirty teams across the company, in just 25 days. They end their explanatory post with an homage to “the things [they] love about Facebook culture” that the project represented for them, including “helping hundreds of millions of people connect with those who are important to them” (Spiridonov and Bandaru). The look back videos also serve a deeper purpose that isn’t addressed explicitly in any explanatory notes or press releases: to demonstrate the great depth of disclosures users make and are implicated in by others on the site. In a one-minute look back video, these disclosures come to serve as the very digital traces that Bowker was interested in, forming a longitudinal record of the persona. Algorithms and Critical Moments Although the explanatory post by Spiridonov and Bandaru did not go into details, the algorithm that determines which photos and status updates go into the look back videos appears to consider the quantity of likes and (potentially) comments on posts, while also seeking to sample disclosures made across the user’s time on the site. The latter consideration works to reinforce the perception of the longitudinal nature of the site’s memory, and the extent to which the life of the user has become entangled with, enmeshed in, and mediated through Facebook. Through the logic of the look back algorithm, critical moments in the user’s life course—those experiences that mark out narratives of growing up—become measured not in terms of their value for individuals, but instead through a quantitative metric of “likes.” While after the initial release of the look back feature, Facebook did provide users with the functionality to alter their videos with some limited control over which images could be featured, the default was determined by the algorithm. Social network sites have come to serve as spaces for reflexive identity work, for the development of personas for young people (boyd; Livingstone; Hodkinson and Lincoln; Lincoln; Robards). The transition towards adulthood is punctuated and shaped by “critical moments” (Thomson et al.) such as moving out of home, dropping out of school, entering a relationship, learning to drive, a death in the family, going clubbing for the first time, and so on. In Giddens’ terms, the “fateful moment” (from which Thomson et al. borrow in conceptualising the critical moment), is “highly consequential for a person’s destiny” (121), and should be understood as distinct from but certainly affecting the inconsequential goings-on of daily life. When these critical moments are articulated and made visible on social network sites like Facebook, and then subsequently archived by way of the persistent nature of these sites, they become key markers in a mediated growing up story for young people. Livingstone points towards the role of these sites for young people who are “motivated to construct identities, to forge new social groupings, and to negotiate alternatives to given cultural meanings” (4). Sharing, discussing, and remembering these critical moments becomes an important activity on social network sites, and thus the look back video serves to neatly capture critical moments in a one minute retrospective. Facebook has also started prompting users to record critical moments through predetermined, normative categories (see fig. 2) such as romance (a first kiss), health (losing weight and not smoking), purchases (buying a house and a car), and civic duty (voting and military service). These disclosure prompts operate at a deeper level to the logic of sharing whatever you are doing right now, and instead feed into that longitudinal memory of the site. As I have argued elsewhere (see Robards) it is clear that not all critical moments are disclosed equally on social network sites. Users may choose not to disclose some critical moments – such as breakups and periods of depression or anxiety – instead preferring to present an “idealised self.” Goffman explains that idealised presentations are aspirational, and that individuals will perform the best version of themselves (44). This isn’t a fake persona or a deception, but simply a presentation of what the individual regards to be the best qualities and appearances, contingent upon what Goffman described as the standards of the region (110). What constitutes an “authentic” persona on Facebook is clearly subjective, and dependent on those region specific standards. In my earlier research on MySpace, the quantity of friends one had was an indicator of popularity, or a quantitative measure of social capital, but over time and with the shift to Facebook this appeared to change, such that smaller networks became more “authentic” (Robards). Similarly, the kinds of disclosures users make on Facebook will vary depending on the conventions of use they have established within their own networks. Importantly, the look back algorithm challenges the user’s capacity to value their own critical moments, or indeed any moments or disclosures that might mark out a narrative of self, and instead chooses moments for the user. In this scenario, at least initially, the look back algorithm co-constructs the retrospective persona summary for the user. Only with effort, and only to a certain extent, can the user exercise curatorial control over that process. Death and Other Conclusions Although the initial function of the look back videos was for users to reflect on their own personas presented through Facebook, users who had lost loved ones quickly sought look back videos for the deceased. John Berlin, a Facebook user who had lost his son Jesse in 2012, tried to access a look back video for his son but was unsuccessful. He posted his plea to YouTube, which received almost three million views, and was eventually successful, after his request “touched the hearts of everyone who heard it” including Facebook staff (Price and DiSclafani). After receiving numerous similar requests, Facebook established a form where people could make have videos for deceased users rendered. In the words of Facebook staff, this was part of the site’s commitment to “preserve legacies on Facebook” (Price and DiSclafani). There is a growing body of research on the digital traces we leave behind after death. Leaver points out that when social media users die, the “significant value of the media traces a user leaves behind” is highlighted. Certainly, this has been the case with the look back videos, further supporting Leaver’s claim. John Berlin’s plea to have his deceased son’s look back video made available to him was presented as a key factor in Facebook’s decision to make these videos available to loved ones. Although the video’s narrative was unchanged (still pitched to users themselves, rather than their loved ones) John Berlin shared his son’s look back video on YouTube to a much wider network than he or his son may have previously imagined. Indeed, Gibson has argued that “digital remains cannot easily be claimed back into a private possessive sphere of ownership” (214). Although Jesse Berlin’s look back video did not reach the millions of viewers his father’s plea reached, on YouTube it still had some 423,000 views, clearly moving beyond Gibson’s “private possessive sphere” (214) to became a very public memorial. Bowker makes the observation that his friends and acquaintances who died before 1992 are sparsely represented online. In 1992, the first widely adopted web browser Mosaic made the Internet accessible for ordinary people in an everyday context. Bowker goes on to explain that his friends who died post-Mosaic “carry on a rich afterlife [… they] still receive email messages; links to their website rot very slowly; their informal thoughts are often captured on list-serv archives, on comments they have left on a website” (23). For Bowker, the rise of the Internet has brought about a “new regime of memory practices” (34). The implications of this new “paradigm of the trace” for Facebook users are only now becoming clear, multiplied in depth and complexity compared to the forms of digital traces Bowker was discussing. The dead, of course, have always left traces—letters, bureaucratic documents, photographs, and so on. There is nothing particularly new about the social and cultural traces that the dead leave behind, only in the way these traces persist and are circulated as the Berlin case study makes clear. The look back video brings the significance of the digital trace into a new light, challenging concepts of personal histories and the longevity of everyday personas. Now that Facebook has developed the infrastructure and the processes for rolling out these look back features, there is the possibility that we will see more in the future. The site already provides annual summaries of the user’s year on Facebook in December. It is possible that look back videos could mark out other moments, too: birthdays, new relationships, potentially even the deaths of loved ones. Might Facebook look back videos – in future forms and iterations, no doubt distinct from the ten-year anniversary video described here – come to serve as a central mechanism for memory, nostalgia, and memorialisation? I don’t have the same kind of apprehension that Bowker expresses in the quote at the top of this article, where he reflects on whether or not it is the “real” him out there on the web. Through Goffman’s dramaturgical lens, I am convinced that there is no single “authentic” persona, but rather many sides to the personas we present to others and to ourselves. The Facebook look back video figures into that presentation and that reflection, albeit through an algorithm that projects a curated set of critical moments back to us. In this sense, these videos become mirrors through which Facebook users experience the personas they have mediated on the site. Facebook is surely aware of this significance, and will no doubt continue to build the importance and depth of the digital traces users inscribe on the site into their plans for the future. References Bowker, Geoffrey C. “The Past and the Internet.” Structures of Participation in Digital Culture. New York: Social Science Research Council, 2007. 20-36. boyd, danah. “Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics, and Implications.” A Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites. New York: Routledge, 2011. 39-58. Gibson, Margaret. “Digital Objects of the Dead: Negotiating Electronic Remains.” The Social Construction of Death: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Ed. Leen van Brussel and Nico Carpentier. Palgrave, 2014: 212-229. Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin, 1959. Hodkinson, Paul, and Sian Lincoln. “Online Journals as Virtual Bedrooms? Young People, Identity and Personal Space.” Young 16.1 (2008): 27-46. Leaver, Tama. “The Social Media Contradiction: Data Mining and Digital Death.” M/C Journal 16.2 (2013). Lincoln, Siân. Youth Culture and Private Space. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Stutzman, Fred, Robert Capra, and Jamila Thompson. “Factors Mediating Disclosure in Social Network Sites.” Computers in Human Behavior 27.1 (2011): 590-598. Livingstone, Sonia. “Taking Risky Opportunities in Youthful Content Creation: Teenagers' Use of Social Networking Sites for Intimacy, Privacy and Self-Expression.” New Media & Society 10.3 (2008): 393-411. Robards, Brady. “Leaving MySpace, Joining Facebook: ‘Growing Up’ on Social Network Sites.” Continuum 26.3 (2012): 385-398. Thomson, Rachel, et al. “Critical Moments: Choice, Chance and Opportunity in Young People's Narratives of Transition.” Sociology 36.2 (2002): 335-354.

Abstract:

Literary history can be viewed alternately in a perspective of continuities or discontinuities. In the former perspective, what I perversely call postmodernism is simply an extension of modernism [which is], as everyone knows, a development of symbolism, which … is itself a specialisation of romanticismand who is there to say that the romantic concept of man does not find its origin in the great European Enlightenment? Etc. In the latter perspective, however, continuities [which are] maintained on a certain level of narrative abstraction (i.e., history [or aesthetic description]) are resisted in the interests of the quiddity and discreteness of art, the space that each work or action creates around itself. – Ihab Hassan Ihab Hassan’s words, published in 1975, continue to resonate today. How should we approach art? Can an artwork ever really fully be described by its critical review, or does its description only lead to an ever multiplying succession of terms? Michel Foucault spoke of the construction of modern sexuality as being seen as the hidden, irresolvable “truth” of our subjectivity, as that secret which we must constantly speak about, and hence as an “incitement to discourse” (Foucault, History of Sexuality). Since the Romantic period, the appreciation of aesthetics has been tied to the subjectivity of the individual and to the degree an art work appeals to the individual’s sense of self: to one’s personal refinement, emotions and so on. Art might be considered part of the truth of our subjectivity which we seem to be endlessly talking about – without, however, actually ever resolving the issue of what a great art work really is (anymore than we have resolved the issue of what natural sexuality is). It is not my aim to explicate the relationship between art and sex but to re-inject a strategic understanding of discourse, as Foucault understood it, back into commonplace, contemporary aesthetic criticism. The problems in rendering into words subjective, emotional experiences and formal aesthetic criteria continue to dog criticism today. The chief hindrances to contemporary criticism remain such institutional factors as the economic function of newspapers. Given their primary function as tools for the selling of advertising space, newspapers are inherently unsuited to sustaining detailed, informed dialogue on any topic – be it international politics or aesthetics. As it is, reviews remain short, quickly written pieces squeezed into already overloaded arts pages. This does not prevent skilled, caring writers and their editorial supporters from ensuring that fine reviews are published. In the meantime, we muddle through as best we can. I argue that criticism, like art, should operate self-consciously as an incitement to discourse, to engagement, and so to further discussion, poetry, et cetera. The possibility of an endless recession of theoretical terms and subjective responses should not dissuade us. Rather, one should provisionally accept the instrumentality of aesthetic discourse provided one is able always to bear in mind the nominalism which is required to prevent the description of art from becoming an instrument of repression. This is to say, aesthetic criticism is clearly authored in order to demonstrate something: to argue a point, to make a fruitful comparison, and so on. This does not mean that criticism should be composed so as to dictate aesthetic taste to the reader. Instead, it should act as an invitation to further responses – much as the art work itself does. Foucault has described discourse – language, terminologies, metaphorical conceits and those logical and poetic structures which underpin them – as a form of technology (Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge and History of Sexuality). Different discursive forces arise in response to different cultural needs and contexts, including, indeed, those formulated not only by artists, but also by reviewers. As Hassan intimates, what is or is not “postmodernism”, for example, depends less on the art work itself – it is less a matter of an art work’s specific “quiddity” and its internal qualities – but is, rather, fundamentally dependent upon what one is trying to say about the piece. If one is trying to describe something novel in a work, something which relates it to a series of new or unusual forms which have become dominant within society since World War Two, then the term “postmodernism” most usefully applies. This, then, would entail breaking down the “the space that each work … creates around itself” in order to emphasise horizontal “continuities”. If, on the other hand, the critic wishes to describe the work from the perspective of historical developments, so as to trace the common features of various art works across a genealogical pattern running from Romanticism to the present day, one must de-emphasise the quiddity of the work in favour of vertical continuities. In both cases, however, the identification of common themes across various art works so as to aid in the description of wider historical or aesthetic conditions requires a certain “abstraction” of the qualities of the aesthetic works in question. The “postmodernism”, or any other quality, of a single art work thus remains in the eye of the beholder. No art work is definitively “postmodern” as such. It is only “postmodern” inasmuch as this description aids one in understanding a certain aspect of the piece and its relationship to other objects of analysis. In short, the more either an art work or its critical review elides full descriptive explication, the more useful reflections which might be voiced in its wake. What then is the instrumental purpose of the arts review as a genre of writing? For liberal humanist critics such as Matthew Arnold, F.R. Leavis and Harold Bloom, the role of the critic is straight forward and authoritative. Great art is said to be imbued with the spirit of humanity; with the very essence of our common subjectivity itself. Critics in this mode seek the truth of art and once it has been found, they generally construct it as unified, cohesive and of great value to all of humanity. The authors of the various avant-garde manifestoes which arose in Europe from the fin de siècle period onwards significantly complicated this ideal of universal value by arguing that such aesthetic values were necessarily abstract and so were not immediately visible within the content of the work per se. Such values were rather often present in the art work’s form and expression. Surrealism, Futurism, Supremacism, the Bauhaus and the other movements were founded upon the contention that these avant-garde art works revealed fundamental truths about the essence of human subjectivity: the imperious power of the dream at the heart of our emotional and psychic life, the geometric principles of colour and shape which provide the language for all experience of the sublime, and so on. The critic was still obliged to identify greatness and to isolate and disseminate those pieces of art which revealed the hidden truth of our shared human experience. Few influential art movements did not, in fact, have a chief theoretician to promote their ideals to the world, be it Ezra Pound and Leavis as the explicators of the works of T.S. Eliot, Martin Esslin for Beckett, or the artist her or himself, such as choreographers Martha Graham or Merce Cunningham, both of whom described in considerable detail their own methodologies to various scribes. The great challenge presented in the writings of Foucault, Derrida, Hassan and others, however, is to abandon such a sense of universal aesthetic and philosophical value. Like their fellow travellers within the New Left and soixante huit-ièmes (the agitators and cultural critics of 1968 Paris), these critics contend that the idea of a universal human subjectivity is problematic at best, if not a discursive fiction, which has been used to justify repression, colonialism, the unequal institutional hierarchies of bourgeois democratic systems, and so on. Art does not therefore speak of universal human truths. It is rather – like aesthetic criticism itself – a discursive product whose value should be considered instrumentally. The kind of a critical relationship which I am proposing here might provisionally be classified as discursive or archaeological criticism (in the Foucauldian sense of tracing discursive relationships and their distribution within any given cross-section or strata of cultural life). The role of the critic in such a situation is not one of acknowledging great art. Rather, the critic’s function becomes highly strategic, with interpretations and opinions regarding art works acting as invitations to engagement, consideration and, hence, also to rejection. From the point of view of the audience, too, the critic’s role is one of utility. If a critical description prompts useful, interesting or pleasurable reflections in the reader, then the review has been effective. If it has not, it has no role to play. The response to criticism thus becomes as subjective as the response to the art work itself. Similarly, just as Marcel Duchamp’s act of inverting a urinal and calling it art showed that anyone could be an artist provided they adopted a suitably creative vision of the objects which surrounded them, so anyone and everyone is a legitimate critic of any art work addressed to him or her as an audience. The institutional power accorded to critics by merit of the publications to which they are attached should not obfuscate the fact that anyone has the moral right to venture a critical judgement. It is not actually logically possible to be “right” or “wrong” in attributing qualities to an art work (although I have had artists assert the contrary to me). I like noise art, for example, and find much to stimulate my intellect and my affect in the chaotic feedback characteristic of the work of Merzbow and others. Many others however simply find such sounds to constitute unpleasant noise. Neither commentator is “right”. Both views co-exist. What is important is how these ideas are expressed, what propositions are marshalled to support either position, and how internally cohesive are the arguments supplied by supporters of either proposition. The merit of any particular critical intervention is therefore strictly formal or expressive, lying in its rhetorical construction, rather than in the subjective content of the criticism itself, per se. Clearly, such discursive criticism is of little value in describing works devised according to either an unequivocally liberal humanist or modernist avant-garde perspective. Aesthetic criticism authored in this spirit will not identify the universal, timeless truths of the work, nor will it act as an authoritative barometer of aesthetic value. By the same token though, a recognition of pluralism and instrumentality does not necessarily entail the rejection of categories of value altogether. Such a technique of aesthetic analysis functions primarily in the realm of superficial discursive qualities and formal features, rather than subterranean essences. It is in this sense both anti-Romantic and anti-Platonic. Discursive analysis has its own categories of truth and evaluation. Similarities between works, influences amongst artists and generic or affective precedents become the primary objects of analysis. Such a form of criticism is, in this sense, directly in accord with a similarly self-reflexive, historicised approach to art making itself. Where artists are consciously seeking to engage with their predecessors or peers, to find ways of situating their own work through the development of ideas visible in other cultural objects and historic aesthetic works, then the creation of art becomes itself a form of practical criticism or praxis. The distinction between criticism and its object is, therefore, one of formal expression, not one of nature or essence. Both practices engage with similar materials through a process of reflection (Marshall, “Vertigo”). Having described in philosophical and critical terms what constitutes an unfettered, democratic and strategic model of discursive criticism, it is perhaps useful to close with a more pragmatic description of how I myself attempt to proceed in authoring such criticism and, so, offer at least one possible (and, by definition, subjective) model for discursive criticism. Given that discursive analysis itself developed out of linguistic theory and Saussure’s discussion of the structural nature of signification, it is no surprise that the primary methodology underlying discursive analysis remains that of semiotics: namely how systems of representation and meaning mutually reinforce and support each other, and how they fail to do so. As a critic viewing an art work, it is, therefore, always my first goal to attempt to identify what it is that the artist appears to be trying to do in mounting a production. Is the art work intended as a cultural critique, a political protest, an avant-garde statement, a work of pure escapism, or some other kind of project – and hence one which can be judged according to the generic forms and values associated with such a style in comparison with those by other artists who work in this field? Having determined or intuited this, several related but nominally distinct critical reflections follow. Firstly, how effectively is this intent underpinning the art work achieved, how internally consistent are the tools, forms and themes utilised within the production, and do the affective and historic resonances evoked by the materials employed therein cohere into a logical (or a deliberately fragmented) whole? Secondly, how valid or aesthetically interesting is such a project in the first place, irrespective of whether it was successfully achieved or not? In short, how does the artist’s work compare with its own apparent generic rules, precedents and peers, and is the idea behind the work a contextually valid one or not? The questions of value which inevitably come into these judgements must be weighed according to explicit arguments regarding context, history and genre. It is the discursive transparency of the critique which enables readers to mentally contest the author. Implicitly transcendental models of universal emotional or aesthetic responses should not be invoked. Works of art should, therefore, be judged according to their own manifest terms, and, so, according to the values which appear to govern the relationships which organise materials within the art work. They should also, however, be viewed from a position definitively outside the work, placing the overall concept and its implicit, underlying theses within the context of other precedents, cultural values, political considerations and so on. In other words, one should attempt to heed Hassan’s caution that all art works may be seen both from the perspective of historico-genealogical continuities, as well as according to their own unique, self-defining characteristics and intentions. At the same time, the critical framework of the review itself – while remaining potentially dense and complex – should be as apparent to the reader as possible. The kind of criticism which I author is, therefore, based on a combination of art-historical, generic and socio-cultural comparisons. Critics are clearly able to elaborate more parallels between various artistic and cultural activities than many of their peers in the audience simply because it is the profession of the former to be as familiar with as wide a range of art-historical, cultural and political materials as is possible. This does not, however, make the opinions of the critic “correct”, it merely makes them more potentially dense. Other audiences nevertheless make their own connections, while spectators remain free to state that the particular parallels identified by the critic were not, to their minds, as significant as the critic would contend. The quantity of knowledge from which the critic can select does not verify the accuracy of his or her observations. It rather enables the potential richness of the description. In short, it is high time critics gave up all pretensions to closing off discourse by describing aesthetic works. On the contrary, arts reviewing, like arts production itself, should be seen as an invitation to further discourse, as a gift offered to those who might want it, rather than a Leavisite or Bloom-esque bludgeon to instruct the insensitive masses as to what is supposed to subjectively enlighten and uplift them. It is this sense of engagement – between critic, artist and audience – which provides the truly poetic quality to arts criticism, allowing readers to think creatively in their own right through their own interaction with a collaborative process of rumination on aesthetics and culture. In this way, artists, audiences and critics come to occupy the same terrain, exchanging views and constructing a community of shared ideas, debate and ever-multiplying discursive forms. Ideally, written criticism would come to occupy the same level of authority as an argument between an audience member and a critic at the bar following the staging of a production. I admit myself that even my best written compositions rarely achieve the level of playful interaction which such an environment often provokes. I nevertheless continue to strive for such a form of discursive exchange and bibulous poetry. References Apollonio, Umbro, ed. Futurist Manifestos. London: Thames and Hudson, 1973. Arnold, Matthew. Essays in Criticism. London: Macmillan, 1903-27, published as 2 series. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. by Annette Lavers. London: Vintage, 1993. Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead, 1998. Benjamin, Walter. Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. Trans. by Edmund Jephcott. New York: Harcourt, 1978. Breton, André. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Trans. by Richard Seaver and Helen Lane. Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 1972. Eliot, T.S. Collected Poems 1909-1962. London: Faber, 1963. Esslin, Martin. Theatre of the Absurd. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. by A.M. Sheridan Smith. London: Tavistock, 1972. ———. The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction. Trans. by Robert Hurley. London: Penguin, 1990. Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. London: Penguin, 1992. Graham, Martha. Blood Memory. New York: Doubleday, 1991. Hassan, Ihab. “Joyce, Beckett and the Postmodern Imagination.” Triquarterly 32.4 (1975): 192ff. Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Dominant of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (1984): 53-92. Leavis, F.R. F.R. Leavis: Essays and Documents. Eds. Ian MacKillop and Richard Storer. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995. Malevich, Kazimir. In Penny Guggenheim, ed. Art of This Century – Drawings – Photographs – Sculpture – Collages. New York: Art Aid, 1942. Marshall, Jonathan. “Documents in Australian Postmodern Dance: Two Interviews with Lucy Guerin,” in Adrian Kiernander, ed. Dance and Physical Theatre, special edition of Australasian Drama Studies 41 (October 2002): 102-33. ———. “Operatic Tradition and Ambivalence in Chamber Made Opera’s Recital (Chesworth, Horton, Noonan),” in Keith Gallasch and Laura Ginters, eds. Music Theatre in Australia, special edition of Australasian Drama Studies 45 (October 2004): 72-96. ———. “Vertigo: Between the Word and the Act,” Independent Performance Forums, series of essays commissioned by Not Yet It’s Difficult theatre company and published in RealTime Australia 35 (2000): 10. Merzbow. Venereology. Audio recording. USA: Relapse, 1994. Richards, Alison, Geoffrey Milne, et al., eds. Pearls before Swine: Australian Theatre Criticism, special edition of Meajin 53.3 (Spring 1994). Tzara, Tristan. Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries. Trans. by Barbara Wright. London: Calder, 1992. Vaughan, David. Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years. Ed. Melissa Harris. New York: Aperture, 1997. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Marshall, Jonathan. "Inciting Reflection: A Short Manifesto for and Introduction to the Discursive Reviewing of the Arts." M/C Journal 8.5 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0510/08-marshall.php>. APA Style Marshall, J. (Oct. 2005) "Inciting Reflection: A Short Manifesto for and Introduction to the Discursive Reviewing of the Arts," M/C Journal, 8(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0510/08-marshall.php>.

Abstract:

IntroductionIn March 2015, I visited the Lambing Flat Folk Museum (established 1967) in the “cherry capital of Australia”, the town of Young, New South Wales, in preparation for a student excursion. Like other Australian folk museums, this museum focuses on the ordinary and the everyday of rural life, and is heavily reliant on local history, local historians, volunteers, and donated objects for the collection. It may not sound as though the Lambing Flat Folk Museum (LFFM) holds much potential for a fashion curator, as fashion exhibitions have become high points of innovation in exhibition design. It is quite a jolt to return to old style folk museums, when travelling shows such as Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty (Metropolitan Museum of Art 2011 – V&A Museum 2015) or The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier (V&A Museum 2011­ – NGV 2014) are popping up around the globe. The contrast stimulated this author to think on the role and the power of curators. This paper will show that the potential for fashion as a vehicle for demonstrating ideas other than through rubrics of design or history has been growing. We all wear dress. We express identity, politics, status, age, gender, social values, and mental state through the way we dress each and every day. These key issues are also explored in many museum exhibitions.Small museums often have an abundance of clothing. For them, it is a case of not only managing and caring for growing collections but also curating objects in a way that communicates regional and often national identity, as well as narrating stories in meaningful ways to audiences. This paper argues that the way in which dress is curated can greatly enhance temporary and permanent exhibitions. Fashion curation is on the rise (Riegels Melchior). This paper looks at why this is so, the potential for this specialisation in curation, the research required, and the sensitivity needed in communicating ideas in exhibitions. It also suggests how fashion curation skills may facilitate an increasing demand.Caring for the AudienceThe paper draws on a case study of how Chinese people at the LFFM are portrayed. The Chinese came to the Young district during the 1860s gold rush. While many people often think the Chinese were sojourners (Rolls), that is, they found gold and returned to China, many actually settled in regional Australia (McGowan; Couchman; Frost). At Young there were riots against the Chinese miners, and this narrative is illustrated at the museum.In examining the LFFM, this paper points to the importance of caring for the audience as well as objects, knowing and acknowledging the current and potential audiences. Caring for how the objects are received and perceived is vital to the work of curators. At this museum, the stereotypic portrayal of Chinese people, through a “coolie” hat, a fan, and two dolls dressed in costume, reminds us of the increased professionalisation of the museum sector in the last 20 years. It also reminds us of the need for good communication through both the objects and texts. Audiences have become more sophisticated, and their expectations have increased. Displays and accompanying texts that do not reflect in depth research, knowledge, and sensitivities can result in viewers losing interest quickly. Not long into my visit I began thinking of the potential reaction by the Chinese graduate students. In a tripartite model called the “museum experience”, Falk and Dierking argue that the social context, personal context, and physical context affect the visitor’s experience (5). The social context of who we visit with influences enjoyment. Placing myself in the students’ shoes sharpened reactions to some of the displays. Curators need to be mindful of a wide range of audiences. The excursion was to be not so much a history learning activity, but a way for students to develop a personal interest in museology and to learn the role museums can play in society in general, as well as in small communities. In this case the personal context was also a professional context. What message would they get?Communication in MuseumsStudies by Falk et al. indicate that museum visitors only view an exhibition for 30 minutes before “museum fatigue” sets in (249–257). The physicality of being in a museum can affect the museum experience. Hence, many institutions responded to these studies by placing the key information and objects in the introductory areas of an exhibition, before the visitor gets bored. As Stephen Bitgood argues, this can become self-fulfilling, as the reaction by the exhibition designers can then be to place all the most interesting material early in the path of the audience, leaving the remainder as mundane displays (196). Bitgood argues there is no museum fatigue. He suggests that there are other things at play which curators need to heed, such as giving visitors choice and opportunities for interaction, and avoiding overloading the audience with information and designing poorly laid-out exhibitions that have no breaks or resting points. All these factors contribute to viewers becoming both mentally and physically tired. Rather than placing the onus on the visitor, he contends there are controllable factors the museum can attend to. One of his recommendations is to be provocative in communication. Stimulating exhibitions are more likely to engage the visitor, minimising boredom and tiredness (197). Xerxes Mazda recommends treating an exhibition like a good story, with a beginning, a dark moment, a climax, and an ending. The LFFM certainly has those elements, but they are not translated into curation that gives a compelling narration that holds the visitors’ attention. Object labels give only rudimentary information, such as: “Wooden Horse collar/very rare/donated by Mr Allan Gordon.” Without accompanying context and engaging language, many visitors could find it difficult to relate to, and actively reflect on, the social narrative that the museum’s objects could reflect.Text plays an important role in museums, particularly this museum. Communication skills of the label writers are vital to enhancing the museum visit. Louise Ravelli, in writing on museum texts, states that “communication needs to be more explicit and more reflexive—to bring implicit assumptions to the surface” (3). This is particularly so for the LFFM. Posing questions and using an active voice can provoke the viewer. The power of text can be seen in one particular museum object. In the first gallery is a banner that contains blatant racist text. Bringing racism to the surface through reflexive labelling can be powerful. So for this museum communication needs to be sensitive and informative, as well as pragmatic. It is not just a case of being reminded that Australia has a long history of racism towards non-Anglo Saxon migrants. A sensitive approach in label-writing could ask visitors to reflect on Australia’s long and continued history of racism and relate it to the contemporary migration debate, thereby connecting the present day to dark historical events. A question such as, “How does Australia deal with racism towards migrants today?” brings issues to the surface. Or, more provocatively, “How would I deal with such racism?” takes the issue to a personal level, rather than using language to distance the issue of racism to a national issue. Museums are more than repositories of objects. Even a small underfunded museum can have great impact on the viewer through the language they use to make meaning of their display. The Lambing Flat Roll-up Banner at the LFFMThe “destination” object of the museum in Young is the Lambing Flat Roll-up Banner. Those with a keen interest in Australian history and politics come to view this large sheet of canvas that elicits part of the narrative of the Lambing Flat Riots, which are claimed to be germane to the White Australia Policy (one of the very first pieces of legislation after the Federation of Australia was The Immigration Restriction Act 1901).On 30 June 1861 a violent anti-Chinese riot occurred on the goldfields of Lambing Flat (now known as Young). It was the culmination of eight months of growing conflict between European and Chinese miners. Between 1,500 and 2,000 Europeans lived and worked in these goldfields, with little government authority overseeing the mining regulations. Earlier, in November 1860, a group of disgruntled European miners marched behind a German brass band, chasing off 500 Chinese from the field and destroying their tents. Tensions rose and fell until the following June, when the large banner was painted and paraded to gather up supporters: “…two of their leaders carrying in advance a magnificent flag, on which was written in gold letters – NO CHINESE! ROLL UP! ROLL UP! ...” (qtd. in Coates 40). Terrified, over 1,270 Chinese took refuge 20 kilometres away on James Roberts’s property, “Currawong”. The National Museum of Australia commissioned an animation of the event, The Harvest of Endurance. It may seem obvious, but the animators indicated the difference between the Chinese and the Europeans through dress, regardless that the Chinese wore western dress on the goldfields once the clothing they brought with them wore out (McGregor and McGregor 32). Nonetheless, Chinese expressions of masculinity differed. Their pigtails, their shoes, and their hats were used as shorthand in cartoons of the day to express the anxiety felt by many European settlers. A more active demonstration was reported in The Argus: “ … one man … returned with eight pigtails attached to a flag, glorifying in the work that had been done” (6). We can only imagine this trophy and the de-masculinisation it caused.The 1,200 x 1,200 mm banner now lays flat in a purpose-built display unit. Viewers can see that it was not a hastily constructed work. The careful drafting of original pencil marks can be seen around the circus styled font: red and blue, with the now yellow shadowing. The banner was tied with red and green ribbon of which small remnants remain attached.The McCarthy family had held the banner for 100 years, from the riots until it was loaned to the Royal Australian Historical Society in November 1961. It was given to the LFFM when it opened six years later. The banner is given key positioning in the museum, indicating its importance to the community and its place in the region’s memory. Just whose memory is narrated becomes apparent in the displays. The voice of the Chinese is missing.Memory and Museums Museums are interested in memory. When visitors come to museums, the work they do is to claim, discover, and sometimes rekindle memory (Smith; Crane; Williams)—-and even to reshape memory (Davidson). Fashion constantly plays with memory: styles, themes, textiles, and colours are repeated and recycled. “Cutting and pasting” presents a new context from one season to the next. What better avenue to arouse memory in museums than fashion curation? This paper argues that fashion exhibitions fit within the museum as a “theatre of memory”, where social memory, commemoration, heritage, myth, fantasy, and desire are played out (Samuels). In the past, institutions and fashion curators often had to construct academic frameworks of “history” or “design” in order to legitimise fashion exhibitions as a serious pursuit. Exhibitions such as Fashion and Politics (New York 2009), Fashion India: Spectacular Capitalism (Oslo 2014) and Fashion as Social Energy (Milan 2015) show that fashion can explore deeper social concerns and political issues.The Rise of Fashion CuratorsThe fashion curator is a relative newcomer. What would become the modern fashion curator made inroads into museums through ethnographic and anthropological collections early in the 20th century. Fashion as “history” soon followed into history and social museums. Until the 1990s, the fashion curator in a museum was seen as, and closely associated with, the fashion historian or craft curator. It could be said that James Laver (1899–1975) or Stella Mary Newton (1901–2001) were the earliest modern fashion curators in museums. They were also fashion historians. However, the role of fashion curator as we now know it came into its own right in the 1970s. Nadia Buick asserts that the first fashion exhibition, Fashion: An Anthology by Cecil Beaton, was held at the Victoria and Albert Museum, curated by the famous fashion photographer Cecil Beaton. He was not a museum employee, a trained curator, or even a historian (15). The museum did not even collect contemporary fashion—it was a new idea put forward by Beaton. He amassed hundreds of pieces of fashion items from his friends of elite society to complement his work.Radical changes in museums since the 1970s have been driven by social change, new expectations and new technologies. Political and economic pressures have forced museum professionals to shift their attention from their collections towards their visitors. There has been not only a growing number of diverse museums but also a wider range of exhibitions, fashion exhibitions included. However, as museums and the exhibitions they mount have become more socially inclusive, this has been somewhat slow to filter through to the fashion exhibitions. I assert that the shift in fashion exhibitions came as an outcome of new writing on fashion as a social and political entity through Jennifer Craik’s The Face of Fashion. This book has had an influence, beyond academic fashion theorists, on the way in which fashion exhibitions are curated. Since 1997, Judith Clark has curated landmark exhibitions, such as Malign Muses: When Fashion Turns Back (Antwerp 2004), which examine the idea of what fashion is rather than documenting fashion’s historical evolution. Dress is recognised as a vehicle for complex issues. It is even used to communicate a city’s cultural capital and its metropolitan modernity as “fashion capitals” (Breward and Gilbert). Hence the reluctant but growing willingness for dress to be used in museums to critically interrogate, beyond the celebratory designer retrospectives. Fashion CurationFashion curators need to be “brilliant scavengers” (Peoples). Curators such as Clark pick over what others consider as remains—the neglected, the dissonant—bringing to the fore what is forgotten, where items retrieved from all kinds of spheres are used to fashion exhibitions that reflect the complex mix of the tangible and intangible that is present in fashion. Allowing the brilliant scavengers to pick over the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life can make for exciting exhibitions. Clothing of the everyday can be used to narrate complex stories. We only need think of the black layette worn by Baby Azaria Chamberlain—or the shoe left on the tarmac at Darwin Airport, having fallen off the foot of Mrs Petrov, wife of the Russian diplomat, as she was forced onto a plane. The ordinary remnants of the Chinese miners do not appear to have been kept. Often, objects can be transformed by subsequent significant events.Museums can be sites of transformation for its audiences. Since the late 1980s, through the concept of the New Museum (Vergo), fashion as an exhibition theme has been used to draw in wider museum audiences and to increase visitor numbers. The clothing of Vivienne Westwood, (34 Years in Fashion 2005, NGA) Kylie Minogue (Kylie: An Exhibition 2004­–2005, Powerhouse Museum), or Princess Grace (Princess Grace: Style Icon 2012, Bendigo Art Gallery) drew in the crowds, quantifying the relevance of museums to funding bodies. As Marie Riegels Melchior notes, fashion is fashionable in museums. What is interesting is that the New Museum’s refrain of social inclusion (Sandell) has yet to be wholly embraced by art museums. There is tension between the fashion and museum worlds: a “collision of the fashion and art worlds” (Batersby). Exhibitions of elite designer clothing worn by celebrities have been seen as very commercial operations, tainting the intellectual and academic reputations of cultural institutions. What does fashion curation have to do with the banner mentioned previously? It would be miraculous for authentic clothing worn by Chinese miners to surface now. In revising the history of Lambing Flat, fashion curators need to employ methodologies of absence. As Clynk and Peoples have shown, by examining archives, newspaper advertisements, merchants’ account books, and other material that incidentally describes the business of clothing, absence can become present. While the later technology of photography often shows “Sunday best” fashions, it also illustrates the ordinary and everyday dress of Chinese men carrying out business transactions (MacGowan; Couchman). The images of these men bring to mind the question: were these the children of men, or indeed the men themselves, who had their pigtails violently cut off years earlier? The banner was also used to show that there are quite detailed accounts of events from local and national newspapers of the day. These are accessible online. Accounts of the Chinese experience may have been written up in Chinese newspapers of the day. Access to these would be limited, if they still exist. Historian Karen Schamberger reminds us of the truism: “history is written by the victors” in her observations of a re-enactment of the riots at the Lambing Flat Festival in 2014. The Chinese actors did not have speaking parts. She notes: The brutal actions of the European miners were not explained which made it easier for audience members to distance themselves from [the Chinese] and be comforted by the actions of a ‘white hero’ James Roberts who… sheltered the Chinese miners at the end of the re-enactment. (9)Elsewhere, just out of town at the Chinese Tribute Garden (created in 1996), there is evidence of presence. Plaques indicating donors to the garden carry names such as Judy Chan, Mrs King Chou, and Mr and Mrs King Lam. The musically illustrious five siblings of the Wong family, who live near Young, were photographed in the Discover Central NSW tourist newspaper in 2015 as a drawcard for the Lambing Flat Festival. There is “endurance”, as the title of NMA animation scroll highlights. Conclusion Absence can be turned around to indicate presence. The “presence of absence” (Meyer and Woodthorpe) can be a powerful tool. Seeing is the pre-eminent sense used in museums, and objects are given priority; there are ways of representing evidence and narratives, and describing relationships, other than fashion presence. This is why I argue that dress has an important role to play in museums. Dress is so specific to time and location. It marks specific occasions, particularly at times of social transitions: christening gowns, bar mitzvah shawls, graduation gowns, wedding dresses, funerary shrouds. Dress can also demonstrate the physicality of a specific body: in the extreme, jeans show the physicality of presence when the body is removed. The fashion displays in the museum tell part of the region’s history, but the distraction of the poor display of the dressed mannequins in the LFFM gets in the way of a “good story”.While rioting against the Chinese miners may cause shame and embarrassment, in Australia we need to accept that this was not an isolated event. More formal, less violent, and regulated mechanisms of entry to Australia were put in place, and continue to this day. It may be that a fashion curator, a brilliant scavenger, may unpick the prey for viewers, placing and spacing objects and the visitor, designing in a way to enchant or horrify the audience, and keeping interest alive throughout the exhibition, allowing spaces for thinking and memories. Drawing in those who have not been the audience, working on the absence through participatory modes of activities, can be powerful for a community. Fashion curators—working with the body, stimulating ethical and conscious behaviours, and constructing dialogues—can undoubtedly act as a vehicle for dynamism, for both the museum and its audiences. As the number of museums grow, so should the number of fashion curators.ReferencesArgus. 10 July 1861. 20 June 2015 ‹http://trove.nla.gov.au/›.Batersby, Selena. “Icons of Fashion.” 2014. 6 June 2015 ‹http://adelaidereview.com.au/features/icons-of-fashion/›.Bitgood, Stephen. “When Is 'Museum Fatigue' Not Fatigue?” Curator: The Museum Journal 2009. 12 Apr. 2015 ‹http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.2151-6952.2009.tb00344.x/abstract›. Breward, Christopher, and David Gilbert, eds. Fashion’s World Cities. Oxford: Berg Publications, 2006.Buick, Nadia. “Up Close and Personal: Art and Fashion in the Museum.” Art Monthly Australia Aug. (2011): 242.Clynk, J., and S. Peoples. “All Out in the Wash.” Developing Dress History: New Directions in Method and Practice. Eds. Annabella Pollen and Charlotte Nicklas C. London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming Sep. 2015. Couchman, Sophia. “Making the ‘Last Chinaman’: Photography and Chinese as a ‘Vanishing’ People in Australia’s Rural Local Histories.” Australian Historical Studies 42.1 (2011): 78–91.Coates, Ian. “The Lambing Flat Riots.” Gold and Civilisation. Canberra: The National Museum of Australia, 2011.Clark, Judith. Spectres: When Fashion Turns Back. London: V&A Publications, 2006.Craik, Jennifer. The Face of Fashion. Oxon: Routledge, 1994.Crane, Susan. “The Distortion of Memory.” History and Theory 36.4 (1997): 44–63.Davidson, Patricia. “Museums and the Shaping of Memory.” Heritage Museum and Galleries: An Introductory Reader. Ed. Gerard Corsane. Oxon: Routledge, 2005.Discover Central NSW. Milthorpe: BMCW, Mar. 2015.Dethridge, Anna. Fashion as Social Energy Milan: Connecting Cultures, 2005.Falk, John, and Lyn Dierking. The Museum Experience. Washington: Whaleback Books, 1992.———, John Koran, Lyn Dierking, and Lewis Dreblow. “Predicting Visitor Behaviour.” Curator: The Museum Journal 28.4 (1985): 249–57.Fashion and Politics. 13 July 2015 ‹http://www.fitnyc.edu/5103.asp›.Fashion India: Spectacular Capitalism. 13 July 2015 ‹http://www.tereza-kuldova.com/#!Fashion-India-Spectacular-Capitalism-Exhibition/cd23/85BBF50C-6CB9-4EE5-94BC-DAFDE56ADA96›.Frost, Warwick. “Making an Edgier Interpretation of the Gold Rushes: Contrasting Perspectives from Australia and New Zealand.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 11.3 (2005): 235-250.Mansel, Philip. Dressed to Rule: Royal and Court Costumes from Louis XIV to Elizabeth II. New Haven: Yale UP, 2005.Mazda, Xerxes. “Exhibitions and the Power of Narrative.” Museums Australia National Conference. Sydney, Australia. 23 May 2015. Opening speech.McGowan, Barry. Tracking the Dragon: A History of the Chinese in the Riverina. Wagga Wagga: Museum of the Riverina, 2010.Meyer, Morgan, and Kate Woodthorpe. “The Material Presence of Absence: A Dialogue between Museums and Cemeteries.” Sociological Research Online (2008). 6 July 2015 ‹http://www.socresonline.org.uk/13/5/1.html›.National Museum of Australia. “Harvest of Endurance.” 20 July 2015 ‹http://www.nma.gov.au/collections/collection_interactives/endurance_scroll/harvest_of_endurance_html_version/home›. Peoples, Sharon. “Cinderella and the Brilliant Scavengers.” Paper presented at the Fashion Tales 2015 Conference, Milan, June 2015. Ravelli, Louise. Museum Texts: Communication Frameworks. Oxon: Routledge, 2006.Riegels Melchior, Marie. “Fashion Museology: Identifying and Contesting Fashion in Museums.” Paper presented at Exploring Critical Issues, Mansfield College, Oxford, 22–25 Sep. 2011. Rolls, Eric. Sojourners: The Epic Story of China's Centuries-Old Relationship with Australia. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1992.Samuels, Raphael. Theatres of Memory. London: Verso, 2012.Sandell, Richard. “Social Inclusion, the Museum and the Dynamics of Sectorial Change.” Museum and Society 1.1 (2003): 45–62.Schamberger, Karen. “An Inconvenient Myth—the Lambing Flat Riots and Birth of a Nation.” Paper presented at Foundational Histories Australian Historical Conference, University of Sydney, 6–10 July 2015. Smith, Laurajane. The Users of Heritage. Oxon: Routledge, 2006.Vergo, Peter. New Museology. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989.Williams, Paul. Memorial Museums: The Global Rush to Commemorate Atrocities. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2007.

Abstract:

Men in crisis Confused by society's mixed messages about what's expected of them as boys, and later as men, many feel a sadness and disconnection they cannot even name. (Pollack 1) The recent 'crisis in masculinity' has been punctuated by a plethora of material devoted to reclaiming men's 'lost' power within a society. Triggered by the recognition that their roles within our society are changing, this emerging cannon often fails to recognise men as part of a social continuum that subjectifies individuals within discursive frameworks. Rather it mourns this process as the emasculation of male identity within our culture. However, this self-help rhetoric masks a wider project of renegotiating men's power within our society. David Buchbinder for example, calls for an interrogation of "how men and various masculinities are represented" (7). As a consequence, male subjectivities are being called into question. There is now examination of the manner in which "power is differentiated so that particular styles of masculinity become ascendant…in certain situations" (Haywood and Mac an Ghaill 52). In this way, male power is being problematised on many fronts. The desire to shore-up male power in the face of various 'threats' has called for a corporeal manifestation of masculine dominance. Men's bodies have been redefined through contemporary attention to physical sculpting and molding. This reanimation of the Superman ethic of embodiment is part of the hegemonic maintenance of masculine power in our culture. At the times of the greatest threat to male competence and control within society - social, political and economic restructuring, war and recovery - the body has been at the frontier of reasserting male power. This paper traces performances of superhero masculinity across men's bodies. As central 'creators' of their world, superheroes embody a mythology in masculine identity that shapes men as social and natural determinists within a society. In attempting to replicate this role, men are subjected to a rupture in the social fabric whereby their bodies move through a series of discursive frameworks in a contradictory tapestry that activates a 'crisis' within masculine identity. This paper seeks to open the seam between masculinity and power to examine how masculine legitimacy is negotiated on embodied surfaces. This trajectory is constantly stretched to its limits where men's bodies are in a persistent state of rebuilding. Henry Rollins forms part of the frayed edges of superhero identity. Simultaneously validating and undermining this mentality, Rollins creates a nexus of contradictory ideologies. Embracing a "rock-hard male body" (Robinson 11) in a powerfully built embodied reality, and at the same time deconstructing it, Rollins takes issue with men in their mythological role as centres of social reality and their power to create and control it. Rollins forms an identity that is shaped within discursive practices rather than the director of them. In tracing this performance through the "Liar" music video that features Rollins in the Superman role, this paper demonstrates the convoluted masculinity embraced by Rollins and the movement of Superman across his body. Between superheroes, war and bodybuilding, the aim is to trace how men are positioned as unproblematic agents of power, change and creation within the embodied myths of our culture. Bodies of knowledge Men's bodies have changed. While they have been the 'normal' against which women's bodies have been defined, this sense of normality has altered (Cranny-Francis 8). Foucault has consistently demonstrated how bodies are created and inscribed through cultural processes whereby discourses determine the shape and nature of embodied realities. Even though men are often centralised in these knowledge systems, it does not mean that they are immune to their influence. Men are insistently defined through metaphors of the mind. The proper man is a controlled man. In bodybuilding this relationship is activated in the repetitive and disciplined action of tensing and relaxing muscle. Defined as, "the toning and accentuating of muscles by the repeated action of flexing and releasing…particularly through the use of weights" (Carden-Coyne n.pag), it reifies a controlled mind restraining and shaping the physical form. During the Enlightenment thrust toward scientific rationalism, Descartes positioned an uncomplicated division between the mind and the body. Men spent their time purifying their souls and using bodies "as a spiritual vessel, a Christian container of morality and purity" (Carden-Coyne n.pag). They were shells that required discipline so the mind was not led astray. The mind was the controlling agent that subdued a disobedient embodiment. The extent to which this was achieved was the measure of the legitimacy and competence of a man. The currency of this corporeal state resonates most potently today through the phallus. As an extension of the phallus, the surface of the male body is a crucial site for the demonstration of embodied control. For the phallus is not very closely related to the possession of a penis as David Buchbinder argues when he suggests, "the phallus as a symbol, however, is not to be identified with an actual penis, because no actual penis could ever really measure up to the imagined sexual potency and social or magical power of the phallus" (49). Indeed, men's penises are "flaccid most of the time" (Buchbinder 48). They are fragile and soft. They rarely meet the 'supernatural' prowess of the phallus. Phallic power is related to the capacity to occupy the space of symbolic power effectively - to be embodied in a competent masculinity. Bodybuilding demonstrates a mastery over the self that articulates this discipline. The capacity to mobilise this control is linked to wider social power in which men are supposed to be privileged agents of creation and control in the political and economic spheres of life. Henry Rollins mobilises a mythos of masculine embodied control and corporeal hardness in his embrace of Superman. He is the epitome of phallic power and Rollins uses this character as a metonym to articulate the contradictions between the ideologies circulating through culture and the reality of lived experience. While Rollins mobilises a superhero musculature, the surfacing of his self masks a vulnerable masculine subjectivity that is embedded within distinct social frameworks. He uses the ideologies surrounding superheroes to create a dialogue between the reality of everyday life and the discourses that frame those experiences. Superheroes are resourceful, disciplined and righteous. They are sites of strength, moral virtue, creation and control. They often have super-powers, super-human strength, agility or speed that enables them to exist apart from regular humans. They occupy spaces removed from everyday life. However, their separateness from these realities is contrary to real men's experiences. Like the phallus, there is a gulf between the superhero ideology that men are supposed to embody and the reality of lived experience. Nevertheless there remains a constant struggle to build and rebuild the male body to the pinnacle of (super)masculine prowess. Superman is framed within the mind/body binary quite clearly. The control he exercises over his body reifies his calm and disciplined mind. His powerful physique, "represents in vividly graphic detail the masculinity, the confidence, the power that personifies the ideal of phallic masculinity" (Brown n.pag). His control extends across his self and out into the world. Rollins embraces this control through his own self-empowering rhetoric that litters his lyrics, spoken word and concert performances. He also most clearly embodies the Superman ideology through a life-long attention to bodybuilding. Introduced to weightlifting as a teenager, Rollins incorporates the Superman ideology into his subjectivity. He has been referred to as the "tattooed, muscled Ubermensch of serious rawk" (geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Palms/4396/hrf.htm). He works his muscles to rebuild his identity after a disaffiliated, Ritalin-addicted childhood spent bouncing between divorced parents. The processes of disciplining his body and empowering the self are made clear through his relationship to his body and to the weights. Rollins believes in extending himself to his limits and beyond. Bodybuilding is the mattering map Rollins uses to construct a sense of self. He uses it to define who he is and to build his self-esteem. For example,"time away from the Iron makes my mind and body degenerate. I turn on myself and wallow in thick depression that makes me unable to function. The body shuts my mind down. The Iron is the best anti-depressant I have ever found. No better way to fight weakness than with strength. Fight degeneration with generation" (Rollins 257). In his embrace of the embodied power of Superman and the building mechanisms of weightlifting he is able to repair and regenerate his sense of self. He is able to transform himself into something new and different, thereby exercising power as an agent of change. This ethic of rebuilding hails an earlier time when control over the body needed to reestablish the coherent corporeality of damaged men within a culture. World War One redefined popular consciousness of men's bodies as the mechanisation of warfare ripped limbs from torsos and severed the relationship between a disciplined mind and the controlled body. Rebuilding battered bodies The first widespread conflict to use guns, shells and tanks produced the first evidence of neurasthenia, or shell shock (Carden-Coyne n.pag). Faith in evolution and human improvement was shaken to its core with the appearance of physically and emotionally broken masculinity. Men's bodies were dismembered and disabled - their minds were tortured. As a result Carden-Coyne argues, [t]he first world war significantly undermined confidence in the male instinct, by demonstrating that the primitive energies of the male body (virility, physical strength and aggression) were no match for modern technological warfare. A process of healing was needed to rebuild a masculinity of control and strength in these men. Faith in progress needed to be renegotiated and the damaged minds and bodies of men mended. Bodybuilding was seen as the most complete demonstration of embodied control. It required discipline and strength and so required the mind to order the body. Bodybuilding was embraced after World War One to repair the fissures in war-ravaged masculinity. It served, "to shape corporeal borders…against the sense of decay and uncertainty that permeated the 'air' of modernity" (Carden-Coyne n.pag). The strong body created a strong mind and bodybuilding in the post-war period also helped to more popularly render images of heroes. War heroes could be more easily framed in musculature. In popular culture, heroes shifted from aristocratic figures such as the Scarlet Pimpernel, to more everyday men. By 1938 the emergence of Superman comics positioned the ordinary-like man as superhero (Bridwell 6). The hard body had the capacity to make the ordinary man exceptional. Indeed, the superheroes of the twentieth century like "Tarzan, Conan, James Bond" (Connell 6) all depict a resilience and similar competence over all aspects of their lives. However as men's authority has been increasingly challenged within our society, embodied strength has increased in Superman to mirror the changes in the lives of these men. Postmodern paychecks World War Two also tore men's bodies apart. However with this war, the machine was reinscribed as saving rather than taking lives on the battlefield (Fussell 3). The development of the atomic bomb was attributed to, and celebrated as, man's ability to create and conquer anything (Easlea 90). By 1950 Superman comics depicted the man of steel withstanding a nuclear blast thereby validating the superiority and resilience of white, western masculinity and embodied hardness over the weak Others (Bridwell 10). Nevertheless World War Two chewed through men's bodies at an imperceptible rate. Despite the rhetoric of heroism and technological superiority, the reality of everyday battle was broken bodies. The ideology of the superhero served to mask the realities of this war. Despite the damage to the corporeal form, the heroic mythology of masculine identity served to reify a coherent embodiment and a clear mind. The mobilisation of this masculine myth masked the erosion of legitimate male power within culture. This resonates into the postwar period where a whole series of structural changes to the social landscape have radically redefined our social reality. The mechanisms men have used to define themselves have decayed. The rising empowerment of women, gay men and black men have problematised the centrality of white, heterosexual men in our culture (Faludi 40). They are no longer able to easily occupy a stable, silent centre in our society. As a result, there has been an attempt to reclaim the body and reclaim the competency that serves to define men as masculine. The rising interest in men's health and physical fitness on the whole, has lead to a reanimation of the superman figure. Men's bodies are getting harder and larger. Part animal, part machine Henry Rollins embraces the contradictions in heroic masculinity. He demonstrates an embodied control that is regimented through an incorporation of Nietzschean will. In this way he embodies the relationship between the superhero and contemporary masculinity. However, Rollins' Superman is not an Ubermensch (Nietzsche 230). He performs a problematic masculinity. As a result, Rollins deconstructs the masculine hierarchy by subverting, not only his own performance of masculinity, but all such performances. The "Liar" music video by The Rollins Band features Rollins in the Superman role. In this clip he interrogates different levels of truth and reality. For him, neither Clark Kent nor Superman is a valid model on which to base effective performances of masculinity. Neither of these men are heroes, rather they are simulations. The version of Superman that Rollins constructs is authoritative and totalitarian. He depicts a corrupt figure and flawed leader who is not in control and is struggling to meet the demands of his role. This performance of Superman deconstructs the myth of the male hero. For Rollins, this hero does not exist - or if he does - he is a "Liar". Henry Rollins both embodies and deconstructs the superhero identity. He forms a nexus around which contradictory ideologies in masculinity collide and are reworked into a radically subversive critique of the relationship between men and superheroes. For Rollins the superhero mentality masks the complicated ideologies men must negotiate everyday in which they are subjectified within contradictory discursive frameworks that demand multifarious performances. Rollins strips back the layers of masculine power to reveal the ways in which men are embedded within social structures that reflect and affect their reality. In this self-reflexive critique he performs Superman in playful, resistive ways. This Superman does not exist apart from everyday life, but is entrenched within its frameworks that can only produce flawed performances of a social ideal. For Rollins a superhero embodiment cannot wipe away the discourses that encircle men within our culture but is rather a reflection of the extent to which men are embedded within them. In negotiating the difficulties in masculinity, Henry Rollins deprioritises men's roles as super-human agents of control, creation and change within a society. He calls into question the validity of masculine power and reifies the contradictions in manhood. He hails an ultimately resilient and empowered dominant masculinity within a deconstructive rhetoric. He is mobilising a moment within our culture where men must redefine who they are. This redefinition must be less concerned with how men can reclaim the power they are currently mourning in the 'crisis of masculinity'. If we are to make lasting change within a Cultural Studies framework then it cannot end, but only begin, with the articulation of a diversity of voices. Deep, structural change can only be made if we examine how a powerful position is able to occupy an unproblematised node of commonsense. Men need to redefine who they are, their bodies, their minds and their performances to position a masculinity that is not separate from society, but that can exist coherently within it. References Bridwell, Nathan. "Introduction." Superman from the Thirties to the Seventies. New York: Bonanza Books, 1971. Brown, James. "Comic book masculinity and the new black superhero." African American Review. 33.1 (1999): expanded academic database [n.pag]. Accessed 9.4.2001. Buchbinder, David. Performance Anxieties. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1998. Carden-Coyne, Anna. "Classical heroism and modern life: Body building and masculinity in the early twentieth century." Journal of Australian Studies. (December 1999): expanded academic database [n.pag] Accessed 9.4.2001. Connell, Robert. "Masculinity, violence and war" in P. Patton and R. Poole (eds.), War/Masculinity. Sydney: Intervention Publications, 1985. Cranny-Francis, Ann. The Body in the Text. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1995. Descartes, Rene. Key Philosphical Writings. (Translated by E. Haldane and G. Ross) Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 1997. Easlea, Brian. Fathering the Unthinkable. London: Pluto Press, 1983. Faludi, Susan. Stiffed: The Betrayal of the Modern Man. London: Chatto and Windus, 1999. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic. London: Routledge, 1973. ---Madness and Civlisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. London: Routledge, 1965. ---The Order of Things. London: Vintage, 1972. Fussell, Paul. Wartime: Understanding of Behaviour in the Second World War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Haywood, Christina and Mac an Ghaill, Martin. "Schooling masculinities" in Martin Mac an Ghaill (ed.), Understanding Masculinities. Buckingham: Open University Press, 1996. "I Have Zero Sex Appeal." Melody Maker. (March 29 1997). geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Palms/4396/hrf/htm. Accessed July 30 2001. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche Volume 4, The Will to Power, Book One and Two. O. Levy (ed.), London: George Allen and Unwin, 1924. Pollack, William. Real Boys. Melbourne: Scribe Publications, 1999. Robinson, Doug. No Less a Man. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University, 1994. Rollins, Henry. "The Iron." The Portable Henry Rollins. London: Phoenix House, 1997.

Abstract:

In the third episode of the British sci-fi/thriller television series Torchwood (BBC3, 2007-) the team are investigating a portable ‘ghost machine’, which allows its users to see events which occurred in the past. After visiting an old man whose younger self the device may have allowed them to witness, the team’s medic, Owen Harper, spots Bernie Harris, who’d previously been in possession of the machine. A chase ensues; they run past a park, between a gang of kids playing football, over a railway bridge, through a housing estate, and eventually Bernie is cornered in a back garden and taken away for questioning. The scene demonstrates the series’ intention to be a fast-paced, modern, glossy thriller, with loud incidental music, fast cuts, and energetic camerawork. Yet for me the scene has quite a different meaning. The housing estate they run through is the one in which I used to live; the railway bridge they run over is the one I crossed every day on my way to and from work; the street they run down is my street; and there, in the background, clear and apparent and obvious for all to see, is my home. Yes; my house was on Torchwood. As Blunt and Dowling note, “home does not simply exist, but is made … [and] … this process has both material and imaginative elements” (23). It is through such imaginative elements that we turn ‘spaces’ that are “unnamed, unhistoried, unnarativized” into ‘places’ that are “indubitably bound up with personal experience” (Darby 50). Such experiences may be ‘real’ (as in things that actually happened there) or ‘representational’ (as in seen on television); my relationship to ‘home’ is here being inflected through the “indexical bond” (Kilborn and Izod 29) that links both of these strategies. In using a scene from Torchwood to say something about my personal history, I’m taking what is, in essence, a televisual ‘space’ and converting it into a ‘place’ which is not only defined by my “profilmic” (Ward 8) relationship to it, but also helps express that relationship. Telling everyone that my house was on Torchwood certainly says something about the programme; but more fundamentally I’m engaging in a process intended to say something about me. A bit of autobiography. The house is in Splott, a residential area of Cardiff, the capital of Wales, where Torchwood is set and filmed. I lived in Cardiff from 2000 to 2006, when I worked at the University of Glamorgan. For much of that time I lived in rented accommodation in Cathays, the student area of Cardiff. But in 2005 I bought a house in Splott, and this was the first property I ever owned. A year later I moved to Norwich (virtually the other side of the UK from Cardiff) to take a job at the University of East Anglia, but I kept the house in Cardiff and now rent it out. It was while living in Norwich that my house appeared on Torchwood, and I had no idea that the programme had been filming in that area. This means that, strictly speaking, at the time it was on television the property was no longer my ‘home’, but was instead my tenants’. Yet what I want to examine here is the “geography of feeling and emotion” (Rodaway 263) which is central to the idea of ‘home’, and which has been kick-started in me since some fictional television characters ran down the street I used to live in and the ‘real’ and the ‘representational’ began to intersect. There certainly is something personal which is required in order to turn a ‘space’ into a ‘place’, but what is it that then transforms it into ‘home’? That is, for me Cardiff is more than a ‘place’ which I know. Owning a property there makes a difference, but that is to too easily equate a commercial transaction with an emotive sense of feeling. Indeed, Cardiff felt like ‘home’ before I’d bought a house, and the majority of my memories of the city are connected to other properties I’ve lived in. In a capitalist society it’s tempting to equate ‘home’ with the property we own, and this probably is the case for the majority of people (Morley 19). Nevertheless, something emotive stirred in me when I saw my house in a chase sequence on a science-fiction television programme when I live in an entirely different city. Tuan defines this as ‘topophilia’, which is “the affective bond between people and place or setting” (Topophilia 4), and it’s clear that such bonds can be highly emotionally charged and a significant aspect of one’s sense of self. This is noticeable because of the ways in which I’ve used my house’s appearance on television. I’ve not been quiet about it; I was telling everyone at work the day after it appeared. Whenever people mention Torchwood it’s something I point out. This might not sound as if that is likely to occur very often, but considering the programme is a spin-off from the highly successful revival of Doctor Who (BBC1, 1963-89, 1996, 2005-) it is part of a well-known media landscape. Both Doctor Who and Torchwood are predominantly filmed in Cardiff and the surrounding areas of South Wales, but whereas Torchwood is also narratively set in Cardiff, Doctor Who merely uses the locations to represent other places, most often London. Yet many of these places are distinctive and therefore obviously Cardiff for those who know the area. For example, the hospital in the episode ‘New Earth’ (2006) is recognisably the interior of the Wales Millennium Centre, just as the exterior location where the Tardis lands at the beginning of the episode is clearly Rhossili on the Gower Peninsula. Inevitably, the use of such locations has often disrupted my understanding of the story being told. That is, it’s hard to accept that this episode is taking place on a planet at the other end of the galaxy thousands of years into the future if the characters are standing on a cliff you recognise because you’ve been camping there. Of course, the use of locations to represent other places is necessary in media fictions, and I’m not trying to carry out some kind of trainspotter location identification in an attempt to undermine the programme’s diegesis. But it is important to note that while “remembering is a process that today is increasingly media-afflicted” (Hoskins 110), media texts can also be affected by the memories, whether communal or individual, that we bring to bear on them. A ‘real’ relationship with a place can be so intimate that it refuses to be ignored when ‘representations’ require it to be unnecessary. I’m a fan of Doctor Who and would rather not recognise the places so I can just get on with enjoying the programme. But it’s not possible to simply erase “Expressions of community” (Moores 368) which bring together identity and place, especially when that place is your home. Importantly, my idea of ‘home’ is inextricably bound up in the past. As it is a place I no longer live in, the ways in which I feel towards it are predicated on the notion that I used to live there, but no longer do. It’s clear that notions of home – especially those related to nation – are often predicated on ideas of history with significant emotional resonance (Anderson; Blunt and Dowling 140-195; Calhoun). This is a place that is an emotional rather than geographical home, even if it used to also be my home geographically. In buying a house, and engaging in the consumer culture which dominates the ways in which we turn a house into a home (oh, those endless hours at Ikea), I spent a lot of time wondering what it was that this sofa, or those lampshades, or that rug, said about me. The idea that the buildings that we own are a key way of creating and demonstrating a particular kind of identity or affiliation with a certain social group is necessary to consumer capitalism. But as I no longer live in it, the inside of this house can no longer be used as something I can show to other people hoping that they’ll ‘read’ my home how I want them to. Instead, the sense of home invigorated by my house’s appearance on Torchwood is one centred on location, related to the city and the housing estate where my house is, rather than what I did to it. ‘Home’ here becomes something symbolised by the bricks and mortar of the house I bought, but is instead more accurately located in the city and area which the house sits in; Cardiff. More importantly, Cardiff and my house become emotionally meaningful because I’m no longer there. That is, while it’s clear I had a particular relationship to Cardiff when I was a resident, this has altered since my move to Norwich. In moving to a new city – one which I had never visited before, and had no family or friends living in – it seems that my understanding of Cardiff as my ‘home’ has become intensified. This might be because continuing to own property there gives me an investment in the city, both emotionally and financially. But this idea of ‘home’ would, I think, have existed even if I’d sold my house. Instead, Cardiff-as-home is predicated on an idea of personal history and nostalgia (Wheeler; Massey). Academics are used to moving great distances in order to get jobs; indeed, “To spend an entire working career in a single department may seem to be a failure of geographical imagination” (Ley 182). The labour market insists that “All people may now be wanderers” (Bauman, Globalization 87), and hence geographical origins become something to be discussed with new colleagues. For me, like most people, this is a complicated question; does it mean where I was born, or where I grew up, or where I studied, or where I have lived most of my life? In the choices I make to answer this question, I’m acknowledging that “migration is a complex process of cultural negotiation, resistance, and adaptation” (Sinclair and Cunningham 14). As Freeman notes, “the history one tells, via memory, assumes the form of a narrative of the past that charts the trajectory of how one’s self came to be” (33, italics in original). Importantly, this narrative must be seen to make sense; that is, it must help explain the present, conforming to narrative ideas of cause and effect. In constructing a “narratable self” (Caravero 33, italics in original) I’m demonstrating how I think I came to end up where I am now, doing the job I’m doing. In order to show that “I am more than what the thin present defines” (Tuan, Space and Place 186) it’s necessary to reiterate a notion of ‘home’ which supports and illustrates the desired identity narrative. This narrative is as much about “the reflexive project of the self” (Gauntlett 99) in these “liquid times” (Bauman, Liquid Times), as it is a “performance” (Goffman) for others. The coherence and stability of my performance was undercut in a recent episode of Doctor Who – ‘Smith and Jones’ (2007) – in which a family row occurred outside a pub. I became quite distraught that I couldn’t work out where that pub was, and was later reassured to discover that it was in Pontypridd, a town a good few miles from Cardiff, and therefore it wasn’t surprising that I couldn’t recognise it. But in being distraught at not recognising locations I was demonstrating how central knowledge is to an idea of ‘home’. Knowing your way around, knowing where certain shops are, knowing the history of the place; these are all aspects of home, all parts of what Crouch calls “lay knowledge” (217). Ignorance of a space marks the outsider, who must stand on street corners with a map and ask locals for directions. For someone like me who prides himself on his sense of direction (who says I conform to gender stereotypes?) an inability to recognise a pub that I thought I should know suggested my knowledge of the area was dissipating, and so perhaps my ability to define that city as my home was becoming less valid. This must be why I take pleasure in noting that Torchwood’s diegesis is often geographically correct, for the ‘representational’ helps demonstrate my knowledge of the ‘real’ place’s layout. As Tuan notes, “When space feels thoroughly familiar to us, it has become place” (Space and Place 73), and the demonstration of that familiarity is one of the ways of reasserting one’s relationship to home. In demonstrating a knowledge of the place I’m defining as home, I’m also insisting that I’m not a tourist. Urry shows how visitors use a “tourist gaze” (The Tourist Gaze), arguing viewing is the most important activity when encountering a place, just as Tuan (Space and Place 16) and Strain (3) do. To visit somewhere is to employ “a dominance of the eye” (Urry, “Sensing the City” 71); this is why photography has become the dominant manner for recording tourist activity. Strain sees the tourist gaze as one “trained for consumerism” (15) with tourist activity defined primarily by commerce. Since Doctor Who returned Cardiff has promoted its association with the programme, opening an ‘Up Close’ exhibition and debating whether to put together a tourist trail of locations. As a fan of these programmes I’m certainly excited by all of this, and have been to the exhibition. Yet it feels odd being a tourist in a place I want to call home, and some of my activity seems an attempt to demonstrate that it was my home before it became a place I might want to visit for its associations with a television programme. For example, I never went and watched the programme being filmed, even though much of it was shot within walking distance of my house, and “The physical places of fandom clearly have an extraordinary importance for fans” (Sandvoss 61). While some of this was due to not wanting to know what was going to happen in the programme, I was uncomfortable with carrying out an activity that would turn a “landscape” into a “mediascape” (Jansson 432), replacing the ‘real’ with the ‘representational’. In insisting on seeing Cardiff, and my house, as something which existed prior to the programmes, I’m attempting to maintain the “imagined community” (Anderson) I have for my home, distinguishing it from the taint of commerce, no matter how pointless or naïve such an act is in effect. Hence, home is resolutely not a commercial place; or, at least, it is a location whose primary emotive aspects are not defined by consumerism. When houses are seen as nothing more than aspects of commerce, that’s when they remain ‘houses’ or ‘properties’; the affective aspects of ‘homes’ are instead emotionally detached from the commercial factors which bring them about. I think this is why I’m keen to demonstrate that my associations with Cardiff existed before Doctor Who started being made there, for if the place only meant anything to me because of the programme that would define me as a tourist and therefore undermine those emotional and personal aspects of the city which allow me to call it ‘home’. It also means I can be proud that such a cultural institution is being made in ‘my’ city. But it’s a city I can no longer claim residence in. This means that Torchwood and Doctor Who have become useful ways for me to ‘visit’ Cardiff. It seems I have started to adopt a ‘tourist gaze’, for the programmes visually recreate the locations and all I can do is view them, no matter how much I use my knowledge of location in an attempt to interpret those images differently from a tourist. It’s tempting to suggest that this shows how there is a “perpetual negotiation between the real event and its representation” (Bruzzi 9), and how willing I am to engage in the “mobile privatization” that Williams saw as a defining aspect of television (26). But this would be to accept the “unhomeyness” which results from “the ultimate failures of the home in postmodern times” (Lewis and Cho 74). In adopting an autobiographical approach to these issues, I hope I’ve demonstrated the ways in which individuals can experience emotional resonances related to ‘home’ which, while clearly inflected through the social, cultural, and technological aspects I’ve outlined, are nevertheless meaningful and maintain a dominance of the ‘real’ over the ‘representational’. Furthermore, my job tells me I shouldn’t feel this way about my home; or, at least, it reminds me that such emotionality can be explained away through cultural analysis. But that doesn’t in any way make ‘home’ any less powerful nor fully explain how such dry criteria mutate into humanist, emotional significance. So, I can tell you what my home is: but I’m not sure I can get you to understand how seeing my home on television makes me feel. In that sense it’s almost too neat that the episode which kick-started all of this is called ‘Ghost Machine’, for television has become the technology through which the ghosts of my home haunt me on a weekly basis, and ghosts have always been difficult to make sense of. References Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 1983. Bauman, Zygmunt. Globalization: The Human Consequences. Cambridge: Polity, 1998. ———. Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity, 2007. Blunt, Alison, and Robyn Dowling. Home. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Bruzzi, Stella. New Documentary: A Critical Introduction. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Calhoun, Craig. Nations Matter: Culture, History, and the Cosmopolitan Dream. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Caravero, Adriana. Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood. Trans. Paul A. Kottman. London and New York: Routledge, 2000/1997. Crouch, David. “Surrounded by Place: Embodied Encounters.” Tourism: Between Place and Performance. Eds. Simon Coleman and Mike Crang. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2002. 207-18. Darby, Wendy Joy. Landscape and Identity: Geographies of Nation and Class in England. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2000. Freeman, Mark. Rewriting the Self: History, Memory, Narrative. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Gauntlett, David. Media, Gender and Identity: An Introduction. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Goffmann, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin, 1959. Hoskins, Andrew. “Television and the Collapse of Memory.” Time and Society 13.1 (2004): 109-27. Jansson, André. “Spatial Phantasmagoria: the Mediatization of Tourism Experience.” European Journal of Communication 17.4 (2002): 429-43. Kilborn, Richard, and John Izod. An Introduction to Television Documentary: Confronting Reality. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1997. Lewis, Tyson, and Daniel Cho. “Home Is Where the Neurosis Is: A Topography of the Spatial Unconscious.” Cultural Critique 64.1 (2006): 69-91. Ley, David. “Places and Contexts.” Approaches to Human Geography. Eds. Stuart Aitken and Gill Valentine. London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage, 2006. 178-83. Massey, Doris. For Space. London: Sage, 2005. Moores, Shaun. “Television, Geography and ‘Mobile Privatization’.” European Journal of Communication 8.4 (1993): 365-79. Morley, David. Home Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Rodaway, Paul. “Humanism and People-Centred Methods.” Approaches to Human Geography. Eds. Stuart Aitken and Gill Valentine. London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage, 2006. 263-72. Sandvoss, Cornel. Fans: The Mirror of Consumption. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. Sinclair, John, and Stuart Cunningham. “Go with the Flow: Diasporas and the Media.” Television and New Media 1.1 (2000): 11-31. Strain, Ellen. Public Places, Private Journeys: Ethnography, Entertainment, and the Tourist Gaze. New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Rutgers UP, 2003. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. New York: Columbia UP, 1974. ———. Space and Place: the Perspective of Experience. London: Edward Arnold, 1977. Urry, John. “Sensing the City.” The Tourist City. Eds. Dennis R. Judd and Susan S. Fainstein. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1999. 71-86. ———. The Tourist Gaze. 2nd ed. London: Sage, 2002. Ward, Paul. Documentary: The Margins of Reality. London and New York: Wallflower, 2005. Wheeler, Wendy. A New Modernity: Change in Science, Literature and Politics. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1999. Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Mills, Brett. "What Happens When Your Home Is on Television?." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/08-mills.php>. APA Style Mills, B. (Aug. 2007) "What Happens When Your Home Is on Television?," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/08-mills.php>.

Abstract:

IntroductionSince its launch in 2005, YouTube has fast become one of the most popular video sharing sites, one of the largest sources of user generated content, and one of the most frequently visited sites globally (Burgess and Green). As YouTube’s popularity has increased, more and more people have taken up the site’s invitation to “Broadcast Yourself.” Vlogging (video blogging) on YouTube has increased in popularity, creating new genres and communities. Vlogging not only allows individuals to create their own mediated content for mass consumption—making it a site for participatory culture (Burgess and Green; Jenkins) and resembling contemporary forms of entertainment such as reality television—but it also allows individuals to engage in narrative and identity forming practices. Through filming their everyday lives, and presenting themselves on camera, YouTubers are engaging in a process of constructing and presenting their identity online. They often form communities around these identities and continue the practice in dialogue and collaboration with their communities of viewers on YouTube. Because of YouTube’s mass global reach, the ability to create one’s own mediated content and the ability to publicly play with and project different self representations becomes a powerful tool allowing YouTubers to publicly challenge social norms and encourage others to do the same. This paper will explore these features of YouTube using the recent “The Power of MAKEUP!” movement, started by NikkieTutorials, as an example. Through a virtual ethnography of the movement as developed by Christine Hine—following the people, dialogue, connections, and narratives that emerged from Nikkie’s original video—this paper will demonstrate that YouTube is not only a tool for self transformation, but has wider potential to transform norms in society. This is achieved mainly through mobilising communities that form around transformative practices, such as makeup transformations, on YouTube. Vlogging as an Identity Forming Practice Vlogging on YouTube is a contemporary form of autobiography in which individuals engage in a process of documenting their life on a daily or weekly basis and, in doing so, constructing their identity online. Although the aim of beauty vlogs is to teach new makeup techniques, demonstrate and review new products, or circulate beauty-related information, the videos include a large amount of self-disclosure. Beauty vloggers reveal intimate things about themselves and actively engage in the practice of self-representation while filming. Beauty vlogging is unique to other vlogging genres as it almost always involves an immediate transformation of the physical self in each video. The vloggers typically begin with their faces bare and “natural” and throughout the course of the video transform their faces into how they want to be seen, and ultimately, who they want to be that day, using makeup. Thus the process of self-representation is multi-dimensional as not only are they presenting the self, but they are also visually constructing the self on camera. The construction of identity that beauty vloggers engage in on YouTube can be likened to what Robert Ezra Park and later Erving Goffman refer to as the construction and performance of a mask. In his work Race and Culture, Park states that the original meaning of the word person is a mask (249). Goffman responds to this statement in his work The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, saying the mask is “our truer self, the self we would like to be” (30). Beauty vloggers are engaging in the process of constructing their mask—their truer self and the self they would like to be—both through their performance on YouTube, and through the visual transformation that takes place on camera. Their performance on YouTube not only communicates a desired identity, but through their performance they realise this identity. The process of filming and the visual process of constructing or transforming the self on camera through makeup brings the subject into being. Scholarship in the fields of Life Writing and Digital Media including Autobiography, Automedia and Persona Studies has acknowledged and explored the ways narratives and identities—both online and offline—are constructed, created, shaped, chosen, and invented by the individual/author (Garner; Bridger; Eakin; Maguire; Poletti and Rak; Marshall; Smith and Watson). It is widely accepted that all representations of the self are constructed. Crucially, it is the process of documenting or communicating the self that is identity forming (Richardson; Bridger), as the process, including writing, filming, and posting, brings the subject or self into being (Neuman). The individual embodies their performance and realises the self through it. Park and Goffman argue that we all engage in this process of performing and realising the self through the roles we play in society. The significance of the beauty vlogger performance and transformation is the space in which it occurs and the community that it fosters. YouTube as a Transformative Tool and MirrorThe space in which beauty vloggers play with and transform the self on camera is significant as digital technologies such as YouTube invite exploration of the self. Networked digital media (Meikle and Young) invite multiplicity, heterogeneity, and fragmentation in/of identity performances (Bolter; Gergen; Turkle, "Parallel Lives"). These technologies create opportunities for defining and re-defining the self (Bolter 130), as they allow people to present a more multi-mediated self, using both audio-visual components and text (Papacharissi 643).YouTube, in particular, allows the individual to experiment with the self, and document an ongoing transformation, through film (Kavoori). Many scholars have described this ongoing process of identity construction online using the metaphor of “the mirror” (see Kavoori; Raun; and Procter as recent examples). In his research on trans gender vlogging on YouTube, Tobias Raun explores the theme of the mirror. He describes vlogging as a “transformative medium for working on, producing and exploring the self” (366). He argues the vlog acts as a mirror allowing the individual to try out and assume various identities (366). He writes, the mirroring function of the vlog “invites the YouTuber to assume the shape of a desired identity/representation, constantly assuming and evaluating oneself as an attractive image, trying out different ‘styles of the flesh’ (Butler 177), poses and appearances” (367). In reference to trans gender vlogging, Raun writes, “The vlog seems to serve an important function in the transitioning process, and is an important part of a process of self-invention, serving as a testing ground for experimentations with, and manifestations of (new) identities” (367). The mirror (vlog) gives the individual a place/space to construct and perform their mask (identity), and an opportunity to see the reflection and adjust the mask (identity) accordingly. An important feature of the vlog as a mirror is the fact that it is less like a conventional mirror and more like a window with a reflective surface. On YouTube the vlog always involves an audience, who not only watch the performance, but also respond to it. This is in keeping with Goffman’s assertion that there is always an audience involved in any performance of the self. On YouTube, Raun argues, “the need to represent oneself goes hand in hand with the need to connect and communicate” (Raun 369). Networked digital media such as YouTube are inherently social. They invite participation (Smith; Sauter)and community through community building functions such as the ability to like, subscribe, and comment. Michael Strangelove refers to YouTube as a social space, “as a domain of self-expression, community and public confession” (4). The audience and community are important in the process of identity construction and representation as they serve a crucial role in providing feedback and encouragement, legitimising the identity being presented. As Raun writes, the vlog is an opportunity “for seeing one’s own experiences and thoughts reflected in others” (366). Raun identifies that for the trans gender vloggers in his study, simply knowing there is an audience watching their vlogs is enough to affirm their identity. He writes the vlog can be both “an individual act of self validation and . . . a social act of recognition and encouragement” (368). However, in the case of beauty vlogging the audience do more than watch, they form communities embodying and projecting the performance in everyday life and thus collectively challenge social norms, as seen in the “The Power of MAKEUP!” movement. Exploring the “The Power of MAKEUP!” MovementOn 10 May 2015, Nikkie, a well-known beauty vlogger, uploaded a video to her YouTube channel NikkieTutorials titled “The Power of MAKEUP!” Nikkie’s video can be watched here. In her video Nikkie challenges “makeup shaming,” arguing that makeup is not only fun, but can “transform” you into who you want to be. Inspired by an episode of the reality television show RuPaul’s Drag Race, in which the competing drag queens transform half of their face into “glam” (drag), and leave the other half of their face bare (male), Nikkie demonstrates that anyone can use makeup as a transformative tool. In her video Nikkie mirrors the drag queen transformations, transforming half her face into “glam” and leaving the other half of her face bare, as shown in Figure 1. In only transforming half of her face, Nikkie emphasises the scope of the transformation, demonstrating just how much you can change your appearance using only makeup on your face. Nikkie’s video communicates that both a transformed “glam” image and an “unedited” image of the self are perfectly fine, “there are no rules” and neither representations of the self should bring you shame. Figure 1: thumbnail of Nikkie’s videoNikkie’s video started a movement and spread throughout the beauty community on YouTube as a challenge. Other famous beauty vloggers, and everyday makeup lovers, took on the challenge of creating YouTube videos or posting pictures on Instagram of their faces half bare and half transformed using makeup with the tag #thepowerofmakeupchallenge. Since its release in May 2015, Nikkie’s video has been watched over thirty million times, has been liked over five hundred and thirty thousand times, and has received over twenty three thousand comments, many of which echo Nikkie’s experience of “makeup shaming.” “The power of makeup” video went viral and was picked up not only by the online beauty community but also by mainstream media with articles by Huffington Post, Yahoo.com, Marie Claire, BuzzFeed, DailyLife, POPSUGAR, Enews, Urbanshowbiz, BoredPanda, and kickvick among others. On Instagram, thousands of everyday makeup lovers have recreated the transformation and uploaded their pictures of the finished result. Various hashtags have been created around this movement and can be searched on Instagram including #thepowerofmakeupchallenge, #powerofmakeupchallenge, #powerofmakeup. Nikkie’s Instagram page dedicated to the challenge can be seen here. “The power of makeup” video is a direct reaction against what Nikkie calls “makeup shaming”—the idea that makeup is bad, and the assumption that the leading motivation for using makeup is insecurity. In her video Nikkie also reacts to the idea that the made-up-girl is “not really you,” or worse is “fake.” In the introduction to her video Nikkie says,I’ve been noticing a lot lately that girls have been almost ashamed to say that they love makeup because nowadays when you say you love makeup you either do it because you want to look good for boys, you do it because you’re insecure, or you do it because you don’t love yourself. I feel like in a way lately it’s almost a crime to love doing your makeup. So after last weeks RuPaul’s Drag Race with the half drag half male, I was inspired to show you the power of makeup. I notice a lot that when I don’t wear makeup and I have my hair up in a bun and I meet people and I show them picture of my videos or, or whatever looks I have done, they look at me and straight up tell me “that is not you.” They tell me “that’s funny” because I don’t even look like that girl on the picture. So without any further ado I’m going to do half my face full on glam—I’m truly going to transform one side of my face—and the other side is going to be me, raw, unedited, nothing, me, just me. So let’s do it.In her introduction, Nikkie identifies a social attitude that many of her viewers can relate to, that the made-up face isn’t the “real you.” This idea reveals an interesting contradiction in social attitude. As this issue of Media/Culture highlights, the theme of transformation is increasingly popular in contemporary society. Renovation shows, weight loss shows, and “makeover” shows have increased in number and popularity around the world (Lewis). Tania Lewis attributes this to an international shift towards “the real” on television (447). Accompanying this turn towards “the real,” confession, intimacy, and authenticity are now demanded and consumed as entertainment (Goldthwaite; Dovey; King). Sites such as YouTube are arguably popular because they offer real stories, real lives, and have a core value of authenticity (Strangelove; Wesch; Young; Tolson). The power of makeup transformations are challenging because they juxtapose a transformation against the natural, on the self. By only transforming half their face, the beauty vloggers juxtapose the “makeover” (transformation) with “authenticity” (the natural). The power of makeup movement is therefore caught between two contemporary social values. However, the desire for authenticity, and the lack of acceptance that the transformed image is authentic seems to be the main criticism that the members of this movement receive. Beauty vloggers identify a strong social value that “natural” is “good” and any attempt to alter the natural is taboo. Even in the commercial world “natural beauty” is celebrated and features heavily in the marketing and advertising campaigns of popular beauty, cosmetic, and skincare brands. Consider Maybelline’s emphasis on “natural beauty” in their byline “Maybe she’s born with it. Maybe it’s Maybelline.” This is not the way the members of “the power of makeup” movement use and celebrate makeup. They use and celebrate makeup as a transformative and identity forming tool, and their use of makeup is most often criticised for not being natural. In her recreation of Nikkie’s video, Evelina Forsell says “people get upset when I’m not natural.” Like Nikkie, Evelina reveals she often receives the criticism that “the person with a full on face with makeup is not you.” Evelina’s video can be watched here.“The power of makeup” movement and its participants challenge this criticism that the made-up self is not the “real” self. Evelina directly responds to this criticism in her video, stating “when I have a full face of makeup . . . that’s still me, but a more . . . creative me, I guess.” The beauty vloggers in this movement use makeup and YouTube as extensions of the self, as tools for self-expression, self-realisation, and ongoing transformation. Beauty vloggers are demonstrating that makeup is a tool and extension of the self that allows them to explore and play with their self-representations. In the same way that technology enables the individual to extend and “reinvent him/herself online” (Papacharissi 645), so does makeup. And in the same way that technology becomes an extension of the self, or even a second self (Turkle, The Second Self; Vaast) so does makeup. Makeup is a tool and technique of the self. Vlogging is about storytelling (Kavoori), but it is also collective—it’s about telling collective stories (Raun 373) which can be seen in various vlogging genres. As Geert Lovink suggests, YouTube is one of the largest databases of global shared experience. YouTube’s global popularity can be attributed to Strangelove’s assertion that “there’s nothing more interesting to real people . . . than authentic stories told about other real people” (65). Individuals are drawn to Nikkie’s experience, seeing themselves reflected in her story. Famous beauty vloggers on YouTube, and everyday beauty lovers, find community in the collective experience of feeling shame for loving makeup and using makeup to transform and communicate their identity. Effectively, the movement forms communities of practice (Wenger) made up of hundreds of people brought together by the shared value and use of makeup as a transformative tool. The online spaces where these activities take place (mainly on YouTube and Instagram) form affinity spaces (Gee) where the community come together, share information, learn and develop their practice. Hundreds of YouTubers from all over the world took up Nikkie’s invitation to demonstrate the power of makeup by transforming themselves on camera. From well-established beauty vloggers with millions of viewers, to amateur beauty lovers with YouTube channels, many people felt moved by Nikkie’s example and embodied the message, adapting the transformation to suit their circumstances. The movement includes both men and women, children and adults. Some transformations are inspirational such as Shalom Blac’s in which she talks about accepting the scars that are all over her face, but also demonstrates how makeup can make them disappear. Shalom has almost five million views on her “POWER OF MAKEUP” video, and has been labelled “inspirational” by the media. Shalom Blac’s video can be watched here and the media article labelling her as “inspirational” can be viewed here. Others, such as PatrickStarrr, send a powerful message that “It’s okay to be yourself.” Unlike a traditional interpretation of that statement, Patrick is communicating that it is okay to be the self that you construct, on any given day. Patrick also has over four million views on his video which can be watched here. During her transformation, Nikkie points out each feature of her face that she does not like and demonstrates how she can change it using makeup. Nikkie’s video is primarily a tutorial, educating viewers on different makeup techniques that can manipulate the appearance of their natural features into how they would like them to appear. These techniques are also reproduced and embodied through the various contributors to the movement. Thus the tutorial is an educational tool enabling others to use makeup for their own self representations (see Paul A. Soukup for an overview of YouTube as an educational tool). A feminist perspective may deconstruct the empowering, educational intentions of Nikkie’s video, insisting that conceptions of beauty are a social construct (Travis, Meginnis, and Bardari) and should not be re-enforced by encouraging women (and men) to use make-up to feel good. However, this sort of discourse does not appear in the movement, and this paper seeks to analyse the movement as its contributors frame and present it. Rather, “the power of makeup” movement falls within a postfeminist framework celebrating choice, femininity, independence, and the individual construction of modern identity (McRobbie; Butler; Beck, Giddens and Lash). Postfeminism embraces postmodern notions of identity in which individuals are “called up to invent their own structures” (McRobbie 260). Through institutions such as education young women have “become more independent and able,” and “‘dis-embedded’ from communities where gender roles were fixed” (McRobbie 260). Angela McRobbie attributes this to the work of scholars such as Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck and their emphasis on individualisation and reflexive modernisation. These scholars take a Foucauldian approach to identity construction in the modern age, where the individual must choose their own structures “internally and individualistically” (260), engaging in an ongoing process of self-monitoring and self-improvement, and resulting in the current self-help culture (McRobbie). In addition to being an educational and constructive tool, Nikkie’s video is also an exercise in self-branding and self-promotion(see Marwick; Duffy and Hund; and van Nuenen for scholarship on self-branding). Through her ongoing presence on YouTube, presenting this video in conjunction with her other tutorials, Nikkie is establishing herself as a beauty vlogger/guru. Nikkie lists all of the products that she uses in her transformation below her video with links to where people can buy them. She also lists her social media accounts, ways that people can connect with her, and other videos that people might be interested in watching. There are also prompts to subscribe, both during her video and in the description bar below her video. Nikkie’s transformation is both an ongoing endeavour to create her image and public persona as a beauty vlogger, and a physical transformation on camera. There is also a third transformation that takes place because her vlog is in the public sphere and consequently mobilises a movement. The transformation is of the way people talk about and eventually perceive makeup. Nikkie’s video aims to end makeup shaming and promote makeup as an empowering tool. With each recreation of her video, with each Instagram photo featuring the transformation, and with each mainstream media article featuring the movement, #thepowerofmakeup movement community are transforming the image of the made-up girl—transforming the association of makeup with presenting an inauthentic identity—in society. ConclusionThe “The Power of MAKEUP!” movement, started by NikkieTutorials, demonstrates one way in which people are using YouTube as a transformative tool, and mirror, to document, construct, and present their identity online, using makeup. Through their online transformation the members of the movement not only engage in a process of constructing and presenting their identity, but they form communities who share a love of makeup and its transformative potential. By embodying Nikkie’s original message to rid makeup shaming and transform the self into a desired identity, the movement re-enforces the “made-up” image of the self as real and authentic, and challenges conceptions that the “made-up” image is “fake” and inauthentic. Ultimately, this case study explores YouTube as a site that allows individuals to play with, construct, and present their identity. YouTube is a tool with which, and a space in which, people can transform themselves, and in doing so create communities which can work together to publicly challenge social norms.References Beck, Ulrich, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash. Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order. Cambridge, England: Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers, 1994. Bolter, Jay David. "Virtual Reality and the Redefinition of Self." Communication and Cyberspace: Social Interaction in an Electronic Environment. Eds. Ronald L. 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Abstract:

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

Abstract:

Perfume is a Japanese “techno-pop” idol trio formed in 2000 consisting of three women–Ayano Omoto, Yuka Kashino, and Ayaka Nishiwaki. Since 2007, when one of their songs was selected for a recycling awareness campaign by Japan's national public broadcaster, Perfume has been a consistent fixture in the Japanese pop music charts. They have been involved in the full gamut of typical idol activities, from television and radio shows to commercials for clothing brands, candy, and drinks. Their success reflects Japanese pop culture's long-standing obsession with pop idols, who once breaking into the mainstream, become ubiquitous cross-media presences. Perfume’s fame in Japan is due in large part to their masterful performance of traditional female idol roles, through which they assume the kaleidoscopic positions of daughter, sister, platonic friend, and heterosexual romantic partner depending on the standpoint of the beholder. In the lyrical content of their songs, they play the various parts of the cute but shy girl who loves from a distance, the strong compatriot that pushes the listener to keep striving for their dreams, and the kindred spirit with whom the listener can face life's ordinary challenges. Like other successful idols, their extensive lines of Perfume-branded merchandise and product endorsements make the exercise of consumer spending power by their fans a vehicle for them to approach the ideals and experiences that Perfume embodies. Yet, Perfume's videos, music, and stage performances are also replete with subversive images of machines, virtual cities and landscapes, and computer generated apparitions. In their works, the traditional idol as an object of consumer desire co-exists with images of the fragmentation of identity, distrust in the world and the senses, and the desire to escape from illusion, all presented in terms of encounters with technology. In what their fans call the "Near Future Trilogy", a set of three singles released soon after their major label debut (2005-06), lyrics refer to the artificiality and transience of virtual worlds ("Nothing I see or touch has any reality" from "Electro-World," or "I want to escape. I want to destroy this city created by immaculate computation" from "Computer City"). In their later work, explicit lyrical references to virtual worlds and machines largely disappear, but they are replaced with images and bodily performances of Perfume with robotic machinery and electronic information. Perfume is an idol group augmented by technology. In this paper, I explore the significance of these images of technological augmentation of the human body in the work of Perfume. I suggest that the ways these bodily encounters of the human body and technology are articulated in their work reflect broader social and economic anxieties and hopes in Japan. I focus in the first section of this paper on describing some of the recurring technological motifs in their works. Next, I show how their recent work is an experiment with the emergent possibilities of human-technology relationships for imagining Japan's future development. Not only in their visual and performance style, but in their modes of engagement with their fans through new media, I suggest that Perfume itself is attempting to seek out new forms of value creation, which hold the promise of pushing Japan out of the extended economic and social stagnation of its 1990s post-bubble "Lost Decade,” particularly by articulating how they connect with the world. The idol's technologically augmented body becomes both icon and experiment for rethinking Japan and staking out a new global position for it. Though I have referred above to Perfume as its three members, I also use the term to signify the broader group of managers and collaborating artists that surrounds them. Perfume is a creation of corporate media companies and the output of development institutions designed to train multi-talented entertainers from a young age. In addition to the three women who form the public face of Perfume, main figures include music producer Yasutaka Nakata, producer and choreographer MIKIKO, and more recently, the new media artist Daito Manabe and his company, Rhizomatiks. Though Perfume very rarely appear on stage or in their videos with any other identifiable human performers, every production is an effort involving dozens of professional staff. In this respect, Perfume is a very conventional pop idol unit. The attraction of these idols for their fans is not primarily their originality, creativity, or musicality, but their professionalism and image as striving servants (Yano 336). Idols are beloved because they "are well-polished, are trained to sing and act, maintain the mask of stardom, and are extremely skillful at entertaining the audience" (Iwabuchi 561). Moreover, their charisma is based on a relationship of omoiyari or mutual empathy and service. As Christine Yano has argued for Japanese Enka music, the singer must maintain the image of service to his or her fans and reach out to them as if engaged in a personal relationship with each (337). Fans reciprocate by caring for the singer, and making his or her needs their own, not the least of which are financial. The omoiyari relationship of mutual empathy and care is essential to the singer’s charismatic appeal (Yano 347). Thus it does not matter to their fans that Perfume do not play their own instruments or write their own songs. These are jobs for other professionals. However, mirroring the role of the employee in the Japanese company-as-family (see Kondo), their devotion to their jobs as entertainers, and their care and respect for their fans must be evident at all times. The tarnishing of this image, for instance through revelations of underage smoking or drinking, can be fatal, and has resulted in banishment from the media spotlight for some former stars. A large part of Japanese stars' conventional appeal is based on their appearance as devoted workers, consummate professionals, and partners in mutual empathy. As charismatic figures that exchange cultural ideals for fans’ disposable income, it is not surprising that many authors have tied the emergence of the pop idol to the height of Japan's economic prosperity in the 1970s and 1980s, when the social contract between labor and corporations that provided both lifelong employment and social identity had yet to be seriously threatened. Aoyagi suggests (82) that the idol system is tied to post-war consumerism and the increased importance of young adults, particularly women, as consumers. As this correlation between the health of idols and the economy might imply, there is a strong popular connection between concerns of social fission and discontent and economic stagnation. Koichi Iwabuchi writes that Japanese media accounts in the 1990s connected the health of the idol system to the "vigor of society" (555). As Iwabuchi describes, some Japanese fans have looked for their idols abroad in places such as Hong Kong, with a sense of nostalgia for a kind of stardom that has waned in Japan and because of "a deep sense of disillusionment and discontent with Japanese society" (Iwabuchi 561) following the collapse of Japan's bubble economy in the early 1990s. In reaction to the same conditions, some Japanese idols have attempted to exploit this nostalgia. During a brief period of fin-de-siècle optimism that coincided with neoliberal structural reforms under the government of Junichiro Koizumi, Morning Musume, the most popular female idol group at the time, had a hit single entitled "Love Machine" that ended the 1990s in Japan. The song's lyrics tie together dreams of life-long employment, romantic love, stable traditional families, and national resurgence, linking Japan's prosperity in the world at large to its internal social, emotional, and economic health. The song’s chorus declares, "The world will be envious of Japan's future!", although that future still has yet to materialize. In its place has appeared the "near-future" imaginary of Perfume. As mentioned above, the lyrics of some of their early songs referenced illusory virtual worlds that need to be destroyed or transcended. In their later works, these themes are continued in images of the bodies of the three performers augmented by technology in various ways, depicting the performers themselves as robots. Images of the three performers as robots are first introduced in the music video for their single "Secret Secret" (2007). At the outset of the video, three mannequins resembling Perfume are frozen on a futuristic TV soundstage being dressed by masked attendants who march off screen in lock step. The camera fades in and out, and the mannequins are replaced with the human members frozen in the same poses. Other attendants raise pieces of chocolate-covered ice cream (the music video also served as an advertisement for the ice cream) to the performers' mouths, which when consumed, activate them, launching them into a dance consisting of stilted, mechanical steps, and orthogonal arm positions. Later, one of the performers falls on stairs and appears to malfunction, becoming frozen in place until she receives another piece of ice cream. They are later more explicitly made into robots in the video for "Spring of Life" (2012), in which each of the three members are shown with sections of skin lifted back to reveal shiny, metallic parts inside. Throughout this video, their backs are connected to coiled cables hanging from the ceiling, which serve as a further visual sign of their robotic characters. In the same video, they are also shown in states of distress, each sitting on the floor with parts exposed, limbs rigid and performing repetitive motions, as though their control systems have failed. In their live shows, themes of augmentation are much more apparent. At a 2010 performance at the Tokyo Dome, which was awarded the jury selection prize in the 15th Japan Media Arts Festival by the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs, the centerpiece was a special performance entitled "Perfume no Okite" or "The Laws of Perfume." Like "Secret Secret," the performance begins with the emergence of three mannequins posed at the center of the stadium. During the introductory sequence, the members rise out of a different stage to the side. They begin to dance, synchronized to massively magnified, computer generated projections of themselves. The projections fluctuate between photorealistic representations of each member and ghostly CG figures consisting of oscillating lines and shimmering particles that perform the same movements. At the midpoint, the members each face their own images, and state their names and dates of birth before uttering a series of commands: "The right hand and right leg are together. The height of the hands must be precise. Check the motion of the fingers. The movement of the legs must be smooth. The palms of the hands must be here." With each command, the members move their own bodies mechanically, mirrored by the CG figures. After more dancing with their avatars, the performance ends with Perfume slowly lowered down on the platform at the center of the stage, frozen in the same poses and positions as the mannequins, which have now disappeared. These performances cleverly use images of robotic machinery in order to subvert Perfume's idol personas. The robotic augmentations are portrayed as vectors for control by some unseen external party, and each of the members must have their life injected into them through cables, ice cream, or external command, before they can begin to dance and sing as pop idols. Pop idols have always been manufactured products, but through such technological imagery Perfume make their own artificiality explicit, revealing to the audience that it is not the performers they love, but the emergent and contingently human forms of a social, technological, and commercial system that they desire. In this way, these images subvert the performers' charisma and idol fans' own feelings of adoration, revealing the premise of the idol system to have been manufactured to manipulate consumer affect and desire. If, as Iwabuchi suggests, some fans of idols are attracted to their stars by a sense of nostalgia for an age of economic prosperity, then Perfume's robotic augmentations offer a reflexive critique of this industrial form. In "The Laws of Perfume", the commands that comport their bodies may be stated in their own voices, yet they issue not from the members themselves, but their magnified and processed avatars. It is Perfume the commercial entity speaking. The malfunctioning bodies of Perfume depicted in "Secret Secret" and "Spring of Life" do not detract from their charisma as idols as an incident of public drunkenness might, because the represented breakdowns in their performances are linked not to the moral purity or professionalism of the humans, but to failures of the technological and economic systems that have supported them. If idols of a past age were defined by their seamless and idealized personas as entertainers and employees, then it is fitting that in an age of much greater economic and social uncertainty that they should acknowledge the cracks in the social and commercial mechanisms from which their carefully designed personas emerge. In these videos and performances, the visual trope of technological body augmentation serves as a means for representing both the dependence of the idol persona on consumer capitalism, and the fracturing of that system. However, they do not provide an answer to the question of what might lie beyond the fracturing. The only suggestions provided are the disappearance of that world, as in the end of "Computer City," or in the reproduction of the same structure, as when the members of Perfume become mannequins in "The Laws of Perfume" and "Secret Secret." Interestingly, it was with Perfume's management's decision to switch record labels and market Perfume to an international audience that Perfume became newly augmented, and a suggestion of an answer became visible. Perfume began their international push in 2012 with the release of a compilation album, "Love the World," and live shows and new media works in Asia and Europe. The album made their music available for purchase outside of Japan for the first time. Its cover depicts three posed figures computer rendered as clouds of colored dots produced from 3D scans of the members. The same scans were used to create 3D-printed plastic figures, whose fabrication process is shown in the Japanese television ad for the album. The robotic images of bodily augmentation have been replaced by a more powerful form of augmentation–digital information. The website which accompanied their international debut received the Grand Prix of the 17th Japan Media Arts Prize. Developed by Daito Manabe and Rhizomatiks, visitors to the Perfume Global website were greeted by a video of three figures composed of pulsating clouds of triangles, dancing to a heavy, glitch-laden electronic track produced by Nakata. Behind them, dozens of tweets about Perfume collected in real-time scroll across the background. Controls to the side let visitors change not only the volume of the music, but also the angle of their perspective, and the number and responsiveness of the pulsating polygons. The citation for the site's prize refers to the innovative participatory features of the website. Motion capture data from Perfume, music, and programming examples used to render the digital performance were made available for free to visitors, who were encouraged to create their own versions. This resulted in hundreds of fan-produced videos showing various figures, from animals and cartoon characters to swooshing multi-colored lines, dancing the same routine. Several of these were selected to be featured on the website, and were later integrated into the stage performance of the piece during Perfume's Asia tour. A later project extended this idea in a different direction, letting website visitors paint animations on computer representations of the members, and use a simple programming language to control the images. Many of these user creations were integrated into Perfume's 2013 performance at the Cannes Lions International Festival as advertising. Their Cannes performance begins with rapidly shifting computer graphics projected onto their costumes as they speak in unison, as though they are visitors from another realm: "We are Perfume. We have come. Japan is far to the east. To encounter the world, the three of us and everyone stand before you: to connect you with Japan, and to communicate with you, the world." The user-contributed designs were projected on to the members' costumes as they danced. This new mode of augmentation–through information rather than machinery–shows Perfume to be more than a representation of Japan's socio-economic transitions, but a live experiment in effecting these transitions. In their international performances, their bodies are synthesized in real-time from the performers' motions and the informatic layer generated from tweets and user-generated creations. This creates the conditions for fans to inscribe their own marks on to Perfume, transforming the emotional engagement between fan and idol into a technological linkage through which the idols’ bodies can be modified. Perfume’s augmented bodies are not just seen and desired, but made by their fans. The value added by this new mode of connection is imagined as the critical difference needed to transform Perfume from a local Japanese idol group into an entity capable of moving around the world, embodying the promise of a new global position for Japan enabled through information. In Perfume, augmentation suggests a possible answer to Japan’s economic stagnation and social fragmentation. It points past a longing for the past towards new values produced in encounters with the world beyond Japan. Augmentations newly connect Perfume and Japan with the world economically and culturally. At the same time, a vision of Japan emerges, more mobile, flexible, and connected perhaps, yet one that attempts to keep Japan a distinct entity in the world. Bodily augmentations, in media representations and as technological practices, do more than figuratively and materially link silicon and metal with flesh. They mark the interface of the body and technology as a site of transnational connection, where borders between the nation and what lies outside are made References Aoyagi, Hiroshi. Islands of Eight Million Smiles: Idol Performance and Symbolic Production in Contemporary Japan. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005. Iwabuchi, Koichi. "Nostalgia for a (Different) Asian Modernity: Media Consumption of "Asia" in Japan." positions: east asia cultures critique 10.3 (2002): 547-573. Kondo, Dorinne K. Crafting Selves: Power, Gender and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Morning Musume. “Morning Musume ‘Love Machine’ (MV).” 15 Oct. 2010. 4 Dec. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6A7j6eryPV4›. Perfume. “[HD] Perfume Performance Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.” 20 June 2013. 11 Nov. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gI0x5vA7fLo›. ———. “[SPOT] Perfume Global Compilation “LOVE THE WORLD.”” 11 Sep. 2012. 11 Nov. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28SUmWDztxI›. ———. “Computer City.” 18 June 2013. 10 Oct. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOXGKTrsRNg›. ———. “Electro World.” 18 June 2013. 10 Oct. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zh0ouiYIZc›. ———. “Perfume no Okite.” 8 May 2011. 10 Oct. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EjOistJABM›. ———. “Perfume Official Global Website.” 2012. 11 Nov. 2013 ‹http://perfume-global.com/project.html›. ———. “Secret Secret.” 18 Jan. 2012. 10 Oct. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=birLzegOHyU›. ———. “Spring of Life.” 18 June 2013. 10 Oct. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PtvnaEo9-0›. Yano, Christine. "Charisma's Realm: Fandom in Japan." Ethnology 36.4 (1997): 335-49.