Journal articles: 'Sensibility – everyday life' – Grafiati (2024)

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Purpose All scholarly writing must straddle the universal and the particular. The universal is commonly addressed in terms of theoretical frameworks and analytical models, supported by the objectivity norm that has guided scientific inquiry since its inception. The particularities, on the other hand, the details and the nuts and bolts of everyday life and organizational reality, are oftentimes associated with subjectivity and therefore raise concern regarding the scholar’s preferences and convictions. In order to better balance objectivity and subjectivity in the organization studies literature, it is important to pay attention to how the choice of literary style may apprehend and convey organizational realities. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach Discussing the role of literature, and the work of the American short-story writer and poet Raymond Carver, more specifically, as a domain wherein language resonates with the pace and breathing of everyday life, it is suggested that an increased level of “lyrical sensibility” in scholarly vocabularies is conducive to more nuanced accounts of organizational practices. To substantiate Carver’s argument, ethnographies of occupational work is referenced and compared to Carver’s work. Findings Carver’s emphasis on writing stories and dialogs that do not hide behind jargon, nor impose unnecessary literary experiments or heavy-handed literary vocabularies on texts, is exemplary to organization researchers. In particular, Carver emphasizes the role of materiality and objects in his stories, the understated tension and concealed conflicts in social situations and relations, and points at how individuals interpret situations wherein they are located; in many cases, leading to apathy and indolence as the protagonists cannot consider meaningful ways to handle perceived issues or to move along. Carver’s emphasis on mundane experience is therefore conducive to a wider recognition of subjectivity in organization studies. Originality/value The paper broadens the discussion about organization studies writing by introducing the work of Raymond Carver, a seminal author only sparsely featured in organization and management studies.

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AbstractThis essay examines the experience of corruption as an unavoidable and self-destructive dynamic of everyday life in post-crisis Argentina. Embedded in both everyday practices and popular evaluations of those practices, corruption in this context of neoliberal crisis operated as a folk category of socio-moral critique much like witchcraft does in some other settings, for it named a cannibalistic logic that imperiled the very framework of sociality. In order to grasp the reflexive pragmatics of this category, the essay attends first to the conceptual, then to the ethnographic, and finally to the historical dimensions of its practical life. Moving across these three dimensions, it argues that corruption indexed a very particular moral sensibility, marked by the sense of exhausted historical possibilities and inevitable national crisis.

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Perhaps the most renowned leftist writer of late colonial Korea, Kim Namch'ŏn left a complex body of work that has so far defied an encompassing interpretation. On the one hand, in his theoretical writings, Kim consistently advocated realism as his aesthetic principle. On the other hand, within his fictional writings, Kim also displayed an antithetical interest in the fragmentary scenes of modern life, which he often depicted through experimental techniques of a modernist aesthetic sensibility. In this essay, an attempt is made to provide a unified account of Kim's works. Special attention is given to Kim's early theorization of the everyday as a proper literary space for a materialist critique of society. This focus on everyday life, it is argued, enabled Kim to critique both the teleological outlook of dogmatic socialism and the utopian vision of pan-Asianism, but it did not shelter him from a fascination with the daily spectacles of urban modernity.

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The aesthetic analysis of everyday life has developed an important body of work whose significance extends beyond the academy. Because of its ubiquity in experience, aesthetic sensibility has many manifestations, both overt and concealed. This paper examines some largely hidden ways in which taste and aesthetic judgment, which are manifested in sense experience, have been subtly appropriated and exploited. I identify and describe such procedures as the cooptation (or appropriation) of aesthetic sensibility, a phenomenon that has consequences damaging to health, to society, and to environment. These practices are a form of negative aesthetics that distorts and manipulates sensible experience in the interest of mass marketing and political control. Such practices have great ethical significance and carry social and political implications that suggest another role for aesthetics, a critical one: aesthetics as an instrument of emancipation in social analysis and political criticism.

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This essay argues for Walt Whitman's significance to contemporary democratic theory, neither as a theorist of moral or aesthetic individualism nor as a theorist of communitarian nationalism, but as a theorist of the democratic sublime. Whitman's account of “aesthetic democracy” emphasizes the affective and autopoetic dimensions of political life. For Whitman, popular attachment to democracy requires an aesthetic component, and he aimed to enact the required reconfiguration of popular sensibility through a poetic depiction of the people as themselves a sublimely poetic, world-making power. Through his poetic translation of the vox populi, Whitman hoped to engender a robustly transformative democratic politics. He found the resources for political regeneration in the poetics of everyday citizenship, in the democratic potentials of ordinary life.

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Nikolai Evreinov (1870–1953) was a Russian playwright, director, and theorist of the theatre who played a leading part in the modernist movement of Russian theatre. Evreinov's 1911 monodrama The Theatre of the Soul(V kulisakh dushi) was staged by the Crooked Mirror theatre in St Petersburg in 1912. It was also performed in London (1915) and Rome (1929), and inspired Man Ray to create his aerograph The Theatre of the Soul (1917). In this article Alexandra Smith links Evreinov's play to Russian modernist thought shaped by the atmosphere of crisis associated with the Russo–Japanese War and the first Russian Revolution. It demonstrates that Edith Craig's production of Evreinov's play suggests that the philosophy of theatricalization of everyday life might enable modern subjects to overcome the fragmentation of modern society. Craig's use of the montage-like techniques of Evreinov's play prefigures cinematographic experiments of the 1920s and Marinetti's notion of synthetic theatre. Alexandra Smith is a Reader in Russian Studies at the University of Edinburgh and is the author of The Song of the Mockingbird: Pushkin in the Works of Marina Tsvetaeva (1994) and Montaging Pushkin: Pushkin and Visions of Modernity in Russian Twentieth-Century Poetry (2006), as well as numerous articles on Russian literature and culture.

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The article seeks to function as a cluster of reminders of the rich, robust and subtle place of ‘our’ concept of beauty—hence of its contrasts. It illustrates this through everyday life examples as well as through criticism of writings that, in apparent embarrassment about using the idea, seek to supplant it with something less suspect. The article seeks to show the concept of beauty at work not only in art but, as Plato urged, in human action and reaction at all levels, as well of course in nature. I try to sketch an epistemology of sensibility and a logic of beauty as a more-or-less topic neutral concept attaching to whole, hence individual and perhaps unique situations.

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The article explores the affective consequences of the new mode of instant access to enormous levels of musical recordings in digital format. It is suggested that this “musical superabundance” might weaken the individual’s ability to be affected by music in everyday life, while at the same time leading to a renewed interest in collective experience, in ways which are not limited to established notions of musical “liveness”. According to a theory of affect influenced by Spinoza, what is at stake is the capacity of the body to be affected by music. The article proposes that a renegotiated relationship between collective and individual modes of experiencing music can be conceptualized with help of Spinoza’s distinction between two kinds of affections: actions and passions. After scrutinizing the interface of hardware like Apple’s Ipod and online services like Spotify, the article proceeds by discussing three musical practices which can all be understood as responses to the superabundance of musical recordings: (1) the ascetic practice of “No Music Day”; (2) the revival of cassette culture; (3) the “bass materialism” associated with the music known as dubstep. While none of these approaches provide any solution to the problem of abundance, they can still be understood as attempts to cultivate a “postdigital sensibility”. The article tries to conceptualize the postdigital in a way that transcends the narrower notion of “post-digital aesthetics” that has recently been gaining popularity. Finally, it is argued that such a sensibility has a political significance in its potential to subvert the contemporary processes of commodification.

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The Israeli law obliges the construction of bomb shelters as integrated rooms within every residential unit throughout the country. Based on 12 months of fieldwork and extensive interviews with both Jewish–Israeli and Arab–Palestinian citizens of Israel, we argue that the mundane presence and use of these everyday-cum-security spaces has produced a new civilian sensibility towards securitization, which we call ‘ routinergency’: the naturalization of security emergency as intrinsic to the flow of routine life. We demonstrate that while the privatization of domestic securitization affords reliable protection to every citizen, routinergency also excludes Arab–Palestinians from the ethnonational boundaries that still inform the constitution of collective identities in Israel. Yet, as embodied practice, routinergency also enables access to a universal form of citizenship in Israel, which is premised on socioeconomic criticism of Zionist discourse. We use the topological metaphor of a Mobius strip to discuss how mamad rooms accentuate the contemporary tension in Israel between these ethnonational and neoliberal vectors of citizenship.

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The scientific consciousness which broke with the holistic perception of life is credited with "unweaving the rainbow," or disenchanting the world. No longer perceived as sacred, the non-human world of plants and animals became a site of struggle for domination and mastery in implementing humankind's supposedly divine mandate to subdue the earth. The nature poetry of Denise Levertov is an attempt to reverse this trend, reaffirm the sense of wonder inherent in the world around us, and reclaim some "holy presence" for the modern sensibility. Her exploratory poetics witnesses to a sense of relationship existing between all creatures, both human and non-human. This article traces Levertov's "transactions with nature" and her evolving spirituality, inscribing her poetry within the space of alternative—or romantic—modernity, one that dismantles the separation paradigm. My intention throughout was to trace the way to a religiously defined faith of a person raised in the modernist climate of suspicion, but keenly attentive to spiritual implications of beauty and open to the epiphanies of everyday.

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AbstractThe idea of nature's sacrality, contrasting starkly with industrial modernity's overwhelmingly instrumental valuation of non-human nature, visibly inform philosophical positions such as deep ecology and Gaia theory. But at a more unspoken level they can also be seen as suffusing a wider societal sensibility, evident not least in popular values regarding nature. But, granted that many people would ascribe such a value to nature, how are such beliefs embodied in their lives? An attention to the theological or cosmological level can only take us so far in understanding the dynamics of culture; we need also to attend to questions of practice, ritual, community and relationship, for it is through such elements that more abstract ideas about humanity's place in the universe are given both support and expression. It is in this spirit of inquiry that this paper proceeds, arguing that religious forms of action and corporateness characteristic of monastic, sectarian, churchly, and folk religiosity have shaped the way that contemporary environmental values are embodied in the practices and experience of everyday life.

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In her article 'Othering Time: Strategies of Attunement to Non-Human Temporalities,' art curator and researcher in the field of art and ecology Alice Smits delves into artistic practices that tune into deep time and non-human time zones. Starting from the viewpoint that our current ecological crisis is in need of developing an ethics of care towards generations far into the future and life forms extremely different to ours, she discusses art and aesthetic knowledge as particularly well suited for experimentation with new stories and sensibilities about our place in time. Making use of geologist Marcia Bjornerud's concept of 'timefulness,' the article focuses on several art projects by Rachel Sussman, Katie Paterson and Špela Petrič, whose works engage in developing a more time-literate sensibility that aims to understand how our everyday lives are shaped by processes that vastly predate us. Underlining changing ways of understanding of time and space by opening up to what is referred to in the title as 'othering time,' art opens up as a discourse in its own right that can interrogate the sciences as a specific epistemological framework that is in need of revision. The author concludes with a few references to how these artistic practices change her own curatorial practice.

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This paper explores the embedding of data producing technologies in people's everyday lives and practices. It traces how repeated encounters with digital data operate to naturalise these entities, while often blindsiding their agentive properties and the ways they get implicated in processes of exploitation and governance. I propose and develop the notion of ‘data doxa’ to conceptualise the way in which digital data – and the devices and platforms that stage data – have come to be perceived in Western societies as normal, necessary and enabling. The ‘data doxa’ concept also accentuates the enculturation of many individuals into a data sharing habitus which frames digital technologies in simplistic terms as (a) panaceas for the problems associated with contemporary life, (b) figures of progress and convenience, and (c) mediums of knowledge, pleasure and identity. I suggest that three types of data-based relations contribute to the formation of this doxic sensibility: fetishisation, habit and enchantment. Each of these relations come to mediate public understandings of digital devices and the data they generate, obscuring the multifaceted nature and hidden depths of data and their propensity to double up as technologies of exposure and discipline. As a result of this situation, imaginative educational programs and revamped regulatory frameworks are urgently needed to inform individuals about the contribution of data to the leveraging of value and power in today's digital economies, but also to protect them from experiencing data-based harms.

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ABSTRACT The validity and applicability of tactile battery tests for the diagnosis and medical follow-up of patients with Alzheimer’s disease and other dementia syndromes do not have their usefulness well understood in clinical practice. While haptic abilities in older individuals receive less attention, in earlier stages of human life they are well focused on. There are even fewer studies on tactile memory, including episodic memory of demented individuals with or without sensorial limitations. The applicability of a new haptic memory battery was evaluated in patients with Alzheimer’s disease with mild or moderate commitment. Objective: The aim of this study is to apply a battery based on tactile perception, recognition, and recollection of everyday objects in patients with Alzheimer’s disease, testing tactile delayed recall memory discrimination and late recognition to compare validated visual and verbal tests. Methods: Tactile-, visual-, and verbal-based memory performance was registered in 21 patients diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Results: Except for tactile identification, it showed that there was a close relationship between the three sensory modalities of memory, with an apparent better performance of tactile incidental memory and recognition compared with the test with pictures. Conclusions: The haptic evaluation of memory demonstrated applicability in the evaluation of memory dysfunction in patients with Alzheimer’s disease. Further studies are needed to establish the sensibility and specificity of the proposed test that had a small sample size and many limitations.

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Abstract In this article I compare a set of early and mid-twentieth-century print publications supportive of the 'new' art teaching in schools. The educator Marion Richardson's reflections on her use of pattern in the classroom in Art and the Child (1948) is considered alongside publications by artist-teachers such as Robin Tanner's Children's Work in Block Printing (1936) and Gwen White's A World of Pattern (1957). The monthly publication Art and Craft Education first published in 1936 was a magazine for teachers of art which showcased the work being done in schools around Britain that were involved in the 'new' art instruction. Pattern-making in schools in these publications is positioned as a modular and constructivist form of learning encouraging multisensory and exploratory ways of looking at and making sense of the world. Ackerman (2004) outlining theories of constructivist models for learning stresses the need for children to be 'builders of their own cognitive tools', and I argue that the exploration of pattern offers multiple strategies for the children to explore their phenomenological experience of the world. Pattern-making is also presented as a democratic form of creativity and a means of introducing the concept of art into everyday life, inculcating an appreciation of well-made things in daily life. I argue that through the lens of this pedagogic print culture with this emphasis on the benefits of teaching pattern-making in schools a nostalgic and pastoral English arts and crafts sensibility can be seen meeting a modernist cultural agenda via psychological theories of child development, creating a distinctively egalitarian, child-centred and craft-led model for learning. Revisiting this moment in childrens' education in Britain offers a timely insight into alternatives to the current educational landscape, with its emphasis on measuring pupil's achievement and downgrading of creative subjects in the school curriculum.

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The aim of the study was self-regulation of behavior and other psychological aspects of adaptive-compensatory mechanisms in patients with schizophrenia and myasthenia, in comparison with a group of healthy subjects.Materials and methods. The study involved 91 people: patients with schizophrenia (N=30); patients with moderate and severe myasthenia gravis (N=31); comparison group — conditionally healthy people (N=30). The participants were examined by experimental psychological methods: «The style of self-regulation of behavior», «Test of life-meaning orientations», «Semantic time differential».Results. Differences in the general level of self-regulation of behavior and its particular aspects in patients with schizophrenia and healthy were revealed, patients with myasthenia gravis don’t show differences from patients with schizophrenia and the control group. In terms of the general meaningfulness of life, patients with schizophrenia differ from healthy ones, while they don’t differ from those suffering from myasthenia gravis, which don’t have differences with the comparison group. In external internality, chronically ill patients don’t reveal differences, but differ from healthy ones. In the psychological perception of the present, patients with schizophrenia and myasthenia differ from healthy ones in assessing its activity and size. Patients with schizophrenia reveal differences with healthy ones in its emotional coloration and structure, not differing from those suffering from myasthenia gravis, which don’t show differences with the control group. Patients with schizophrenia differ from healthy patients in the sensibility of the future, but don’t differ from patients with myasthenia gravis who don’t reveal differences with healthy individuals.Conclusions. The targets of psychocorrectional effects are indicated. For patients with schizophrenia — the development of skills for differentiation and impulse control, behavioral flexibility and correlation of results with the original goals. For patients with myasthenia gravis — reliance on available classes in the cognitive and spiritual spheres that compensate for the appearance of physical limitations. Common to both nosologies are measures that increase the meaningfulness of life, highlighting the spheres of influence on the disease, rational acceptance of responsibility for what is happening. The skills to enjoy everyday activities are important.

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Abstract Among the many genres of visual art to emerge in the wake of computerisation, the subset of generative or algorithmic art known as complexism seems uniquely keyed to the social and technological mainsprings of everyday life in the twenty-first century. Complexism typically deploys computer algorithms to demonstrate how complex phenomena can emerge through the reiterative enactment of simple rulesets. The light and sound installations and the videos that complexist artists produce, alongside the discourses surrounding the works, stand out as singularly contemporary, not necessarily for their exploitation of now-ubiquitous telematic tools and techniques, but for their deep commitment to the trailblazing problems, methods, and hypotheses set out by the new science of complexity. Practitioners of and commentators on complexism (the work and writings of Philip Galanter feature most prominently here) persistently invoke this booming interdisciplinary field of complexity research. Against this trend, I argue that for all the leverage the tools and terms of complexity science supply to complexist art, the concept of complexity itself remains surprisingly vague and shorn of any historical sensibility. One preliminary aim of this essay is to bring more theoretical rigour to the artists’ use of this concept by beginning to fill in the missing backstory. From there, I move to complicate this genealogy by introducing a somewhat controversial figure-the social theorist, political economist, and legal philosopher Friedrich Hayek, who had posited similar problems concerning the emergence and maintenance of complex, self-organized systems as early as the 1930s, and whose theoretical solutions to these problems were instrumental to what historians and sociologists have subsequently described as capitalism’s late “neoliberal turn.”

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Just after the end of the Great War Miloš Crnjanski wrote a poem dedicated to Gavrilo Princip, the assassin of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, in Sarajevo, on 28 June 1914. The title of the poem is “A Tribute to Princip” (“Spomen Principu”), and it was first published in Crnjanski’s early book of poetry Lyrics of Ithaca (Lirika Itake, 1919). Forty years later Crnjanski wrote a commentary on the poem, a sort of its prose paraphrase, and entitled it “On the Poem about Princip” (“Uz pesmu o Principu”); it was published in his Commentaries on Lyrics of Ithaca (Komentari uz Liriku Itake, 1959). Although by no means as significant as his famous poem “Sumatra”, and equally famous “Explanation of Sumatra”, that is considered a kind of Crnjanski’s personal poetic manifesto, as well as a poetic manifesto of Serbian modernism in general, “A Tribute to Princip” and its explanation represent an equally important testimony to Crnjanski’s poetic sensibility and his literary inspiration. The subject of the poem, the manner of poetic expression, on the one side, and the prose style of its commentary, on the other, clearly indicate what was considered by young Crnjanski the main role of the new, modern poetry he was advocating for: the break with the tradition, the rejection of the old and no longer productive poetic and national myths, and the affirmation of the new role of poetry in the everyday life. Therefore, opposing the standard interpretation of the poem, in this paper I argue that “A Tribute to Princip” is not a political poem but a “poem about poem”, which we could read as metapoetry or a poetry poem, providing that we apply the term with a little more freedom.

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This essay studies an often overlooked and understudied topic – the survival of Shanghai vernacular longtang (alleyway house) urbanite culture in the Mao era (1949-1976). It discovers how bourgeois sentiments embodied by the Shanghai national bourgeoisie were aspired to and inherited by the longtang petty urbanites (xiaoshimin) and their quotidian practices of Shanghai-styled (haipai) everyday life. By delving into archives, newspapers, and urban cultural studies, the essay particularly examines how urbanite culture was revitalized by the mode of Shanghai everyday living and how it resiliently co-existed with socialist revolutionary culture through a type of distinctive material culture particularly manifested in housing and food. It investigates the dialectical and conflictual relationship between the discourse of revolution and that of everyday life. It challenges the problematic incompleteness of Socialist Transformation project and searches for a new understanding of historical viability and sustainability of Chinese socialism, as Chinese socialism did not succeed in eradicating bourgeois sensibility as an oppositional historical force in Shanghai in the Mao era. In this context, the essay argues that Shanghai maintained a privileged urban center while its urbanite culture persisted by means of self-preservation of the longtang everyday life and fetishized bourgeois materialism and aspirations under Maoist Chinese socialism.

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Solar crosses were symbolic markers that once punctuated the rolling pathways at the foot of the French Pyrenees. For Henri Lefebvre, these “crucified suns” came to symbolize a number of time-tested traditions that could revitalize everyday life in the modern world. His efforts to resurrect the archaic confronted two contemporary contexts: the hypermodernization promoted throughout France's long Reconstruction and the degradation of provincial communities that attended it. A heretical Marxist, Lefebvre's social thought included a Romantic sensibility that was organically connected to southwestern France and Friedrich Nietzsche. Dialectical in nature, Lefebvre's revolutionary Romanticism repurposed age-old styles of symbolic expression and cyclical recurrence in order to transform everyday life and keep the deracinating forces of modernization at bay. The French sociologist's enduring interest in archaic traces, and his belief that they might one day be revived, reorients how we approach his landmark studies on space and time in the modern city.

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In the last decade, the cell phone’s transformation from a tool for mobile telephony into a multi-modal, computational “smart” media device has engendered a new kind of emplacement, and the ubiquity of technological mediation into the everyday settings of urban life. With it, a new kind of media literacy has become necessary for participation in the networked social publics (Ito; Jenkins et al.). Increasingly, the way we experience our physical environments, make sense of immediate events, and form impressions is through the lens of the camera and through the ear of the microphone, framed by the mediating possibilities of smartphones. Adopting these practices as a kind of new media “grammar” (Burn 29)—a multi-modal language for public and interpersonal communication—offers new perspectives for thinking about the way in which mobile computing technologies allow us to explore our environments and produce new types of cultural knowledge. Living in the Social Multiverse Many of us are concerned about new cultural practices that communication technologies bring about. In her now classic TED talk “Connected but alone?” Sherry Turkle talks about the world of instant communication as having the illusion of control through which we micromanage our immersion in mobile media and split virtual-physical presence. According to Turkle, what we fear is, on the one hand, being caught unprepared in a spontaneous event and, on the other hand, missing out or not documenting or recording events—a phenomenon that Abha Dawesar calls living in the “digital now.” There is, at the same time, a growing number of ways in which mobile computing devices connect us to new dimensions of everyday life and everyday experience: geo-locative services and augmented reality, convergent media and instantaneous participation in the social web. These technological capabilities arguably shift the nature of presence and set the stage for mobile users to communicate the flow of their everyday life through digital storytelling and media production. According to a Digital Insights survey on social media trends (Bennett), more than 500 million tweets are sent per day and 5 Vines tweeted every second; 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute; more than 20 billion photos have been shared on Instagram to date; and close to 7 million people actively produce and publish content using social blogging platforms. There are more than 1 billion smartphones in the US alone, and most social media platforms are primarily accessed using mobile devices. The question is: how do we understand the enormity of these statistics as a coherent new media phenomenon and as a predominant form of media production and cultural participation? More importantly, how do mobile technologies re-mediate the way we see, hear, and perceive our surrounding evironment as part of the cultural circuit of capturing, sharing, and communicating with and through media artefacts? Such questions have furnished communication theory even before McLuhan’s famous tagline “the medium is the message”. Much of the discourse around communication technology and the senses has been marked by distinctions between “orality” and “literacy” understood as forms of collective consciousness engendered by technological shifts. Leveraging Jonathan Sterne’s critique of this “audio-visual litany”, an exploration of convergent multi-modal technologies allows us to focus instead on practices and techniques of use, considered as both perceptual and cultural constructs that reflect and inform social life. Here in particular, a focus on sound—or aurality—can help provide a fresh new entry point into studying technology and culture. The phenomenon of everyday photography is already well conceptualised as a cultural expression and a practice connected with identity construction and interpersonal communication (Pink, Visual). Much more rarely do we study the act of capturing information using mobile media devices as a multi-sensory practice that entails perceptual techniques as well as aesthetic considerations, and as something that in turn informs our unmediated sensory experience. Daisuke and Ito argue that—in contrast to hobbyist high-quality photographers—users of camera phones redefine the materiality of urban surroundings as “picture-worthy” (or not) and elevate the “mundane into a photographic object.” Indeed, whereas traditionally recordings and photographs hold institutional legitimacy as reliable archival references, the proliferation of portable smart technologies has transformed user-generated content into the gold standard for authentically representing the everyday. Given that visual approaches to studying these phenomena are well underway, this project takes a sound studies perspective, focusing on mediated aural practices in order to explore the way people make sense of their everyday acoustic environments using mobile media. Curation, in this sense, is a metaphor for everyday media production, illuminated by the practice of listening with mobile technology. Everyday Listening with Technology: A Case Study The present conceptualisation of curation emerged out of a participant-driven qualitative case study focused on using mobile media to make sense of urban everyday life. The study comprised 10 participants using iPod Touches (a device equivalent to an iPhone, without the phone part) to produce daily “aural postcards” of their everyday soundscapes and sonic experiences, over the course of two to four weeks. This work was further informed by, and updates, sonic ethnography approaches nascent in the World Soundscape Project, and the field of soundscape studies more broadly. Participants were asked to fill out a questionnaire about their media and technology use, in order to establish their participation in new media culture and correlate that to the documentary styles used in their aural postcards. With regard to capturing sonic material, participants were given open-ended instructions as to content and location, and encouraged to use the full capabilities of the device—that is, to record audio, video, and images, and to use any applications on the device. Specifically, I drew their attention to a recording app (Recorder) and a decibel measurement app (dB), which combines a photo with a static readout of ambient sound levels. One way most participants described the experience of capturing sound in a collection of recordings for a period of time was as making a “digital scrapbook” or a “media diary.” Even though they had recorded individual (often unrelated) soundscapes, almost everyone felt that the final product came together as a stand-alone collection—a kind of gallery of personalised everyday experiences that participants, if anything, wished to further organise, annotate, and flesh out. Examples of aural postcard formats used by participants: decibel photographs of everyday environments and a comparison audio recording of rain on a car roof with and without wipers (in the middle). Working with 139 aural postcards comprising more than 250 audio files and 150 photos and videos, the first step in the analysis was to articulate approaches to media documentation in terms of format, modality, and duration as deliberate choices in conversation with dominant media forms that participants regularly consume and are familiar with. Ambient sonic recordings (audio-only) comprised a large chunk of the data, and within this category there were two approaches: the sonic highlight, a short vignette of a given soundscape with minimal or no introduction or voice-over; and the process recording, featuring the entire duration of an unfolding soundscape or event. Live commentaries, similar to the conventions set forth by radio documentaries, represented voice-over entries at the location of the sound event, sometimes stationary and often in motion as the event unfolded. Voice memos described verbal reflections, pre- or post- sound event, with no discernable ambience—that is, participants intended them to serve as reflective devices rather than as part of the event. Finally, a number of participants also used the sound level meter app, which allowed them to generate visual records of the sonic levels of a given environment or location in the form of sound level photographs. Recording as a Way of Listening In their community soundwalking practice, Förnstrom and Taylor refer to recording sound in everyday settings as taking world experience, mediating it through one’s body and one’s memories and translating it into approximate experience. The media artefacts generated by participants as part of this study constitute precisely such ‘approximations’ of everyday life accessed through aural experience and mediated by the technological capabilities of the iPod. Thinking of aural postcards along this technological axis, the act of documenting everyday soundscapes involves participants acting as media producers, ‘framing’ urban everyday life through a mobile documentary rubric. In the process of curating these documentaries, they have to make decisions about the significance and stylistic framing of each entry and the message they wish to communicate. In order to bring the scope of these curatorial decisions into dialogue with established media forms, in this work’s analysis I combine Bill Nichols’s classification of documentary modes in cinema with Karin Bijsterveld’s concept of soundscape ‘staging’ to characterise the various approaches participants took to the multi-modal curation of their everyday (sonic) experience. In her recent book on the staging of urban soundscapes in both creative and documentary/archival media, Bijsterveld describes the representation of sound as particular ‘dramatisations’ that construct different kinds of meanings about urban space and engender different kinds of listening positions. Nichols’s articulation of cinematic documentary modes helps detail ways in which the author’s intentionality is reflected in the styling, design, and presentation of filmic narratives. Michel Chion’s discussion of cinematic listening modes further contextualises the cultural construction of listening that is a central part of both design and experience of media artefacts. The conceptual lens is especially relevant to understanding mobile curation of mediated sonic experience as a kind of mobile digital storytelling. Working across all postcards, settings, and formats, the following four themes capture some of the dominant stylistic dimensions of mobile media documentation. The exploratory approach describes a methodology for representing everyday life as a flow, predominantly through ambient recordings of unfolding processes that participants referred to in the final discussion as a ‘turn it on and forget it’ approach to recording. As a stylistic method, the exploratory approach aligns most closely with Nichols’s poetic and observational documentary modes, combining a ‘window to the world’ aesthetic with minimal narration, striving to convey the ‘inner truth’ of phenomenal experience. In terms of listening modes reflected in this approach, exploratory aural postcards most strongly engage causal listening, to use Chion’s framework of cinematic listening modes. By and large, the exploratory approach describes incidental documentaries of routine events: soundscapes that are featured as a result of greater attentiveness and investment in the sonic aspects of everyday life. The entries created using this approach reflect a process of discovering (seeing and hearing) the ordinary as extra-ordinary; re-experiencing sometimes mundane and routine places and activities with a fresh perspective; and actively exploring hidden characteristics, nuances of meaning, and significance. For instance, in the following example, one participant explores a new neighborhood while on a work errand:The narrative approach to creating aural postcards stages sound as a springboard for recollecting memories and storytelling through reflecting on associations with other soundscapes, environments, and interactions. Rather than highlighting place, routine, or sound itself, this methodology constructs sound as a window into the identity and inner life of the recordist, mobilising most strongly a semantic listening mode through association and narrative around sound’s meaning in context (Chion 28). This approach combines a subjective narrative development with a participatory aesthetic that draws the listener into the unfolding story. This approach is also performative, in that it stages sound as a deeply subjective experience and approaches the narrative from a personally significant perspective. Most often this type of sound staging was curated using voice memo narratives about a particular sonic experience in conjunction with an ambient sonic highlight, or as a live commentary. Recollections typically emerged from incidental encounters, or in the midst of other observations about sound. In the following example a participant reminisces about the sound of wind, which, interestingly, she did not record: Today I have been listening to the wind. It’s really rainy and windy outside today and it was reminding me how much I like the sound of wind. And you know when I was growing up on the wide prairies, we sure had a lot of wind and sometimes I kind of miss the sound of it… (Participant 1) The aesthetic approach describes instances where the creation of aural postcards was motivated by a reduced listening position (Chion 29)—driven primarily by the qualities and features of the soundscape itself. This curatorial practice for staging mediated aural experience combines a largely subjective approach to documenting with an absence of traditional narrative development and an affective and evocative aesthetic. Where the exploratory documentary approach seeks to represent place, routine, environment, and context through sonic characteristics, the aesthetic approach features sound first and foremost, aiming to represent and comment on sound qualities and characteristics in a more ‘authentic’ manner. The media formats most often used in conjunction with this approach were the incidental ambient sonic highlight and the live commentary. In the following example we have the sound of coffee being made as an important domestic ritual where important auditory qualities are foregrounded: That’s the sound of a stovetop percolator which I’ve been using for many years and I pretty much know exactly how long it takes to make a pot of coffee by the sound that it makes. As soon as it starts gurgling I know I have about a minute before it burns. It’s like the coffee calls and I come. (Participant 6) The analytical approach characterises entries that stage mediated aural experience as a way of systematically and inductively investigating everyday phenomena. It is a conceptual and analytical experimental methodology employed to move towards confirming or disproving a ‘hypothesis’ or forming a theory about sonic relations developed in the course of the study. As such, this approach most strongly aligns with Chion’s semantic listening mode, with the addition of the interactive element of analytical inquiry. In this context, sound is treated as a variable to be measured, compared, researched, and theorised about in an explicit attempt to form conclusions about social relationships, personal significance, place, or function. This analytical methodology combines an explicit and critical focus to the process of documenting itself (whether it be measuring decibels or systematically attending to sonic qualities) with a distinctive analytical synthesis that presents as ‘formal discovery’ or even ‘truth.’ In using this approach, participants most often mobilised the format of short sonic highlights and follow-up voice memos. While these aural postcards typically contained sound level photographs (decibel measurement values), in some cases the inquiry and subsequent conclusions were made inductively through sustained observation of a series of soundscapes. The following example is by a participant who exclusively recorded and compared various domestic spaces in terms of sound levels, comparing and contrasting them using voice memos. This is a sound level photograph of his home computer system: So I decided to record sitting next to my computer today just because my computer is loud, so I wanted to see exactly how loud it really was. But I kept the door closed just to be sort of fair, see how quiet it could possibly get. I think it peaked at 75 decibels, and that’s like, I looked up a decibel scale, and apparently a lawn mower is like 90 decibels. (Participant 2) Mediated Curation as a New Media Cultural Practice? One aspect of adopting the metaphor of ‘curation’ towards everyday media production is that it shifts the critical discourse on aesthetic expression from the realm of specialised expertise to general practice (“Everyone’s a photographer”). The act of curation is filtered through the aesthetic and technological capabilities of the smartphone, a device that has become co-constitutive of our routine sensorial encounters with the world. Revisiting McLuhan-inspired discourses on communication technologies stages the iPhone not as a device that itself shifts consciousness but as an agent in a media ecology co-constructed by the forces of use and design—a “crystallization of cultural practices” (Sterne). As such, mobile technology is continuously re-crystalised as design ‘constraints’ meet both normative and transgressive user approaches to interacting with everyday life. The concept of ‘social curation’ already exists in commercial discourse for social web marketing (O’Connell; Allton). High-traffic, wide-integration web services such as Digg and Pinterest, as well as older portals such as Reddit, all work on the principles of arranging user-generated, web-aggregated, and re-purposed content around custom themes. From a business perspective, the notion of ‘social curation’ captures, unsurprisingly, only the surface level of consumer behaviour rather than the kinds of values and meaning that this process holds for people. In the more traditional sense, art curation involves aesthetic, pragmatic, epistemological, and communication choices about the subject of (re)presentation, including considerations such as manner of display, intended audience, and affective and phenomenal impact. In his 2012 book tracing the discourse and culture of curating, Paul O’Neill proposes that over the last few decades the role of the curator has shifted from one of arts administrator to important agent in the production of cultural experiences, an influential cultural figure in her own right, independent of artistic content (88). Such discursive shifts in the formulation of ‘curatorship’ can easily be transposed from a specialised to a generalised context of cultural production, in which everyone with the technological means to capture, share, and frame the material and sensory content of everyday life is a curator of sorts. Each of us is an agent with a unique aesthetic and epistemological perspective, regardless of the content we curate. The entire communicative exchange is necessarily located within a nexus of new media practices as an activity that simultaneously frames a cultural construction of sensory experience and serves as a cultural production of the self. To return to the question of listening and a sound studies perspective into mediated cultural practices, technology has not single-handedly changed the way we listen and attend to everyday experience, but it has certainly influenced the range and manner in which we make sense of the sensory ‘everyday’. Unlike acoustic listening, mobile digital technologies prompt us to frame sonic experience in a multi-modal and multi-medial fashion—through the microphone, through the camera, and through the interactive, analytical capabilities of the device itself. Each decision for sensory capture as a curatorial act is both epistemological and aesthetic; it implies value of personal significance and an intention to communicate meaning. The occurrences that are captured constitute impressions, highlights, significant moments, emotions, reflections, experiments, and creative efforts—very different knowledge artefacts from those produced through textual means. Framing phenomenal experience—in this case, listening—in this way is, I argue, a core characteristic of a more general type of new media literacy and sensibility: that of multi-modal documenting of sensory materialities, or the curation of everyday life. References Allton, Mike. “5 Cool Content Curation Tools for Social Marketers.” Social Media Today. 15 Apr. 2013. 10 June 2015 ‹http://socialmediatoday.com/mike-allton/1378881/5-cool-content-curation-tools-social-marketers›. Bennett, Shea. “Social Media Stats 2014.” Mediabistro. 9 June 2014. 20 June 2015 ‹http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/social-media-statistics-2014_b57746›. Bijsterveld, Karin, ed. Soundscapes of the Urban Past: Staged Sound as Mediated Cultural Heritage. Bielefeld: Transcript-Verlag, 2013. Burn, Andrew. Making New Media: Creative Production and Digital Literacies. New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing, 2009. Daisuke, Okabe, and Mizuko Ito. “Camera Phones Changing the Definition of Picture-worthy.” Japan Media Review. 8 Aug. 2015 ‹http://www.dourish.com/classes/ics234cw04/ito3.pdf›. Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. New York, NY: Columbia UP, 1994. Förnstrom, Mikael, and Sean Taylor. “Creative Soundwalks.” Urban Soundscapes and Critical Citizenship Symposium. Limerick, Ireland. 27–29 March 2014. Ito, Mizuko, ed. Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2010. Jenkins, Henry, Ravi Purushotma, Margaret Weigel, Katie Clinton, and Alice J. Robison. Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. White Paper prepared for the McArthur Foundation, 2006. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964. Nichols, Brian. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington & Indianapolis, Indiana: Indiana UP, 2001. Nielsen. “State of the Media – The Social Media Report.” Nielsen 4 Dec. 2012. 12 May 2015 ‹http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/reports/2012/state-of-the-media-the-social-media-report-2012.html›. O’Connel, Judy. “Social Content Curation – A Shift from the Traditional.” 8 Aug. 2011. 11 May 2015 ‹http://judyoconnell.com/2011/08/08/social-content-curation-a-shift-from-the-traditional/›. O’Neill, Paul. The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. Pink, Sarah. Doing Visual Ethnography. London, UK: Sage, 2007. ———. Situating Everyday Life. London, UK: Sage, 2012. Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003. Schafer, R. Murray, ed. World Soundscape Project. European Sound Diary (reprinted). Vancouver: A.R.C. Publications, 1977. Turkle, Sherry. “Connected But Alone?” TED Talk, Feb. 2012. 8 Aug. 2015 ‹http://www.ted.com/talks/sherry_turkle_alone_together?language=en›.

Abstract:

Social media fuel a sense of constant updating to encourage uninterrupted connectivity and generate quantifiable engagement. This paper is concerned with the habitual character acquired by these platforms, and with how this is paradoxically constructed by prompting a permanent state of anticipation. The aim is to explore, with a phenomenological sensibility, the experiences that emerge in settings of continuous connectedness from the perspective of the people who use these technologies in the context of everyday life – i.e. the ‘users’. Theoretically, the entry point is to revisit the claim of liveness and to position it as a central resource in this process. Empirically, I draw from the thematic analysis of data collected through the diary-interview method with people who live in London and use a range of social media to examine both how this urge of continuous connectedness operates and the ambivalent experiences it generates. I discuss, in particular, the finding that the use of social media is often described as aimless and pointless – which means that, in a research centrally concerned with liveness (with what feels animated, pulsating, injected with life), one of the most commonly observed experiences is that of deadness, lifelessness. This lack of life of social media is described both as a result of the presence of too many potentially interesting things, and as the platforms’ incapacity to deliver anything interesting at all.

Abstract:

Aufstieg und Entwicklung der interdisziplinären akademischen Disziplin der Cultural Studies sind Teil eines breiteren cultural turn in den Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften, der für eine Verabschiedung monokausaler und reduktionistischer Methodologien steht zugunsten komplexer, holistischer und dialektischer Analysen sozialer und kultureller Prozesse. In der sogenannten Kritischen Theorie hat dies zu einem Aufmerksamkeitswechsel geführt von ökonomischen und politischen Ursachen sozialer Ungleichheit und sozialer Kämpfe zur Beharrlichkeit und irreduziblen Komplexität kultureller Differenzen oder von Andersheit, belegt durch wichtige Studien über die Rolle des Nationalismus, der Ästhetisierung des Alltagslebens und des wachsenden Einflusses der neuen Medien auf Kommunikation und Imagination. Dieser cultural turn in den Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften ist verbunden mit einem wachsenden Einfluss kultureller und zugleich post-politischer Formen von Macht im Alltagsleben, veranschaulicht durch die Dominanz der leistungsorientierten Kultur ›positiven Denkens‹ in verschiedenen gesellschaftlichen Bereichen, mit anderen Worten: einer neoliberalen Kultur und Ideologie. In den Kulturwissenschaften wird das historische Bewusstsein vom wachsenden Einfluss kultureller Macht kombiniert mit anthropologischer Forschung über die Besonderheiten gegenwärtiger Alltagskultur und einer starken Sensibilität für die Spannungen, Ungleichheiten und Widersprüche in dieser Kultur infolge der anwachsenden Globalisierung ihrer Bedingungen. Diese inter- oder transdisziplinäre Perspektive auf die Macht der Kultur kann schließlich nicht erfolgreich sein, ohne erneut seriös nachzudenken über die ästhetische Qualität oder Dimension der Alltagskultur und zugleich über den Bereich und die Substanz des Ästhetischen selber. <br><br>The rise and development of the interdisciplinary academic discipline of cultural studies is part of a broader cultural turn in the humanities and social sciences that represents a fare- well to mono-causal and reductionist methodologies in favor of a more complex, holistic and dialectical analysis of social and cultural processes. In so-called ‘critical theory’ this has led to a shift from economic and political sources of social inequality and struggles towards the persistence and irreducible complexity of cultural difference or otherness, evidenced by important studies of the role of nationalism, the aestheticization of everyday life or the growing influence of new media of communication and imagination. This cultural turn in humanities and social sciences is related to a growing influence of cultural and at the same time post-political forms of power in everyday life, exemplified by the dominance of a meritocratic culture of ‘positive thinking’ in different areas of society, or in other words: of a neoliberal culture and ideology. In cultural studies historical awareness of this growing influence of cultural power is combined with anthropological research into the specificities of contemporary everyday culture and with a strong sensibility for the tensions, inequalities and contradictions in that culture, due to an ever growing globalization of its conditions. This inter- or transdisciplinary perspective on the power of culture finally cannot do without a serious rethinking of the aesthetic quality or dimension of everyday culture – and at the same time a rethinking of the scope and substance of aesthetics itself.

Abstract:

Social media fuel a sense of unsettledness to encourage uninterrupted connectivity and generate quantifiable engagement. This article is concerned with the habitual, naturalized character acquired by these platforms and with how this is paradoxically constructed by prompting a permanent state of anticipation. The aim here is to explore, with a phenomenological sensibility, the experiences that emerge in settings of continuous connectedness from the perspective of the people who use these technologies in the context of everyday life – that is, the ‘users’. Theoretically, the entry point is to revisit the claim of liveness – and its shifting relations with issues of sequential flow and eventfulness – and to position it as a central resource in this process, in which users are deliberately encouraged to expect the unexpected even in ‘non-eventful’ situations. Drawing from the thematic analysis of data collected through the diary-interview method with people who live in London and use a range of social media, I examine both how this urge of continuous connectedness operates and the ambivalent experiences it generates. The findings were categorized into five themes: excitement, anxiety, reassurance, fatigue, and responsibility.

Abstract:

We are living in challenging times, surfacing many reactions, thoughts, visions and beliefs in an attempt to understand and offer ways to cope with the COVID crisis and the recovery of the world. We believe a constructionist stance can help us respond to this moment. Everyday life is uncertain, although we most often act as if it is predictable and dependably redundant. We organize our lives around certainties that lead us to feel that we are in control. The pandemic has pulled the rug from under our feet and uncertainty is now the slogan of our time. However, one “silver lining” of the pandemic might be the way it exposes the unfolding nature of our worlds. To that end, the pandemic helps us embody and thus “know from within” (Shotter, 2010) a constructionist sensibility. This embodiment of social construction takes us far beyond a simple academic understanding. The confluence of the pandemic and learning about social construction can create the opportunity to put ideas into practice and, in so doing, our understanding of constructionist ideas is deepened. From a constructionist perspective, COVID-19 is not separate from us. It is happening through us, in us, between us and because of us. Social construction helps us see the world as an interconnected and complex system in which macro and micro levels, as well as human and non-human entities are constantly creating and re-creating possible realities (Simon & Salter, 2020). Indeed, this highly contagious virus, initially framed as a public health issue, soon revealed its complexity, having also political, social, economic, environmental and relational entanglements. Our attempt to balance the shutdowns (staying at home), for health protection, with the economic need for business to operate is an illustration of how interconnected these systems are. The virus also makes it necessary to balance physical distance with social connection and collective support. Despite the fear and discomfort, the potential for change ignited by this global crisis is substantial. By coming together with a diversity of voices, experiences, and perspectives, new performances can be enacted, new ways to respond and cope can be imagined, and new forms of living can be created – and these are all changes that could possibly be sustained once the pandemic has past. The pandemic therefore is a perfect time for dialogue and innovation. Dialogue and relationality are fundamental pillars in the construction, de-construction and re-construction of knowledge and society (Gergen, 2009a). Change starts with us in our interactions, one interaction at a time. SC invites us to come together and share the challenges we face, co-creating new possibilities for health and connection. Through collective interactions, new meanings and possibilities emerge; we re-invent realities. How can we address this interconnected and complex reality? And how do we ignite change that supports a reconstruction of our world in ways that address the inequities we currently face? What are the social conditions that can ignite new forms of understanding that generate new and resourceful ways of living?

Abstract:

IntroductionFrom reality television and self-help literature to exhortations to be “true to yourself,” authenticity pervades contemporary culture. Despite their prevalence, cultures of self-improvement and authenticity are routinely linked to arguments about increasing narcissism and declining care for others. Self-improvement involves self-based practices geared to help realise the “improved” and “better you” while authenticity is focused on developing the unique, inner and “real” you. Critiques of both self-improvement and authenticity culture are particularly evident in a sociological tradition of “cultural pessimism” (Hookway, Moral). This group of thinkers argue that the dominance of a “therapeutic” culture where the “self improved is the ultimate concern of modern culture” has catastrophic social and moral consequences (Reiff; Bell; Lasch; Bellah; Bauman and Donskis). Drawing upon Charles Taylor, I take critical aim at such assessments, arguing that ideals and practices of authenticity can be morally productive. I then turn to an empirical investigation of how everyday Australians understand and practice morality based on a qualitative analysis of 44 Australian blogs combined with 25 follow-up online in-depth interviews. I suggest that while the data shows the prevalence and significance of “being true to yourself” as an orientating principle, the bloggers produce a version of authenticity that misses the relational and socially-shaped character of self and morality (Taylor; Vannini and Williams).Authenticity and NarcissismA key tenet of modern cultural diagnosis (Rieff, Bell; Lasch; Bellah; Bauman and Donskis) is that Westerners have become increasingly “narcissistic” as cultural authority weakens and the self becomes something to “be discovered” and “worked out” (Bauman). Rieff, a key proponent of this tradition, locates the problem specifically with the rise of therapeutic culture in the 1960s, which denied the proper prohibitive function of culture and transformed moral problems into analytic issues for the self-actualising and “authentic” self. Bell identifies growing consumerism and weakening religion as issuing a shift from a culture of restraint to a culture of release, resulting in an unparalleled permissiveness, hedonism and potential nihilism. More recently, Bauman and Donskis (13) argue that our consumerist pursuit of “authentic” or “peak” experiences tears apart the once solid social bonds of the past. For these theorists, a modern culture postulating the uniqueness and authenticity of the individual can only result in a diminishing care for others and a self-defeating culture of self-fulfilment.Lasch launches perhaps the most scathing critique of “authenticity” culture. Lasch asserts that the modern West has seen the emergence of a “culture of narcissism:” a culture pathologically preoccupied with the care and well-being of the self. He contends that meaning and morality comes to be increasingly defined through the lens of “psychic self-improvement” and “an intense preoccupation with the self” (Lasch 25). Lasch writes:Having no hope of improving their lives in any of the ways that matter, people have convinced themselves that what matters is psychic self-improvement: getting in touch with their feelings, eating health food, taking lessons in ballet or belly-dancing, immersing themselves in the wisdom of the East, jogging, learning how to relate’, overcoming the ‘fear of pleasure’ (Lasch 4).This search for self-fulfilment within the private realm of the self offers little hope of escape in Lasch’s analysis. It is a symptom of the disease rather than a treatment. Having sacrificed obedience to a higher authority for an intensive focus on the authentic and self-actualising self, the modern West is left with amoral, uncaring and “narcissistic” selves (Lasch). In the end, morality has little hope in a culture in which the individual is allowed to create their “own set of rules,” where “no” has disappeared from our moral vocabulary, and where foundational moral laws enforced by religious tradition and higher moral authorities have disappeared.Self-Improvement and Authenticity as Moral Ideals A central problem with cultural decline accounts is that they miss how the search for personal authenticity or self-discovery could be morally productive (Taylor). Practices of therapy and self-improvement do not always need to be one-dimensionally read as exemplars of narcissism (Wright). For example, it is important to recognise how contemporary therapeutic and confessional cultures, underpinned by a focus on self-authenticity, self-discovery and personal growth, can emphasise the “moral makeover” or becoming a “better” person (Elliott and Lemert 124). Talk-shows, self-help literature, reality TV and blogging are all cultural examples that underpin how the therapeutic search for authenticity does not have to read as a one-way road to shrinking moral concern.Lasch’s indices of moral decline—“the wisdom of the east” or “eating health food”—can also be read in a more positive moral light. Take yoga, meditation and vegetarianism as examples. These practices are growing rapidly in popularity in Australia (Penman; Hookway, Moral) and have a strong cultural focus on values of authenticity. While these self-practices emphasise personal growth, self-awareness and self-care, at the same time they promote ethical relations of responsibility between self, others, body, nature, animals and environment. As actor Gillian Anderson said: “the whole thing about meditation and yoga is about connecting to the higher part of yourself, and then seeing that every living thing is connected in some way” (Marati). Could these practices, therefore, not be re-interpreted as self-originating acts of ethics—as acts of personal authenticity that morally recognise the Other? (Taylor)?Taylor (1992) provides a useful approach to salvage values of authenticity from the despair of much cultural diagnosis. He (81) suggests that the ethical ideal of authenticity—wrapped in notions of self-discovery, self-fulfilment and personal improvement—now plays a central role in modern Western culture. Taylor (11) emphasises the moral possibilities of authenticity as an ethical ideal built on the principle of “being true to yourself” (Taylor 26). This is a moral mode that rests in the moral ideal of “being true to my own originality,” which is “something only I can articulate” (Taylor 29).Taylor (74) contends that “at its best” authenticity as a contemporary ideal “allows a richer model of existence.” Rather than destroying it point-blank for its weaknesses, Taylor sets as his task to raise the bar of the ideal. He suggests that authenticity in this higher form calls upon people to adopt a self-responsible form of life that engenders people to be “true to themselves” within relations of responsibility to others. The key to achieving this is a tempered version of authenticity that acknowledges its “constitutive tensions” (Taylor 71). This is a reconstructed ideal that balances the creative, original and non-conformist dimensions of authenticity—the artistic aspects—with external signifiers or points of reference outside the self.What Taylor is doing here is putting some checks and balances around authenticity as a notion of unfettered self-determining freedom. He does this by underlining the significance of the self in relation to what he calls “horizons of significance.” For Taylor, it is only through “horizons of significance”—for example, history, nature, charity, citizenship and God—that we come to know and recognise ourselves in meaningful ways (45–48; 68). Taylor highlights here the importance of a social self where the individual choosing/feeling self is absurd taken in isolation from others (36).Like the poet, the musician or the artist, moral creation is personal and intensely subjective but it is still connected to a social self. For example, vegetarianism or yoga may involve the development of an authentic relationship with the self through the cultivation of qualities of personal awareness, growth and self-care but they are also fundamentally about dialogical relations with others—with animals, with nature, with a sense of social and cosmic connectedness. As Taylor asserts, personal sensibility finds significance in the construction of a world independent of self-choice and feeling (89). The value of Taylor is that he recovers authenticity and practices of self-improvement from the straight out negativity of decline theory but does not trivialise morality to a sort of unfettered self-determining and disencumbered freedom. This theoretical discussion provides a conceptual framework in which to investigate how everyday moralities are constructed and practiced in contemporary Australia.Present Study How do Australians understand and experience morality in their everyday lives? What role does authenticity play? What are the implications of this and what it does it mean for authenticity as a contemporary ethical ideal? To help answer these questions I now report the findings of a qualitative study I conducted into everyday Australian moralities. A small qualitative sample of bloggers is in no way representative of the population but provides some illustrative examples of the shape and influence of authenticity culture on moral life. The aim of the everyday moralities project was to “thickly describe” (Geertz) how individuals “write” and “talk” their everyday moral worlds into existence from their own perspectives. The first part of the study involved a qualitative analysis of 44 Australian blogs. Blogs offered an original empirical lens through which to investigate the contemporary production of morality and selfhood in late-modernity. The blogs were selected as a form of personal life record (Thomas and Znaniecki 1833) that allowed access to spontaneous accounts of everyday life that reflected what was important to the blogger without the intervention of a researcher (Hookway, Entering). The blogs were sampled from the blog hosting Website LiveJournal (LJ). Blogs were selected that contained at least two incidents, moments, descriptions or experiences that shed light on the blogger’s everyday moral constructions and practices. The second part of the study inviting sampled bloggers to participate in an online interview to further develop themes expressed in their blog posts. This resulted in 25 online interviews, which were conducted via various instant-messaging programs.“Being True to Yourself”: Authenticity as Moral Value? Meet Queen_Extremist, a 26 year-old female university student from Melbourne and president of the university student association. While writing that her life is “all in a spin”, Queen_Extremist says she “likes who I am, I like the way I do things, I’m proud of what I’ve achieved. I stayed true to myself”. Although Queen_Extremist may position herself as someone who is “not sure what [her] beliefs are based on, or whether they are worthwhile”, she “knows who she is”. And while potentially conflicted about whether “the concept of staying true to one’s self is arrogant and selfish”, “being true to yourself” according to what “feels right” is positioned as a sort of royal road to the construction of everyday rightness. She writes:I know what I feel. I know when something feels wrong to me. I know when something feels right. And I know that it feels terrible when I do something that feels wrong. It’s not logical. It’s not rational. I don’t know if it’s the right thing to do or if it’s selfish or arrogant. But I don't like being something I’m not. I don't like being false or changing my personality for others. I’m really happy with who I am. If something contrary to that is required, I suggest that someone other than me is requested to do it.Queen_Extremist offers a clear articulation of the everyday guiding power of authenticity. This type of morality is rooted in an obligation to realise an authentic selfhood found in a feeling-based sense of right and wrong. One “looks within” to the subjective and authentic world of the feeling and true self to determine “right” and “wrong.” The source of “who I am” is found within the inner world of “true feelings”. So while Queen_Extremist may feel that she does not “know much about anything” she is confident in her knowledge of who she truly is and what she truly feels. This is an ethical knowledge that she can explicitly trust. The trick for Queen_Extremist’s practice of an “ethics of authenticity” is discovering who you are and sticking to it.Universal_cloak, Squash_pippa and Snifflethebouncer all advance a similar moral strategy that highlights the power of “being true to yourself”. 32-year-old Universal_cloak, an artistic designer from Melbourne, writes on her blog of the importance of “being true to yourself” and its helping role in “making moral choices about who I am and what I stand for”:Being true to yourself is one of the most important things you can nurture in life … I think it’s important to live your life in a way that reflects who you are. If you lead a false life you will sooner or later run into problems because you’re ignoring huge parts of yourself that require attention (interview).Universal_cloak believes that “it’s morally wrong to avoid, ignore or otherwise mistreat yourself”. Inverting “do unto others”, she writes, “if you wouldn’t do it to other people, don’t do it to yourself”. She reasons that to not be “who you are” is inherently self-destructive: “I have known people who have ignored who they are, and as a result have sort of ‘soured themselves’”. For Universal_cloak, a corollary of “souring” the self is “souring” relations to others: “in turn, they build up this sourness and it reflects in their life, making them sour toward other people”. For Universal_cloak, authenticity not only governs the relation of self upon self but also involves relations of care with others; the personal search for authenticity is connected to how one treats and relates to other people.Similarly, Snifflethebouncer, a 22-year old PhD student from Sydney, writes “one of the things that matters most to me, with morality, is that you feel genuine about what you’re doing”. Feeling emerges here as a strategy to validate a “genuine” or “authentic” morality:You feel in your heart that it’s the right thing. If you feel one thing and do something else, then you’re not being true to yourself. If I feel one thing is the right thing to do, but I do something else (to benefit myself, most probably), then I’ll feel bad about it, and I’ll feel I haven't followed my morals.Squash_pippa, a 32-year-old female community worker from Sydney, elaborates the significance of “being true to yourself” as a code of action by describing a story about someone who “invented themselves to be someone that they’re not” and how this had caused her to feel inferior, to even “hate” herself “for not being as good as what they were”. She explains, claiming to now see the “situation objectively”, that this person had actually lied about “who they were” by “making themselves out to be so good”. They had violated the ideal of being the “real” and “authentic” you. For Squash_pippa this meant they were actually a “lesser person” as they were not prepared to accept the reality of “who they really are”. This notion of being authentic to the self (Taylor) is something Squash_pippa says she has always committed to. She is “who I am” and “never compromises what ‘feels’ right”:I am who I am and people can either like me or hate me, either way I’m not too fussy just as long as I never have to go against the morals and values I have and never compromise what ‘feels’ right … We all have our faults and they're not always easy to accept but it takes a stronger person to accept who they really are than the one who lies and makes themselves to be someone who they’re not.Queen_Extremist, Universal_cloak, Squash_pippa and Snifflethebouncer evoke a type of “ethics of authenticity”, where the notion of “being true to yourself” is sourced from the “romantic solace” of moral feeling. In these accounts, there is only one true or authentic self—the rest are imposters that lead to falseness and the problems of inauthenticity, fakery and phoniness—the contemporary sins of an “age of authenticity”.Being true to self is developed in these accounts as a life-principle that suggests we all have a unique and original way of being moral within us that needs to be realised and fulfilled. For these bloggers, the primary moral task is to search and reveal the “authentic” self, the real and truthful self that lurks within. While “being true to yourself” operates as a powerful framework of belief in these blog accounts, it does not meet Taylor’s criteria of authenticity in its “higher form.” Authenticity is mobilised in its more “narcissistic” form, where moral talk is never linked to something external to the self. For example, Queen_Extremist knows who she is and does not want to be something she is not. Likewise, Universal_Cloak believes in living life “in a way that reflects who you are”. These are highly subjectivist accounts of morality which not only ignore the social basis of morality but also present morality as unilateral and deaf rather than something that is responsive to people’s suffering or flourishing (Sayer). Authenticity—using Taylor’s language—is presented in an impoverished form where ideals of action never reside outside the self and thus fail to invoke a better or higher form of life worth searching and striving for (Taylor 61). In many ways, we end up with evidence that support declinist accounts of authenticity discourses as self-centred, introverted and amoral.ConclusionIn this paper I have examined the importance of authenticity as a contemporary cultural and moral value. In the first part, I showed how authenticity and cultures of self-fulfilment have been negatively theorised by the “cultural pessimists.” Using the work of Taylor, I went on to argue that authenticity, particularly the ethical principle of “being true to yourself” can be retrieved from the pessimism of thinkers like Rieff, Lasch, Bell, Bauman and Donskis. I argue that Taylor is particularly important in how he recognises the value of authenticity in terms of it’s creative and artistic dimensions but also the external “horizons of significance” that give it substance, life and meaning. The second part of the paper moved to an empirical analysis of how authenticity was mobilized by a selection of Australian bloggers. For these individuals, to be authentic means not “being something I’m not” (Queen_Extremist); “not leading a false life” (Universal_cloak); and not “inventing” yourself “as someone else”. Like reality television contestants, their task is to sort the real from the fake, from those “playing the game” and those being themselves—to work out who’s being “real” and who’s not. Why authenticity is clearly a powerful guide for this group of bloggers, their accounts do seem to partly support the pessimists’ charge of narcissism. Ideas of authenticity are presented as coming purely from inside the self without reference to external “horizons of significance.” This leaves us with an anemic form of authenticity that ignores the social basis of self, authenticity and morality (Taylor).“Being true to yourself” is a moral strategy that invokes a modernist assumption of a stable and unitary model of self. It is a version of self that appears distinctly “non-liquid” (Bauman). There are, for example, no “multiple” or “fragmented” selves in the blog accounts of Queen_Extremist, Universal_cloak and Snifflethebouncer but only “true” and “false” “personalities”; “real”, “false” or “invented selves”. As Universal_cloak says, being “true to yourself” means “to live your life in a way that reflects who you are” (Universal_cloak). In this way the bloggers appear to not only miss the socially-shaped character of the moral self but also the aboutness of morality—how morality is about people’s well-being, suffering and flourishing rather than simply the authority of the subject (Sayer).Two key research agendas emerge from these findings. First, further research is needed to empirically investigate wider practices of authenticity and morality beyond internet populations and to examine the extent and shape of narcissism. Second, there are fruitful lines of inquiry in investigating the dynamics of “being true to yourself” in a “liquid” age supposedly defined by identity reinvention and instant transformation (Elliott and Lemert). Does the pursuit of an authentic ethical self represent a form of resistance to identity fluidity and reinvention or could it actually feed the short-termism of a “no strings attached” world, where the search for “true” or “authentic” selves promote a culture of “moving on” and weak social bonds (Bauman and Donskis 14)?ReferencesBauman, Zygmunt, and Donskis, Leonidas. Moral Blindness: The Loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity, 2013. Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity, 2000.Bell, Daniel. The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York: Basic Books, 1976.Bellah, Robert, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steve Tipton. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Berkeley: U of California P, 1996.Elliott, Anthony and Charles Lemert. The New Individualism: The Emotional Costs of Globalization. New York: Routledge, 2006.Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973.Hookway, Nicholas. “Entering the Blogosphere: Some Strategies for Using Blogs in Social Research.” Qualitative Research 8.1 (2008): 91–113.Hookway, Nicholas. “Moral Decline Sociology: Critiquing the Legacy of Durkheim.” Journal of Sociology 20 Jan. 2014. DOI: 10.1177/1440783313514644.Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. New York: W.W. Norton, 1979. Marati, Jessica. 50 Quotes about Meditation and Yoga. 2012. 15 Jan. 2015 ‹http://ecosalon.com/50-quotes-on-meditation-amp-yoga/›.Penman, Stephen. Yoga in Australia: Sign of the Times. 2010. 15 Jan. 2015 ‹http://www.yogasurvey.com/SignoftheTimes.pdf›.Rieff, Phillip. The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud. New York: Harper and Row, [1966] 1987.Sayer, Andrew. Why Things Matter to People. New York: Cambridge UP, 2011.Taylor, Charles. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992.Thomas, William I. and Florian Znaniecki. The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. New York: Dover,[1918] 1958.Vannini, Phillip and J. Patrick Williams. Authenticity in Culture, Self and Society. Surrey: Ashgate, 2009. Wright, Katie. “Theorizing Therapeutic Culture: Past Influences, Future Directions.” Journal of Sociology 44.1 (2008): 321–336.

Abstract:

Rather than trying to lead an audience into a suspension of disbelief, cornball artists who get their own joke hope everyone will play along, or anyway enjoy the joke, which suggests that successful corn involves a suspension of embarrassment, or else a revel in it. (Marcus 323) Sure, it was corny as anything, pretentious, and silly beyond reason. But it felt so refreshing to see a band so absolutely devoid of irony and hipster chic, to see them perform and actually have enough sense and gravitas to not take themselves so damned seriously. And I think that, for a lot of people (myself included), that was a breath of fresh air. If there had been even the slightest trace of irony in the Illinoisemakers’ performance, the crowd would have picked up on it, and I doubt Sufjan and Co would have made it out with their pom-poms intact. (Morehead) The club was packed tight but I managed to find a spot to stand for the next two hours, squeezed along the rail of the upstairs balcony, looking down almost directly at the top of Sufjan Stevens’s head and, in front of him, an unusually hushed audience of fresh-faced indie rock kids. In conversation with some of the club’s staff a few days after the show, they would confide in me that they were unnerved by the evening’s crowd: “Where did these people come from?”, just “too well-behaved” for an all-ages show, there was something vaguely eerie about the level of rapt attention, about their/our unembarrassed affection for the on-stage spectacle. After all, with his gender-split six-piece back-up band (why have just one glockenspiel when two could be better?) dressed in matching cheerleader uniforms (offering between-song cheers and “spirit fingers” and a show-closing human pyramid) and himself all decked-out in a silk American flag jumpsuit, which may or may not have also had a cape, it would be tempting to see and hear 30-year-old Sufjan Stevens and his band – known, on this tour, as the Illinoisemakers – as “kitsch” or “camp”, but that’s not quite it. The affective tone is a bit too far off the mark – the archly self-ironic quotation marks – to qualify as camp or kitsch (or, for that matter, it is also far too waxing to fit any thesis about the waning of affect, such as Fredric Jameson’s notion of “blank parody”). Migrating elsewhere, this affect locates its heartfelt kernel, unabashedly, as corn. Susan Sontag, in her 1964 essay Notes on “Camp”, helped to set out the critical coordinates for the camp sensibility. Among them, an affection for the affectations of artifice and exaggeration, a rewiring of the logics of taste (bad can be good!) in order to account for an excessiveness and/or a “failed seriousness” that doubles back to slip quotation marks around itself, often undertaking a kind of historical salvage operation whereby the once-banal might now be redeemed as fantastic. As a significant subset of (non-naïve) camp, kitsch pertains to the more intentionally frivolous or ostentatious, and it inheres, most immediately, in the practices/objects produced through the camp sensibility. In sum, camp and kitsch take pleasure and refuge in affectedness, and regularly draw upon a particular relationship to the past: a past not to be conserved as it once was but to be transformed toward different, potentially more liberating ends within the present. The sensibility of corn occupies an almost coincidental space in our contemporary moment (where else could it be?) but its initial impulse faces in the other direction: rather than a past, it seeks to redeem a future for the present. Although by no means bypassing the powers of being affected (though without ironically turning this affectedness upon itself), cornball art sets to work by fictively divulging capacities to affect among existing constellations of forces and aesthetic figures, finding hidden-in-plain-sight alliances and branchings, offering a glimpse of a future not quite in view. That is, if camp and especially kitsch are the sound of a world chortling in the mirror at the sight of its own enlightened cynicism, corn gives voice to the near-impossible belief, in the face of all-available evidence to the contrary, that traversing the dreadfully familiar still holds the chance potential for imagining (and perhaps creating) a world that is decidedly otherwise. A work of (“successful”) corn actively dedicates itself to conjuring up an affective topography – opening the way for the possibility of collective inhabitation or contagion – within and around the hollows and shadows of the cliché and the commonplace, extracting from the field of its circulation the tiniest differences and variations. Although camp and kitsch are “statistically” on the political left (in the same way that Roland Barthes claims that “myth” is statistically on the right), corn has no intrinsic political valence. Making itself at home in the midst of the already known and patently obvious, corn’s stubborn (“silly beyond reason”) act of faith in the conversion of the banal becomes the future-oriented task of the always-to-be-made. The fabulist potential of corn then is that, beginning in the middle of nowhere, it can deliver us somewhere else: even if somewhere else is inevitably right here (no-where turned now-here). Corn’s politics don’t arrive in advance but only through its own act of creative, patchwork assembling. Rather than camp’s self-inoculating wink of solidarity (often delivered from arm’s length), whatever might be the coming politics of corn, it is precisely in its articulations and the expanse of its arms-wide embrace. Sufjan Stevens is already a fairly complex tangle of articulations all by himself: a plainly quirky musical composer-arranger and multi-instrumentalist (imagine Philip Glass writing “twee lo-fi” scores for a local community theater) / simultaneously straightforward balladeer and goofy-assed cheerleader-bandleader / fabulating geo-philosopher / practicing Christian (Episcopalian) of the non-evangelical variety / undeterred and affectionate chronicler of an increasingly unsettled America. What keeps this tangle of articulations from falling into a mess of contradictions is his earnestly cornball conceit as a musical surveyor – with or without a cape – of the vast American landscape. Stevens’s new Come on Feel the Illinoise and his 2003 release Greetings from Michigan serve merely as the first two states in an ambitious and admittedly foolhardy “50 States” project. Stevens re-conjures these states as immensely intimate geographies of the everyday mundane (folding laundry, wasp stings, zoo visits), of the cosmically mythic (UFOs, God, ghosts), and through figures, events and places, both past and present (Mary Todd Lincoln, the Black Hawk War, Decatur, his stepmother). In and across his musical compositions, there are no conceptual, lyrical or moral hierarchies (no above or below, including God); everything is situated alongside each other. Nothing is subordinated to anything else, and all are linked as one. Describing his “poetics of landscape”, Stevens says: I think this is a complicated subject, this idea of environment and geography shaping our doctrines, our behavior, our memory, even our inclinations … Now, our life is not a series of compartments. Here is our health. Here is our diet. Here is our genealogy. Here is our religion. Here is our politics. Here is our job. No, these things are all one big thing. Landscape is the palate of all activity. We live and move on the surface of this planet. Of course the character of that geography informs us. Even more, it determines us, and we affect it as well. It’s correlative … (Dodd). Although everything is already in immanence, it is also always to be articulated. Or, in the case of Sufjan Stevens’s rewrite of the United States’ national anthem, it is still all to be re-articulated: reclaiming God from the religious right while declaiming America’s militarism. The affective-aesthetic resonance of these articulations, through corn’s familiar traversal of the recurring same, serves as a selective ontology that comes to guide what falls out or rises up – the difference in repetition – into resources for hope in the present (Massumi). By nurturing these hopeful fall-outs and rise-ups into their next iterations, and by sustaining them into ever-expanding and self-varying accumulation, corn’s peculiar affective sensibility invokes its ethical task and, thus, its capacity to deliver its audience – though there are no guarantees – from nowhere (especially given the present sorry state of affairs on the US political left). It takes landscape as the palate of its activity, and then “populate[s] it with other instances, with other poetic, novelistic, or even pictorial or musical entities” (Deleuze and Guattari 66-7), populates it with a people to come. At present, it is safe to say that Sufjan Stevens is almost precisely nowhere, a mere speck on the popular music landscape of North America – at least as such matters might be determined through sales statistics or mainstream radio airplay. But a growing number of US music critics, journalists, and music bloggers have begun to take notice. See, for example, the critics at Amazon.com in the US or Metacritic.com – a Website that cross-tabulates critical reviews (mostly US and British) of film, television, music, etc – where, in both, Stevens’s Illinoise stands as the number one music release for 2005. All of which might add up, of course, to next to nothing (a temporary crush, this year’s model, a critical darling). Except that, wedged along the balcony rail as I observed the evening’s crowd in resonant conjunction with Stevens and his band, there seemed and still seems every reason to believe or every reason to want to believe that a reconfigured, newly-weird and corn-fed America may be nudging its way onto the horizon as an emergent, fledgling generational sensibility. Or, so, that’s the infectious hope anyway … admittedly as naïve as any before it. Think of it as a manifestation of what Deleuze calls the need for belief (and not its suspension) in the world. In this world (this world now: no waiting for a next one) belief that operates, in one way, through “the powers of the false” (fabulation): supplanting the close-to-expired effectivity of “speaking truth to power” anytime too soon. Deleuze and Guattari maintain that, “belief becomes a genuine concept only when it is made into belief in this world and is connected rather than projected” (92). To connect. To fabulate. To pass into the landscape. To create the conditions for a people-who-are-missing. But, more than any other ingredient to be drawn as political necessity from the contemporary moment, it is belief – unembarrassed by its open expression, unfettered by irony’s built-in self-protection mechanism – that sets corn apart from camp and kitsch. It is belief in this world that sets Sufjan Stevens’s music and its live performance, as corn, into motion: belief as force for belonging. Corn lends itself, almost by its very nature (albeit its fictive nature), to such gathering-up, to collective enunciation. “All things go / All things go / To re-create us / All things grow / All things grow”, Stevens sings in part of the chorus of his Chicago (arguably the centrepiece of Illinoise), his voice supported – both live and on record – by what feels like every other voice in its vicinity. But, in the song, Chicago serves as just a momentary passing through on the way to somewhere else, on the way to New York and beyond that: “Freedom from myself and from the land”. In the sliver of this moment (beyond one state or two, a nation or land dissolving into what develops), the affect of corn reveals its opening on to a boundless expansion of landscape, out past the amber waves of grain, the majesty of purple mountains, and God shedding his grace, pom-poms intact. References Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. What is Philosophy? Trans. H. Tomlinson, and G. Burchell. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. Dodd, J. “Feature Interview with Sufjan Stevens.” Bandoppler #5. 10 Oct. 2005 http://www.bandoppler.com/5_F_Sufjan.htm>. Marcus, G. Ranters and Crowd Pleasers: Punk in Pop Music, 1977-92. New York: Anchor, 1993. Massumi, Brian. “Navigating Movements.” In M. Zournazi, Hope: New Philosophies for Change. New York: Routledge, 2002. This interview with Massumi is also available online: http://www.21cmagazine.com/issue2/massumi.html>. Morehead, J. “Omaha, Lift Up Your Weary Head.” OpusZine.com 23 Sep. 2005. http://www.opuszine.com/blog/entry.html?ID=1276>. Sontag, Susan. “Notes on ‘Camp’.” Against Interpretation. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Seigworth, Gregory J. "The Affect of Corn." M/C Journal 8.6 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/12-seigworth.php>. APA Style Seigworth, G. (Dec. 2005) "The Affect of Corn," M/C Journal, 8(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/12-seigworth.php>.

Abstract:

Fig. 1: "Xiao Ming (little Ming) and xiao meng (little sprout/cutie)", satirical take on a popular Chinese textbook character. Shared online Introduction: Cuteness, Online Vernaculars, and Digital FolkloreThis short essay presents some preliminary materials for a discussion of the social circulation of contemporary Chinese vernacular terms among digital media users. In particular, I present the word meng (萌, literally "sprout", recently adopted as a slang term for "cute") as a case in point for a contextual analysis of elements of digital folklore in their transcultural flows, local appropriations, and social practices of signification. One among many other neologisms that enter Mandarin Chinese from seemingly nowhere and gain a widespread popularity in everyday online and offline linguistic practices, meng belongs to a specific genealogy of Japanese animation fansubbing communities, and owes its rapid popularisation to its adaptation to local contexts in different syntactic forms. The resulting inclusion of meng in the changing repertoire of wangluo liuxing ciyu ("words popular on the Internet")—the online vernacular common among Chinese Internet users which is often the target of semantic or structural analyses—is in fact just the last step of processes of networked production and social signification happening across digital media and online platforms.As an anthropologist of media use, I aim to advance the thesis that, in the context of widespread access to digital media, vernacular terms popularised across online platforms and making their way into everyday linguistic interactions are not necessarily the epiphenomena of subcultural formations, nor can they be simply seen as imported aesthetics, or understood through semantic analyses. Rather, “words popular on the Internet” must be understood as part of a local digital folklore, the open repertoire of vernacular content resulting from the daily interaction of users and digital technologies (Lialina & Espenschied 9) in a complex and situated media ecology (Fuller). I argue that the difference between these two approaches is the same passing between a classical structural understanding of signification proposed by Lévi-Strauss and the counter-Copernican revolution proposed by Latour’s quasi-objects proliferating in collectives of actors. Are incredibly pervasive terms like meng actually devoid of meaning, floating signifiers enabling the very possibility of signification? Or are they rather more useful when understood as both signifiers and signifieds, quasi-objects tracing networks and leading to collectives of other hybrids and practices?The materials and observations presented in this essay are part of the data collected for my PhD research on Chinese digital folklore, a study grounded on both ethnographic and archaeological methods. The ethnographic part of my project consists of in-depth interviews, small talk and participant observation of users on several Chinese online platforms such as AcFun, Baidu Tieba, Douban, Sina Weibo and WeChat (Hine). The archaeological part, on the other hand, focuses on the sampling of user-generated content from individual feeds and histories of these online platforms, an approach closer to the user-focused Internet archaeology of Nicholson than to the media archaeology of Parikka. My choice of discussing the term meng as an example is motivated by its pervasiveness in everyday interactions in China, and is supported by my informants identifying it as one of the most popular vernacular terms originating in online interaction. Moreover, as a rather new term jostling its way through the crowded semantic spectrum of cuteness, meng is a good example of the minor aesthetic concepts identified by Ngai as pivotal for judgments of taste in contemporary consumer societies (812). If, as in the words of one of my informants, meng "just means 'cute'," why did it end up on Coca-Cola bottle labels which were then featured in humorous self-portraits with perplexed cats? Fig. 2: "Meng zhu" (Cute leader, play on word on hom*ophone “alliance leader”) special edition Coca-Cola bottle with cat, uploaded on Douban image gallery. Screenshot by the author Cuteness after JapanContemporary Japan is often portrayed as the land of cuteness. Academic explanations of the Japanese fascination with the cute, neotenic and miniaturised abound, tackling the topic from the origins of cute aesthetics in Japanese folkloric characters (Occhi) and their reappearance in commercial phenomena such as Pokémon (Allison), to the role of cuteness as gender performance and normativity (Burdelski & Mitsuhashi) and the "spectacle of kawaii" (Yano 681) as a trans-national strategy of cultural soft power (683). Although the export and localisation of Japanese cultural products across and beyond Asia has been widely documented (Iwabuchi), the discussion has often remained at the level of specific products (comics, TV series, games). Less frequently explored are the repertoires of recontextualised samples, snippets and terms that local audiences piece together after the localisation and consumption of these transnational cultural products. In light of this, is it the case that "the very aesthetic and sensibility that seems to dwell in the playful, the girlish, the infantilized, and the inevitably sexualized" are inevitably adopted after the "widespread distribution and consumption of Japanese cute goods and aesthetics to other parts of the industrial world" (Yano 683)? Or is it rather the case that language precedes aesthetics, and that terms end up reconfigured according to the local discursive contexts in ongoing dialogic and situated negotiations? In other words, what happens when the Japanese word moe (萌え), a slang term "originally referring to the fictional desire for characters of comics, anime, and games or for pop idols” (Azuma 48) is read in its Mandarin Chinese pronunciation meng by amateur translators of anime and manga, picked up by audiences of video streaming websites, and popularised on discussion boards and other online platforms? On a broader level, this is a question of how the vocabularies of specialised fan cultures mutate when they move across language barriers on the vectors of digital media and amateur translations. While in Japanese otaku culture moe indicates a very specific, physically arousing form of aesthetic appreciation that is proper to a devote fan (Azuma 57), the appropriation of the (originally Chinese) logograph by the audiences of dongman (animation and comics) products in Mainland China results in the general propagation of meng as a way of saying 'cute' slightly more fashionable and hip than the regular Mandarin word ke'ai. Does this impact on the semantics or the aesthetics of cuteness in China? These questions have not been ignored by researchers; Chinese academics in particular, who have a first-hand experience of the unpredictable moods of vernacular terms circulating from digital media user cultures to everyday life interactions, appear concerned with finding linguistic explanations or establishing predictors for these rogue terms that seem to ignore lexical rules and traditional etymologies. Liu, for example, tries to explain the popularity of this particular term through Dawkins' neo-Darwinian theorisation of memes as units of cultural transmission, identifying in meng the evolutionary advantages of shortness and memorisability. As simplistic treatments of language, this sort of explanations does not account for the persistence of various other ways of describing general and specific kinds of cuteness in Mandarin Chinese, such as ke'ai, dia or sajiao, as described by Zhang & Kramarae (767). On the other hand, most of the Chinese language research about meng at least acknowledges how the word appears under the sign of a specific media ecology: Japanese comics and animation (dongman) translated and shared online by fan communities, Japanese videogames and movies widely consumed by Chinese young audiences, and the popularisation of Internet access and media literacy across China. It is in this context that this and other neologisms "continuously end up in the latest years' charts of most popular words" (Bai 28, translation by the author), as vernacular Mandarin integrates words from digital media user cultures and online platforms. Similar comparative analyses also recognise that "words move faster than culture" (Huang 15, translation by the author), and that it is now young Chinese digital media users who negotiate their understanding of meng, regardless of the implications of the Japanese moe culture and its aesthetic canons (16). According to Huang, this process indicates on the one hand the openness and curiosity of Chinese youth for Japanese culture, and on the other "the 'borrowist' tendency of the language of Internet culture" (18). It is precisely the speed and the carefree ‘borrowist’ attitude with which these terms are adopted, negotiated and transformed across online platforms which makes it questionable to inscribe them in the classic relationship of generational resistance such as the one that Moore proposes in his treatment of ku, the Chinese word for 'cool' described as the "verbal icon of a youth rebellion that promises to transform some of the older generation's most enduring cultural values" (357). As argued in the following section, meng is definitely not the evolutionary winner in a neo-Darwinian lexical competition between Chinese words, nor occupies a clear role in the semantics of cuteness, nor is it simply deployed as an iconic and rebellious signifier against the cultural values of a previous generation. Rather, after reaching Chinese digital media audiences along the "global wink of pink globalization" (Yano 684) of Japanese animation, comics, movies and videogames, this specific subcultural term diffracts along the vectors of the local media ecology. Specialised communities of translators, larger audiences of Japanese animation streaming websites, larger populations of digital media users and ultimately the public at large all negotiate meng’s meaning and usage in their everyday interactions, while the term quickly becomes just another "word popular on the Internet” listed in end-of-the-year charts, ready to be appropriated by marketing as a local wink to Chinese youth culture. Fig. 3: Baidu image search for 萌 (meng), as of 28 February 2014: the term ‘cute’ elicits neotenic puppies, babies, young girls, teen models, and eroticised Japanese comic characters. Screenshot by the author Everything Meng: Localising and Appropriating CutenessIn the few years since it entered the Chinese vernacular, first as a specialised term adopted by dongman fans and then as a general exclamation for "cute!", meng has been repurposed and adapted to local usages in many different ways, starting from its syntactic function: while in Japanese moe is usually a verb (the action of arousing feelings of passion in the cultivated fan), meng is more frequently used in Chinese as an adjective (cute) and has been quickly compounded in new expressions such as maimeng (literally "to sell cuteness", to act cute), mengwu (cute thing), mengdian (cute selling point), widening the possibilities for its actual usage beyond the specific aesthetic appreciation of female pre-teen anime characters that the word originally refers to. This generalisation of a culturally specific term to the general domain of aesthetic judgments follows local linguistic patterns: for example maimeng (to act cute) is clearly modelled on pre-existing expressions like zhuang ke'ai (acting cute) or sajiao (acting like a spoiled child) which, as Zhang & Kramarae (762) show, are common Mandarin Chinese terms to describe infantilised gender performativity. This connection between being meng and setting up a performance is confirmed by the commentative practices and negotiations around the cuteness of things: as one of my informants quipped regarding a recently popular Internet celebrity: "Some people think that he is meng. But I don't think he's meng, I think he's just posing." Hence, while Japanese moe characters belong to a specific aesthetic canon in the realm of 2D animation, the cuteness that meng indicates in Chinese refers to a much broader scope of content and interactions, in which the semantic distinctions from other descriptors of cuteness are quite blurred, and negotiated in individual use. As another informant put it, commenting on the new WeChat avatar of one of her contacts: "so meng! This is not just ke'ai, this is more ke'ai than ke'ai, it's meng!" Other informants explained meng variably as a more or less performed and faked cuteness, as regular non-specified cuteness, as a higher degree or as a different form of it, evidencing how the term is deployed in both online and offline everyday life interactions according to imitation, personal invention, context and situation, dialogic negotiations, shared literacies, and involvements in specific communities. Moreover, besides using it without the sexual overtones of its Japanese counterpart, my research participants were generally not aware of the process of cross-linguistic borrowing and specialised aesthetic meaning of meng—for most of them, it just meant 'cute', although it did so in very personal ways. These observations do not exclude, however, that meng maintains its linkages to Japanese cultural products and otaku fandom: on the same online platforms where meng was originally borrowed from the lines of fansubbed Japanese anime series, its definition continues to be discussed and compared to its original meaning. The extremely detailed entries on Mengniang Baike (MoeGirl Wiki, http://zh.moegirl.org) testify a devoted effort in collecting and rationalising the Japanese moe aesthetics for an audience of specialised Chinese zhainan (literally 'shut-in guy", the Chinese word for otaku), while Weimeng (Micro-Moe, http://www.weimoe.com) provides a microblogging platform specifically dedicated to sharing dongman content and discuss all things meng. The recent popularity of the word is not lost on the users of these more specialised online platforms, who often voice their discontent with the casual and naive appropriations of uncultured outsiders. A simple search query of the discussion board archives of AcFun, a popular zhainan culture video streaming website, reveals the taste politics at play around these vernacular terms. Here are some complaints, voiced directly by anonymous users of the board, regarding meng: "Now I really detest this meng word, day and night everywhere is meng meng meng and maimeng but do you really understand what do these words mean?" "Don't tell me, alternative people think that watching anime is fashionable; they watch it, learn some new word and use it everywhere. Last time I was playing videogames I heard a girl saying Girl: 'Do you know what does meng mean?' Guy: 'I don't know' Girl: 'You don't even know this! Meng means beautiful, lovely' f*ck your mom's c*nt hearing this I wanted to punch through the screen" "Anyway these 'popular words' are all leftovers from our playing around, then a bunch of boons start using them and feel pleased of 'having caught up with fashion', hehe" Fig. 4: "Don't tell me, alternative people think that watching anime is fashionable…", anonymous post commenting on the use of meng on the AcFun message board. Screenshot by the authorConclusion: Do Signifiers Float in Media Ecologies? The choice of examining the networks traced by a slang term signifying cuteness was determined by the conviction that the "minor aesthetics" described by Ngai (812) play an important role in the social construction of taste and judgment in contemporary consumer societies. This is especially significant when discussing digital folklore as the content produced by the everyday interactions of users and digital media: cuteness and the negotiations around its deployment are in fact important features of the repertoires of user-generated content shared and consumed on online platforms. In the case of this essay, the strange collective included green sprouts, textbook illustrations, cats, Japanese anime characters, selfies, and co*ke bottle label designs. Summing up the overview of the word meng presented above, and attempting a critical response to Ngai's linkage of the minor aesthetics of cuteness to national contexts which make them "ideologically meaningful" (819), I suggest the recuperation of Lévi-Strauss’ concept of floating signifier as developed in his analysis of Melanesians’ fuzzy notion of mana. This theoretical choice comes almost naturally when dealing with pervasive terms: as Holbraad explains, “part of the original attraction of mana-terms to anthropologists was their peculiarly double universality – their semantic breadth (‘mana is everywhere’, said the native) coupled with their geographical diffusion (‘mana-terms are everywhere’, replied the anthropologist)” (189). Meng seems to be everywhere in China as both a term (in everyday, online and offline interactions) and as cuteness (in popular culture and media), thus making it an apparently perfect candidate for the role of floating signifier. Lévi-Strauss deployed Mauss’ concept as a reinforcement of his structuralist conception of meaning against a surfeit of signifiers (Holbraad 196-197), "a symbol in its pure state, therefore liable to take on any symbolic content whatever [...] a zero symbolic value […] a sign marking the necessity of a supplementary symbolic content over and above that which the signified already contains" (Lévi-Strauss 63-64). Moore’s framing of the Chinese ku and the American cool as “basic slang terms” (360) follows the same structuralist logic: extremely pervasive terms lose in meaning and specificity what they gain in supplementary symbolic content (in his case, generational distinction). Yet, as shown through the examples presented in the essay, meng does in no case reach a zero symbolic value—rather, it is “signifier and signified (and more)” (Holbraad 197), meaning different kinds of cuteness and aesthetic judgement across more or less specialised usages, situated contexts, individual understandings and dialogic negotiations. This oversimplified rebuttal to Lévi-Strauss' concept is my attempt to counter several arguments that I believe to be grounded in the structuralist theorisation of series of signifiers and signified: the linkage between aesthetic categories and national contexts (Ngai); the correlation between language and cultural practices or aesthetics (Yano); the semantic analyses of slang terms (Moore, Bai); the memetic explanations of digital folklore (Liu). As briefly illustrated, meng’s popularity does not necessarily convey a specific Japanese aesthetic culture, nor does its adaptation mirror a peculiarly Chinese one; the term does not necessarily define a different form of cuteness, nor does it confront generational values. It could be more useful to conceptualise meng, and other elements of digital folklore, as what Latour calls quasi-objects, strange hybrids existing in different versions and variations across different domains. Understood in this way, meng traces a network leading to: the specialised knowledge of fansubbing communities, the large audiences of video streaming websites, the echo chambers of social networking platforms and participatory media, and the ebbs and flows of popular culture consumption. To conclude, I agree with Yano that "it remains useful for Asia analysts to observe these ebbs and flows as they intersect with political frameworks, economic trends, and cultural values" (687-88). Meng, as scores of other Chinese slang terms that crowd the yearly charts of ‘words popular on the Internet’ might not be here to stay. But digital folklore is, as long as there will be users interacting and negotiating the minor aesthetics of their everyday life on online platforms. The general theoretical aim of this brief discussion of one vernacular term is evidencing how the very idea of a "Internet culture", when understood through the concepts of media ecology, online vernaculars and quasi-objects becomes hard to grasp through simple surveying, encyclopaedic compilations, statistical analyses or linguistic mapping. Even in a brief contextualisation of one simple slang term, what is revealed is in fact a lively bundle of practices: the cross-linguistic borrowing of a specialised aesthetic, its definition on crowdsourced wikis and anonymous discussion boards, the dialogic negotiations regarding its actual usage in situated contexts of everyday life, and the sectorial dynamics of distinction and taste. Yet, meng just means 'cute'.ReferencesAllison, Anne. “Portable Monsters and Commodity Cuteness: Pokémon as Japan’s New Global Power.” Postcolonial Studies 6.3 (2003): 381–95. Azuma, Hiroki. Otaku: Japan's Database Animals. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2009. Bai, Lin. “Qianxi Wangluo Liuxingyu - Meng [A Brief Analysis of a Popular Internet Term - Meng].” Wuyi Xueyuan Xuebao 31.3 (2012): 28–30. Burdelski, Matthew, and Koji Mitsuhashi. “‘She Thinks You’re Kawaii’: Socializing Affect, Gender, and Relationships in a Japanese Preschool.” Language in Society 39.1 (2010): 65–93. 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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 circ*mscribed 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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Deflem, Mathieu. “Ritual, Anti-Structure and Religion: A Discussion of Victor Turner’s Processural Symbolic Analysis.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 30.1 (1991): 1–25. Gifford, Robert. “Psychology’s Essential Role in Alleviating the Impacts of Climate Change.” Canadian Psychology 49.4 (2008): 273–80. Hamilton, Maxwell John. “Introduction.” Media and the Environment. Eds. Craig L. LaMay, Everette E. Dennis. Washington: Island P, 1991. 3–16. Horvath, Agnes., Bjørn Thomassen, and Harald Wydra. “Introduction: Liminality and Cultures of Change.” International Political Anthropology 2.1 (2009): 3–4. Howard-Williams, Rowan. “Consumers, Crazies and Killer Whales: The Environment on New Zealand Television.” International Communications Gazette 73.1–2 (2011): 27–43. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Climate Change Synthesis Report. (2007). 23 March 2012 ‹http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr.pdf› Killingsworth, M. J., and Jacqueliene S. Palmer. “Silent Spring and Science Fiction: An Essay in the History and Rhetoric of Narrative.” And No Birds Sing: Rhetorical Analyses of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Ed. Craig Waddell. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 2000. 174–204. Littleton, C. Scott. Gods, Goddesses and Mythology. New York: Marshall Cavendish, 2005. Lorenzoni, Irene, Mavis Jones, and John R. Turnpenny. “Climate Change, Human Genetics, and Post-normality in the UK.” Futures 39.1 (2007): 65–82. Lopez, Antonio. “Defusing the Cannon/Canon: An Organic Media Approach to Environmental Communication.” Environmental Communication 4.1 (2010): 99–108. Maier, Daniela Carmen. “Communicating Business Greening and Greenwashing in Global Media: A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of CNN's Greenwashing Video.” International Communications Gazette 73.1–2 (2011): 165–77. Milfront, Taciano L. “Global Warming, Climate Change and Human Psychology.” Psychological Approaches to Sustainability: Current Trends in Theory, Research and Practice. Eds. Victor Corral-Verdugo, Cirilo H. Garcia-Cadena and Martha Frias-Armenta. New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2010. 20–42. O’Neill, Saffron, and Sophie Nicholson-Cole. “Fear Won’t Do It: Promoting Positive Engagement with Climate Change through Visual and Iconic Representations.” Science Communication 30.3 (2009): 355–79. Pawlik, Kurt. “The Psychology of Global Environmental Change: Some Basic Data and an Agenda for Cooperative International Research.” International Journal of Psychology 26.5 (1991): 547–63. Reynolds, Jock., ed. Emmet Gowin: Changing the Earth: Aerial Photographs. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2002. Rosenzweig, Cynthia, David Karoly, Marta Vicarelli, Peter Neofotis, Qigang Wu, Gino Casassa, Annette Menzel, Terry L. Root, Nicole Estrella, Bernard Seguin, Piotr Tryjanowski, Chunzhen Liu, Samuel Rawlins, and Anton Imeson. “Attributing Physical and Biological Impacts to Anthropogenic Climate Change.” Nature 453.7193 (2008): 353–58. Roser-Renouf, Connie, and Edward W. Maibach. “Communicating Climate Change.” Encyclopaedia of Science and Technology Communication. Ed. Susanna Hornig Priest. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage. 2010. 141–47. Stamm, Keith R., Fiona Clark, and Paula R. Eblacas. “Mass Communication and the Public Understanding of Environmental Problems: The Case of Global Warming.” Public Understanding of Science 9 (2000): 219–37. Turner, Victor. “Dramatic Ritual – Ritual Drama: Performative and Reflexive Anthropology.” The Kenyon Review, New Series 1.3 (1979): 80–93. —-. “Symbols in African Ritual.” Perspectives in Cultural Anthropology. Ed. Herbert A. Applebaum. Albany: State U of New York P, 1987. 488–501. —-. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2008.

Abstract:

We do not bear a straightforwardly passive relationship with the ubiquitous regime of the logo-sign. As dwellers of the eternity of the consumer present, the luxury of our boredom allows us to pick and choose. The overwhelming celerity with which the everyday perpetually transforms its packaging, the excessively rapid turnover of signs has condensed our historical perspective. Tomorrow I will buy that new pair of shoes. As congenital sufferers of a logorrhea of the logo, our chatter is articulated by product placement. We become active in distinguishing ourselves with these loaded and at once empty signifiers. Whether linguistically or graphically organized the condensation of ideas, facilitated by the economy of the logo is allowed through the operation of the sign. It is beneath the dazzling lights of signification that we can find the logo, a tool bandied about by ‘ideas men.’ Signification is that logic upon which the logo depends. Though the mechanism that silently determines our findings remains obscure, as good little consumers we have nonetheless done our research. Our choice, seemingly personal, but actually orchestrated by the dissimulated forces of the social, perpetuates a cycle of exchange, the endless circulation of logo-signs. In compliance with our socio-economic status, one logo demarcated product has more symbolic purchase than another. Our habitual belief that we have a choice, and that this choice is well informed, allows the naturalisation of logo-signs in such a way that subtle, often unspoken thresholds between taste communities become reified. There persists, all the same, a traffic across such thresholds, and although it would appear that there is little room to move, our product choices are not necessarily all determined in advance. Though our habitation is one composed of multitudinous worldly signs, this does not mean that it is impossible to discover some way out, or perhaps some other mode of operation for the logo-sign. Our taste for the logo-sign is augmented by what might be considered an apprenticeship in signs, one that commences with early childhood. As the philosopher Gilles Deleuze suggests, “to learn is first of all to consider a substance, an object, a being as if it emitted signs to be deciphered, interpreted” (Deleuze, 2000: 4). As it relates to the logo this apprenticeship and the desire it produces operates almost exclusively with what Deleuze has called the worldly sign. As for the world, “there is no milieu that emits and concentrates so many signs, in such reduced space, at so great a rate” (5). And there is no world that is more banal than that of the logo. And yet, at once, it is by way of our reading of the logo that we imagine another world, better, brighter and more beautiful. This is the transcendent logic of the logo. The banalisation of this world, the one I must face everyday, is effectuated in the desire for this imaginary other place that the logo invites me to enter. If I buy that pair of shoes I will find a suitable lover (presumably also a shoe fetishist) who will steal me away from the present drudgery of my life. We use logos to cover over the damp spots on our threadbare walls, to sugar coat the unpalatable real. Could it be, nonetheless, that the insistence of the logo can teach us something about how to manage our signs, or even create new ones? By what practice can we make the logo immanent, or reverse the emptying out of the quotidian that its logic demands? How might we secure “relations with others based not in identification or recognition, but encounter and new compositions” (Deleuze, 2001: 15)? The efficacy of the logo-sign is related to our capacity for recognition and our desire to secure identity. In response to our propensity toward consumer boredom, there unfolds increasingly sophisticated morphological permutations of logos and the products, both material and immaterial, they designate. The fact that we are apt to the immediate, frequently unconscious recognition of the logo-sign allows it an elasticity of expression. All the same, there is an insistent emptiness in worldly signs, as witnessed in the logo, “one does not think and one does not act, but one makes signs,” (Deleuze, 2000: 6) the more the better. I am not laughing, I am merely making the gestures that suggest the idea of laughter. I am not a sportsperson, but I am wearing garb that would suggest a healthy and active life. We are even more sophisticated than this, for we can appreciate the multiple levels of significance that the running shoe seemingly offers its wearer. The worldly sign, and I would like to suggest that the logo-sign is an exemplary instance of this, “anticipates action as it does thought, annuls thought as it does action, and declares itself adequate: whence its stereotyped aspect and its vacuity” (6-7). It could be that Deleuze is too harsh here. The consumer can be a sophisticated actor, even if they do frequently become indiscernible from the logo of their choice. Deleuze and Guattari deplore the ‘ideas men,’ who have wrought such havoc, who have made of our desire something empty and unproductive. They accuse these “shameless and inane” advertising executives of having requisitioned the philosophical concept for their add campaigns, making of it a commercial product (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 10). Logos, the word of the god of consumerism. The ideas men know that the strength of the logo-sign resides in the fact that, “it doesn’t matter what it means, it’s still signifying” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 112). The logo-sign holds us firmly under its seductive sway. It permeates our affective landscape, impressing itself upon us so thoroughly that our very corporeal existence becomes host to a swarm of signs. We ourselves circulate as so many signs, carrying on our bodies innumerable minor signs and insignias. We inhabit a “network without beginning or end…an amorphous atmospheric continuum” (112), from which it is frequently difficult to distinguish ourselves. Instead, we become mere ciphers of our consumer behaviour, which will be noted and collated with each electro-plastic transaction. This is what Deleuze and Guattari have called the shadow world of signs, where signs refer to other signs ad infinitum, and where “the statement survives its object, the name survives its owner” (113). Here, although it offers little nourishment, “the simulation of a pack of noodles has become the true concept” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 10). The logo-sign operates by way of its relationship with an idea, or that concept stolen by ideas men. It is a vague idea, perhaps little more than a feeling that arouses an ill-defined desire that we believe will be consummated in the acquisition of some object or other. The work of the logo-sign is to designate a product-object, but this is a relation we tend to reverse, “we think that the ‘object’ itself has the secret of the sign it emits.” (Deleuze, 2000: 27) Ironically, the habitual assumption by which we think we can count on the “possession of things or on the consumption of objects,” an assumption augmented by the logo-sign, generally leaves us dissatisfied. Why, finally, despite our conquest of the object, do we so often feel that something is missing? Because the logo-sign that attaches itself to the object induces in us, the consumer, a sensibility toward the complex of logo and product. We become convinced that the object accommodates a fixed content that exists as a doppelganger for the obscure idea that has begun to plague our fantasies. It is important that the idea the logo communicates is vague and inexact, for we should not be given the opportunity to compare the registers of product and logo too closely. We achieve the object, we take it into our possession and all the gradually accumulated consumer pleasure begins to dissipate. The idea that aroused our desire has silently and surreptitiously slipped away. With what remarkable ease we become hooked. Then, the perpetuity of the consumer present demands that we promptly go in search of our next conquest, as little by little the world gets used up. Such are the highs and lows of logo induced consumer activity. That fiery and brief flush we suffer when we finally act on our desire to purchase, to own, to sport that particular product (my pair of shoes), makes the heart race. Quite literally, the blood is caused to rise. But this consumer glow tends to be followed by a vague, queasy sense of consumer guilt, which is succeeded in turn by consumer amnesia. The forgetfulness that assuages our consumer dissatisfaction keeps the logo-world turning. If we assume that we cannot escape the reign of the logo-sign and its logic, what can we instead choose to do with it? How do we return from our transcendent distractions to a field of immanence? How do we address the ever unfolding problems of this difficult world, day in, day out? This difficult world, a temporal maelstrom of immanence is only thinly disguised by our habits. Though it gives us little purchase, its unending upsurge of novelty surely offers some clues. As has been suggested above, the logo-sign depends on our well-tuned faculty for recognition. I see the same again, or the same with minor variations. Where is the novelty here? I circle around the constant of an obscure idea that draws me in and then, at the last moment, mysteriously escapes. How does the logo-sign instead become the sign of an unexpected encounter that encourages creative endeavours, especially when it always seems that the ideas men are one step ahead? Ideas men know full well the attraction of the new and are well practiced in dressing old concepts in the garb of the novel. They know how to deploy the logo, often setting it loose on the field of immanence where it will catch us unawares only to draw us away from real problems and productive engagements. Deleuze tells us that it is the plane of immanence that leads us into and not away from a life. This is the milieu in which we actualise possibilities at once as continuing to address the problems of the here and now as it slips away (Deleuze, 2001: 31). In part it is a matter of disentangling ourselves from the stultification of brand oriented identity formation, manifested in our intricate taxonomies of consumer-subjects and product-objects. Deleuze incites us to consider instead a participation in the impersonal process of singularisation. This has nothing to do with the spectacularly particular individual, her ownership of a value laden object, and her belief that such acquisitiveness will lead her to a higher actuality. The work required demands our extrication from the careful consumer training we have received, wherein we have determined that we are subjects of a certain genre of product in need of appropriate object accessories. It may simply be a matter of practicing a logo-awareness, of readjusting our consumer mores so that they align with the presentiment of other, less exploitative possibilities. We might consider all the minor relations, silent, invisible and absolutely crucial that interact to deliver the items that populate our consumer world. By these endlessly reconfigured relations, we are inextricably gathered into other lives, into the ebb and flow of uncountable singularities. Works Cited Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Capitalism and Schizophrenia: A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. What is Philosophy? Trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson, London and New York: Verso, 1994. Deleuze, Gilles. Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Deleuze, Gilles. Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life, trans. Anne Boyman, New York: Zone Books, 2001. Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Frichot, Hélène. "On the relentless logic of the logo-sign" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/10-sign.php>. APA Style Frichot, H. (2003, Jun 19). On the relentless logic of the logo-sign. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/10-sign.php>

Abstract:

No man [...] can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which one may be true. (Nathaniel Hawthorne Scarlet Letter – as seen and pondered by Tony Soprano at Bowdoin College, The Sopranos, Season 1, Episode 5: “College”)The fictitious is a particular and varied source of insight into the everyday world. The idea of seriality—with its variations of the serial, series, seriated—is very much connected to our patterns of entertainment. In this essay, I want to begin the process of testing what values and meanings can be drawn from the idea of seriality into comprehending the play of persona in contemporary culture. From a brief overview of the intersection of persona and seriality as well as a review of the deployment of seriality in popular culture, the article focuses on the character/ person-actor relationship to demonstrate how seriality produces persona. The French term for character—personnage—will be used to underline the clear relations between characterisation, person, and persona which have been developed by the recent work by Lenain and Wiame. Personnage, through its variation on the word person helps push the analysis into fully understanding the particular and integrated configuration between a public persona and the fictional role that an actor inhabits (Heinich).There are several qualities related to persona that allow this movement from the fictional world to the everyday world to be profitable. Persona, in terms of origins, in and of itself implies performance and display. Jung, for instance, calls persona a mask where one is “acting a role” (167); while Goffman considers that performance and roles are at the centre of everyday life and everyday forms and patterns of communication. In recent work, I have use persona to describe how online culture pushes most people to construct a public identity that resembles what celebrities have had to construct for their livelihood for at least the last century (“Persona”; “Self”). My work has expanded to an investigation of how online persona relates to individual agency (“Agency”) and professional postures and positioning (Barbour and Marshall).The fictive constructions then are intensified versions of what persona is addressing: the fabrication of a role for particular directions and ends. Characters or personnages are constructed personas for very directed ends. Their limitation to the study of persona as a dimension of public culture is that they are not real; however, when one thinks of the actor who takes on this fictive identity, there is clearly a relationship between the real personality and that of the character. Moreover, as Nayar’s analysis of highly famous characters that are fictitious reveals, these celebrated characters, such as Harry Potter or Wolverine, sometime take on a public presence in and of themselves. To capture this public movement of a fictional character, Nayar blends the terms celebrity with fiction and calls these semi-public/semi-real entities “celefiction”: the characters are famous, highly visible, and move across media, information, and cultural platforms with ease and speed (18-20). Their celebrity status underlines their power to move outside of their primary text into public discourse and through public spaces—an extra-textual movement which fundamentally defines what a celebrity embodies.Seriality has to be seen as fundamental to a personnage’s power of and extension into the public world. For instance with Harry Potter again, at least some of his recognition is dependent on the linking or seriating the related books and movies. Seriality helps organise our sense of affective connection to our popular culture. The familiarity of some element of repetition is both comforting for audiences and provides at least a sense of guarantee or warranty that they will enjoy the future text as much as they enjoyed the past related text. Seriality, though, also produces a myriad of other effects and affects which provides a useful background to understand its utility in both the understanding of character and its value in investigating contemporary public persona. Etymologically, the words “series” and seriality are from the Latin and refer to “succession” in classical usage and are identified with ancestry and the patterns of identification and linking descendants (Oxford English Dictionary). The original use of the seriality highlights its value in understanding the formation of the constitution of person and persona and how the past and ancestry connect in series to the current or contemporary self. Its current usage, however, has broadened metaphorically outwards to identify anything that is in sequence or linked or joined: it can be a series of lectures and arguments or a related mark of cars manufactured in a manner that are stylistically linked. It has since been deployed to capture the production process of various cultural forms and one of the key origins of this usage came from the 19th century novel. There are many examples where the 19th century novel was sold and presented in serial form that are too numerous to even summarise here. It is useful to use Dickens’ serial production as a defining example of how seriality moved into popular culture and the entertainment industry more broadly. Part of the reason for the sheer length of many of Charles Dickens’ works related to their original distribution as serials. In fact, all his novels were first distributed in chapters in monthly form in magazines or newspapers. A number of related consequences from Dickens’ serialisation are relevant to understanding seriality in entertainment culture more widely (Hayward). First, his novel serialisation established a continuous connection to his readers over years. Thus Dickens’ name itself became synonymous and connected to an international reading public. Second, his use of seriality established a production form that was seen to be more affordable to its audience: seriality has to be understood as a form that is closely connected to economies and markets as cultural commodities kneaded their way into the structure of everyday life. And third, seriality established through repetition not only the author’s name but also the name of the key characters that populated the cultural form. Although not wholly attributable to the serial nature of the delivery, the characters such as Oliver Twist, Ebenezer Scrooge or David Copperfield along with a host of other major and minor players in his many books become integrated into everyday discourse because of their ever-presence and delayed delivery over stories over time (see Allen 78-79). In the same way that newspapers became part of the vernacular of contemporary culture, fictional characters from novels lived for years at a time in the consciousness of this large reading public. The characters or personnages themselves became personalities that through usage became a way of describing other behaviours. One can think of Uriah Heep and his sheer obsequiousness in David Copperfield as a character-type that became part of popular culture thinking and expressing a clear negative sentiment about a personality trait. In the twentieth century, serials became associated much more with book series. One of the more successful serial genres was the murder mystery. It developed what could be described as recognisable personnages that were both fictional and real. Thus, the real Agatha Christie with her consistent and prodigious production of short who-dunnit novels was linked to her Belgian fictional detective Hercule Poirot. Variations of these serial constructions occurred in children’s fiction, the emerging science fiction genre, and westerns with authors and characters rising to related prominence.In a similar vein, early to mid-twentieth century film produced the film serial. In its production and exhibition, the film serial was a déclassé genre in its overt emphasis on the economic quality of seriality. Thus, the film serial was generally a filler genre that was interspersed before and after a feature film in screenings (Dixon). As well as producing a familiarity with characters such as Flash Gordon, it was also instrumental in producing actors with a public profile that grew from this repetition. Flash Gordon was not just a character; he was also the actor Buster Crabbe and, over time, the association became indissoluble for audiences and actor alike. Feature film serials also developed in the first half-century of American cinema in particular with child actors like Shirley Temple, Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland often reprising variations of their previous roles. Seriality more or less became the standard form of delivery of broadcast media for most of the last 70 years and this was driven by the economies of production it developed. Whether the production was news, comedy, or drama, most radio and television forms were and are variation of serials. As well as being the zenith of seriality, television serials have been the most studied form of seriality of all cultural forms and are thus the greatest source of research into what serials actually produced. The classic serial that began on radio and migrated to television was the soap opera. Although most of the long-running soap operas have now disappeared, many have endured for more than 30 years with the American series The Guiding Light lasting 72 years and the British soap Coronation Street now in its 64th year. Australian nighttime soap operas have managed a similar longevity: Neighbours is in its 30th year, while Home and Away is in its 27th year. Much of the analyses of soap operas and serials deals with the narrative and the potential long narrative arcs related to characters and storylines. In contrast to most evening television serials historically, soap operas maintain the continuity from one episode to the next in an unbroken continuity narrative. Evening television serials, such as situation comedies, while maintaining long arcs over their run are episodic in nature: the structure of the story is generally concluded in the given episode with at least partial closure in a manner that is never engaged with in the never-ending soap opera serials.Although there are other cultural forms that deploy seriality in their structures—one can think of comic books and manga as two obvious other connected and highly visible serial sources—online and video games represent the other key media platform of serials in contemporary culture. Once again, a “horizon of expectation” (Jauss and De Man 23) motivates the iteration of new versions of games by the industry. New versions of games are designed to build on gamer loyalties while augmenting the quality and possibilities of the particular game. Game culture and gamers have a different structural relationship to serials which at least Denson and Jahn-Sudmann describe as digital seriality: a new version of a game is also imagined to be technologically more sophisticated in its production values and this transformation of the similitude of game structure with innovation drives the economy of what are often described as “franchises.” New versions of Minecraft as online upgrades or Call of Duty launches draw the literal reinvestment of the gamer. New consoles provide a further push to serialisation of games as they accentuate some transformed quality in gameplay, interaction, or quality of animated graphics. Sports franchises are perhaps the most serialised form of game: to replicate new professional seasons in each major sport, the sports game transforms with a new coterie of players each year.From these various venues, one can see the centrality of seriality in cultural forms. There is no question that one of the dimensions of seriality that transcends these cultural forms is its coordination and intersection with the development of the industrialisation of culture and this understanding of the economic motivation behind series has been explored from some of the earliest analyses of seriality (see Hagedorn; Browne). Also, seriality has been mined extensively in terms of its production of the pleasure of repetition and transformation. The exploration of the popular, whether in studies of readers of romance fiction (Radway), or fans of science fiction television (Tulloch and Jenkins; Jenkins), serials have provided the resource for the exploration of the power of the audience to connect, engage and reconstruct texts.The analysis of the serialisation of character—the production of a public personnage—and its relation to persona surprisingly has been understudied. While certain writers have remarked on the longevity of a certain character, such as Vicky Lord’s 40 year character on the soap opera One Life to Live, and the interesting capacity to maintain both complicated and hidden storylines (de Kosnik), and fan audience studies have looked at the parasocial-familiar relationship that fan and character construct, less has been developed about the relationship of the serial character, the actor and a form of twinned public identity. Seriality does produce a patterning of personnage, a structure of familiarity for the audience, but also a structure of performance for the actor. For instance, in a longitudinal analysis of the character of Fu Manchu, Mayer is able to discern how a patterning of iconic form shapes, replicates, and reiterates the look of Fu Manchu across decades of films (Mayer). Similarly, there has been a certain work on the “taxonomy of character” where the serial character of a television program is analysed in terms of 6 parts: physical traits/appearance; speech patterns, psychological traits/habitual behaviours; interaction with other characters; environment; biography (Pearson quoted in Lotz).From seriality what emerges is a particular kind of “type-casting” where the actor becomes wedded to the specific iteration of the taxonomy of performance. As with other elements related to seriality, serial character performance is also closely aligned to the economic. Previously I have described this economic patterning of performance the “John Wayne Syndrome.” Wayne’s career developed into a form of serial performance where the individual born as Marion Morrison becomes structured into a cultural and economic category that determines the next film role. The economic weight of type also constructs the limits and range of the actor. Type or typage as a form of casting has always been an element of film and theatrical performance; but it is the seriality of performance—the actual construction of a personnage that flows between the fictional and real person—that allows an actor to claim a persona that can be exchanged within the industry. Even 15 years after his death, Wayne remained one of the most popular performers in the United States, his status unrivalled in its close definition of American value that became wedded with a conservative masculinity and politics (Wills).Type and typecasting have an interesting relationship to seriality. From Eisenstein’s original use of the term typage, where the character is chosen to fit into the meaning of the film and the image was placed into its sequence to make that meaning, it generally describes the circ*mscribing of the actor into their look. As Wojcik’s analysis reveals, typecasting in various periods of theatre and film acting has been seen as something to be fought for by actors (in the 1850s) and actively resisted in Hollywood in 1950 by the Screen Actors Guild in support of more range of roles for each actor. It is also seen as something that leads to cultural stereotypes that can reinforce the racial profiling that has haunted diverse cultures and the dangers of law enforcement for centuries (Wojcik 169-71). Early writers in the study of film acting, emphasised that its difference from theatre was that in film the actor and character converged in terms of connected reality and a physicality: the film actor was less a mask and more a sense of “being”(Kracauer). Cavell’s work suggested film over stage performance allowed an individuality over type to emerge (34). Thompson’s semiotic “commutation” test was another way of assessing the power of the individual “star” actor to be seen as elemental to the construction and meaning of the film role Television produced with regularity character-actors where performance and identity became indissoluble partly because of the sheer repetition and the massive visibility of these seriated performances.One of the most typecast individuals in television history was Leonard Nimoy as Spock in Star Trek: although the original Star Trek series ran for only three seasons, the physical caricature of Spock in the series as a half-Vulcan and half-human made it difficult for the actor Nimoy to exit the role (Laws). Indeed, his famous autobiography riffed on this mis-identity with the forceful but still economically powerful title I am Not Spock in 1975. When Nimoy perceived that his fans thought that he was unhappy in his role as Spock, he published a further tome—I Am Spock—that righted his relationship to his fictional identity and its continued source of roles for the previous 30 years. Although it is usually perceived as quite different in its constitution of a public identity, a very similar structure of persona developed around the American CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite. With his status as anchor confirmed in its power and centrality to American culture in his desk reportage of the assassination and death of President Kennedy in November 1963, Cronkite went on to inhabit a persona as the most trusted man in the United States by the sheer gravitas of hosting the Evening News stripped across every weeknight at 6:30pm for the next 19 years. In contrast to Nimoy, Cronkite became Cronkite the television news anchor, where persona, actor, and professional identity merged—at least in terms of almost all forms of the man’s visibility.From this vantage point of understanding the seriality of character/personnage and how it informs the idea of the actor, I want to provide a longer conclusion about how seriality informs the concept of persona in the contemporary moment. First of all, what this study reveals is the way in which the production of identity is overlaid onto any conception of identity itself. If we can understand persona not in any negative formulation, but rather as a form of productive performance of a public self, then it becomes very useful to see that these very visible public blendings of performance and the actor-self can make sense more generally as to how the public self is produced and constituted. My final and concluding examples will try and elucidate this insight further.In 2013, Netflix launched into the production of original drama with its release of House of Cards. The series itself was remarkable for a number of reasons. First among them, it was positioned as a quality series and clearly connected to the lineage of recent American subscription television programs such as The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Dexter, Madmen, The Wire, Deadwood, and True Blood among a few others. House of Cards was an Americanised version of a celebrated British mini-series. In the American version, an ambitious party whip, Frank Underwood, manoeuvres with ruthlessness and the calculating support of his wife closer to the presidency and the heart and soul of American power. How the series expressed quality was at least partially in its choice of actors. The role of Frank Underwood was played by the respected film actor Kevin Spacey. His wife, Clare, was played by the equally high profile Robin Warren. Quality was also expressed through the connection of the audience of viewers to an anti-hero: a personnage that was not filled with virtue but moved with Machiavellian acuity towards his objective of ultimate power. This idea of quality emerged in many ways from the successful construction of the character of Tony Soprano by James Gandolfini in the acclaimed HBO television series The Sopranos that reconstructed the very conception of the family in organised crime. Tony Soprano was enacted as complex and conflicted with a sense of right and justice, but embedded in the personnage were psychological tropes and scars, and an understanding of the need for violence to maintain influence power and a perverse but natural sense of order (Martin).The new television serial character now embodied a larger code and coterie of acting: from The Sopranos, there is the underlying sense and sensibility of method acting (see Vineberg; Stanislavski). Gandolfini inhabited the role of Tony Soprano and used the inner and hidden drives and motivations to become the source for the display of the character. Likewise, Spacey inhabits Frank Underwood. In that new habitus of television character, the actor becomes subsumed by the role. Gandolfini becomes both over-determined by the role and his own identity as an actor becomes melded to the role. Kevin Spacey, despite his longer and highly visible history as a film actor is overwhelmed by the televisual role of Frank Underwood. Its serial power, where audiences connect for hours and hours, where the actor commits to weeks and weeks of shoots, and years and years of being the character—a serious character with emotional depth, with psychological motivation that rivals the most visceral of film roles—transforms the actor into a blended public person and the related personnage.This blend of fictional and public life is complex as much for the producing actor as it is for the audience that makes the habitus real. What Kevin Spacey/Frank Underwood inhabit is a blended persona, whose power is dependent on the constructed identity that is at source the actor’s production as much as any institutional form or any writer or director connected to making House of Cards “real.” There is no question that this serial public identity will be difficult for Kevin Spacey to disentangle when the series ends; in many ways it will be an elemental part of his continuing public identity. This is the economic power and risk of seriality.One can see similar blendings in the persona in popular music and its own form of contemporary seriality in performance. For example, Eminem is a stage name for a person sometimes called Marshall Mathers; but Eminem takes this a step further and produces beyond a character in its integration of the personal—a real personnage, Slim Shady, to inhabit his music and its stories. To further complexify this construction, Eminem relies on the production of his stories with elements that appear to be from his everyday life (Dawkins). His characterisations because of the emotional depth he inhabits through his rapped stories betray a connection to his own psychological state. Following in the history of popular music performance where the singer-songwriter’s work is seen by all to present a version of the public self that is closer emotionally to the private self, we once again see how the seriality of performance begins to produce a blended public persona. Rap music has inherited this seriality of produced identity from twentieth century icons of the singer/songwriter and its display of the public/private self—in reverse order from grunge to punk, from folk to blues.Finally, it is worthwhile to think of online culture in similar ways in the production of public personas. Seriality is elemental to online culture. Social media encourage the production of public identities through forms of repetition of that identity. In order to establish a public profile, social media users establish an identity with some consistency over time. The everydayness in the production of the public self online thus resembles the production and performance of seriality in fiction. Professional social media sites such as LinkedIn encourage the consistency of public identity and this is very important in understanding the new versions of the public self that are deployed in contemporary culture. However, much like the new psychological depth that is part of the meaning of serial characters such as Frank Underwood in House of Cards, Slim Shady in Eminem, or Tony Soprano in The Sopranos, social media seriality also encourages greater revelations of the private self via Instagram and Facebook walls and images. We are collectively reconstituted as personas online, seriated by the continuing presence of our online sites and regularly drawn to reveal more and greater depths of our character. In other words, the online persona resembles the new depth of the quality television serial personnage with elaborate arcs and great complexity. Seriality in our public identity is also uncovered in the production of our game avatars where, in order to develop trust and connection to friends in online settings, we maintain our identity and our patterns of gameplay. At the core of this online identity is a desire for visibility, and we are drawn to be “picked up” and shared in some repeatable form across what we each perceive as a meaningful dimension of culture. Through the circulation of viral images, texts, and videos we engage in a circulation and repetition of meaning that feeds back into the constancy and value of an online identity. Through memes we replicate and seriate content that at some level seriates personas in terms of humour, connection and value.Seriality is central to understanding the formation of our masks of public identity and is at least one valuable analytical way to understand the development of the contemporary persona. This essay represents the first foray in thinking through the relationship between seriality and persona.ReferencesBarbour, Kim, and P. David Marshall. “The Academic Online Constructing Persona.” First Monday 17.9 (2012).Browne, Nick. “The Political Economy of the (Super)Text.” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 9.3 (1984): 174-82. Cavell, Stanley. “Reflections on the Ontology of Film.” Movie Acting: The Film Reader. Ed. Wojcik and Pamela Robertson. London: Routledge, 2004 (1979). 29-35.Dawkins, Marcia Alesan. “Close to the Edge: Representational Tactics of Eminem.” The Journal of Popular Culture 43.3 (2010): 463-85.De Kosnik, Abigail. “One Life to Live: Soap Opera Storytelling.” How to Watch Television. Ed. Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell. New York: New York University Press, 2013. 355-63.Denson, Shane, and Andreas Jahn-Sudmann. “Digital Seriality: On the Serial Aesthetics and Practice of Digital Games.” Journal of Computer Game Culture 7.1 (2013): 1-32.Dixon, Wheeler Winston. “Flash Gordon and the 1930s and 40s Science Fiction Serial.” Screening the Past 11 (2011). 20 May 2014.Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Woodstock, New York: The Overlook Press, 1973.Hagedorn, Roger “Technology and Economic Exploitation: The Serial as a Form of Narrative Presentation.” Wide Angle 10. 4 (1988): 4-12.Hayward, Jennifer Poole. Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997.Heinrich, Nathalie. “Personne, Personnage, Personalité: L'acteur a L'ère De Sa Reproductibilité Technique.” Personne/Personnage. Eds. Thierry Lenain and Aline Wiame. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 2011. 77-101.Jauss, Hans Robert, and Paul De Man. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Brighton: Harvester, 1982.Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992.Jung, C. G., et al. Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. 2nd ed. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966.Kracauer, Siegfried. “Remarks on the Actor.” Movie Acting, the Film Reader. Ed. Pamela Robertson Wojcik. London: Routledge, 2004 (1960). 19-27.Leonard Nimoy & Pharrell Williams: Star Trek & Creating Spock. Ep. 12. Reserve Channel. December 2013. Lenain, Thierry, and Aline Wiame (eds.). Personne/Personnage. Librairie Philosophiques J. VRIN, 2011.Lotz, Amanda D. “House: Narrative Complexity.” How to Watch TV. Ed. Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell. New York: New York University Press, 2013. 22-29.Marshall, P. David. “The Cate Blanchett Persona and the Allure of the Oscar.” The Conversation (2014). 4 April 2014.Marshall, P. David “Persona Studies: Mapping the Proliferation of the Public Self.” Journalism 15.2 (2014): 153-70.Marshall, P. David. “Personifying Agency: The Public–Persona–Place–Issue Continuum.” Celebrity Studies 4.3 (2013): 369-71.Marshall, P. David. “The Promotion and Presentation of the Self: Celebrity as Marker of Presentational Media.” Celebrity Studies 1.1 (2010): 35-48.Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. 2nd Ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.Martin, Brett. Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad. London: Faber and Faber, 2013.Mayer, R. “Image Power: Seriality, Iconicity and the Mask of Fu Manchu.” Screen 53.4 (2012): 398-417.Nayar, Pramod K. Seeing Stars: Spectacle, Society, and Celebrity Culture. New Delhi; Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, 2009.Nimoy, Leonard. I Am Not Spock. Milbrae, California: Celestial Arts, 1975.Nimoy, Leonard. I Am Spock. 1st ed. New York: Hyperion, 1995.Radway, Janice A. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984.Stanislavski, Constantin. Creating a Role. New York: Routledge, 1989 (1961).Thompson, John O. “Screen Acting and the Commutation Test.” Movie Acting: The Film Reader. Ed. Pamela Robertson Wojcik. London: Routledge, 2004 (1978). 37-48.Tulloch, John, and Henry Jenkins. Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Doctor Who and Star Trek. London; New York: Routledge, 1995.Vineberg, Steve. Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style. New York; Toronto: Schirmer Books, 1991.Wills, Garry. John Wayne’s America: The Politics of Celebrity. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.Wojcik, Pamela Robertson. “Typecasting.” Movie Acting: The Film Reader. Ed. Pamela Robertson Wojcik. London: Routledge, 2004. 169-89.

Abstract:

Through Andy Warhol, much important thinking about the meanings of celebrity for a capitalist, schizoid world takes place — by Andy, by his significant others (Pat Hackett, Bob Colacello, Brigid Berlin), and by the consumers and contemplators of his works. Both a source of his own observations and a screen on which philosophies are projected, Warhol presents an unparalleled critique of celebrity. Other horizontalities, such as Madonna’s, do not generate half the heat as Warhol’s own tendril-like intrusion into so many aspects of the media machine (music, publishing, modeling, painting, film-making, writing). Exchanging competence for breadth, Warhol follows Michel de Certeau’s critique of Freud in Heterologies: Discourse on the Other perfectly: he, too, makes a “conquista” of disciplines and practices outside his sphere of competence. Warhol’s comments with respect to actress Janet Gaynor’s paintings after her May 1976 opening at Manhattan’s Wally Findlay Gallery refer both to Gaynor and himself: “‘The paintings are so bad…but I bet they go up. Look how big she signs her name. It’s like buying an autograph and then you get the flowers thrown in, right?’” (Colacello 289). Comprehending the power of branding, Warhol grants autograph primacy over “autographed.” Factoring the art market into his aesthetics, Warhol founds his definition about what counts as art upon what counts as economics. Through him, business art truly comes into its own. Contemplating art suddenly means comprehending art’s social and financial contexts as well — as when, for example, Warhol ponders the absence of a black audience for his work: “Some blacks recognized me a few times this weekend, and I’m trying to figure out what they recognize so I can somehow sell it to them, whatever it is” (Diaries, Sunday 3 July 1977). Setting his own life up as a philosophical object, Warhol exemplifies astrophysics’ great question of how nothing can produce something. Fashion philosophe himself, he also answers fellow thinker Quentin Crisp’s important question about how “zero” becomes “one.” For both Warhol and Crisp, celebrity is founded upon the algebraic exchange of a positive quantity (fame) for a placeholding nonquantity (nonentity). In How to Have a Life-Style, Crisp traces his interest in the proliferative zero to the educative childhood lunchtime acquisition which first taught him the importance of spontaneous generation: One day, when I was lying as naked as the Greater London Council would allow on a few planks in the “life” room of Walthamstowe College of Art, a student came and sat beside me. It did not befit my station in life to begin a conversation with her. My supposition was that she wished less to be with me than in front of the only electric heater in the place. I was amazed when she asked me if I would like some of the chocolate that formed the “afters” of her instant lunch. I sat up at once. My limbs were galvanized, as though insulin had been pumped into my muscles, by the thought of getting something for nothing. The girl broke her slab of chocolate in two and handed me half. (3) For Crisp, the production of celebrity from nonentity echoes other unbalanced nonexchanges; concerned with similar economic aberrances, Warhol takes a related pleasure in the freak appearance of fame. Like Crisp, he also finds himself “galvanized” by the prospect of converting the null set into the productive series. Setting himself up as a “stargazer” (Stephen Koch’s epithet), Warhol makes it his project to reflect the fame of others, while using those reflections to garner fame for himself. Becoming a surface, Warhol makes fame a question of optics. Throughout the Diaries, we witness Warhol’s constant attention to his own appearance: “Got my live-in contacts but I can’t read or draw in them. Do they have bifocals you can wear with contacts? It’s so scary to wake up in the middle of the night and be able to see” (Tuesday 11 Aug. 1981). Normality is consistently painted in the fauve colors of the bizarre — in this quote, vision becomes a source of disorientation. Sight and unsight cross wires. Rather than facilitate the production of his art, ocular prostheses impede it — implying that he is a better artist when blind or half-sighted. Even odder is the fact that Warhol’s new contacts boost his performance as a model. That someone with so “off” an appearance should ever qualify as model material seems almost like a cruel insider joke (as in John Waters’ 1972 film Female Trouble, the repulsive is given new life as the gorgeous). Warhol had always been interested in modeling, though, as a 1968 photo shoot, “The Status Shirt Put On,” demonstrates. The caption reads: “Andy Warhol, right, garnishes velvet pants ($40, from Stone the Crows) with chains, belts and a lace-trimmed dinner shirt from Turnbull & Asser ($40, Bonwit Teller).” Situated at the confluence of status, fashion and chicanery, Warhol as putter-on emerges from his chrysalis as a model — someone meant to be looked at and emulated, a body meant to be run through the media machine and copied. As the Diaries draw to a close, Warhol’s modeling career provides him with his final cultural act: “In the morning I was preparing myself for my appearance in the fashion show Benjamin coordinated at the Tunnel. They’d sent the clothes over and I look like Liberace in them. Should I just go all the way and be the new Liberace? Snakeskin and rabbit fur. Julian Schnabel (laughs) would be so impressed he would start wearing them” (Tuesday 17 Feb. 1987). Bob Colacello is less than kind in his analysis of Warhol as model: Zoli did get him a couple of runway jobs and Daniela Morela put him in a L’Uomo Vogue spread jumping up and down with some other cute guys, but it was obvious that he was being used for his joke value. That October, Halston asked him to model in a Martha Graham charity fashion show as Bloomingdale’s. He didn’t appear until the end of the show, accompanied by Victor Hugo. His face was caked with makeup and he wore a voluminous royal blue taffeta smock with a big red bow around his neck. He looked like a cross between a clown and a Christmas present. Victor wore the same outfit in emerald green. As Andy minced down the runway, I could hear the ladies around me buzz. The words they used were weirdo, creep, and sissy. (442-3) Bursting Warhol’s balloon, and probably paying him back for countless episodes of personal humiliation, Colacello points out the strangeness of Warhol’s new career choice. Like so many other classes of people (old bags, debs), models pique Andy’s curiosity by virtue of their ontological freshness. In his Diaries, Warhol expresses a keen interest in model anthropology: how this new breed of human beings and these new workers comport themselves commands attention. Their language bemuses him: “Jerry Hall came by with a Halston model named Carol, and models just all talk that baby talk, the girls and the boys — you always know you’re talking to a model” (Wednesday 8 July 1981). Like all other industry-bound jargons, model talk emerges from a concrete set of practices and concerns. All creatures from the modeling industry seem to partake of its linguistic possibilities: “Went into the kitchen for coffee in the main house. Pat Cleveland was reading her Latin books and her mind-control books…She was after Jon, showing him how to walk like you have a dime up your ass and they did that well. She talks model talk. And she plays the flute. And she does yoga. All those things” (Saturday 11 July 1981). Generically distinct from other public creatures, models have their own enunciative staples and rules for structuring an utterance. Like Martians, they have their own unique mode of communicating. Ever interested in specificity, Warhol cannot help but be intrigued by the novelty of their speech; in its simplicity and in its constant juvenilization, their language mirrors his own. Saturated with Hollywoodisms, like “up-there” or “the kids,” Warhol’s vocabulary and syntax point to the existence of other linguistic subsystems and idioms. What matters most is the existence of what de Certeau refers to as a “way of operating,” a mode of getting around. Warhol’s fascination with celebrity species informs his own attention to his development over time. Reflecting important fashion debates of the decades he inhabits, Warhol makes his body a living record of all that transpires around it. As in Richard Avedon’s famous photograph of Warhol’s torso (Andy Warhol, Artist, New York City, 8/20/69), his body tells a story — in this instance, about Valerie Solanas’ rage and its traces. Warhol gets to know Warhol, recording his own oscillations in image: “Everyone tells me they like my hair this new way. I cut it every day. It’s almost a crewcut. Fred said I dress like the kids I hang around with now, he likes it. I guess the preppie look really is big because of the Preppie Handbook. I’m wearing all of Jed’s leftover clothes, the ones he left behind. I’m so skinny they fit me now” (Wednesday 8 July 1981). Warhol monitors his appearance with precision, never failing to provide his readers with the details of his transformation from one type to another. With almost an evolutionary sensibility, Warhol traces the development of new styles while also showing the effect they have on his own aesthetic of dressing. Inextricably immersed in time, Warhol gives in to its flows, which wash over him, carrying his body along with their currents. Similarly, he keeps meticulous track of styles of locomotion, as when, after a Twyla Tharp show, he comments: “The dancing, it’s a funny new kind of dancing, falling and tripping, and it looks like disco dancing. It looks like if you had a creative person on the disco floor, that they would do this (intermission drinks $10)” (Thursday, February 15, 1979). Using his early films, like Vinyl, to document dance styles, such as the frug, Warhol records different ways of posturing. He also documents the emergence of new social diseases: “The Donahue Show was on the flasher problem. This is a big important new problem, right? Men who flash. A wife and her husband who flashed were on, they were in the dark, and businessmen and lawyers who flashed” (Monday 28 July 1980). Within the hypermediated universe of capitalism, everything has its fifteen moments of fame, including problems. Ever the voyeur, Warhol makes note of new trends in exhibitionism, well aware that the job of the talk show is to fabricate and disseminate new fears (What do I do if my neighbor flashes me?, etc.). Fears, too, are commodities, as discussed by Barry Glossner in his The Culture of Fear. Alongside locomotionary styles and fashion creature Feynmann sums, anxieties wax and wane in popularity, produced, dissolved and eventually recycled by the media as products-of-the-week. Recognizing the new status of the media in everyday life, Warhol dedicates himself to recording its fluctuations for the purposes of fashion documentary, biography and contemplation. Positing glamour as a breakdown in the fashion system, Warhol offers a worldview in which the faux pas, the leftover and the mismatched forge an aesthetics of desperation. Warhol is the vehicle for fame. Through him, this abstract entity comes to know itself as such, realizing its possibilities through sensual and material objectification. References Books Colacello, Bob. Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up. New York: Cooper Square Press, 1990. Crisp, Quentin. How to Have a Life-Style. Los Angeles: Alyson Books, 1998. De Certeau, Michel. Heterologies: Discourse on the Other. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Glossner, Barry. The Culture of Fear. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Warhol, Andy. The Warhol Diaries. New York: Warner Books, 1989. ——— and Hackett, Pat. POPism: The Warhol Sixties. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980. Articles “The Status Shirt Put On.” Look. 12 Nov. 1968. Time Capsule –12. Films Warhol, Andy. Vinyl, 1965. Waters, John. Female Trouble. New Line Cinema, 1972. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Tata, Michael Angelo. "Beyond the Stars: Warholian Meta-Celebrity." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/11-tata.php>. APA Style Tata, M. (Nov. 2004) "Beyond the Stars: Warholian Meta-Celebrity," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/11-tata.php>.

Abstract:

Who would have thought so much activity and noise over stillness? According to the contributors of this issue of M/C Journal 'still' as phenomenon, state, pause, symbolic field or geopolitical struggle fizzes, vibrates and resonates. It hums; it makes one vulnerable; it draws one into the world differently and it accesses new agencies and movement. Or not. Such is the complexity of the topologies/ecologies and economies (in every sense of the word) of still. For us and our contributors, still is an intriguing theoretical figure that media-mobility-cultural studies and indeed, the world should attend to more closely, more slowly. Now is the time for what Andrew Murphie has called, "the revenge of the still". This collection is positioned within a world that has increasingly come to be understood through the theoretical and conceptual lens of animation. There are multiple overlapping antecedents to this, criss-crossing the humanities and social sciences. Metaphors of movement, from Manuel Castells’ space of flows to Zygmunt Bauman’s liquid modernity underpin much work within the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ (Sheller and Urry) that is interested in understanding the world through relations of movement and flux. Moving away from a sedentary metaphysics of being-in-the-world, burgeoning mobilities research illustrates a commitment to exploring the differentiated dynamics of a world increasingly characterised by networks of corporeal, virtual and imaginative mobilities. In a different but related vein, the ‘affective turn’ (Clough and Halley) has generated new ways of attending to the relations between bodies, technology and matter, through a renewed ontological focus on the pre-individual bodily forces that constitute life. Attending to the excessiveness of affect, matter is increasingly apprehended as processual, turbulent and fluid. Indeed it is through a sense of liveliness and energy within which worldly dwelling is increasingly conceptualised. Against this buzz of mobility and animation, a topology of stillness haunts the space of flows. Indeed mobility scholars have increasingly recognised the importance of considering the relational dialectic of mobilities and immobilities; or 'mobilities and moorings' to use John Urry's phrase; understanding how these relations are central, not only to the functioning of mobility systems, but how they have the capacity to generate the systematic inequalities that are such a significant (and indeed integral) part of such systems. Yet we want to suggest that to focus on such a dialectic of stasis and movement neglects other registers and modalities which still inhabits, where still emerges through other configurations of matter which are not necessarily reducible to the dialectic of mobility and immobility. What happens if we think stillness not only as rhythm, but also as technic or trope? As attunement or perception? As such, each paper in this collection attends to still through a range of different grammars and vocabularies; illuminating the multiplicity of ontological and epistemological registers through which still moves.For some in this collection, still emerges as a site of political and ethical potential. For Emma co*cker, the significance of collective acts of still have the capacity to augment the affectual capacity of the body. Here, experimental practices of still in the city constitute events of resistance that disrupt habitual modalities of inhabiting the city, producing fissures within which new lines of flight can emerge. Such deliberative attunement through collective practices of still produces an affirmative model of subjectivity; a challenge to the choking assemblages of governance that stratify bodies. Similarly, for Natalia Radwyl, the body’s affective intensities are enhanced and augmented through still. Still here works as a reflexive figure, serving to focus attention on how we are conditioned and desensitised by habitual rhythms of the everyday. In a rather different context, Sebastian Abrahamsson’s discussion of the still of Gunther van Hagen's plastinates also highlights how still enacts a mode of resistance, in this instance to the temporal organisational logics of modernity. Such an affirmative vitalism works to emphasise the presencing tendencies of still; how still enables bodies to become aware of the otherwise imperceptible rhythms, materialities and intensities that are more often than not subsumed beneath the hallucinatory effects of the dizzying flux of contemporary flows. We might consider this still as attunement where still provides the necessary conditions under which productive, focused activity can emerge. Greg Noble and Megan Watkins emphasise how such attunement in educational settings might be achieved through a particular set of corporeal postures characterised by still. Still here generates a more receptive body, enhancing a disposition towards learning. In a radically different context, Peter Adey describes how still functioned to prime the body in a variety of different ways during the air raids of World War II. Here the development of anticipatory structures of feeling through still formed part of a strategy of affectual management where achieving still was a means of survival. Others in this collection illustrate the problematics of aligning still with such affirmative presencing; the calling into being of a body. Paul Harrison considers the nature of agency and determination through an exploration of gestures of ‘suspension’, ‘decline’ and ‘remaining aside’. In the absence of wilful or effective action, where resolution is suspended, we are forced to rethink the morality of action and the persistent ‘telos of the political’ that is often assumed to inhabit action. For Harrison, far from constituting resignation or failure, this suspension of meaning and value in ‘remaining still’ exists as a condition of political possibility.Debbie Lisle too points to the radical incommensurability of still, where meaning stutters and fails. Her discussion of the still of photographic images thus problematises the assumption of the role of media to generate and transmit meaning. In a similar non-relational vein, J.-D. Dewsbury also problematises the assumption of a reflexive, intentional body, arguing that still invites us to consider the ‘neutral presence of life itself’. This is not the surrender to still that emerges through Radywyl’s discussion, rather it is the still point which brings bodies into being, and provides the conditions through which it is possible to comprehend as a body. This still not only promises a sensitivity to the susceptibility and vulnerability of corporeal being in the world, but also radically decentres the body from analysis; demonstrating an appreciation for an expanded repertoire of materialities. Shades of the post-human are evident in Ross Harley’s paper which considers the dynamic geometries brought about by a range of non-human materialities in the airport. Here it is only a spectre of the human that haunts these images which are instead inhabited by a world of hums, transparencies, lightwaves, luminosities and glows. Reworking the oft-invoked dualistic relation between the attentive body and inattentive spatiality, these ‘techno-veins and tendrils’ reach out and press into a body tending towards still. Indeed the stubborn obduracy of matter is also underlined by Nour Dados in her discussion on the endurance of the archive. Contrary to a corporeal emphasis, Adey also points to how still might be better apprehended as a sensibility distributed through ‘bodies, feelings, materials and atmospheres’. And yet this collection also warns us that we need to be attentive to the shadows of still; where still is seized upon and engineered by other forces - particularly through channels of authoritarian capitalism to great material and symbolic effect. Whilst still often denotes as a threat to neoliberal capitalism, for Sarah Sharma, even under conditions of capitalism disintegration, the inexorable power of capitalism is revealed through its wily recalibrations. The constraints placed on mobility during periods of capital restructuring open up new avenues of exploitation, which, when folded through sentimental, insular nationalist discourses culminates in an intoxicating profusion of moral responsibility to be still and an obedience to capitalism that only exacerbates socio-economic inequalities. Whilst remaining still is presented as a necessary consolation of the broken promises of capitalism, it also serves to illustrate the tensions that simmer between the impression of an agentive, autonomous individual taking charge of their situation, and the parallel still of the credulous ‘passenger’, swindled yet again by the overbearing affective and discursive power of capitalism. This echoes co*cker’s assertion of the power of capitalism to generate ‘sad affects’. Such a sinister manipulation of still also emerges through regimes of governmentality. For Andrew Murphie, still has always been and remains a powerful ‘technic of modernity’, which has the capacity to coerce, organise and stratify bodies in harmful ways that reduce their potential for action. In contrast to vitalist-inspired literature that explores how corporeal limits can be transcended affectually and materially through various configurations of practical activity, coerced still can push bodies to limits in ways that diminish their potentials. Here, still can inflict wounds, tear and break down the body, reducing its capacity to act. In a similar vein, for Nicholas Gill, still emerges as a crucial tool of political strategy to organise and arrange asylum seekers’ bodies.But in attending to still, are we merely just reversing the glamour of animation? World-weary with the dizzying effect that chasing movement induces, have we become self-effacing post-humanists, taking respite by languishing in the resignation and reprive that tending to still might offer? Does still offer an escapist fantasy from the hell of constant commodified and complicit motion, as co*cker asks? Or in tending to still are we just acknowledging the failure and fallout, not only of systems and networks, but also of representational, symbolic and discursive systems? There are certainly many suggestions that we need to slow down. Indeed many writers have draw attention to the epistemic problematic associated with the impulse to relentlessly move conceptual understandings beyond; a drive that is often characteristic of academic practice. An unremitting desire to put things in the 'post-'. The implication here is that speed, and the resulting displacement, as a particular characteristic of engagement does not provide the space for a sustained involvement within - or sufficient reflection through - worldly phenomena. Decisions and interventions made too hastily, where the unabating power of affect curtails apparently sensible, reflective dispositions, are often condemned for being overly reactive, partisan or thoughtless. Here, still is related to tropes of mindfulness, contemplation and responsibility where an enhanced, attuned ethical sensibility is forged out of a suspension of judgement. Still might enable composure and provide the conditions through which a responsibility towards depth and detail can emerge.Whilst there certainly might be inflections of each of these suggestions, this collection does not proffer a critique of hyper-mobility.Indeed reflection on recent catastrophic events illuminates how the ‘still’ aligned with inaction is often taken to be ethically scandalous, not to mention politically disastrous. No writer in this collection evidences an urge to simply escape, transcend or withdraw from the liveliness of being-in-the-world. Still is not a state or place of escape. It is not introspective or purposefully deferential. Still here is resolutely not about the wilful invitation of an 'agency to come' in the words of Harrison. Whilst each of these papers works to undo the pejorative associations with indolence and laziness that so often accretes around paranoiac renderings of still, equally they do not advocate that still should be put to work to generate productive, purposive activity.Yes, still can be optimised, engineered, governed. But is is the radical aporia that still presents which gives it its significance to our thinking. Taken together, what this collection demonstrates is a sensitivity to still as a relation-to-the-world that moves beyond the dualisms of mobility and immobility; activity and inactivity without transcending them. The promise of still is a particular mode of engagement with a world that rearranges intensities, folds through the vital and the vulnerable, providing a new set of political and ethical concerns.Is there a still that is still? Is still to cultural studies what God might be to the process philosophy of Alfred Whitehead. If as Paul Harrison suggests still can be thought of as a theoretical figure without value - a condition of political possibility in all forms, then there is much value in this lack of value as it produces a still that is neither immanent nor transcendent but which provides a new mode of 'coherence' through which we might explore the flux of the world.AcknowledgementsWe would like to take this opportunity to thank each of the contributors for making this issue sparkle. We would like to extent our debt of gratitude to the referees for providing such thoughtful, detailed and helpful commentaries on each of the papers. We would also like to thank Elly Clarke, our cover artist, for providing such a pertinent image to front our collection.ReferencesBauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity P, 2000.Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996Clough, Patricia, and Jean Halley. The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Durham: Duke U P, 2007.Sheller, Mimi, and John Urry. "The New Mobilities Paradigm." Environment and Planning A 38.2 (2006): 207-226.Urry, John. Global Complexity. Cambridge: Polity P, 2003.

Abstract:

Introduction There is, as Andrew Rowan dubs it, a “constant paradox” in the way we treat, relate to, and consume animals in our everyday lives (Arluke and Sanders 4). This paper examines this paradox in relation to the rise of vegetarianism as a new taste and consumer culture in the West. The first part of the paper, drawing upon Bourdieu, argues that vegetarian “taste” is fundamentally a social practice linked to class and gender. It then offers a preliminary theoretical sketch of the sociological drivers and consequences of vegetarianism in late-modernity, drawing on social theory. Having established the theoretical framework, the second part of the paper turns to an empirical analysis of the moral motivations and experiences of a selection of Australian bloggers. The key argument is that the bloggers narrate vegetarianism as a taste practice that entangles self-care with a larger assemblage of non-human responsibility that works to re-enchant a demoralised consumer modernity. Vegetarianism as Taste Practice “Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier”, Pierre Bourdieu famously claimed (xxix). Bourdieu demonstrated the classificatory power of taste not only in relation to music, home décor, and art but also in relation to food. Taste, for Bourdieu, is a social process by which people actively communicate social position through classification of the judgements and preferences of both themselves and others. For example, he highlighted how the working-class dislike for fish was part of a wider class system of dispositions where the middle-class favour “the light, the refined and the delicate” defined in negation of working-class taste for “the heavy, the fat and the coarse” (182–83). How then do we read vegetarianism as a taste practice? First, we need to take Bourdieu’s point that vegetarianism is not simply an expression of personal preference, but is a social practice that articulates identity, group membership, and systems of cultural distinction. Bourdieu, while not writing about vegetarianism, did link meat eating to masculine and working-class displays of embodied strength and power—“warrior food”, as Nietzsche called it (Bennett 141). Meat, Bourdieu wrote, was “nourishing food par excellence, strong and strong-making, giving vigour, blood, and health is the dish for men” (190). On this reading, meat avoidance can be located as part of a middle-class taste for the “light” and the “healthy” but also a rejection of working-class and masculine food taste practices. Vegetarianism, like buying fair-trade, organic, and eco-friendly, might be theorised as a symbolic device for enacting middle-class displays of cultural distinction based on claims to moral purity and virtue. On the gender front, female vegetarians conform to taste trends for middle-class women—light, not fattening, and healthy—whereas for men, vegetarianism is linked to the rejection of “hegemonic” masculinity and patriarchy (Bourdieu; Connell). Empirical research partially lends support to this depiction, showing that vegetarianism is predominantly practiced by female, middle-class, university-qualified professionals working in service-sector or white-collar occupations (RealEat; Keane and Willetts). This kind of Bourdieuian analysis is important in drawing attention to the social configurations of vegetarianism as a taste practice. It, however, misses the ethical substance of vegetarianism and the wider social and cultural changes that are driving its growth in the West. The following section addresses this gap. Theorising Vegetarianism Adrian Franklin explains the growth of vegetarianism in the last part of the 20th century as part of a process of “de-centring” human-animal relations in conditions of late-modernity. Franklin suggests that vegetarianism is part of a wider social and cultural shift where animals make new types of moral claims on humans as they form closer and more intimate emotional bonds. He argues that in the context of widespread feelings of moral decline and disorder, animals are constructed as morally pure and innocent, and humans morally blameworthy and destructive (Franklin 196). From this perspective, vegetarianism is less about an ethical regards for animals but more about what animals reveal about human moral worlds: the reflections are less about an ethical consideration of the “Other” and more about a moral consideration of “ourselves” (Franklin 196). A sticker plastered on the door of my local vegetarian café encapsulates this perspective: it reads, “humans are the real pests.” Unlike Bourdieu and Franklin, Tester is important in moving from a narrow focus on what humans “do” with animals as symbolic or communicative acts to the ethical significance of vegetarianism. Tester makes a critical distinction between the “ethical” and “lifestyle” vegetarian. In Tester’s terms, the “lifestyle” vegetarian avoids meat for health and well-being reasons while the “ethical” vegetarian is concerned for the ethical treatment of animals. The “lifestyle” vegetarian is problematic for Tester due to “the being of the ethical conduct of life” being substituted for “the doing of the consumer” (218). Vegetarianism becomes emptied of moral meaning as it turns into big business marked by the growth of a multi-billion dollar faux meat industry, trendy vegetarian restaurants, lifestyle converts, and celebrity endorsem*nts. In “lifestyle” mode, Tester argues, vegetarian concern for animal cruelty, slaughter, and death is colonised by a narcissistic concern for slimming, youth, and health—for the promotion of a contented consumer self (Humphery). Although Tester highlights the ethical substance of vegetarianism and the challenges it faces in a consumer world, like the rest of the accounts, it tends to be anthropocentric. Animals tend to speak solely to human worlds, ignoring the vitality and “distributed agency” (Bennett 38) of the non-human. The non-human animal tends to be construed as a passive and inert resource existing solely for human intentionality, rather than acknowledging their “vital power” and “liveliness” outside human agendas (133). Bennett claims that eating highlights the inseparability of humans and edible matter, and the capacity for both human and nonhuman bodies to effect social and political change. She proposes that through a greater sense of ourselves as entwined with, and part of, nature as physical entities, we can enchant the world and become energised as co-participants. Here vegetarianism can be understood as part of recognition of the “assemblage” of human and non-human actions, where self, body, nature and planet become mutually constituting and supportive. Vegetarian taste is not just about middle-class concerns for distinction, but an ethics of the non-human. What does vegetarianism as an ethical taste practice look like “on the ground”? What are the moral motivations for becoming vegetarian, and how is this understood and experienced? What roles do lifestyle and ethical motivations play in vegetarian eating behaviours? In the following section, I turn to a selection of Australian bloggers to make a modest contribution to understanding these questions in the contemporary Australian context. The bloggers are taken from a wider study that analysed 44 urban Australian blogs as part of a project on everyday Australian moralities. The blogs were sampled from the blog hosting website LiveJournal (LJ) between 2006 and 2007. Blog usernames used have been fictionalised to maintain anonymity. Specifically, I focus on a selection of three blog case studies: Universal_cloak, a 32-year-old female artistic designer from Melbourne, Starbright, a 28-year-old female student from Brisbane, and Snig, a 25-year-old male paramedic from Melbourne. The bloggers are a representative selection from a wider sample of blog writing on vegetarianism and human-animal relations. The blog narratives complicate Tester’s simplistic distinction between the “ethical” and “lifestyle” vegetarian, articulating vegetarianism as form of ethical practice that works to morally enchant the world in a dialogue between self-improvement, personal well-being, and ethical relationships with animals and the planet (Taylor). Vegetarianism in Practice: “Positive for Me, Positive for Others” Universal_cloak writes how “being hippy—wearing hippy clothes, eating healthy organic food and being full of positive energy” makes her “feel healthier […] like I’m doing a better thing for the world (society in particular) […] like I’m doing something good”. Being “authentic” to a “hippy” identity—“being true to herself”—is connected for Universal_cloak to a wider concern for the non-human—for animals, nature, and the planet. An important component of this link between self-fulfilment and “doing a better thing for the world” is not eating the “corpses of animals.” Universal_cloak describes this in detail, at the same time underlining the environmental dimensions of her vegetarianism: I feel sick to my stomach to think that an animal dies so I can eat. Why is it any different to feel the same way that people are abused, tortured and killed, that eco-systems are ravaged and torn up and irreversibly damaged, just so I can have the choice of four kinds of marinated tuna in a can? So I can have two newsagents to choose from? So I can have Alice Cooper iron-on patches, miniature plastic bowling pins, disposable cameras, instant oats, microwavable popcorn, extra-soft, quilted and f*cking fragranced toilet paper? McDonalds f*cking everywhere [...] ugh, I can't take it. I need to go to bed. No wonder depression is on the rise—we have a kingdom of putrid revulsion to look down upon. Vegetarianism figures for Universal_cloak as a form of ethical consumption that enables resistance to feelings of modern demoralisation, to the feeling of being “swallowed up by the great hulky polluted monster, with ads and consumer sh*t everywhere around you.” For Universal_cloak, vegetarianism works to both critique and re-enchant modernity: a way of saying “she doesn’t agree with the modern world” but also building a “better world around herself.” She writes that following her “ideal diet” of “fair-trade, veg-o, organic and local” and not “white bread and processed meat” gives her a strong sense of “staving off her fear that I’m f*cking up the planet”. Universal_cloak locates vegetarianism within an assemblage of self-interest, nutritional advantage, ecological sustainability, and anti-consumerism (Bennett). Universal_cloak, ­as Tester distinguishes, is neither a straightforward “lifestyle vegetarian” or “ethical vegetarian” (218), neither avoiding meat-eating solely because of reasons to do with health, well-being, and risk avoidance or due to an ethical regard for the being of animals. Universal_cloak shows up Tester’s critique on two fronts. First, she highlights how vegetarianism comes alive in an assemblage that includes not only the needs of the non-human animal but also the materiality of food production, marketing, consumerism, and issues of ecological unsustainability. Universal_Cloak’s practice reflects a wider “greening of the ‘vegetarian assemblage’.” As an advertisem*nt on the Australian Vegetarian Society’s website states: “reduce your eco footprint—GO VEGO.” Secondly, Universal_cloak underscores how Tester is bound to an overly pessimistic reading of contemporary lifestyle cultures of well-being or self-improvement. Tester reads the “lifestyle vegetarian,” focused on well-being and health, as morally inferior. In contrast, Universal_cloak reveals how vegetarianism built around a culture of self-improvement—being true to her “hippy” identity—connects her to a larger web of interacting material flows and forces constituted between self, body, non-human animals, and planetary concern. As Bennett argues, recognising the entanglement of self within a larger assemblage of the non-human means that self-interest is refashioned as ecological and interconnected ­(119). Starbright, a 28-year-old woman from Brisbane and newly practising Buddhist, further captures the expansion of self-interest within the larger aggregate of ecological and non-human concern. Picking up a copy of Peter Singer’s call to arms Animal Liberation in a second-hand bookshop while travelling in Laos, Starbright describes how she initially decided to make “a firm decision to stick to vegetarianism.” Now a devoted vegan, Starbright abstains from eating and using “anything that comes from an animal”, including clothing and footwear (e.g., wool, silk, and leather), food sources such as eggs, milk, honey or cochineal (red dye from beetles) and cosmetic products that may either contain animal derivatives or have been tested on animals. While requiring rigorous discipline and regulation of the self—a kind of secular version of Weber’s Protestant ascetic—Starbright depicts her decision to become vegan as being “one of the easiest and most rewarding changes I've made in my life.” In explaining this, Starbright, in a manner similar to that of Universal_cloak, invokes the interconnections between humans and ecological and animal life as the basis of her moral motivation. She writes: “I’m just another well-informed individual who has discovered the virtues of not eating meat, like being environmentally and ethically aware.” Starbright positions her choice not to eat meat as both an ethical and political act, which compounds to improve the lives of both human and non-human animals: If I don’t support the meat industry, I make a tiny dent in the consumption rate. Others around me take on vegetarianism, and the effect increases. Others eat less meat around me, and the dent gets slightly bigger [...] Less grazing land needed means less environmental destruction as well. Less crops to feed the animals as well. Veganism is a “rewarding change” not only because “its good to reduce suffering” but also because it is “positive to [her] health”, that she is “happier now” and she “get[s] a positive feeling out of it.” Starbright adds: “it just makes me happy, and it reduces the suffering in the world—that’s the main reason I do it.” Vegetarianism enables Starbright to engage in clearly defined morally “good works,” where there is mutual reinforcement of the “feel-good factor” (Franklin 36) between personal wellbeing and “care for the Other” (Bauman 8): “it just seems positive for me, and positive for others.” This is a form of care not perpetuating a human centred approach, which Bennett (88) warns against, but one that recognises the entanglement of human lives with non-human lives—where humans are called upon to recognise that the plight of animals and the environment is also our own plight. Snig similarly places his practice of vegetarianism within a dialectic of self-fulfilment and interconnection with the non-human world. For him, vegetarianism is about maintaining what he refers to as “internal balance,” enabling him to avoid “over-filling” his “physical needs” bucket at the expense of his “emotional bucket.” Snig believes that much of the “physical or psychic illness, unhappiness and dissatisfaction” experienced in the contemporary West is due to an “over-filling” or “over-satisfaction of one at the expense of another.” Accordingly, he advocates the “positive effects” of “filling the emotional bucket” by “doing good works” which downplay the negative psychological consequences of an “excess of sex but no romantic love” and an “excess of shallow entertainment but no deeper intellectual life.” Snig writes: If you put yourself in a position where you have a greater capacity to do good works, the path to do so becomes easier. But if you’re hopelessly mired in your own filth, any benefit you do to the world will be by accident. If you’re so locked up in your tiny little world of tv-fast-food-boring job, you can’t see what the big wide world has to offer, and what you have to offer it. Step outside and it can become much clearer. Similar to Universal_cloak, there is an emphasis in Snig’s blog on how “doing good works” (which includes vegetarianism, alongside working as a paramedic, living in small flat in the city, and volunteering on conservation projects) enables a kind of moral renewal in a perceived demoralised consumer modernity. Abstaining from eating meat—sometimes alone, but often in conjunction with a range of other eco-friendly acts—works as a way of distancing oneself, of “stepping outside,” from the excess and waste of modernity and a practical way of “doing good,” of “trying to make a better world.” Conclusion This paper has analysed vegetarianism as a contemporary taste and consumer practice. Drawing upon Bourdieu, the first part argued that it is important to recognise vegetarianism as a taste practice with distinct social configurations that are classed and gendered. Vegetarianism is linked to taste as a vehicle of distinction, making and reinforcing social divisions and distance. In such an analysis, Vegetarianism aligns with feminine and middle-class notions of food as “light, healthy and non-fattening” and for men can figure as a rejection of dominant forms of masculinity. It was argued that while Bourdieu is useful for highlighting the social dimensions of taste, this form of analysis underplays the ethical substance of vegetarianism and the wider drivers of change in contemporary human–animal relations. Here the paper drew upon the work of Franklin, Tester, and Bennett. The first two authors underline the tensions between ethics, consumerism, and lifestyle in late-modernity while Bennett highlights the distribution of agency across human/non-human “assemblages.” This theoretical background was used as a framework to investigate blogged accounts of vegetarianism. The bloggers highlight how vegetarianism works as a moral space for performing “good works” and re-enchanting a demoralised consumer modernity. In Universal_cloak’s words, vegetarianism serves as a way of saying “you don’t agree with the modern world”. Critiquing Tester’s distinction between the “lifestyle” and “ethical” vegetarian, the bloggers show how vegetarianism/veganism is constituted in a complex assemblage between health, personal well-being, animal, and environmental concerns. Drawing upon Bennett, it was suggested that vegetarianism emerges as part of a refashioning of self-interest where concerns for self and personal wellbeing are articulated within wider concerns for nature, animals and the planet. This paper raises bigger questions concerning how animals enter into human lives as “particular” Others in conditions of growing human–animal closeness. For example, to what extent will responsibility for and with the non-human grow and how will this impact upon meat eating in the West? Will vegetarianism flourish as part of contemporary middle-class taste trends toward “green,” “healthy,” and “organic” consumption? The question remains whether vegetarianism will primarily be an expression of middle-class distinction or part of a genuine ecological sensibility where the non-human—both animal and planetary—play a significant role in the working out of moral sensibilities. Perhaps Universal_cloak’s practice of vegetarianism provides an important model, where contemporary concern for self-fulfilment, health, and well-being are articulated within a large assemblage of interdependence and connection with animals, nature and the environment. The recent UN recommendation to either reduce meat-intake or adopt a plant-based diet to minimise carbon emissions (Steinfeld et al.) suggests that the nexus between human, animal, and environmental responsibility is, and will continue to be, central to everyday moral negotiation in late-modernity. References Arluke, Arnold, and Clinton R. Sanders. Regarding Animals. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1996. Bauman, Zygmunt. Postmodern Ethics. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke UP, 2010. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Harvard UP, 1984. Franklin, Adrian. Animals and Modern Cultures: A Sociology of Human–Animal Relations in Modernity. London: Sage, 1999.Humphrey, Kim. Excess: Anti-Consumerism in the West. Cambridge: Polity, 2009. Keane, Anne, and Anna Willets. Concepts of Healthy Eating: An Anthropological Investigation in South-East London. London: Goldsmiths College, 1996. RealEat Survey Office. The RealEat Survey 1984–1993: Changing Attitudes to Meat Consumption. London: Vegetarian Society, 1995. Steinfeld, Henning, Pierre Gerber, Tom Wassenaar, Vincent Castel, Mauricio Rosales, M. and Cees de Haan. “LiveStock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options”. Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (2006). 10 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/a0701e/a0701e00.HTM›. Taylor, Charles. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992. Tester, Keith. “The Moral Malaise of McDonaldization: The Values of Vegetarianism”. Resisting McDonaldization. Ed. Barry Smart. London: Sage, 1999. 207–222.

Abstract:

There is no diagram that does not also include, besides the points it connects up, certain relatively free or unbounded points, points of creativity, change and resistance, and it is perhaps with these that we ought to begin in order to understand the whole picture. (Deleuze, “Foucault” 37) Monty Cantsin: Why do we use a pervert software robot to exploit our collective consensual mind? Letitia: Because we want the thief to be a digital entity. Monty Cantsin: But isn’t this really blasphemic? Letitia: Yes, but god – in our case a meta-co*cktail of authorship and copyright – can not be trusted anymore. (Amazon Noir, “Dialogue”) In 2006, some 3,000 digital copies of books were silently “stolen” from online retailer Amazon.com by targeting vulnerabilities in the “Search inside the Book” feature from the company’s website. Over several weeks, between July and October, a specially designed software program bombarded the Search Inside!™ interface with multiple requests, assembling full versions of texts and distributing them across peer-to-peer networks (P2P). Rather than a purely malicious and anonymous hack, however, the “heist” was publicised as a tactical media performance, Amazon Noir, produced by self-proclaimed super-villains Paolo Cirio, Alessandro Ludovico, and Ubermorgen.com. While controversially directed at highlighting the infrastructures that materially enforce property rights and access to knowledge online, the exploit additionally interrogated its own interventionist status as theoretically and politically ambiguous. That the “thief” was represented as a digital entity or machinic process (operating on the very terrain where exchange is differentiated) and the emergent act of “piracy” was fictionalised through the genre of noir conveys something of the indeterminacy or immensurability of the event. In this short article, I discuss some political aspects of intellectual property in relation to the complexities of Amazon Noir, particularly in the context of control, technological action, and discourses of freedom. Software, Piracy As a force of distribution, the Internet is continually subject to controversies concerning flows and permutations of agency. While often directed by discourses cast in terms of either radical autonomy or control, the technical constitution of these digital systems is more regularly a case of establishing structures of operation, codified rules, or conditions of possibility; that is, of guiding social processes and relations (McKenzie, “Cutting Code” 1-19). Software, as a medium through which such communication unfolds and becomes organised, is difficult to conceptualise as a result of being so event-orientated. There lies a complicated logic of contingency and calculation at its centre, a dimension exacerbated by the global scale of informational networks, where the inability to comprehend an environment that exceeds the limits of individual experience is frequently expressed through desires, anxieties, paranoia. Unsurprisingly, cautionary accounts and moral panics on identity theft, email fraud, p*rnography, surveillance, hackers, and computer viruses are as commonplace as those narratives advocating user interactivity. When analysing digital systems, cultural theory often struggles to describe forces that dictate movement and relations between disparate entities composed by code, an aspect heightened by the intensive movement of informational networks where differences are worked out through the constant exposure to unpredictability and chance (Terranova, “Communication beyond Meaning”). Such volatility partially explains the recent turn to distribution in media theory, as once durable networks for constructing economic difference – organising information in space and time (“at a distance”), accelerating or delaying its delivery – appear contingent, unstable, or consistently irregular (Cubitt 194). Attributing actions to users, programmers, or the software itself is a difficult task when faced with these states of co-emergence, especially in the context of sharing knowledge and distributing media content. Exchanges between corporate entities, mainstream media, popular cultural producers, and legal institutions over P2P networks represent an ongoing controversy in this respect, with numerous stakeholders competing between investments in property, innovation, piracy, and publics. Beginning to understand this problematic landscape is an urgent task, especially in relation to the technological dynamics that organised and propel such antagonisms. In the influential fragment, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” Gilles Deleuze describes the historical passage from modern forms of organised enclosure (the prison, clinic, factory) to the contemporary arrangement of relational apparatuses and open systems as being materially provoked by – but not limited to – the mass deployment of networked digital technologies. In his analysis, the disciplinary mode most famously described by Foucault is spatially extended to informational systems based on code and flexibility. According to Deleuze, these cybernetic machines are connected into apparatuses that aim for intrusive monitoring: “in a control-based system nothing’s left alone for long” (“Control and Becoming” 175). Such a constant networking of behaviour is described as a shift from “molds” to “modulation,” where controls become “a self-transmuting molding changing from one moment to the next, or like a sieve whose mesh varies from one point to another” (“Postscript” 179). Accordingly, the crisis underpinning civil institutions is consistent with the generalisation of disciplinary logics across social space, forming an intensive modulation of everyday life, but one ambiguously associated with socio-technical ensembles. The precise dynamics of this epistemic shift are significant in terms of political agency: while control implies an arrangement capable of absorbing massive contingency, a series of complex instabilities actually mark its operation. Noise, viral contamination, and piracy are identified as key points of discontinuity; they appear as divisions or “errors” that force change by promoting indeterminacies in a system that would otherwise appear infinitely calculable, programmable, and predictable. The rendering of piracy as a tactic of resistance, a technique capable of levelling out the uneven economic field of global capitalism, has become a predictable catch-cry for political activists. In their analysis of multitude, for instance, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt describe the contradictions of post-Fordist production as conjuring forth a tendency for labour to “become common.” That is, as productivity depends on flexibility, communication, and cognitive skills, directed by the cultivation of an ideal entrepreneurial or flexible subject, the greater the possibilities for self-organised forms of living that significantly challenge its operation. In this case, intellectual property exemplifies such a spiralling paradoxical logic, since “the infinite reproducibility central to these immaterial forms of property directly undermines any such construction of scarcity” (Hardt and Negri 180). The implications of the filesharing program Napster, accordingly, are read as not merely directed toward theft, but in relation to the private character of the property itself; a kind of social piracy is perpetuated that is viewed as radically recomposing social resources and relations. Ravi Sundaram, a co-founder of the Sarai new media initiative in Delhi, has meanwhile drawn attention to the existence of “pirate modernities” capable of being actualised when individuals or local groups gain illegitimate access to distributive media technologies; these are worlds of “innovation and non-legality,” of electronic survival strategies that partake in cultures of dispersal and escape simple classification (94). Meanwhile, pirate entrepreneurs Magnus Eriksson and Rasmus Fleische – associated with the notorious Piratbyrn – have promoted the bleeding away of Hollywood profits through fully deployed P2P networks, with the intention of pushing filesharing dynamics to an extreme in order to radicalise the potential for social change (“Copies and Context”). From an aesthetic perspective, such activist theories are complemented by the affective register of appropriation art, a movement broadly conceived in terms of antagonistically liberating knowledge from the confines of intellectual property: “those who pirate and hijack owned material, attempting to free information, art, film, and music – the rhetoric of our cultural life – from what they see as the prison of private ownership” (Harold 114). These “unruly” escape attempts are pursued through various modes of engagement, from experimental performances with legislative infrastructures (i.e. Kembrew McLeod’s patenting of the phrase “freedom of expression”) to musical remix projects, such as the work of Negativland, John Oswald, RTMark, Detritus, Illegal Art, and the Evolution Control Committee. Amazon Noir, while similarly engaging with questions of ownership, is distinguished by specifically targeting information communication systems and finding “niches” or gaps between overlapping networks of control and economic governance. Hans Bernhard and Lizvlx from Ubermorgen.com (meaning ‘Day after Tomorrow,’ or ‘Super-Tomorrow’) actually describe their work as “research-based”: “we not are opportunistic, money-driven or success-driven, our central motivation is to gain as much information as possible as fast as possible as chaotic as possible and to redistribute this information via digital channels” (“Interview with Ubermorgen”). This has led to experiments like Google Will Eat Itself (2005) and the construction of the automated software thief against Amazon.com, as process-based explorations of technological action. Agency, Distribution Deleuze’s “postscript” on control has proven massively influential for new media art by introducing a series of key questions on power (or desire) and digital networks. As a social diagram, however, control should be understood as a partial rather than totalising map of relations, referring to the augmentation of disciplinary power in specific technological settings. While control is a conceptual regime that refers to open-ended terrains beyond the architectural locales of enclosure, implying a move toward informational networks, data solicitation, and cybernetic feedback, there remains a peculiar contingent dimension to its limits. For example, software code is typically designed to remain cycling until user input is provided. There is a specifically immanent and localised quality to its actions that might be taken as exemplary of control as a continuously modulating affective materialism. The outcome is a heightened sense of bounded emergencies that are either flattened out or absorbed through reconstitution; however, these are never linear gestures of containment. As Tiziana Terranova observes, control operates through multilayered mechanisms of order and organisation: “messy local assemblages and compositions, subjective and machinic, characterised by different types of psychic investments, that cannot be the subject of normative, pre-made political judgments, but which need to be thought anew again and again, each time, in specific dynamic compositions” (“Of Sense and Sensibility” 34). This event-orientated vitality accounts for the political ambitions of tactical media as opening out communication channels through selective “transversal” targeting. Amazon Noir, for that reason, is pitched specifically against the material processes of communication. The system used to harvest the content from “Search inside the Book” is described as “robot-perversion-technology,” based on a network of four servers around the globe, each with a specific function: one located in the United States that retrieved (or “sucked”) the books from the site, one in Russia that injected the assembled documents onto P2P networks and two in Europe that coordinated the action via intelligent automated programs (see “The Diagram”). According to the “villains,” the main goal was to steal all 150,000 books from Search Inside!™ then use the same technology to steal books from the “Google Print Service” (the exploit was limited only by the amount of technological resources financially available, but there are apparent plans to improve the technique by reinvesting the money received through the settlement with Amazon.com not to publicise the hack). In terms of informational culture, this system resembles a machinic process directed at redistributing copyright content; “The Diagram” visualises key processes that define digital piracy as an emergent phenomenon within an open-ended and responsive milieu. That is, the static image foregrounds something of the activity of copying being a technological action that complicates any analysis focusing purely on copyright as content. In this respect, intellectual property rights are revealed as being entangled within information architectures as communication management and cultural recombination – dissipated and enforced by a measured interplay between openness and obstruction, resonance and emergence (Terranova, “Communication beyond Meaning” 52). To understand data distribution requires an acknowledgement of these underlying nonhuman relations that allow for such informational exchanges. It requires an understanding of the permutations of agency carried along by digital entities. According to Lawrence Lessig’s influential argument, code is not merely an object of governance, but has an overt legislative function itself. Within the informational environments of software, “a law is defined, not through a statue, but through the code that governs the space” (20). These points of symmetry are understood as concretised social values: they are material standards that regulate flow. Similarly, Alexander Galloway describes computer protocols as non-institutional “etiquette for autonomous agents,” or “conventional rules that govern the set of possible behavior patterns within a heterogeneous system” (7). In his analysis, these agreed-upon standardised actions operate as a style of management fostered by contradiction: progressive though reactionary, encouraging diversity by striving for the universal, synonymous with possibility but completely predetermined, and so on (243-244). Needless to say, political uncertainties arise from a paradigm that generates internal material obscurities through a constant twinning of freedom and control. For Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, these Cold War systems subvert the possibilities for any actual experience of autonomy by generalising paranoia through constant intrusion and reducing social problems to questions of technological optimisation (1-30). In confrontation with these seemingly ubiquitous regulatory structures, cultural theory requires a critical vocabulary differentiated from computer engineering to account for the sociality that permeates through and concatenates technological realities. In his recent work on “mundane” devices, software and code, Adrian McKenzie introduces a relevant analytic approach in the concept of technological action as something that both abstracts and concretises relations in a diffusion of collective-individual forces. Drawing on the thought of French philosopher Gilbert Simondon, he uses the term “transduction” to identify a key characteristic of technology in the relational process of becoming, or ontogenesis. This is described as bringing together disparate things into composites of relations that evolve and propagate a structure throughout a domain, or “overflow existing modalities of perception and movement on many scales” (“Impersonal and Personal Forces in Technological Action” 201). Most importantly, these innovative diffusions or contagions occur by bridging states of difference or incompatibilities. Technological action, therefore, arises from a particular type of disjunctive relation between an entity and something external to itself: “in making this relation, technical action changes not only the ensemble, but also the form of life of its agent. Abstraction comes into being and begins to subsume or reconfigure existing relations between the inside and outside” (203). Here, reciprocal interactions between two states or dimensions actualise disparate potentials through metastability: an equilibrium that proliferates, unfolds, and drives individuation. While drawing on cybernetics and dealing with specific technological platforms, McKenzie’s work can be extended to describe the significance of informational devices throughout control societies as a whole, particularly as a predictive and future-orientated force that thrives on staged conflicts. Moreover, being a non-deterministic technical theory, it additionally speaks to new tendencies in regimes of production that harness cognition and cooperation through specially designed infrastructures to enact persistent innovation without any end-point, final goal or natural target (Thrift 283-295). Here, the interface between intellectual property and reproduction can be seen as a site of variation that weaves together disparate objects and entities by imbrication in social life itself. These are specific acts of interference that propel relations toward unforeseen conclusions by drawing on memories, attention spans, material-technical traits, and so on. The focus lies on performance, context, and design “as a continual process of tuning arrived at by distributed aspiration” (Thrift 295). This later point is demonstrated in recent scholarly treatments of filesharing networks as media ecologies. Kate Crawford, for instance, describes the movement of P2P as processual or adaptive, comparable to technological action, marked by key transitions from partially decentralised architectures such as Napster, to the fully distributed systems of Gnutella and seeded swarm-based networks like BitTorrent (30-39). Each of these technologies can be understood as a response to various legal incursions, producing radically dissimilar socio-technological dynamics and emergent trends for how agency is modulated by informational exchanges. Indeed, even these aberrant formations are characterised by modes of commodification that continually spillover and feedback on themselves, repositioning markets and commodities in doing so, from MP3s to iPods, P2P to broadband subscription rates. However, one key limitation of this ontological approach is apparent when dealing with the sheer scale of activity involved, where mass participation elicits certain degrees of obscurity and relative safety in numbers. This represents an obvious problem for analysis, as dynamics can easily be identified in the broadest conceptual sense, without any understanding of the specific contexts of usage, political impacts, and economic effects for participants in their everyday consumptive habits. Large-scale distributed ensembles are “problematic” in their technological constitution, as a result. They are sites of expansive overflow that provoke an equivalent individuation of thought, as the Recording Industry Association of America observes on their educational website: “because of the nature of the theft, the damage is not always easy to calculate but not hard to envision” (“Piracy”). The politics of the filesharing debate, in this sense, depends on the command of imaginaries; that is, being able to conceptualise an overarching structural consistency to a persistent and adaptive ecology. As a mode of tactical intervention, Amazon Noir dramatises these ambiguities by framing technological action through the fictional sensibilities of narrative genre. Ambiguity, Control The extensive use of imagery and iconography from “noir” can be understood as an explicit reference to the increasing criminalisation of copyright violation through digital technologies. However, the term also refers to the indistinct or uncertain effects produced by this tactical intervention: who are the “bad guys” or the “good guys”? Are positions like ‘good’ and ‘evil’ (something like freedom or tyranny) so easily identified and distinguished? As Paolo Cirio explains, this political disposition is deliberately kept obscure in the project: “it’s a representation of the actual ambiguity about copyright issues, where every case seems to lack a moral or ethical basis” (“Amazon Noir Interview”). While user communications made available on the site clearly identify culprits (describing the project as jeopardising arts funding, as both irresponsible and arrogant), the self-description of the artists as political “failures” highlights the uncertainty regarding the project’s qualities as a force of long-term social renewal: Lizvlx from Ubermorgen.com had daily shootouts with the global mass-media, Cirio continuously pushed the boundaries of copyright (books are just pixels on a screen or just ink on paper), Ludovico and Bernhard resisted kickback-bribes from powerful Amazon.com until they finally gave in and sold the technology for an undisclosed sum to Amazon. Betrayal, blasphemy and pessimism finally split the gang of bad guys. (“Press Release”) Here, the adaptive and flexible qualities of informatic commodities and computational systems of distribution are knowingly posited as critical limits; in a certain sense, the project fails technologically in order to succeed conceptually. From a cynical perspective, this might be interpreted as guaranteeing authenticity by insisting on the useless or non-instrumental quality of art. However, through this process, Amazon Noir illustrates how forces confined as exterior to control (virality, piracy, noncommunication) regularly operate as points of distinction to generate change and innovation. Just as hackers are legitimately employed to challenge the durability of network exchanges, malfunctions are relied upon as potential sources of future information. Indeed, the notion of demonstrating ‘autonomy’ by illustrating the shortcomings of software is entirely consistent with the logic of control as a modulating organisational diagram. These so-called “circuit breakers” are positioned as points of bifurcation that open up new systems and encompass a more general “abstract machine” or tendency governing contemporary capitalism (Parikka 300). As a consequence, the ambiguities of Amazon Noir emerge not just from the contrary articulation of intellectual property and digital technology, but additionally through the concept of thinking “resistance” simultaneously with regimes of control. This tension is apparent in Galloway’s analysis of the cybernetic machines that are synonymous with the operation of Deleuzian control societies – i.e. “computerised information management” – where tactical media are posited as potential modes of contestation against the tyranny of code, “able to exploit flaws in protocological and proprietary command and control, not to destroy technology, but to sculpt protocol and make it better suited to people’s real desires” (176). While pushing a system into a state of hypertrophy to reform digital architectures might represent a possible technique that produces a space through which to imagine something like “our” freedom, it still leaves unexamined the desire for reformation itself as nurtured by and produced through the coupling of cybernetics, information theory, and distributed networking. This draws into focus the significance of McKenzie’s Simondon-inspired cybernetic perspective on socio-technological ensembles as being always-already predetermined by and driven through asymmetries or difference. As Chun observes, consequently, there is no paradox between resistance and capture since “control and freedom are not opposites, but different sides of the same coin: just as discipline served as a grid on which liberty was established, control is the matrix that enables freedom as openness” (71). Why “openness” should be so readily equated with a state of being free represents a major unexamined presumption of digital culture, and leads to the associated predicament of attempting to think of how this freedom has become something one cannot not desire. If Amazon Noir has political currency in this context, however, it emerges from a capacity to recognise how informational networks channel desire, memories, and imaginative visions rather than just cultivated antagonisms and counterintuitive economics. As a final point, it is worth observing that the project was initiated without publicity until the settlement with Amazon.com. There is, as a consequence, nothing to suggest that this subversive “event” might have actually occurred, a feeling heightened by the abstractions of software entities. To the extent that we believe in “the big book heist,” that such an act is even possible, is a gauge through which the paranoia of control societies is illuminated as a longing or desire for autonomy. As Hakim Bey observes in his conceptualisation of “pirate utopias,” such fleeting encounters with the imaginaries of freedom flow back into the experience of the everyday as political instantiations of utopian hope. Amazon Noir, with all its underlying ethical ambiguities, presents us with a challenge to rethink these affective investments by considering our profound weaknesses to master the complexities and constant intrusions of control. It provides an opportunity to conceive of a future that begins with limits and limitations as immanently central, even foundational, to our deep interconnection with socio-technological ensembles. References “Amazon Noir – The Big Book Crime.” http://www.amazon-noir.com/>. Bey, Hakim. T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism. New York: Autonomedia, 1991. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fibre Optics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Crawford, Kate. “Adaptation: Tracking the Ecologies of Music and Peer-to-Peer Networks.” Media International Australia 114 (2005): 30-39. Cubitt, Sean. “Distribution and Media Flows.” Cultural Politics 1.2 (2005): 193-214. Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Trans. Seán Hand. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. ———. “Control and Becoming.” Negotiations 1972-1990. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia UP, 1995. 169-176. ———. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” Negotiations 1972-1990. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia UP, 1995. 177-182. Eriksson, Magnus, and Rasmus Fleische. “Copies and Context in the Age of Cultural Abundance.” Online posting. 5 June 2007. Nettime 25 Aug 2007. Galloway, Alexander. Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin Press, 2004. Harold, Christine. OurSpace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007. Lessig, Lawrence. Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. New York: Basic Books, 1999. McKenzie, Adrian. Cutting Code: Software and Sociality. New York: Peter Lang, 2006. ———. “The Strange Meshing of Impersonal and Personal Forces in Technological Action.” Culture, Theory and Critique 47.2 (2006): 197-212. Parikka, Jussi. “Contagion and Repetition: On the Viral Logic of Network Culture.” Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization 7.2 (2007): 287-308. “Piracy Online.” Recording Industry Association of America. 28 Aug 2007. http://www.riaa.com/physicalpiracy.php>. Sundaram, Ravi. “Recycling Modernity: Pirate Electronic Cultures in India.” Sarai Reader 2001: The Public Domain. Delhi, Sarai Media Lab, 2001. 93-99. http://www.sarai.net>. Terranova, Tiziana. “Communication beyond Meaning: On the Cultural Politics of Information.” Social Text 22.3 (2004): 51-73. ———. “Of Sense and Sensibility: Immaterial Labour in Open Systems.” DATA Browser 03 – Curating Immateriality: The Work of the Curator in the Age of Network Systems. Ed. Joasia Krysa. New York: Autonomedia, 2006. 27-38. Thrift, Nigel. “Re-inventing Invention: New Tendencies in Capitalist Commodification.” Economy and Society 35.2 (2006): 279-306. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Dieter, Michael. "Amazon Noir: Piracy, Distribution, Control." M/C Journal 10.5 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/07-dieter.php>. APA Style Dieter, M. (Oct. 2007) "Amazon Noir: Piracy, Distribution, Control," M/C Journal, 10(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/07-dieter.php>.

Abstract:

Anyone contemplating the role of a “hermeneutics of suspicion” in literary and cultural studies must concede that the phrase is rarely used—even by its most devout practitioners, who usually think of themselves engaged in something called “critique.” What, then, are the terminological differences between “critique” and “the hermeneutics of suspicion”? What intellectual worlds do these specific terms conjure up, and how do these worlds converge or diverge? And what is the rationale for preferring one term over the other?The “hermeneutics of suspicion” is a phrase coined by Paul Ricoeur to capture a common spirit that pervades the writings of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. In spite of their obvious differences, he argued, these thinkers jointly constitute a “school of suspicion.” That is to say, they share a commitment to unmasking “the lies and illusions of consciousness;” they are the architects of a distinctively modern style of interpretation that circumvents obvious or self-evident meanings in order to draw out less visible and less flattering truths (Ricoeur 356). Ricoeur’s term has sustained an energetic after-life within religious studies, as well as in philosophy, intellectual history, and related fields, yet it never really took hold in literary studies. Why has a field that has devoted so much of its intellectual energy to interrogating, subverting, and defamiliarising found so little use for Ricoeur’s phrase?In general, we can note that hermeneutics remains a path not taken in Anglo-American literary theory. The tradition of hermeneutical thinking is rarely acknowledged (how often do you see Gadamer or Ricoeur taught in a theory survey?), let alone addressed, assimilated, or argued over. Thanks to a lingering aura of teutonic stodginess, not to mention its long-standing links with a tradition of biblical interpretation, hermeneutics was never able to muster the intellectual edginess and high-wattage excitement generated by various forms of poststructuralism. Even the work of Gianni Vattimo, one of the most innovative and prolific of contemporary hermeneutical thinkers, has barely registered in the mainstream of literary and cultural studies. On occasion, to be sure, hermeneutics crops up as a synonym for a discredited model of “depth” interpretation—the dogged pursuit of a hidden true meaning—that has supposedly been superseded by more sophisticated forms of thinking. Thus the ascent of poststructuralism, it is sometimes claimed, signaled a turn away from hermeneutics to deconstruction and genealogy—leading to a focus on surface rather than depth, on structure rather than meaning, on analysis rather than interpretation. The idea of suspicion has fared little better. While Ricoeur’s account of a hermeneutics of suspicion is respectful, even admiring, critics are understandably leery of having their lines of argument reduced to their putative state of mind. The idea of a suspicious hermeneutics can look like an unwarranted personalisation of scholarly work, one that veers uncomfortably close to Harold Bloom’s tirades against the “School of Resentment” and other conservative complaints about literary studies as a hot-bed of paranoia, kill-joy puritanism, petty-minded pique, and defensive scorn. Moreover, the anti-humanist rhetoric of much literary theory—its resolute focus on transpersonal and usually linguistic structures of determination—proved inhospitable to any serious reflections on attitude, disposition, or affective stance.The concept of critique, by contrast, turns out to be marred by none of these disadvantages. An unusually powerful, flexible and charismatic idea, it has rendered itself ubiquitous and indispensable in literary and cultural studies. Critique is widely seen as synonymous with intellectual rigor, theoretical sophistication, and intransigent opposition to the status quo. Drawing a sense of intellectual weightiness from its connections to the canonical tradition of Kant and Marx, it has managed, nonetheless, to retain a cutting-edge sensibility, retooling itself to fit the needs of new fields ranging from postcolonial theory to disability studies. Critique is contagious and charismatic, drawing everything around it into its field of force, marking the boundaries of what counts as serious thought. For many scholars in the humanities, it is not just one good thing but the only conceivable thing. Who would want to be associated with the bad smell of the uncritical? There are five facets of critique (enumerated and briefly discussed below) that characterise its current role in literary and cultural studies and that have rendered critique an exceptionally successful rhetorical-cultural actor. Critique, that is to say, inspires intense attachments, serves as a mediator in numerous networks, permeates disciplines and institutional structures, spawns conferences, essays, courses, and book proposals, and triggers countless imitations, translations, reflections, revisions, and rebuttals (including the present essay). While nurturing a sense of its own marginality, iconoclasm, and outsiderdom, it is also exceptionally effective at attracting disciples, forging alliances, inspiring mimicry, and ensuring its own survival. In “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” Bruno Latour remarks that critique has been so successful because it assures us that we are always right—unlike those naïve believers whose fetishes we strive to expose (225–48). At the same time, thanks to its self-reflexivity, the rhetoric of critique is more tormented and self-divided than such a description would suggest; it broods constantly over the shame of its own success, striving to detect signs of its own complicity and to root out all possible evidence of collusion with the status quo.Critique is negative. Critique retains the adversarial force of a suspicious hermeneutics, while purifying it of affective associations by treating negativity as an essentially philosophical or political matter. To engage in critique is to grapple with the oversights, omissions, contradictions, insufficiencies, or evasions in the object one is analysing. Robert Koch writes that “critical discourse, as critical discourse, must never formulate positive statements: it is always ‘negative’ in relation to its object” (531). Critique is characterised by its “againstness,” by its desire to take a hammer, as Latour would say, to the beliefs of others. Faith is to be countered with vigilant skepticism, illusion yields to a sobering disenchantment, the fetish must be defetishised, the dream world stripped of its befuddling powers. However, the negativity of critique is not just a matter of fault-finding, scolding, and censuring. The nay-saying critic all too easily calls to mind the Victorian patriarch, the thin-lipped schoolmarm, the glaring policeman. Negating is tangled up with a long history of legislation, prohibition and interdiction—it can come across as punitive, arrogant, authoritarian, or vitriolic. In consequence, defenders of critique often downplay its associations with outright condemnation. It is less a matter of refuting particular truths than of scrutinising the presumptions and procedures through which truths are established. A preferred idiom is that of “problematising,” of demonstrating the ungroundedness of beliefs rather than denouncing errors. The role of critique is not to castigate, but to complicate, not to engage in ideas’ destruction but to expose their cultural construction. Barbara Johnson, for example, contends that a critique of a theoretical system “is not an examination of its flaws and imperfections” (xv). Rather, “the critique reads backwards from what seems natural, obvious, self-evident, or universal in order to show that these things have their history” and to show that the “start point is not a (natural) given, but a (cultural) construct, usually blind to itself” (Johnson xv–xvi). Yet it seems a tad disingenuous to describe such critique as free of negative judgment and the examination of flaws. Isn’t an implicit criticism being transmitted in Johnson’s claim that a cultural construct is “usually blind to itself”? And the adjectival chain “natural, obvious, self-evident, or universal” strings together some of the most negatively weighted words in contemporary criticism. A posture of detachment, in other words, can readily convey a tacit or implicit judgment, especially when it is used to probe the deep-seated convictions, primordial passions, and heart-felt attachments of others. In this respect, the ongoing skirmishes between ideology critique and poststructuralist critique do not over-ride their commitment to a common ethos: a sharply honed suspicion that goes behind the backs of its interlocutors to retrieve counter-intuitive and uncomplimentary meanings. “You do not know that you are ideologically-driven, historically determined, or culturally constructed,” declares the subject of critique to the object of critique, “but I do!” As Marcelo Dascal points out, the supposedly non-evaluative stance of historical or genealogical argument nevertheless retains a negative or demystifying force in tracing ideas back to causes invisible to the actors themselves (39–62).Critique is secondary. A critique is always a critique of something, a commentary on another argument, idea, or object. Critique does not vaunt its self-sufficiency, independence, and autotelic splendor; it makes no pretense of standing alone. It could not function without something to critique, without another entity to which it reacts. Critique is symbiotic; it does its thinking by responding to the thinking of others. But while secondary, critique is far from subservient. It seeks to wrest from a text a different account than it gives of itself. In doing so, it assumes that it will meet with, and overcome, a resistance. If there were no resistance, if the truth were self-evident and available for all to see, the act of critique would be superfluous. Its goal is not the slavish reconstruction of an original or true meaning but a counter-reading that brings previously unfathomed insights to light. The secondariness of critique is not just a logical matter—critique presumes the existence of a prior object—but also a temporal one. Critique comes after another text; it follows or succeeds another piece of writing. Critique, then, looks backward and, in doing so, it presumes to understand the past better than the past understands itself. Hindsight becomes insight; from our later vantage point, we feel ourselves primed to see better, deeper, further. The belatedness of critique is transformed into a source of iconoclastic strength. Scholars of Greek tragedy or Romantic poetry may mourn their inability to inhabit a vanished world, yet this historical distance is also felt as a productive estrangement that allows critical knowledge to unfold. Whatever the limitations of our perspective, how can we not know more than those who have come before? We moderns leave behind us a trail of errors, finally corrected, like a cloud of ink from a squid, remarks Michel Serres (48). There is, in short, a quality of historical chauvinism built into critique, making it difficult to relinquish a sense of in-built advantage over those lost souls stranded in the past. Critique likes to have the last word. Critique is intellectual. Critique often insists on its difference from everyday practices of criticism and judgment. While criticism evaluates a specific object, according to one definition, “critique is concerned to identify the conditions of possibility under which a domain of objects appears” (Butler 109). Critique is interested in big pictures, cultural frameworks, underlying schema. It is a mode of thought well matched to the library and seminar room, to a rhythm of painstaking inquiry rather than short-term problem-solving. It “slows matters down, requires analysis and reflection, and often raises questions rather than providing answers” (Ruitenberg 348). Critique is thus irresistibly drawn toward self-reflexive thinking. Its domain is that of second-level observation, in which we reflect on the frames, paradigms, and perspectives that form and inform our understanding. Even if objectivity is an illusion, how can critical self-consciousness not trump the available alternatives? This questioning of common sense is also a questioning of common language: self-reflexivity is a matter of form as well as content, requiring the deployment of what Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb call “difficult language” that can undermine or “un-write” the discourses that make up our world (1–14). Along similar lines, Paul Bove allies himself with a “tradition that insists upon difficulty, slowness, complex, often dialectical and highly ironic styles,” as an essential antidote to the “prejudices of the current regime of truth: speed, slogans, transparency, and reproducibility” (167). Critique, in short, demands an arduous working over of language, a stoic refusal of the facile phrase and ready-made formula. Yet such programmatic divisions between critique and common sense have the effect of relegating ordinary language to a state of automatic servitude, while condescending to those unschooled in the patois of literary and critical theory. Perhaps it is time to reassess the dog-in-the-manger attitude of a certain style of academic argument—one that assigns to scholars the vantage point of the lucid and vigilant thinker, while refusing to extend this same capacity to those naïve and unreflecting souls of whom they speak.Critique comes from below. Politics and critique are often equated and conflated in literary studies and elsewhere. Critique is iconoclastic in spirit; it rails against authority; it seeks to lay bare the injustices of the law. It is, writes Foucault, the “art of voluntary insubordination, that of reflected intractability” (194). This vision of critique can be traced back to Marx and is cemented in the tradition of critical theory associated with the Frankfurt School. Critique conceives of itself as coming from below, or being situated at the margins; it is the natural ally of excluded groups and subjugated knowledges; it is not just a form of knowledge but a call to action. But who gets to claim the mantle of opposition, and on what grounds? In a well-known essay, Nancy Fraser remarks that critical theory possesses a “partisan though not uncritical identification” with oppositional social movements (97). As underscored by Fraser’s judicious insertion of the phrase “not uncritical,” critique guards its independence and reserves the right to query the actions and attitudes of the oppressed as well as the oppressors. Thus the intellectual’s affiliation with a larger community may collide with a commitment to the ethos of critique, as the object of a more heartfelt attachment. A separation occurs, as Francois Cusset puts it, “between academics questioning the very methods of questioning” and the more immediate concerns of the minority groups with which they are allied (157). One possible strategy for negotiating this tension is to flag one’s solidarity with a general principle of otherness or alterity—often identified with the utopian or disruptive energies of the literary text. This strategy gives critique a shot in the arm, infusing it with a dose of positive energy and ethical substance, yet without being pinned down to the ordinariness of a real-world referent. This deliberate vagueness permits critique to nurture its mistrust of the routines and practices through which the everyday business of the world is conducted, while remaining open to the possibility of a radically different future. Critique in its positive aspects thus remains effectively without content, gesturing toward a horizon that must remain unspecified if it is not to lapse into the same fallen state as the modes of thought that surround it (Fish 446).Critique does not tolerate rivals. Declaring itself uniquely equipped to diagnose the perils and pitfalls of representation, critique often chafes at the presence of other forms of thought. Ruling out the possibility of peaceful co-existence or even mutual indifference, it insists that those who do not embrace its tenets must be denying or disavowing them. In this manner, whatever is different from critique is turned into the photographic negative of critique—evidence of an irrefutable lack or culpable absence. To refuse to be critical is to be uncritical; a judgment whose overtones of naiveté, apathy, complacency, submissiveness, and sheer stupidity seem impossible to shrug off. In short, critique thinks of itself as exceptional. It is not one path, but the only conceivable path. Drew Milne pulls no punches in his programmatic riff on Kant: “to be postcritical is to be uncritical: the critical path alone remains open” (18).The exceptionalist aura of critique often thwarts attempts to get outside its orbit. Sociologist Michael Billig, for example, notes that critique thinks of itself as battling orthodoxy, yet is now the reigning orthodoxy—no longer oppositional, but obligatory, not defamiliarising, but oppressively familiar: “For an increasing number of younger academics,” he remarks, “the critical paradigm is the major paradigm in their academic world” (Billig 292). And in a hard-hitting argument, Talal Asad points out that critique is now a quasi-automatic stance for Western intellectuals, promoting a smugness of tone that can be cruelly dismissive of the deeply felt beliefs and attachments of others. Yet both scholars conclude their arguments by calling for a critique of critique, reinstating the very concept they have so meticulously dismantled. Critique, it seems, is not to be abandoned but intensified; critique is to be replaced by critique squared. The problem with critique, it turns out, is that it is not yet critical enough. The objections to critique are still very much part and parcel of the critique-world; the value of the critical is questioned only to be emphatically reinstated.Why do these protestations against critique end up worshipping at the altar of critique? Why does it seem so exceptionally difficult to conceive of other ways of arguing, reading, and thinking? We may be reminded of Eve Sedgwick’s comments on the mimetic aspect of critical interpretation: its remarkable ability to encourage imitation, repetition, and mimicry, thereby ensuring its own reproduction. It is an efficiently running form of intellectual machinery, modeling a style of thought that is immediately recognisable, widely applicable, and easily teachable. Casting the work of the scholar as a never-ending labour of distancing, deflating, and diagnosing, it rules out the possibility of a different relationship to one’s object. It seems to grow, as Sedgwick puts it, “like a crystal in a hypersaturated solution, blotting out any sense of the possibility of alternative ways of understanding or things to understand” (131).In this context, a change in vocabulary—a redescription, if you will—may turn out to be therapeutic. It will come as no great surprise if I urge a second look at the hermeneutics of suspicion. Ricoeur’s phrase, I suggest, can help guide us through the interpretative tangle of contemporary literary studies. It seizes on two crucial parts of critical argument—its sensibility and its interpretative method—that deserve more careful scrutiny. At the same time, it offers a much-needed antidote to the charisma of critique: the aura of ethical and political exemplarity that burnishes its negativity with a normative glow. Thanks to this halo effect, I’ve suggested, we are encouraged to assume that the only alternative to critique is a full-scale surrender to complacency, quietism, and—in literary studies—the intellectual fluff of aesthetic appreciation. Critique, moreover, presents itself as an essentially disembodied intellectual exercise, an austere, even abstemious practice of unsettling, unmaking, and undermining. Yet contemporary styles of critical argument are affective as well as analytical, conjuring up distinctive dispositions and relations to their object. As Amanda Anderson has pointed out in The Way We Argue Now, literary and cultural theory is saturated with what rhetoricians call ethos—that is to say, imputations of motive, character, or attitude. We need only think of the insouciance associated with Rortyan pragmatism, the bad-boy iconoclasm embraced by some queer theorists, or the fastidious aestheticism that characterises a certain kind of deconstructive reading. Critical languages, in other words, are also orientations, encouraging readers to adopt an affectively tinged stance toward their object. Acknowledging the role of such orientations in critical debate does not invalidate its intellectual components, nor does it presume to peer into, or diagnose, an individual scholar’s state of mind.In a related essay, I scrutinise some of the qualities of a suspicious or critical reading practice: distance rather than closeness; guardedness rather than openness; aggression rather than submission; superiority rather than reverence; attentiveness rather than distraction; exposure rather than tact (215–34). Suspicion, in this sense, constitutes a muted affective state—a curiously non-emotional emotion of morally inflected mistrust—that overlaps with, and builds upon, the stance of detachment that characterises the stance of the professional or expert. That this style of reading proves so alluring has much to do with the gratifications and satisfactions that it offers. Beyond the usual political or philosophical justifications of critique, it also promises the engrossing pleasure of a game-like sparring with the text in which critics deploy inventive skills and innovative strategies to test their wits, best their opponents, and become sharper, shrewder, and more sophisticated players. In this context, the claim that contemporary criticism has moved “beyond” hermeneutics should be treated with a grain of salt, given that, as Stanley Fish points out, “interpretation is the only game in town” (446). To be sure, some critics have backed away from the model of what they call “depth interpretation” associated with Marx and Freud, in which reading is conceived as an act of digging and the critic, like a valiant archaeologist, excavates a resistant terrain in order to retrieve the treasure of hidden meaning. In this model, the text is envisaged as possessing qualities of interiority, concealment, penetrability, and depth; it is an object to be plundered, a puzzle to be solved, a secret message to be deciphered. Instead, poststructuralist critics are drawn to the language of defamiliarising rather than discovery. The text is no longer composed of strata and the critic does not burrow down but stands back. Instead of brushing past surface meanings in pursuit of hidden truth, she dwells in ironic wonder on these surface meanings, seeking to “denaturalise” them through the mercilessness of her gaze. Insight, we might say, is achieved by distancing rather than by digging. Recent surveys of criticism often highlight the rift between these camps, underscoring the differences between the diligent seeker after buried truth and the surface-dwelling ironist. From a Ricoeur-inflected point of view, however, it is their shared investment in a particular ethos—a stance of knowingness, guardedness, suspicion and vigilance—that turns out to be more salient and more striking. Moreover, these approaches are variously engaged in the dance of interpretation, seeking to go beyond the backs of texts or fellow-actors in order to articulate non-obvious and often counter-intuitive truths. In the case of poststructuralism, we can speak of a second-order hermeneutics that is less interested in probing the individual object than the larger frameworks and conditions in which it is embedded. What the critic interprets is no longer a self-contained poem or novel, but a broader logic of discursive structures, reading formations, or power relations. Ricoeur’s phrase, moreover, has the singular advantage of allowing us to by-pass the exceptionalist tendencies of critique: its presumption that whatever is not critique can only be assigned to the ignominious state of the uncritical. As a less prejudicial term, it opens up a larger history of suspicious reading, including traditions of religious questioning and self-scrutiny that bear on current forms of interpretation, but that are occluded by the aggressively secular connotations of critique (Hunter). In this context, Ricoeur’s own account needs to be supplemented and modified to acknowledge this larger cultural history; the hermeneutics of suspicion is not just the brain-child of a few exceptional thinkers, as his argument implies, but a widespread practice of interpretation embedded in more mundane, diffuse and variegated forms of life (Felski 220).Finally, the idea of a suspicious hermeneutics does not invalidate or rule out other interpretative possibilities—ranging from Ricoeur’s own notion of a hermeneutics of trust to more recent coinages such as Sedgwick’s “restorative reading,” Sharon Marcus’s “just reading” or Timothy Bewes’s “generous reading.” Literary studies in France, for example, is currently experiencing a new surge of interest in hermeneutics (redefined as a practice of reinvention rather than exhumation) as well as a reinvigorated phenomenology of reading that elucidates, in rich and fascinating detail, its immersive and affective dimensions (see Citton; Macé). This growing interest in the ethos, aesthetics, and ethics of reading is long overdue. Such an orientation by no means rules out attention to the sociopolitical resonances of texts and their interpretations. It is, however, no longer willing to subordinate such attention to the seductive but sterile dichotomy of the critical versus the uncritical.ReferencesAnderson, Amanda. The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005.Asad, Talal. “Free Speech, Blasphemy, and Secular Criticism.” Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. Ed. Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood. Berkeley: Townsend Center for the Humanities, 2009. 20–63. Bewes, Timothy. “Reading with the Grain: A New World in Literary Studies.” Differences 21.3 (2010): 1–33.Billig, Michael. “Towards a Critique of the Critical.” Discourse and Society 11.3 (2000): 291–92. Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994.Bove, Paul. Mastering Discourse: The Politics of Intellectual Culture. Durham: Duke UP, 1992. Butler, Judith. “The Sensibility of Critique: Response to Asad and Mahmood.” Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. Ed. Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood. Berkeley: Townsend Center for the Humanities, 2009. 101–136.Citton, Yves. Lire, interpréter, actualiser: pourqoi les études littéraires? Paris: Editions Amsterdam, 2007. Culler, Jonathan and Kevin Lamb, “Introduction.” Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena. Ed. Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003. 1–14. Cusset, Francois. French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States. Trans. Jeff Fort. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008.Dascal, Marcelo. “Critique without Critics?” Science in Context 10.1 (1997): 39–62.Felski, Rita. “Suspicious Minds.” Poetics Today 32.2 (2011): 215–34.Fish, Stanley. Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies. Durham: Duke UP, 1989.Foucault, Michel. “What is Critique?” The Political. Ed. David Ingram. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. 191–211. Fraser, Nancy. “What’s Critical about Critical Theory? The Case of Habermas and Gender.” New German Critique 35 (1985): 97–131. Hunter, Ian. Rethinking the School: Subjectivity, Bureaucracy, Criticism. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994.Johnson, Barbara. “Translator’s Introduction.” Jacques Derrida’s Dissemination. London: Continuum, 2004. vii–xxxv. Koch, Robert. “The Critical Gesture in Philosophy.” Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art. Ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel. Cambridge: MIT, 2002. 524–36. Latour, Bruno. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 225–48.Macé, Marielle. Facons de lire, manières d’être. Paris: Gallimard, 2011. Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007.Milne, Drew. “Introduction: Criticism and/or Critique.” Modern Critical Thought: An Anthology of Theorists Writing on Theorists. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. 1–22. Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Haven: Yale UP, 1970. Ruitenberg, Claudia. “Don’t Fence Me In: The Liberation of Undomesticated Critique.” Journal of the Philosophy of Education 38.3 (2004): 314–50. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay is About You.” Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. 123–52. Serres, Michel and Bruno Latour. Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time. Trans. Roxanne Lapidus. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995.Vattimo, Gianni. Beyond Interpretation: The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy. Trans. David Webb. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997.

Abstract:

"Birds of a feather (and colour) will flock (and fly) together." — Old English Proverb, 1545 (approx) While the notion of the 'coalition' is one normally associated with formalised alliances between political parties, coalitional affiliations are not limited to mainstream politics, and instead share a focus on strategy and outcome across the full range of human endeavours. Parties with varying priorities will put to one side their differences in order to focus on overlapping concerns. Thus coalitions come in all shapes and sizes and cross all walks of life: from families, clubs and teams to friendships, churches and sects, from companies and co-operatives to scientific formula, mathematical groupings and multimedia/multi person online gaming environments. This issue of M/C Journal mounts a timely critical reflection on the multiple contemporary meanings and uses of 'coalition' and coalitional thinking. Some of the questions the authors of this edition have addressed include: how does the notion of coalition inform political practices and powers? How have coalitions changed in recent times? What other (non-political party) coalitions exist and how might they work? How do coalitions inform understandings and expressions of race and whiteness, gender and sexuality, class and poverty, nations and borders? What does it mean to be 'post-coalitional' and how might we map persistence and change in recent political and non-political groupings and collectives? Recent history has revealed large cracks and major shifts in public and political alliances. In Australia for example, November 2007 marked a change in politics and culture that saw the demise of then Prime Minister John Howard and his Coalition government. The coupling of neoliberalism and social conservatism was said to be the hallmark of that government's commitment to 'old Australian values', to severe forms of border control, the refusal of same-sex marriage, scepticism toward climate change, and rapid privatisation policies for public services. The Coalition, it appeared, no longer represented the interests of the public. Since then, the incumbent Labor leader was deposed from within his own party, and Australia’s first female Prime Minister, after having lost a majority, formed a new coalition with smaller parties and independents in order to keep governing. This new coalition came in the wake of Britain’s 2010 election, in which the Conservatives joined with the Liberal Democrats to form the first ever British coalition government, and later was followed by the mid-term resurgence of Republican power in the American Lower House. And of course it was not too long ago that the ‘coalition of the willing', as a collective American-led force fighting the war-or-terror, fell apart in the later stages of the Bush administration, and that the 2008 shift in American politics to Barack Obama's presidency became a singular moment of international historical significance. We ask then, as connections to particular coalitions shift, what new affiliations are formed? And which aspects of older coalitions continue in the midst of change? What do regions, nations and individuals do when the groups they belong to fall apart or lose power? Larger coalitional shifts tell us much about culture, history, law, media, technology and human behaviour. As Australia and the Western world continually move away from supporting the power and policy of previously dominant groups, questions emerge as to the nature and ethics of collectives (of all kinds) as the expression of political, social and personal change. And despite these changes, borders are strengthened, and the associated fears of difference and otherness (from racism to war, Islamaphobia to hom*ophobia) continue to reassert themselves across the globe. This logic of coalition is systematically unpacked and interrogated in this edition’s feature essay by Nick Mansfield. In “Coalition: The Politics of Decision”, Mansfield draws upon the work of Jacques Derrida to carefully analyse the implications of coalition for contemporary politics. Coalition can be distinguished from community or family, and is more akin to friendship, according to Mansfield. This is for two fundamental reasons: firstly, coalitions involve “decision”, and secondly, coalitions are always inevitably in relation to enmity. While coalitions start with a gesture of friendship, Mansfield argues via Derrida’s reading of Schmitt, that this category can slip into enemy territory. Mansfield’s paper uses this theoretical framework in order to comment on political action today. Indeed, each of the papers presented in this volume understand and illuminate ‘coalition’ as a critical tool or useful conceptual framework. In this collection, coalition is deployed in a manner which illuminates the relationships between different parties, interest groups, affiliational thinking and behaviours, and even the bodily senses. Coalitions are understood as contesting and reiterating dominant political paradigms and socio-cultural norms. Ann Deslandes, Randall Livingstone and Christopher Phillips bring our attention to the coalitions that contest dominant forms of political power. Deslandes’s thoughtful engagement with the ‘global justice movement’ focuses on the “ethical scene of activist coalition”. Deslandes examines what she terms the three ethics of coalition, risk, prayer and gift. In so doing, she asks important questions of privileged activists, who must risk the possibility of repeating “domination”. In both Livingston and Phillips, the Internet is a primary tool and site for critical engagement. Livingstone’s paper looks at the “virtual coalition” of online editors concerned with combating Western bias on the major Web encyclopaedia Wikipedia: “WikiProject: Countering Systemic Bias”. Since its inception in 2001, Wikipedia has grown in popularity to be one of the most accessed websites available. This research provides much needed insight into the extent to which Western bias frames the information uploaded to Wiki. At a time when there is a temptation to regard the Internet as liberatory, discussion of its uneven political power is significant. After all, as Livingstone reiterates, the Web does not dissolve border and boundaries. Further exploring relations between visibility and democracy. Phillips takes Gailbraith’s A Good Society as a starting point for a discussion of how contemporary coalitions work, and what larger coalitions of previously marginalised or silenced groups might look like. In this way, Phillips asks if Gailbraith’s vision has been borne out in the American context with particular reference to the 2008 Obama campaign’s use of Internet technologies and the more recent rise of the Tea Party to a position of considerable influence. Given the surprising similarities between such opposing forces, might an understanding of the coalitional ground shared by both be possible? An ongoing theme of this edition of M/C is its engagement with the current local/global coalitional and post-coalitional conditions in which people live - from larger contexts of geopolitics through to the micropolitics of everyday practices, pleasures and identifications. Elaine Kelly engages with the changes to land rights legislation in Australia over the past five years, with the Northern Territory Intervention and more recently with the decision by the Labor Party to uphold the nomination of Muckaty as a site for nuclear waste. Kelly extends the discussion of coalition to encompass its etymology – to grow together. Framing her discussing using critical race and whiteness theory, Kelly argues that private and governmental coalitional interests are at play in land rights reform. This in turn reiterates a relationship between neoliberalism and social conservatism which prompts the question: in whose interests is this “growth”?Also in the Australian context, Anthony Lambert’s paper “Rainbow Blindness” filters contemporary government attitudes and legislative change with respect to marriage and same-sex relationships through the effects of recent coalitional changes in the Australian and global political landscape. Lambert argues that the confusion surrounding the issue of gay marriage and the blurring/changes within political positions constitutes Australia as living within a ‘post-coalitional’ framework – one defined by persistence and change, where a new sensibility towards equity and difference is accompanied by the reassertion of larger coalitional affiliations and normative regimes. Duncan McKay’s paper sees a coalitional model of engagement as potentially providing productive possibilities between governmental bodies and the Western Australian Arts community. McKay passionately critiques the WA Department of Culture and the Arts (DCA) policy document Creating Value arguing that it “may be considered that the DCA and many WA cultural producers may not be engaged in the same project at all, let alone be in effective partnership or coalition”. Blair McDonald’s poetic contribution contends that out of a reading of Foucauldian resistance to sexual norms, new coalitions of behaviour and identity may be possible. In a coalitional context, Foucault cannot and does not simply seek to exit the networks of power and sexuality that he himself constructs. In retracing Foucault’s attention to power and sex-desire, the author seeks a movement toward “new coalitions” or “rallying points” at the limits of bodies and pleasures; in the bodies that are as yet ”unformed” and pleasures that are as yet “unknown”. Meanwhile, Lauren Cruikshank’s “Synaestheory: Fleshing Out a Coalition of the Senses” demonstrates how understanding the relationship between senses as coalitional breaks down the Cartesian dominance regarding subjectivity as exemplified by the mind/body split. Cruikshank’s careful analysis also challenges the privileging of vision in Western culture. As noted above, around the world, many new coalitional minority governments have taken power in recent times. In Australia, Christopher Payne of the Liberal Party referred to the negotiations following the August 2010 election (which resulted in a hung parliament) as Labor, the Independents and the Greens “trying to put together a coalition of the mongoose and the cobra” (ABC). Here, Payne attempts to cast doubt over the stability of this sort of coalition, by positing the Greens as the cobra and the Independents as potential pray to be attacked and devoured. More importantly, Payne has referenced, as this collection of papers does, the changeability of coalitions, and the sometimes antagonistic relationships that may need to co-exist in coalitions of all kinds. ReferencesAustralian Broadcasting Authority (ABC) Online News. “Pyne Warns of Labor ‘Mongoose and Cobra Coalition.” 4 Sep. 2010. 1 Dec. 2010 ‹http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/09/04/3002524.htm›.

Abstract:

“There is nothing more public than privacy.” (Berlant and Warner, Sex) How did it come to this? How did it happen that a one-off, two-hour event at a public swimming pool in a suburb of outer Melbourne ignited international hate mail and generated media-fanned political anguish and debate about the proper use of public spaces? In 2010, women who attend a women’s only swim session on Sunday evenings at the Dandenong Oasis public swimming pool asked the pool management and the local council for permission to celebrate the end of Ramadan at the pool during the time of their regular swim session. The request was supported by the pool managers and the council and promoted by both as an opportunity for family and friends to get together in a spirit of multicultural learning and understanding. Responding to criticisms of the event as an unreasonable claim on public facilities by one group, the Mayor of the City of Greater Dandenong, Jim Memeti, rejected claims that this event discriminates against non-Muslim residents of the suburb. But here’s the rub. The event, to be held after hours at the pool, requires all participants older than ten years of age to follow a dress code of knee-length shorts and T-shirts. This is a suburban moment that is borne of but exceeds the local. It reflects and responds to a contemporary global conundrum of great political and theoretical significance—how to negotiate and govern the relations between multiculturalism, religion, gender, sexual freedom, and democracy. Specifically this event speaks to how multicultural democracy in the public sphere negotiates the public presence and expression of different cultural and religious frameworks related to gender and sexuality. This is demanding political stuff. Situated in the messy political and theoretical terrains of the relation between public space and the public sphere, this local moment called for political judgement about how cultural differences should be allowed to manifest in and through public space, giving consideration to the potential effects of these decisions on an inclusive multicultural democracy. The local authorities in Dandenong engaged in an admirable process of democratic labour as they puzzled over how to make decisions that were responsible and equitable, in the absence of a rulebook or precedents for success. Ultimately however this mode of experimental decision-making, which will become increasingly necessary to manage such predicaments in the future, was foreclosed by unwarranted and unhelpful media outrage. "Foreclosed" here stresses the preemptive nature of the loss; a lost opportunity for trialing approaches to governing cultural diversity that may fail, but might then be modified. It was condemned in advance of either success or failure. The role of the media rather than the discomfort of the local publics has been decisive in this event.This Multicultural SuburbDandenong is approximately 30 kilometres southeast of central Melbourne. Originally home to the Bunorong People of the Kulin nation, it was settled by pastoralists by the 1800s, heavily industrialised during the twentieth century, and now combines cultural diversity with significant social disadvantage. The City of Greater Dandenong is proud of its reputation as the most culturally and linguistically diverse municipality in Australia. Its population of approximately 138,000 comprises residents from 156 different language groups. More than half (56%) of its population was born overseas, with 51% from nations where English is not the main spoken language. These include Vietnam, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, India, China, Italy, Greece, Bosnia and Afghanistan. It is also a place of significant religious diversity with residents identifying as Buddhist (15 per cent) Muslim (8 per cent), Hindu (2 per cent) and Christian (52 per cent) [CGD]. Its city logo, “Great Place, Great People” evokes its twin pride in the placemaking power of its diverse population. It is also a brazen act of civic branding to counter its reputation as a derelict and dangerous suburb. In his recent book The Bogan Delusion, David Nichols cites a "bogan" website that names Dandenong as one of Victoria’s two most bogan areas. The other was Moe. (p72). The Sunday Age newspaper had already depicted Dandenong as one of two excessively dangerous suburbs “where locals fear to tread” (Elder and Pierik). The other suburb of peril was identified as Footscray.Central Dandenong is currently the site of Australia’s largest ever state sponsored Urban Revitalisation program with a budget of more than $290 million to upgrade infrastructure, that aims to attract $1billion in private investment to provide housing and future employment.The Cover UpIn September 2010, the Victorian and Civil and Administrative Appeals Tribunal (VCAT) granted the YMCA an exemption from the Equal Opportunity Act to allow a dress code for the Ramadan event at the Oasis swimming pool that it manages. The "Y" sees the event as “an opportunity for the broader community to learn more about Ramadan and the Muslim faith, and encourages all members of Dandenong’s diverse community to participate” (YMCA Ramadan). While pool management and the municipal council refer to the event as an "opening up" of the closed swimming session, the media offer a different reading of the VCAT decision. The trope of the "the cover up" has framed most reports and commentaries (Murphy; Szego). The major focus of the commentaries has not been the event per se, but the call to dress "appropriately." Dress codes however are a cultural familiar. They exist for workplaces, schools, nightclubs, weddings, racing and sporting clubs and restaurants, to name but a few. While some of these codes or restrictions are normatively imposed rather than legally required, they are not alien to cultural life in Australia. Moreover, there are laws that prohibit people from being meagerly dressed or naked in public, including at beaches, swimming pools and so on. The dress code for this particular swimming pool event was, however, perceived to be unusual and, in a short space of time, "unusual" converted to "social threat."Responses to media polls about the dress code reveal concerns related to the symbolic dimensions of the code. The vast majority of those who opposed the Equal Opportunity exemption saw it as the thin edge of the multicultural wedge, a privatisation of public facilities, or a denial of the public’s right to choose how to dress. Tabloid newspapers reported on growing fears of Islamisation, while the more temperate opposition situated the decision as a crisis of human rights associated with tolerating illiberal cultural practices. Julie Szego reflects this view in an opinion piece in The Age newspaper:the Dandenong pool episode is neither trivial nor insignificant. It is but one example of human rights laws producing outcomes that restrict rights. It raises tough questions about how far public authorities ought to go in accommodating cultural practices that sit uneasily with mainstream Western values. (Szego)Without enquiring into the women’s request and in the absence of the women’s views about what meaning the event held for them, most media commentators and their electronically wired audiences treated the announcement as yet another alarming piece of evidence of multicultural failure and the potential Islamisation of Australia. The event raised specific concerns about the double intrusion of cultural difference and religion. While the Murdoch tabloid Herald Sun focused on the event as “a plan to force families to cover up to avoid offending Muslims at a public event” (Murphy) the liberal Age newspaper took a more circ*mspect approach, reporting on its small vox pop at the Dandenong pool. Some people here referred to the need to respect religions and seemed unfazed by the exemption and the event. Those who disagreed thought it was important not to enforce these (dress) practices on other people (Carey).It is, I believe, significant that several employees of the local council informed me that most of the opposition has come from the media, people outside of Dandenong and international groups who oppose the incursion of Islam into non-Islamic settings. Opposition to the event did not appear to derive from local concern or opposition.The overwhelming majority of Herald Sun comments expressed emphatic opposition to the dress code, citing it variously as unAustralian, segregationist, arrogant, intolerant and sexist. The Herald Sun polled readers (in a self-selecting and of course highly unrepresentative on-line poll) asking them to vote on whether or not they agreed with the VCAT exemption. While 5.52 per cent (512 voters) agreed with the ruling, 94.48 per cent (8,760) recorded disagreement. In addition, the local council has, for the first time in memory, received a stream of hate-mail from international anti-Islam groups. Muslim women’s groups, feminists, the Equal Opportunity Commissioner and academics have also weighed in. According to local reports, Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Melbourne, Shahram Akbarzadeh, considered the exemption was “nonsense” and would “backfire and the people who will pay for it will be the Muslim community themselves” (Haberfield). He repudiated it as an example of inclusion and tolerance, labeling it “an effort of imposing a value system (sic)” (Haberfield). He went so far as to suggest that, “If Tony Abbott wanted to participate in his swimwear he wouldn’t be allowed in. That’s wrong.” Tasneem Chopra, chairwoman of the Islamic Women’s Welfare Council and Sherene Hassan from the Islamic Council of Victoria, both expressed sensitivity to the group’s attempt to establish an inclusive event but would have preferred the dress code to be a matter of choice rather coercion (Haberfield, "Mayor Defends Dandenong Pool Cover Up Order"). Helen Szoke, the Commissioner of the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission, defended the pool’s exemption from the Law that she oversees. “Matters such as this are not easy to resolve and require a balance to be achieved between competing rights and obligations. Dress codes are not uncommon: e.g., singlets, jeans, thongs etc in pubs/hotels” (in Murphy). The civil liberties organisation, Liberty Victoria, supported the ban because the event was to be held after hours (Murphy). With astonishing speed this single event not only transformed the suburban swimming pool to a theatre of extra-local disputes about who and what is entitled to make claims on public space and publically funded facilities, but also fed into charged debates about the future of multiculturalism and the vulnerability of the nation to the corrosive effects of cultural and religious difference. In this sense suburbs like Dandenong are presented as sites that not only generate fear about physical safety but whose suburban sensitivities to its culturally diverse population represent a threat to the safety of the nation. Thus the event both reflects and produces an antipathy to cultural difference and to the place where difference resides. This aversion is triggered by and mediated in this case through the figure, rather than the (corpo)reality, of the Muslim woman. In this imagining, the figure of the Muslim woman is assigned the curious symbolic role of "cultural creep." The debates around the pool event is not about the wellbeing or interests of the Muslim women themselves, nor are broader debates about the perceived, culturally-derived restrictions imposed on Muslim women living in Australia or other western countries. The figure of the Muslim woman is, I would argue, simply the ground on which the debates are held. The first debate relates to social and public space, access to which is considered fundamental to freedom and participatory democracy, and in current times is addressed in terms of promoting inclusion, preventing exclusion and finding opportunities for cross cultural encounters. The second relates not to public space per se, but to the public sphere or the “sphere of private people coming together as a public” for political deliberation (Habermas 21). The literature and discussions dealing with these two terrains have remained relatively disconnected (Low and Smith) with public space referring largely to activities and opportunities in the socio-cultural domain and the public sphere addressing issues of politics, rights and democracy. This moment in Dandenong offers some modest leeway for situating "the suburb" as an ideal site for coalescing these disparate discussions. In this regard I consider Iveson’s provocative and productive question about whether some forms of exclusions from suburban public space may actually deepen the democratic ideals of the public sphere. Exclusions may in such cases be “consistent with visions of a democratically inclusive city” (216). He makes his case in relation to a dispute about the exclusion of men exclusion from a women’s only swimming pool in the Sydney suburb of Coogee. The Dandenong case is similarly exclusive with an added sense of exclusion generated by an "inclusion with restrictions."Diversity, Difference, Public Space and the Public SphereAs a prelude to this discussion of exclusion as democracy, I return to the question that opened this article: how did it come to this? How is it that Australia has moved from its renowned celebration and pride in its multiculturalism so much in evidence at the suburban level through what Ghassan Hage calls an “unproblematic” multiculturalism (233) and what others have termed “everyday multiculturalism” (Wise and Velayutham). Local cosmopolitanisms are often evinced through the daily rituals of people enjoying the ethnic cuisines of their co-residents’ pasts, and via moments of intercultural encounter. People uneventfully rub up against and greet each other or engage in everyday acts of kindness that typify life in multicultural suburbs, generating "reservoirs of hope" for democratic and cosmopolitan cities (Thrift 147). In today’s suburbs, however, the “Imperilled Muslim women” who need protection from “dangerous Muslim men” (Razack 129) have a higher discursive profile than ethnic cuisine as the exemplar of multiculturalism. Have we moved from pleasure to hostility or was the suburban pleasure in racial difference always about a kind of “eating the other” (bell hooks 378). That is to ask whether our capacity to experience diversity positively has been based on consumption, consuming the other for our own enrichment, whereas living with difference entails a commitment not to consumption but to democracy. This democratic multicultural commitment is a form of labour rather than pleasure, and its outcome is not enrichment but transformation (although this labour can be pleasurable and transformation might be enriching). Dandenong’s prized cultural precincts, "Little India" and the "Afghan bazaar" are showcases of food, artefacts and the diversity of the suburb. They are centres of pleasurable and exotic consumption. The pool session, however, requires one to confront difference. In simple terms we can think about ethnic food, festivals and handicrafts as cultural diversity, and the Muslim woman as cultural difference.This distinction between diversity and difference is useful for thinking through the relation between multiculturalism in public space and multicultural democracy of the public sphere. According to the anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen, while a neoliberal sensibility supports cultural diversity in the public space, cultural difference is seen as a major cause of social problems associated with immigrants, and has a diminishing effect on the public sphere (14). According to Eriksen, diversity is understood as aesthetic, or politically and morally neutral expressions of culture that are enriching (Hage 118) or digestible. Difference, however, refers to morally objectionable cultural practices. In short, diversity is enriching. Difference is corrosive. Eriksen argues that differences that emerge from distinct cultural ideas and practices are deemed to create conflicts with majority cultures, weaken social solidarity and lead to unacceptable violations of human rights in minority groups. The suburban swimming pool exists here at the boundary of diversity and difference, where the "presence" of diverse bodies may enrich, but their different practices deplete and damage existing culture. The imperilled Muslim woman of the suburbs carries a heavy symbolic load. She stands for major global contests at the border of difference and diversity in three significant domains, multiculturalism, religion and feminism. These three areas are positioned simultaneously in public space and of the public sphere and she embodies a specific version of each in this suburban setting. First, there a global retreat from multiculturalism evidenced in contemporary narratives that describe multiculturalism (both as official policy and unofficial sensibility) as failed and increasingly ineffective at accommodating or otherwise dealing with religious, cultural and ethnic differences (Cantle; Goodhart; Joppke; Poynting and Mason). In the UK, Europe, the US and Australia, popular media sources and political discourses speak of "parallel lives,"immigrant enclaves, ghettoes, a lack of integration, the clash of values, and illiberal cultural practices. The covered body of the Muslim woman, and more particularly the Muslim veil, are now read as visual signs of this clash of values and of the refusal to integrate. Second, religion has re-emerged in the public domain, with religious groups and individuals making particular claims on public space both on the basis of their religious identity and in accord with secular society’s respect for religious freedom. This is most evident in controversies in France, Belgium and Netherlands associated with banning niqab in public and other religious symbols in schools, and in Australia in court. In this sense the covered Muslim woman raises concerns and indignation about the rightful place of religion in the public sphere and in social space. Third, feminism is increasingly invoked as the ground from which claims about the imperilled Muslim woman are made, particularly those about protecting women from their dangerous men. The infiltration of the Muslim presence into public space is seen as a threat to the hard won gains of women’s freedom enjoyed by the majority population. This newfound feminism of the public sphere, posited by those who might otherwise disavow feminism, requires some serious consideration. This public discourse rarely addresses the discrimination, violation and lack of freedom experienced systematically on an everyday basis by women of majority cultural backgrounds in western societies (such as Australia). However, the sexism of racially and religiously different men is readily identified and decried. This represents a significant shift to a dubious feminist register of the public sphere such that: “[w]omen of foreign origin, ...more specifically Muslim women…have replaced the traditional housewife as the symbol of female subservience” (Tissot 41–42).The three issues—multiculturalism, religion and feminism—are, in the Dandenong pool context, contests about human rights, democracy and the proper use of public space. Szego’s opinion piece sees the Dandenong pool "cover up" as an example of the conundrum of how human rights for some may curtail the human rights of others and lead us into a problematic entanglement of universal "rights," with claims of difference. In her view the combination of human rights and multiculturalism in the case of the Dandenong Pool accommodates illiberal practices that put the rights of "the general public" at risk, or as she puts it, on a “slippery slope” that results in a “watering down of our human rights.” Ideas that entail women making a claim for private time in public space are ultimately not good for "us."Such ideas run counter to the West's more than 500-year struggle for individual freedom—including both freedom of religion and freedom from religion—and for gender equality. Our public authorities ought to be pushing back hardest when these values are under threat. Yet this is precisely where they've been buckling under pressure (Szego)But a different reading of the relation between public and private space, human rights, democracy and gender freedom is readily identifiable in the Dandenong event—if one looks for it. Living with difference, I have already suggested, is a problem of democracy and the public sphere and does not so easily correspond to consuming diversity, as it demands engagement with cultural difference. In what remains, I explore how multicultural democracy in the public sphere and women’s rights in public and private realms relate, firstly, to the burgeoning promise of democracy and civility that might emerge in public space through encounter and exchange. I also point out how this moment in Dandenong might be read as a singular contribution to dealing with this global problematic of living with difference; of democracy in the public sphere. Public urban space has become a focus for speculation among geographers and sociologists in particular, about the prospects for an enhanced civic appreciation of living with difference through encountering strangers. Random and repetitious encounters with people from all cultures typify contemporary urban life. It remains an open question however as to whether these encounters open up or close down possibilities for conviviality and understanding, and whether they undo or harden peoples’ fears and prejudices. There is, however, at least in some academic and urban planning circles, some hope that the "throwntogetherness" (Massey) and the "doing" of togetherness (Laurier and Philo) found in the multicultural city may generate some lessons and opportunities for developing a civic culture and political commitment to living with difference. Alongside the optimism of those who celebrate the city, the suburb, and public spaces as forging new ways of living with difference, there are those such as Gill Valentine who wonder how this might be achieved in practice (324). Ash Amin similarly notes that city or suburban public spaces are not necessarily “the natural servants of multicultural engagement” (Ethnicity 967). Amin and Valentine point to the limited or fleeting opportunities for real engagement in these spaces. Moreover Valentine‘s research in the UK revealed that the spatial proximity found in multicultural spaces did not so much give rise to greater mutual respect and engagement, but to a frustrated “white self-segregation in the suburbs.” She suggests therefore that civility and polite exchange should not be mistaken for respect (324). Amin contends that it is the “micro-publics” of social encounters found in workplaces, schools, gardens, sports clubs [and perhaps swimming pools] rather than the fleeting encounters of the street or park, that offer better opportunities for meaningful intercultural exchange. The Ramadan celebration at the pool, with its dress code and all, might be seen more fruitfully as a purposeful event engaging a micro-public in which people are able to “break out of fixed relations and fixed notions” and “learn to become different” (Amin, Ethnicity 970) without that generating discord and resentment.Micropublics, Subaltern Publics and a Democracy of (Temporary) ExclusionsIs this as an opportunity to bring the global and local together in an experiment of forging new democratic spaces for gender, sexuality, culture and for living with difference? More provocatively, can we see exclusion and an invitation to share in this exclusion as a precursor to and measure of, actually existing democracy? Painter and Philo have argued that democratic citizenship is questionable if “people cannot be present in public spaces (streets, squares, parks, cinemas, churches, town halls) without feeling uncomfortable, victimized and basically ‘out of place’…" (Iveson 216). Feminists have long argued that distinctions between public and private space are neither straightforward nor gender neutral. For Nancy Fraser the terms are “cultural classifications and rhetorical labels” that are powerful because they are “frequently deployed to delegitimate some interests, views and topics and to valorize others” (73). In relation to women and other subordinated minorities, the "rhetoric of privacy" has been historically used to restrict the domain of legitimate public contestation. In fact the notion of what is public and particularly notions of the "public interest" and the "public good" solidify forms of subordination. Fraser suggests the concept of "subaltern counterpublics" as an alternative to notions of "the public." These are discursive spaces where groups articulate their needs, and demands are circulated formulating their own public sphere. This challenges the very meaning and foundational premises of ‘the public’ rather than simply positing strategies of inclusion or exclusion. The twinning of Amin’s notion of "micro-publics" and Fraser’s "counterpublics" is, I suggest, a fruitful approach to interpreting the Dandenong pool issue. It invites a reading of this singular suburban moment as an experiment, a trial of sorts, in newly imaginable ways of living democratically with difference. It enables us to imagine moments when a limited democratic right to exclude might create the sorts of cultural exchanges that give rise to a more authentic and workable recognition of cultural difference. I am drawn to think that this is precisely the kind of democratic experimentation that the YMCA and Dandenong Council embarked upon when they applied for the Equal Opportunity exemption. I suggest that by trialing, rather than fixing forever a "critically exclusive" access to the suburban swimming pool for two hours per year, they were in fact working on the practical problem of how to contribute in small but meaningful ways to a more profoundly free democracy and a reworked public sphere. In relation to the similar but distinct example of the McIver pool for women and children in Coogee, New South Wales, Kurt Iveson makes the point that such spaces of exclusion or withdrawal, “do not necessarily serve simply as spaces where people ‘can be themselves’, or as sites through which reified identities are recognised—in existing conditions of inequality, they can also serve as protected spaces where people can take the risk of exploring who they might become with relative safety from attack and abuse” (226). These are necessary risks to take if we are to avoid entrenching fear of difference in a world where difference is itself deeply, and permanently, entrenched.ReferencesAmin, Ash. “Ethnicity and the Multicultural City: Living with Diversity.” Environment and Planning A 34 (2002): 959–80.———. “The Good City.” Urban Studies 43 (2006): 1009–23.Berlant, Lauren, and Michael Warner. “Sex in Public.” Critical Inquiry 24 (1998): 547–66.Cantle, Ted. Community Cohesion: A Report of the Independent Review Team. London, UK Home Office, 2001.Carey, Adam. “Backing for Pool Cover Up Directive.” The Age 17 Sep. 2010. ‹http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/backing-for-pool-coverup-directive-20100916-15enz.html›.Elder, John, and Jon Pierick. “The Mean Streets: Where the Locals Fear to Tread.” The Sunday Age 10 Jan. 2010. ‹http://www.theage.com.au/national/the-mean-streets-where-the-locals-fear-to-tread-20100109-m00l.html?skin=text-only›.Eriksen, Thomas Hyland. “Diversity versus Difference: Neoliberalism in the Minority Debate." The Making and Unmaking of Difference. Ed. Richard Rottenburg, Burkhard Schnepel, and Shingo Shimada. Bielefeld: Transaction, 2006. 13–36.Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” Social Text 25/26 (1990): 56–80.Goodhart, David. “Too Diverse.” Prospect 95 (2004): 30-37.Haberfield, Georgie, and Gilbert Gardner. “Mayor Defends Pool Cover-up Order.” Dandenong Leader 16 Sep. 2010 ‹http://dandenong-leader.whereilive.com.au/news/story/dandenong-oasis-tells-swimmers-to-cover-up/›.Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2001.Hage, Ghassan. White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. Sydney: Pluto, 1998.hooks, bell. "Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance." Media and Cultural Studies Keyworks. Eds. Meenakshi Gigi and Douglas Kellner. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001. 366-380.Iveson, Kurt. "Justifying Exclusion: The Politics of Public Space and the Dispute over Access to McIvers Ladies' Baths, Sydney.” Gender, Place and Culture 10.3 (2003): 215–28.Joppke, Christian. “The Retreat of Multiculturalism in the Liberal State: Theory and Policy.” The British Journal of Sociology 55.2 (2004): 237–57.Laurier, Chris, and Eric Philo. “Cold Shoulders and Napkins Handed: Gestures of Responsibility.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 31 (2006): 193–207.Low, Setha, and Neil Smith, eds. The Politics of Public Space. London: Routledge, 2006.Massey, Doreen. For Space. London: Sage, 2005.Murphy, Padraic. "Cover Up for Pool Even at Next Year's Ramadan.” Herald Sun 23 Sep. 2010. ‹http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/cover-up-for-pool-event-during-next-years-ramadan/story-e6frf7kx-1225924291675›.Nichols, David. The Bogan Delusion. Melbourne: Affirm Press, 2011.Poynting, Scott, and Victoria Mason. "The New Integrationism, the State and Islamophobia: Retreat from Multiculturalism in Australia." International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice 36 (2008): 230–46.Razack, Sherene H. “Imperilled Muslim Women, Dangerous Muslim Men and Civilised Europeans: Legal and Social Responses to Forced Marriages.” Feminist Legal Studies 12.2 (2004): 129–74.Szego, Julie. “Under the Cover Up." The Age 9 Oct. 2010. < http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/under-the-coverup-20101008-16c1v.html >.Thrift, Nigel. “But Malice Afterthought: Cities and the Natural History of Hatred.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30 (2005): 133–50.Tissot, Sylvie. “Excluding Muslim Women: From Hijab to Niqab, from School to Public Space." Public Culture 23.1 (2011): 39–46.Valentine, Gill. “Living with Difference: Reflections on Geographies of Encounter.” Progress in Human Geography 32.3 (2008): 323–37.Wise, Amanda, and Selveraj Velayutham, eds. Everyday Multiculturalism. Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.YMCA. “VCAT Ruling on Swim Sessions at Dandenong Oasis to Open Up to Community During Ramadan Next Year.” 16 Sep. 2010. ‹http://www.victoria.ymca.org.au/cpa/htm/htm_news_detail.asp?page_id=13&news_id=360›.

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 circ*mstances 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 circ*mstances 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:

In 2014, telecommunications companies Ooredoo and Telenor introduced a 3G phone network to Myanmar, one of the last, great un-phoned territories of the world (“Mobile Mania”). Formerly accessible only to military and cultural elites, the smartphone was now available to virtually all. In 2020, just six years later, smartphones are commonplace, used by every class and walk of life. The introduction and mainstreaming of the smartphone in Myanmar coincided with the transition from military dictatorship to quasi democracy; from heavy censorship to relative liberalisation of culture and the media. This ongoing transition continues to be a painful one for many in Myanmar. The 3G network and smartphone ownership enable ordinary people to connect with one another and the Internet—or, more specifically, Facebook, which is ‘the Internet in Myanmar’ (Nyi Nyi Kyaw, “Facebooking in Myanmar” 1). However, the smartphone and what it enables has also been identified as a new instrument of control, with mass-texting campaigns and a toxic social media culture implicated in recent concerted violence against ethnic and minority religious groups such as the Muslim Rohingya. In this article, I consider the political and cultural conversations enabled by the smartphone in the period following its introduction. The smartphone can be read as an anomalous, hybrid, and foreign object, with connotations of fluidity and connection, all dangerous qualities in Myanmar, a conservative, former pariah state. Drawing from Sarah Ahmed’s article, “The Skin of Community: Affect and Boundary Formation” (2005), as well as recent scholarship on mixed race identification, I examine deeply held fears around ethnic belonging, cultural adeptness, and hybridity, arguing that these anxieties can be traced back to the early days of colonisation. During military rule, Myanmar’s people were underserved by their telecommunications network. Domestic landlines were rare. Phone calls were generally made from market stalls. SIM cards cost up to US$3000, out of reach of most. The lack of robust services was reflected by remarkably low connection rates; 2012 mobile connections numbered at a mere 5.4 million while fixed lines were just 0.6 million for a population of over 50 million people (Kyaw Myint, “Myanmar Country Report” 232). In 2013, the Norwegian telecommunications company Telenor and the Qatari company Ooredoo won licenses to establish network infrastructure for Myanmar. In August 2014, with network construction still underway, the two companies released SIM cards costing a mere 1500 kyats or US$1.50 each. At the time, 1500 kyats bought two plates of fried rice at a Yangon street food stall, making these SIM cards easily affordable. Chinese-manufactured handsets quickly became available (Fink 44). Suddenly, Myanmar was connected. By early 2019, there were 105 smart connections per 100 people in the country (Kyaw Myint, “Facebooking in Myanmar” 1). While this number doesn’t count multiple connections within a single household or the realities of unreliable network coverage in rural areas, the story of the smartphone in Myanmar would seem to be about democratisation and a new form of national unity. But after half a century of military rule, what did national unity mean? Myanmar’s full name is The Republic of the Union of Myanmar. Since independence in 1948 the country has been torn by internal civil wars as political factions and ethnic groups fought for sovereignty. What actually bound the Union of Myanmar together? And where might discussions of such painful and politically sensitive questions take place? Advertising as a Space for Crafting Conversations of National Identity In a report on Asian Advertising, Mila Chaplin of Mango Marketing, the agency charged with launching the Telenor brand in Myanmar, observes thatin many markets, brands talk about self-expression and invite consumers to get involved in co-creation … . In Myanmar what the consumers really need is some guidance on how to start crafting [national] …] identities. (4) Advertising has often been used as a means of retelling national stories and myths as well as a site for the collective imaginary to be visualised (Sawchuk 43). However, Myanmar was unlike other territories. Decades of heavy censorship and isolationist diplomatic policies, euphemistically named the “closed” period, left the country without a functional, independent national media. Television programming, including advertising, was regulated and national identity was an edict, not a shared conversation. With the advent of democratic reforms in 2011, ushering in a new “open” period, paid advertising campaigns in 2015 offered an in-between space on nationally broadcast television where it was possible to discuss questions of national identity from a perspective other than that of the government (Chaplin). Such conversations had to be conducted sensitively, given that the military were still the true national power. However, an advertising campaign that launched a new way to physically connect the country almost inevitably had to address questions of shared identity as well as clearly set out how the alien technology might shape the nation. To do so required addressing the country’s painful colonial past. The Hybrid in National Narratives of Myanmar In contemporary Myanmar, the smartphone is synonymous with military and government power (mobile Internet traffic in northern Rakhine state, for example, has been shut down since February 2020, ostensibly for security). Yet, when the phone was first introduced in 2014, it too was seen as a “foreign” object, one that had the potential to connect but also “instantiated ... a worldly sensibility that national borders and boundaries are potentially breached, and thus in need of protection from ‘others’” (Sawchuk 45). This fear of foreign influence coupled with the yearning for connection with the outside world is summed up by Ei Phyu Aung, editor of Myanmar’s weekly entertainment journal Sunday:it’s like dust coming in when you open the window. We can’t keep the window closed forever so we have to find a way to minimize the dust and maximize the sunlight. (Thin)Ei Phyu Aung wishes to enjoy the benefits of connecting with the world outside (sunlight) yet also fears cultural pollution (dust) linked with exploitation, an anxiety that reflects Myanmar’s approach to belonging and citizenship, shaped by its colonial history. Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, was colonised in stages. Upper Burma was annexed by British forces in 1886, completing a process of colonisation begun with the first Anglo-Burmese wars of 1823. The royal family was exiled from the pre-colonial capital at Mandalay and the new colony ruled as a province of India. Indian migration, particularly to Rangoon, was encouraged and these highly visible, economic migrants became the symbol of colonialism, of foreign exploitation. A deep mistrust of foreign influence, based on the experiences of colonialism, continued to shape the nation decades after independence. The 1962 military coup was followed by the expulsion of “foreigners” in 1964 as the country pursued a policy of isolation. In 1982, the government introduced a new citizenship law “driven as much by a political campaign to exclude the ‘alien’ from the country as to define the ‘citizen’” (Transnational Institute 10). This law only recognises ethnicities who can prove their presence prior to 1824, the year British forces first annexed lower Burma. As a consequence of the 1982 laws, groups such as the Rohingya are considered “Bengali migrants” and those descended from Chinese and Indian diasporas are excluded from full citizenship. In 1989, the ruling State Law and Order Council (SLORC) changed the country’s name to Myanmar and the anglicised Rangoon to Yangon. Thus the story of Burma/Myanmar since independence is of a nation that continues to be traumatised by colonisation. Given the mistrust of the foreign, how then might an anomalous hybrid object like the smartphone be received? Smartphone Advertising and National Narratives Television advertising is well suited to creating a sense of national identity; commercials are usually broadcast repeatedly. As Sarah Ahmed argues, it is through “the repetition of norms” that “boundary, fixity and surface of ‘social forms’ such as the ‘nation’ are produced” (Cultural Politics of Emotion 12). In her article, “The Skin of Community”, Ahmed describes these boundaries as a kind of “skin”, where difference is recognised through affective responses, such as disgust or delight. These responses and their associated meanings delineate a kind of belonging through shared experience, akin to shared identity—a shared skin. Telenor’s first advertisem*nt in this space, Breakfast, draws from the metaphor of skin as boundary, connecting a family meal with cultural myths and social history. Breakfast was developed by Mango Marketing Services in 2014 and Telenor launched its initial television campaign in 2015, consisting of several advertisem*nts brought to market in the period between 2014 and 2016 (Hicks, Mumbrella). The commercial runs for 60 seconds, a relatively expensive long format typical of a broadly-disseminated launch where the advertiser aims to introduce something new to the public and subsequently, build market share. Opening with images of Yangon, the country’s commercial centre, Breakfast tells the story of May, a newlywed, and the first time she cooks for her in-laws. May’s mother-in-law requests a famous breakfast dish, nanjithoke, typical of Mandalay, where May is from. But May does not know how to cook the dish and blunders around the kitchen as her in-laws wait. Sensing her distress, her husband suggests that she use his smartphone to call her mother in Mandalay and get the recipe. May’s dish is approved by her in-laws as tasty and authentic. In Breakfast, the phone is used as if it were a landline, its mobility not wholly relevant. The locations of both parties, May and her mother, are fixed and predictable and the phone in both instances is closely associated with connecting homes and more significantly, two important cities, Yangon and Mandalay. The advertisem*nt presents the smartphone as solving the systemic problem of unreliable telecommunication in Myanmar as well as its lack of access; there is a final message reassuring the user that calls are affordable. That the smartphone is shown as part of everyday life presents it as a force for stability, a service that locates and connects fixed places. This in itself represented a profound shift for most people, in light of the fact that such communication was not possible during the “closed” period. Thus, this foreign, hybrid object enables what was not previously possible.While the benefits of the smartphone and network may be clear, the subtext of the advertisem*nt nonetheless points to fears of foreign influence and the dangers of introducing an alien object into everyday life. To mitigate these concerns, May is presented in the traditional htamein or longyi and aingi, a long wrap skirt and fitted blouse with sleeves that end on the forearm, rather than western jeans and a t-shirt—both types of clothing are commonly worn in Yangon. Her hair is pulled back and pinned up, her makeup is subtle. She inhabits domestic space and does not have her own smartphone. In fact, it does not even occur to her to call her mother for the nanjithoke recipe, which is slightly surprising given her mother has a smartphone and knows how to use it, indicating that she has probably had it for some time. This subtext reflects conservative power structures in which elder generations pass knowledge down to new generations. The choice to connect Yangon and Mandalay through the local noodle dish is also significant. Breakfast makes manifest historic meanings associated with “place” a mapping of the “hidden” and “already given cultural order” (Mazzarella 24-25). As discussed earlier, Yangon was the colonial capital, known as an Indian city, but Mandalay as the pre-colonial capital remains a seat of cultural sophistication, where the highest form of the Myanmar language is spoken. The choice to connect Myanmar with the phone, as foreign object and bearer of anomaly, should be read as a repudiation of its bordered past, when foreigners (or kalaa, a derogatory term), including European ambassadors, were kept separate from the royal family by walls and a moat. The commercial, too, strongly evokes a shared skin of community through the evocation of the senses, from Yangon’s heat to the anticipation of a tasty and authentic meal, as well as through the visualisation of kinship and inheritance. In one extremely slow dissolve, May and her mother share the screen simultaneously, compressed in space as well as time. It is as if their skin of kinship is stretched before us. As the viewer’s eye passes from left to right across the screen, May’s present, past, and future is visible. She too will become the mother, at the other end the phone, offering advice to her daughter. There is suggestion of a continuum, of an “immemorial past” (Anderson 12), part of a national narrative that connects to pre-colonial Mandalay and the cultural systems that precede it, to the modern city of Yangon, still the commercial of contemporary Myanmar.At first glance, Breakfast seems to position the phone as an object that will enable Myanmar to stay Myanmarese through the strengthening of family connections. The commercial also strives to allay fears of the phone as a source of cultural pollution or exploitation by demonstrating its adoption among the older generation and inserting it into a fantasy of an uninterrupted culture, harking back to pre-colonial Burma. Yet, while the phone is represented in anodyne terms, it is only because it is an anomalous and hybrid object that such connections are possible. Furthermore, the smartphone in this representation also enables a connection between pre-colonial Mandalay to contemporary Yangon, breaching painful associations with both annexation and colonisation. In contrast to the advertisem*nt Breakfast, Telenor’s information video, Why we should use SIM slot 1, does not attempt to disassociate the smartphone with foreignness. Instead, it capitalises on the smartphone as a hybrid object whose benefit is that it can be adapted to specific needs, including faster Internet speeds to enable connection to external video channel, such as YouTube.The video features young women dressed in foreign jeans and short-sleeved tops, wearing Western-style make-up, including sparkly nail polish. Both women appear to own their smartphones, and one is technically adept, delivering the complex information about which slot to use to facilitate the fastest Internet connection. Neither has difficulty with negotiating the complicated ports beneath the back cover of their smartphone to make the necessary change. They are happy to alter their phones to suit their own needs. These women are perhaps more closely in line with other markets, where the younger generation “do not expect to follow their parents’ practice” (Horst and Miller 9). This is in direct contrast to Breakfast, where May’s middle-aged mother has adopted the phone and, in keeping with conservative power structures, is already well-versed in its uses and capabilities. While this video was never intended to be seen by the audience for Breakfast, there remain parallels in the way the smartphone enables a connection within the control of its user: like May’s mother, both women in Breakfast are able to control or mitigate the foreign material through the manipulation of their device, moving from 2G to H+. They can opt in or out of the H+ network.This article has explored discussions of national identity prompted by the introduction of the smartphone to Myanmar during a moment of unprecedented political change. Breakfast, the advertisem*nt that launched the smartphone into the country, offered a space in which the people of Myanmar were able to address questions of national identity and gently probe the discomfort of the colonial past. The communication video Why we should use SIM slot 1 reflects Myanmar’s burgeoning sense of connection with the region and presents the smartphone as customisable. The smartphone in advertising is thus positioned as a means for connecting the generations and continuing the immemorial past of the Burmese nation into the future, as well as a hybrid object capable of linking the country to the outside world. Further directions for this enquiry might consider how the discussion of Myanmar’s national identity continues to be addressed and exploited through advertising in Myanmar, and how the smartphone’s hybridity is used to counteract established national narratives in other spaces.References Adas, Michael. The Burma Delta 1852-1941. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2011.Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Ahmed, Sara. Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2014.———. “The Skin of Community: Affect and Boundary Formation.” Revolt, Affect, Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva’s Polis. Eds. Tina Chanter and Ewa Płonowska Ziarek. Albany: State U of New York, 2005. 95-111. Chaplin, Milla. “Advertising in Myanmar: Digging Deep to Even Scratch the Surface.” WARC, Mar. 2016. <https://origin.warc.com/content/paywall/article/warc-exclusive/advertising-in-myanmar-digging-deep-to-even-scratch-the-surface/106815>.Charney, Michael W. A History of Modern Burma. Cambridge, Cambridge UP: 2009.Cheesman, Nick. “How in Myanmar ‘National Races’ Came to Surpass Citizenship and Exclude Rohingya.” Journal of Contemporary Asia 47.3 (2017): 461‑483.Fink, Christine. “Dangerous Speech, Anti-Muslim Violence, and Facebook in Myanmar.” Journal of International Affairs 71.1 (2018): 43‑52.Hicks, Robin. “Telenor Launches First TV Ad in Myanmar.” Mumbrella, 2 Feb. 2015. <http://www.mumbrella.asia/2015/02/telenor-launches-first-tv-ad-myanmar>.Horst, Heather A., and Daniel Miller. The Cell Phone. An Anthropology of Communication. New York: Berg, 2006.Kyaw Myint. “Myanmar Country Report.” Financing ASEAN Connectivity: ERIA Research Project Report. Eds. F. Zen and M. Regan. Jakarta: ERIA, 2014. 221-267. Breakfast. Mango Creative, Mango Media Marketing, Telenor Myanmar. 26 Jan. 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2G2xjK8QFSo>.Mazzarella, William. Shovelling Smoke. Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2003.“Mobile Mania.” The Economist. 24 Jan. 2015. <https://www.economist.com/business/2015/01/22/mobile-mania>.Nyi Nyi Kyaw. “Adulteration of Pure Native Blood by Aliens? Mixed Race Kapya in Colonial and Post-Colonial Myanmar.” Social Identities 25.3 (2018): 345-359. ———. “Facebooking in Myanmar: From Hate Speech to Fake News to Partisan Political Communication.” Yusof Ishak Institute Perspective 36 (2019): 1-10. Sawchuk, Kim. “Radio Hats, Wireless Rats and Flying Families.” The Wireless Spectrum: The Politics, Practices and Poetics of Mobile Media. Eds. Barbara Crow, Michael Longford, and Kim Sawchuk. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2010.Thin Lei Win. “Beauty Pageants Expose Dreams and Dangers in Modern Myanmar.” Reuters, 26 Sep. 2014. <https://www.reuters.com/article/us-foundation-myanmar-beautycontests/beauty-pageants-expose-dreams-and-dangers-in-modern-myanmar-idUSKCN0HL0Y520140926>.Transnational Institute. “Ethnicity without Meaning, Data without Context: The 2014 Census, Identity and Citizenship in Burma/Myanmar.” Amsterdam: TNI-BCN Burma Policy Briefing, 2014.

Abstract:

The Leichhardt Highway is a six hundred-kilometre stretch of sealed inland road that joins the Australian Queensland border town of Goondiwindi with the Capricorn Highway, just south of the Tropic of Capricorn. Named after the young Prussian naturalist Ludwig Leichhardt, part of this roadway follows the route his party took as they crossed northern Australia from Morton Bay (Brisbane) to Port Essington (near Darwin). Ignoring the usual colonial practice of honouring the powerful and aristocratic, Leichhardt named the noteworthy features along this route after his supporters and fellow expeditioners. Many of these names are still in use and a series of public monuments have also been erected in the intervening century and a half to commemorate this journey. Unlike Leichhardt, who survived his epic trip, some contemporary travellers who navigate the remote roadway named in his honour do not arrive at their final destinations. Memorials to these violently interrupted lives line the highway, many enigmatically located in places where there is no obvious explanation for the lethal violence that occurred there. This examination profiles the memorials along Leichhardt’s highway as Gothic practice, in order to illuminate some of the uncanny paradoxes around public memorials, as well as the loaded emotional terrain such commemorative practices may inhabit. All humans know that death awaits them (Morell). Yet, despite this, and the unprecedented torrent of images of death and dying saturating news, television, and social media (Duwe; Sumiala; Bisceglio), Gorer’s mid-century ideas about the denial of death and Becker’s 1973 Pulitzer prize-winning description of the purpose of human civilization as a defence against this knowledge remains current in the contemporary trope that individuals (at least in the West) deny their mortality. Contributing to this enigmatic situation is how many deny the realities of aging and bodily decay—the promise of the “life extension” industries (Hall)—and are shielded from death by hospitals, palliative care providers, and the multimillion dollar funeral industry (Kiernan). Drawing on Piatti-Farnell’s concept of popular culture artefacts as “haunted/haunting” texts, the below describes how memorials to the dead can powerfully reconnect those who experience them with death’s reality, by providing an “encrypted passageway through which the dead re-join the living in a responsive cycle of exchange and experience” (Piatti-Farnell). While certainly very different to the “sublime” iconic Gothic structure, the Gothic ruin that Summers argued could be seen as “a sacred relic, a memorial, a symbol of infinite sadness, of tenderest sensibility and regret” (407), these memorials do function in both this way as melancholy/regret-inducing relics as well as in Piatti-Farnell’s sense of bringing the dead into everyday consciousness. Such memorialising activity also evokes one of Spooner’s features of the Gothic, by acknowledging “the legacies of the past and its burdens on the present” (8).Ludwig Leichhardt and His HighwayWhen Leichhardt returned to Sydney in 1846 from his 18-month journey across northern Australia, he was greeted with surprise and then acclaim. Having mounted his expedition without any backing from influential figures in the colony, his party was presumed lost only weeks after its departure. Yet, once Leichhardt and almost all his expedition returned, he was hailed “Prince of Explorers” (Erdos). When awarding him a significant purse raised by public subscription, then Speaker of the Legislative Council voiced what he believed would be the explorer’s lasting memorial —the public memory of his achievement: “the undying glory of having your name enrolled amongst those of the great men whose genius and enterprise have impelled them to seek for fame in the prosecution of geographical science” (ctd. Leichhardt 539). Despite this acclaim, Leichhardt was a controversial figure in his day; his future prestige not enhanced by his Prussian/Germanic background or his disappearance two years later attempting to cross the continent. What troubled the colonial political class, however, was his transgressive act of naming features along his route after commoners rather than the colony’s aristocrats. Today, the Leichhardt Highway closely follows Leichhardt’s 1844-45 route for some 130 kilometres from Miles, north through Wandoan to Taroom. In the first weeks of his journey, Leichhardt named 16 features in this area: 6 of the more major of these after the men in his party—including the Aboriginal man ‘Charley’ and boy John Murphy—4 more after the tradesmen and other non-aristocratic sponsors of his venture, and the remainder either in memory of the journey’s quotidian events or natural features there found. What we now accept as traditional memorialising practice could in this case be termed as Gothic, in that it upset the rational, normal order of its day, and by honouring humble shopkeepers, blacksmiths and Indigenous individuals, revealed the “disturbance and ambivalence” (Botting 4) that underlay colonial class relations (Macintyre). On 1 December 1844, Leichhardt also memorialised his own past, referencing the Gothic in naming a watercourse The Creek of the Ruined Castles due to the “high sandstone rocks, fissured and broken like pillars and walls and the high gates of the ruined castles of Germany” (57). Leichhardt also disturbed and disfigured the nature he so admired, famously carving his initials deep into trees along his route—a number of which still exist, including the so-called Leichhardt Tree, a large coolibah in Taroom’s main street. Leichhardt also wrote his own memorial, keeping detailed records of his experiences—both good and more regretful—in the form of field books, notebooks and letters, with his major volume about this expedition published in London in 1847. Leichhardt’s journey has since been memorialised in various ways along the route. The Leichhardt Tree has been further defaced with numerous plaques nailed into its ancient bark, and the town’s federal government-funded Bicentennial project raised a formal memorial—a large sandstone slab laid with three bronze plaques—in the newly-named Ludwig Leichhardt Park. Leichhardt’s name also adorns many sites both along, and outside, the routes of his expeditions. While these fittingly include natural features such as the Leichhardt River in north-west Queensland (named in 1856 by Augustus Gregory who crossed it by searching for traces of the explorer’s ill-fated 1848 expedition), there are also many businesses across Queensland and the Northern Territory less appropriately carrying his name. More somber monuments to Leichhardt’s legacy also resulted from this journey. The first of these was the white settlement that followed his declaration that the countryside he moved through was well endowed with fertile soils. With squatters and settlers moving in and land taken up before Leichhardt had even arrived back in Sydney, the local Yeeman people were displaced, mistreated and completely eradicated within a decade (Elder). Mid-twentieth century, Patrick White’s literary reincarnation, Voss of the eponymous novel, and paintings by Sidney Nolan and Albert Tucker have enshrined in popular memory not only the difficult (and often described as Gothic) nature of the landscape through which Leichhardt travelled (Adams; Mollinson, and Bonham), but also the distinctive and contrary blend of intelligence, spiritual mysticism, recklessness, and stoicism Leichhardt brought to his task. Roadside Memorials Today, the Leichhardt Highway is also lined with a series of roadside shrines to those who have died much more recently. While, like centotaphs, tombstones, and cemeteries, these memorialise the dead, they differ in usually marking the exact location that death occurred. In 43 BC, Cicero articulated the idea of the dead living in memory, “The life of the dead consists in the recollection cherished of them by the living” (93), yet Nelson is one of very few contemporary writers to link roadside memorials to elements of Gothic sensibility. Such constructions can, however, be described as Gothic, in that they make the roadway unfamiliar by inscribing onto it the memory of corporeal trauma and, in the process, re-creating their locations as vivid sites of pain and suffering. These are also enigmatic sites. Traffic levels are generally low along the flat or gently undulating terrain and many of these memorials are located in locations where there is no obvious explanation for the violence that occurred there. They are loci of contradictions, in that they are both more private than other memorials, in being designed, and often made and erected, by family and friends of the deceased, and yet more public, visible to all who pass by (Campbell). Cemeteries are set apart from their surroundings; the roadside memorial is, in contrast, usually in open view along a thoroughfare. In further contrast to cemeteries, which contain many relatively standardised gravesites, individual roadside memorials encapsulate and express not only the vivid grief of family and friends but also—when they include vehicle wreckage or personal artefacts from the fatal incident—provide concrete evidence of the trauma that occurred. While the majority of individuals interned in cemeteries are long dead, roadside memorials mark relatively contemporary deaths, some so recent that there may still be tyre marks, debris and bloodstains marking the scene. In 2008, when I was regularly travelling this roadway, I documented, and researched, the six then extant memorial sites that marked the locations of ten fatalities from 1999 to 2006. (These were all still in place in mid-2014.) The fatal incidents are very diverse. While half involved trucks and/or road trains, at least three were single vehicle incidents, and the deceased ranged from 13 to 84 years of age. Excell argues that scholarship on roadside memorials should focus on “addressing the diversity of the material culture” (‘Contemporary Deathscapes’) and, in these terms, the Leichhardt Highway memorials vary from simple crosses to complex installations. All include crosses (mostly, but not exclusively, white), and almost all are inscribed with the name and birth/death dates of the deceased. Most include flowers or other plants (sometimes fresh but more often plastic), but sometimes also a range of relics from the crash and/or personal artefacts. These are, thus, unsettling sights, not least in the striking contrast they provide with the highway and surrounding road reserve. The specific location is a key component of their ability to re-sensitise viewers to the dangers of the route they are travelling. The first memorial travelling northwards, for instance, is situated at the very point at which the highway begins, some 18 kilometres from Goondiwindi. Two small white crosses decorated with plastic flowers are set poignantly close together. The inscriptions can also function as a means of mobilising connection with these dead strangers—a way of building Secomb’s “haunted community”, whereby community in the post-colonial age can only be built once past “murderous death” (131) is acknowledged. This memorial is inscribed with “Cec Hann 06 / A Good Bloke / A Good hoarseman [sic]” and “Pat Hann / A Good Woman” to tragically commemorate the deaths of an 84-year-old man and his 79-year-old wife from South Australia who died in the early afternoon of 5 June 2006 when their Ford Falcon, towing a caravan, pulled onto the highway and was hit by a prime mover pulling two trailers (Queensland Police, ‘Double Fatality’; Jones, and McColl). Further north along the highway are two memorials marking the most inexplicable of road deaths: the single vehicle fatality (Connolly, Cullen, and McTigue). Darren Ammenhauser, aged 29, is remembered with a single white cross with flowers and plaque attached to a post, inscribed hopefully, “Darren Ammenhauser 1971-2000 At Rest.” Further again, at Billa Billa Creek, a beautifully crafted metal cross attached to a fence is inscribed with the text, “Kenneth J. Forrester / RIP Jack / 21.10.25 – 27.4.05” marking the death of the 79-year-old driver whose vehicle veered off the highway to collide with a culvert on the creek. It was reported that the vehicle rolled over several times before coming to rest on its wheels and that Forrester was dead when the police arrived (Queensland Police, ‘Fatal Traffic Incident’). More complex memorials recollect both single and multiple deaths. One, set on both sides of the road, maps the physical trajectory of the fatal smash. This memorial comprises white crosses on both sides of road, attached to a tree on one side, and a number of ancillary sites including damaged tyres with crosses placed inside them on both sides of the road. Simple inscriptions relay the inability of such words to express real grief: “Gary (Gazza) Stevens / Sadly missed” and “Gary (Gazza) Stevens / Sadly missed / Forever in our hearts.” The oldest and most complex memorial on the route, commemorating the death of four individuals on 18 June 1999, is also situated on both sides of the road, marking the collision of two vehicles travelling in opposite directions. One memorial to a 62-year-old man comprises a cross with flowers, personal and automotive relics, and a plaque set inside a wooden fence and simply inscribed “John Henry Keenan / 23-11-1936–18-06-1999”. The second memorial contains three white crosses set side-by-side, together with flowers and relics, and reveals that members of three generations of the same family died at this location: “Raymond Campbell ‘Butch’ / 26-3-67–18-6-99” (32 years of age), “Lorraine Margaret Campbell ‘Lloydie’ / 29-11-46–18-6-99” (53 years), and “Raymond Jon Campbell RJ / 28-1-86–18-6-99” (13 years). The final memorial on this stretch of highway is dedicated to Jason John Zupp of Toowoomba who died two weeks before Christmas 2005. This consists of a white cross, decorated with flowers and inscribed: “Jason John Zupp / Loved & missed by all”—a phrase echoed in his newspaper obituary. The police media statement noted that, “at 11.24pm a prime mover carrying four empty trailers [stacked two high] has rolled on the Leichhardt Highway 17km north of Taroom” (Queensland Police, ‘Fatal Truck Accident’). The roadside memorial was placed alongside a ditch on a straight stretch of road where the body was found. The coroner’s report adds the following chilling information: “Mr Zupp was thrown out of the cabin and his body was found near the cabin. There is no evidence whatsoever that he had applied the brakes or in any way tried to prevent the crash … Jason was not wearing his seatbelt” (Cornack 5, 6). Cornack also remarked the truck was over length, the brakes had not been properly adjusted, and the trip that Zupp had undertaken could not been lawfully completed according to fatigue management regulations then in place (8). Although poignant and highly visible due to these memorials, these deaths form a small part of Australia’s road toll, and underscore our ambivalent relationship with the automobile, where road death is accepted as a necessary side-effect of the freedom of movement the technology offers (Ladd). These memorials thus animate highways as Gothic landscapes due to the “multifaceted” (Haider 56) nature of the fear, terror and horror their acknowledgement can bring. Since 1981, there have been, for instance, between some 1,600 and 3,300 road deaths each year in Australia and, while there is evidence of a long term downward trend, the number of deaths per annum has not changed markedly since 1991 (DITRDLG 1, 2), and has risen in some years since then. The U.S.A. marked its millionth road death in 1951 (Ladd) along the way to over 3,000,000 during the 20th century (Advocates). These deaths are far reaching, with U.K. research suggesting that each death there leaves an average of 6 people significantly affected, and that there are some 10 to 20 per cent of mourners who experience more complicated grief and longer term negative affects during this difficult time (‘Pathways Through Grief’). As the placing of roadside memorials has become a common occurrence the world over (Klaassens, Groote, and Vanclay; Grider; Cohen), these are now considered, in MacConville’s opinion, not only “an appropriate, but also an expected response to tragedy”. Hockey and Draper have explored the therapeutic value of the maintenance of “‘continuing bonds’ between the living and the dead” (3). This is, however, only one explanation for the reasons that individuals erect roadside memorials with research suggesting roadside memorials perform two main purposes in their linking of the past with the present—as not only sites of grieving and remembrance, but also of warning (Hartig, and Dunn; Everett; Excell, Roadside Memorials; MacConville). Clark adds that by “localis[ing] and personalis[ing] the road dead,” roadside memorials raise the profile of road trauma by connecting the emotionless statistics of road death directly to individual tragedy. They, thus, transform the highway into not only into a site of past horror, but one in which pain and terror could still happen, and happen at any moment. Despite their increasing commonality and their recognition as cultural artefacts, these memorials thus occupy “an uncomfortable place” both in terms of public policy and for some individuals (Lowe). While in some states of the U.S.A. and in Ireland the erection of such memorials is facilitated by local authorities as components of road safety campaigns, in the U.K. there appears to be “a growing official opposition to the erection of memorials” (MacConville). Criticism has focused on the dangers (of distraction and obstruction) these structures pose to passing traffic and pedestrians, while others protest their erection on aesthetic grounds and even claim memorials can lower property values (Everett). While many ascertain a sense of hope and purpose in the physical act of creating such shrines (see, for instance, Grider; Davies), they form an uncanny presence along the highway and can provide dangerous psychological territory for the viewer (Brien). Alongside the townships, tourist sites, motels, and petrol stations vying to attract customers, they stain the roadway with the unmistakable sign that a violent death has happened—bringing death, and the dead, to the fore as a component of these journeys, and destabilising prominent cultural narratives of technological progress and safety (Richter, Barach, Ben-Michael, and Berman).Conclusion This investigation has followed Goddu who proposes that a Gothic text “registers its culture’s contradictions” (3) and, in profiling these memorials as “intimately connected to the culture that produces them” (Goddu 3) has proposed memorials as Gothic artefacts that can both disturb and reveal. Roadside memorials are, indeed, so loaded with emotional content that their close contemplation can be traumatising (Brien), yet they are inescapable while navigating the roadway. Part of their power resides in their ability to re-animate those persons killed in these violent in the minds of those viewing these memorials. In this way, these individuals are reincarnated as ghostly presences along the highway, forming channels via which the traveller can not only make human contact with the dead, but also come to recognise and ponder their own sense of mortality. While roadside memorials are thus like civic war memorials in bringing untimely death to the forefront of public view, roadside memorials provide a much more raw expression of the chaotic, anarchic and traumatic moment that separates the world of the living from that of the dead. While traditional memorials—such as those dedicated by, and to, Leichhardt—moreover, pay homage to the vitality of the lives of those they commemorate, roadside memorials not only acknowledge the alarming circ*mstances of unexpected death but also stand testament to the power of the paradox of the incontrovertibility of sudden death versus our lack of ability to postpone it. In this way, further research into these and other examples of Gothic memorialising practice has much to offer various areas of cultural study in Australia.ReferencesAdams, Brian. Sidney Nolan: Such Is Life. Hawthorn, Vic.: Hutchinson, 1987. Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety. “Motor Vehicle Traffic Fatalities & Fatality Rate: 1899-2003.” 2004. Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973. Bisceglio, Paul. “How Social Media Is Changing the Way We Approach Death.” The Atlantic 20 Aug. 2013. Botting, Fred. Gothic: The New Critical Idiom. 2nd edition. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2014. 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Abstract:

Introduction One of the ways in which ‘country’ is made to work discursively is in ‘country music’ – defining a genre and sensibility in music production, marketing and consumption. This article seeks to excavate one small niche in the historical geography of country music to explore exactly how discursive antecedents emerged, and crucially, how images associated with ‘country’ surfaced and travelled internationally via one of the new ‘global’ media of the first half of the twentieth century – sheet music. My central arguments are twofold: first, that alongside aural qualities and lyrical content, the visual elements of sheet music were important and thus far have been under-acknowledged. Sheet music diffused the imagery connecting ‘country’ to music, to particular landscapes, and masculinities. In the literature on country music much emphasis has been placed on film, radio and television (Tichi; Peterson). Yet, sheet music was for several decades the most common way people bought personal copies of songs they liked and intended to play at home on piano, guitar or ukulele. This was particularly the case in Australia – geographically distant, and rarely included in international tours by American country music stars. Sheet music is thus a rich text to reveal the historical contours of ‘country’. My second and related argument is that that the possibilities for the globalising of ‘country’ were first explored in music. The idea of transnational discourses associated with ‘country’ and ‘rurality’ is relatively new (Cloke et al; Gorman-Murray et al; McCarthy), but in music we see early evidence of a globalising discourse of ‘country’ well ahead of the time period usually analysed. Accordingly, my focus is on the sheet music of country songs in Australia in the first half of the twentieth century and on how visual representations hybridised travelling themes to create a new vernacular ‘country’ in Australia. Creating ‘Country’ Music Country music, as its name suggests, is perceived as the music of rural areas, “defined in contrast to metropolitan norms” (Smith 301). However, the ‘naturalness’ of associations between country music and rurality belies a history of urban capitalism and the refinement of deliberate methods of marketing music through associated visual imagery. Early groups wore suits and dressed for urban audiences – but then altered appearances later, on the insistence of urban record companies, to emphasise rurality and cowboy heritage. Post-1950, ‘country’ came to replace ‘folk’ music as a marketing label, as the latter was considered to have too many communistic references (Hemphill 5), and the ethnic mixing of earlier folk styles was conveniently forgotten in the marketing of ‘country’ music as distinct from African American ‘race’ and ‘r and b’ music. Now an industry of its own with multinational headquarters in Nashville, country music is a ‘cash cow’ for entertainment corporations, with lower average production costs, considerable profit margins, and marketing advantages that stem from tropes of working class identity and ‘rural’ honesty (see Lewis; Arango). Another of country music’s associations is with American geography – and an imagined heartland in the colonial frontier of the American West. Slippages between ‘country’ and ‘western’ in music, film and dress enhance this. But historical fictions are masked: ‘purists’ argue that western dress and music have nothing to do with ‘country’ (see truewesternmusic.com), while recognition of the Spanish-Mexican, Native American and Hawaiian origins of ‘cowboy’ mythology is meagre (George-Warren and Freedman). Similarly, the highly international diffusion and adaptation of country music as it rose to prominence in the 1940s is frequently downplayed (Connell and Gibson), as are the destructive elements of colonialism and dispossession of indigenous peoples in frontier America (though Johnny Cash’s 1964 album The Ballads Of The American Indian: Bitter Tears was an exception). Adding to the above is the way ‘country’ operates discursively in music as a means to construct particular masculinities. Again, linked to rural imagery and the American frontier, the dominant masculinity is of rugged men wrestling nature, negotiating hardships and the pressures of family life. Country music valorises ‘heroic masculinities’ (Holt and Thompson), with echoes of earlier cowboy identities reverberating into contemporary performance through dress style, lyrical content and marketing imagery. The men of country music mythology live an isolated existence, working hard to earn an income for dependent families. Their music speaks to the triumph of hard work, honest values (meaning in this context a musical style, and lyrical concerns that are ‘down to earth’, ‘straightforward’ and ‘without pretence’) and physical strength, in spite of neglect from national governments and uncaring urban leaders. Country music has often come to be associated with conservative politics, heteronormativity, and whiteness (Gibson and Davidson), echoing the wider politics of ‘country’ – it is no coincidence, for example, that the slogan for the 2008 Republican National Convention in America was ‘country first’. And yet, throughout its history, country music has also enabled more diverse gender performances to emerge – from those emphasising (or bemoaning) domesticity; assertive femininity; creative negotiation of ‘country’ norms by gay men; and ‘alternative’ culture (captured in the marketing tag, ‘alt.country’); to those acknowledging white male victimhood, criminality (‘the outlaw’), vulnerability and cruelty (see Johnson; McCusker and Pecknold; Saucier). Despite dominant tropes of ‘honesty’, country music is far from transparent, standing for certain values and identities, and yet enabling the construction of diverse and contradictory others. Historical analysis is therefore required to trace the emergence of ‘country’ in music, as it travelled beyond America. A Note on Sheet Music as Media Source Sheet music was one of the main modes of distribution of music from the 1930s through to the 1950s – a formative period in which an eclectic group of otherwise distinct ‘hillbilly’ and ‘folk’ styles moved into a single genre identity, and after which vinyl singles and LP records with picture covers dominated. Sheet music was prevalent in everyday life: beyond radio, a hit song was one that was widely purchased as sheet music, while pianos and sheet music collections (stored in a piece of furniture called a ‘music canterbury’) in family homes were commonplace. Sheet music is in many respects preferable to recorded music as a form of evidence for historical analysis of country music. Picture LP covers did not arrive until the late 1950s (by which time rock and roll had surpassed country music). Until then, 78 rpm shellac discs, the main form of pre-recorded music, featured generic brown paper sleeves from the individual record companies, or city retail stores. Also, while radio was clearly central to the consumption of music in this period, it obviously also lacked the pictorial element that sheet music could provide. Sheet music bridged the music and printing industries – the latter already well-equipped with colour printing, graphic design and marketing tools. Sheet music was often literally crammed with information, providing the researcher with musical notation, lyrics, cover art and embedded advertisem*nts – aural and visual texts combined. These multiple dimensions of sheet music proved useful here, for clues to the context of the music/media industries and geography of distribution (for instance, in addresses for publishers and sheet music retail shops). Moreover, most sheet music of the time used rich, sometimes exaggerated, images to convince passing shoppers to buy songs that they had possibly never heard. As sheet music required caricature rather than detail or historical accuracy, it enabled fantasy without distraction. In terms of representations of ‘country’, then, sheet music is perhaps even more evocative than film or television. Hundreds of sheet music items were collected for this research over several years, through deliberate searching (for instance, in library archives and specialist sheet music stores) and with some serendipity (for instance, when buying second hand sheet music in charity shops or garage sales). The collected material is probably not representative of all music available at the time – it is as much a specialised personal collection as a comprehensive survey. However, at least some material from all the major Australian country music performers of the time were found, and the resulting collection appears to be several times larger than that held currently by the National Library of Australia (from which some entries were sourced). All examples here are of songs written by, or cover art designed for Australian country music performers. For brevity’s sake, the following analysis of the sheet music follows a crudely chronological framework. Country Music in Australia Before ‘Country’ Country music did not ‘arrive’ in Australia from America as a fully-finished genre category; nor was Australia at the time without rural mythology or its own folk music traditions. Associations between Australian national identity, rurality and popular culture were entrenched in a period of intense creativity and renewed national pride in the decades prior to and after Federation in 1901. This period saw an outpouring of art, poetry, music and writing in new nationalist idiom, rooted in ‘the bush’ (though drawing heavily on Celtic expressions), and celebrating themes of mateship, rural adversity and ‘battlers’. By the turn of the twentieth century, such myths, invoked through memory and nostalgia, had already been popularised. Australia had a fully-established system of colonies, capital cities and state governments, and was highly urbanised. Yet the poetry, folk music and art, invariably set in rural locales, looked back to the early 1800s, romanticising bush characters and frontier events. The ‘bush ballad’ was a central and recurring motif, one that commentators have argued was distinctly, and essentially ‘Australian’ (Watson; Smith). Sheet music from this early period reflects the nationalistic, bush-orientated popular culture of the time: iconic Australian fauna and flora are prominent, and Australian folk culture is emphasised as ‘native’ (being the first era of cultural expressions from Australian-born residents). Pioneer life and achievements are celebrated. ‘Along the road to Gundagai’, for instance, was about an iconic Australian country town and depicted sheep droving along rustic trails with overhanging eucalypts. Male figures are either absent, or are depicted in situ as lone drovers in the archetypal ‘shepherd’ image, behind their flocks of sheep (Figure 1). Figure 1: No. 1 Magpie Ballads – The Pioneer (c1900) and Along the road to Gundagai (1923). Further colonial ruralities developed in Australia from the 1910s to 1940s, when agrarian values grew in the promotion of Australian agricultural exports. Australia ‘rode on the sheep’s back’ to industrialisation, and governments promoted rural development and inland migration. It was a period in which rural lifestyles were seen as superior to those in the crowded inner city, and government strategies sought to create a landed proletariat through post-war land settlement and farm allotment schemes. National security was said to rely on populating the inland with those of European descent, developing rural industries, and breeding a healthier and yet compliant population (Dufty), from which armies of war-ready men could be recruited in times of conflict. Popular culture served these national interests, and thus during these decades, when ‘hillbilly’ and other North American music forms were imported, they were transformed, adapted and reworked (as in other places such as Canada – see Lehr). There were definite parallels in the frontier narratives of the United States (Whiteoak), and several local adaptations followed: Tex Morton became Australia’s ‘Yodelling boundary rider’ and Gordon Parsons became ‘Australia’s yodelling bushman’. American songs were re-recorded and performed, and new original songs written with Australian lyrics, titles and themes. Visual imagery in sheet music built upon earlier folk/bush frontier themes to re-cast Australian pastoralism in a more settled, modernist and nationalist aesthetic; farms were places for the production of a robust nation. Where male figures were present on sheet music covers in the early twentieth century, they became more prominent in this period, and wore Akubras (Figure 2). The lyrics to John Ashe’s Growin’ the Golden Fleece (1952) exemplify this mix of Australian frontier imagery, new pastoralist/nationalist rhetoric, and the importation of American cowboy masculinity: Go west and take up sheep, man, North Queensland is the shot But if you don’t get rich, man, you’re sure to get dry rot Oh! Growin’ the golden fleece, battlin’ a-way out west Is bound to break your flamin’ heart, or else expand your chest… We westerners are handy, we can’t afford to crack Not while the whole darn’d country is riding on our back Figure 2: Eric Tutin’s Shearers’ Jamboree (1946). As in America, country music struck a chord because it emerged “at a point in history when the project of the creation and settlement of a new society was underway but had been neither completed nor abandoned” (Dyer 33). Governments pressed on with the colonial project of inland expansion in Australia, despite the theft of indigenous country this entailed, and popular culture such as music became a means to normalise and naturalise the process. Again, mutations of American western imagery, and particular iconic male figures were important, as in Roy Darling’s (1945) Overlander Trail (Figure 3): Wagon wheels are rolling on, and the days seem mighty long Clouds of heat-dust in the air, bawling cattle everywhere They’re on the overlander trail Where only sheer determination will prevail Men of Aussie with a job to do, they’ll stick and drive the cattle through And though they sweat they know they surely must Keep on the trail that winds a-head thro’ heat and dust All sons of Aussie and they will not fail. Sheet music depicted silhouetted men in cowboy hats on horses (either riding solo or in small groups), riding into sunsets or before looming mountain ranges. Music – an important part of popular culture in the 1940s – furthered the colonial project of invading, securing and transforming the Australian interior by normalising its agendas and providing it with heroic male characters, stirring tales and catchy tunes. Figure 3: ‘Roy Darling’s (1945) Overlander Trail and Smoky Dawson’s The Overlander’s Song (1946). ‘Country Music’ Becomes a (Globalised) Genre Further growth in Australian country music followed waves of popularity in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s, and was heavily influenced by new cross-media publicity opportunities. Radio shows expanded, and western TV shows such as Bonanza and On the Range fuelled a ‘golden age’. Australian performers such as Slim Dusty and Smokey Dawson rose to fame (see Fitzgerald and Hayward) in an era when rural-urban migration peaked. Sheet music reflected the further diffusion and adoption of American visual imagery: where male figures were present on sheet music covers, they became more prominent than before and wore Stetsons. Some were depicted as chiselled-faced but simple men, with plain clothing and square jaws. Others began to more enthusiastically embrace cowboy looks, with bandana neckerchiefs, rawhide waistcoats, embellished and harnessed tall shaft boots, pipe-edged western shirts with wide collars, smile pockets, snap fasteners and shotgun cuffs, and fringed leather jackets (Figure 4). Landscapes altered further too: cacti replaced eucalypts, and iconic ‘western’ imagery of dusty towns, deserts, mesas and buttes appeared (Figure 5). Any semblance of folk music’s appeal to rustic authenticity was jettisoned in favour of showmanship, as cowboy personas were constructed to maximise cinematic appeal. Figure 4: Al Dexter’s Pistol Packin’ Mama (1943) and Reg Lindsay’s (1954) Country and Western Song Album. Figure 5: Tim McNamara’s Hitching Post (1948) and Smoky Dawson’s Golden West Album (1951). Far from slavish mimicry of American culture, however, hybridisations were common. According to Australian music historian Graeme Smith (300): “Australian place names appear, seeking the same mythological resonance that American localisation evoked: hobos became bagmen […] cowboys become boundary riders.” Thus alongside reproductions of the musical notations of American songs by Lefty Frizzel, Roy Carter and Jimmie Rodgers were songs with localised themes by new Australian stars such as Reg Lindsay and Smoky Dawson: My curlyheaded buckaroo, My home way out back, and On the Murray Valley. On the cover of The square dance by the billabong (Figure 6) – the title of which itself was a conjunction of archetypal ‘country’ images from both America and Australia – a background of eucalypts and windmills frames dancers in classic 1940s western (American) garb. In the case of Tex Morton’s Beautiful Queensland (Figure 7), itself mutated from W. Lee O’Daniel’s Beautiful Texas (c1945), the sheet music instructed those playing the music that the ‘names of other states may be substituted for Queensland’. ‘Country’ music had become an established genre, with normative values, standardised images and themes and yet constituted a stylistic formula with enough polysemy to enable local adaptations and variations. Figure 6: The Square dance by the billabong, Vernon Lisle, 1951. Figure 7: Beautiful Queensland, Tex Morton, c1945 source: http://nla.gov.au/nla.mus-vn1793930. Conclusions In country music images of place and masculinity combine. In music, frontier landscapes are populated by rugged men living ‘on the range’ in neo-colonial attempts to tame the land and convert it to productive uses. This article has considered only one media – sheet music – in only one country (Australia) and in only one time period (1900-1950s). There is much more to say than was possible here about country music, place and gender – particularly recently, since ‘country’ has fragmented into several niches, and marketing of country music via cable television and the internet has ensued (see McCusker and Pecknold). My purpose here has been instead to explore the early origins of ‘country’ mythology in popular culture, through a media source rarely analysed. Images associated with ‘country’ travelled internationally via sheet music, immensely popular in the 1930s and 1940s before the advent of television. The visual elements of sheet music contributed to the popularisation and standardisation of genre expectations and appearances, and yet these too travelled and were adapted and varied in places like Australia which had their own colonial histories and folk music heritages. Evidenced here is how combinations of geographical and gender imagery embraced imported American cowboy imagery and adapted it to local markets and concerns. Australia saw itself as a modern rural utopia with export aspirations and a desire to secure permanence through taming and populating its inland. Sheet music reflected all this. So too, sheet music reveals the historical contours of ‘country’ as a transnational discourse – and the extent to which ‘country’ brought with it a clearly defined set of normative values, a somewhat exaggerated cowboy masculinity, and a remarkable capacity to be moulded to local circ*mstances. Well before later and more supposedly ‘global’ media such as the internet and television, the humble printed sheet of notated music was steadily shaping ‘country’ imagery, and an emergent international geography of cultural flows. References Arango, Tim. “Cashville USA.” Fortune, Jan 29, 2007. Sept 3, 2008, http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/01/22/8397980/index.htm. Cloke, Paul, Marsden, Terry and Mooney, Patrick, eds. Handbook of Rural Studies, London: Sage, 2006. Connell, John and Gibson, Chris. Sound Tracks: Popular Music, Identity and Place, London: Routledge, 2003. Dufty, Rae. Rethinking the politics of distribution: the geographies and governmentalities of housing assistance in rural New South Wales, Australia, PhD thesis, UNSW, 2008. Dyer, Richard. White: Essays on Race and Culture, London: Routledge, 1997. George-Warren, Holly and Freedman, Michelle. How the West was Worn: a History of Western Wear, New York: Abrams, 2000. Fitzgerald, Jon and Hayward, Phil. “At the confluence: Slim Dusty and Australian country music.” Outback and Urban: Australian Country Music. Ed. Phil Hayward. Gympie: Australian Institute of Country Music Press, 2003. 29-54. Gibson, Chris and Davidson, Deborah. “Tamworth, Australia’s ‘country music capital’: place marketing, rural narratives and resident reactions.” Journal of Rural Studies 20 (2004): 387-404. Gorman-Murray, Andrew, Darian-Smith, Kate and Gibson, Chris. “Scaling the rural: reflections on rural cultural studies.” Australian Humanities Review 45 (2008): in press. Hemphill, Paul. The Nashville Sound: Bright Lights and Country Music, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970. Holt, Douglas B. and Thompson, Craig J. “Man-of-action heroes: the pursuit of heroic masculinity in everyday consumption.” Journal of Consumer Research 31 (2004). Johnson, Corey W. “‘The first step is the two-step’: hegemonic masculinity and dancing in a country western gay bar.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 18 (2004): 445-464. Lehr, John C. “‘Texas (When I die)’: national identity and images of place in Canadian country music broadcasts.” The Canadian Geographer 27 (1983): 361-370. Lewis, George H. “Lap dancer or hillbilly deluxe? The cultural construction of modern country music.” Journal of Popular Culture, 31 (1997): 163-173. McCarthy, James. “Rural geography: globalizing the countryside.” Progress in Human Geography 32 (2008): 132-137. McCusker, Kristine M. and Pecknold, Diane. Eds. A Boy Named Sue: Gender and Country Music. UP of Mississippi, 2004. Peterson, Richard A. Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997. Saucier, Karen A. “Healers and heartbreakers: images of women and men in country music.” Journal of Popular Culture 20 (1986): 147-166. Smith, Graeme. “Australian country music and the hillbilly yodel.” Popular Music 13 (1994): 297-311. Tichi, Cecelia. Readin’ Country Music. Durham: Duke UP, 1998. truewesternmusic.com “True western music.”, Sept 3, 2008, http://truewesternmusic.com/. Watson, Eric. Country Music in Australia. Sydney: Rodeo Publications, 1984. Whiteoak, John. “Two frontiers: early cowboy music and Australian popular culture.” Outback and Urban: Australian Country Music. Ed. P. Hayward. Gympie: AICMP: 2003. 1-28.

Abstract:

IntroductionIn the contemporary West, experiences of time are shaped by—and inextricably linked to—the nature of media production and consumption. In Derrida and Steigler’s estimation, teletechnologies bring time “into play” and thus produce time as an “artifact”, that is, a knowable product (3). How and why time becomes “artifactually” produced, according to these thinkers, is a result of the various properties of media production; media ensure that “gestures” (which can be understood here as the cultural moments marked as significant in some way, especially public ones) are registered. Being so, time is constrained, “formatted, initialised” by the matrix of the media system (3). Subsequently, because the media apparatus undergirds the Western imaginary, so too, the media apparatus undergirds the Western concept of time. We can say, in the radically changing global mediascape then, digital culture performs and generates ontological shifts that rewrite the relationship between media, time, and experience. This point lends itself to the significance of the role of both new media platforms and new media texts in reconfiguring understandings between past, present, and future timescapes.There are various ways in which new media texts and platforms work upon experiences of time. In the following, I will focus on just one of these ways: narrativity. By examining a ‘new media’ text, I elucidate how new media narratives imagine timescapes that are constructed through metaphors of ‘confetti’ or ‘snow’, as opposed to more traditional lineal metaphors like ‘rivers’ or ‘streams’ (see Augustine Sedgewick’s “Against Flows” for more critical thinking on the relationship between history, narrative, and the ‘flows’ metaphor). I focus on the revisioning of narrative structure in the Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House (2018) from its original form in the 1959 novel by Shirley Jackson. The narrative revisioning from the novel to the televisual both demonstrates and manifests emergent conceptualisations of time through the creative play of temporal multi-flows, which are contemporaneous yet fragmented.The first consideration is the shift in textual format. However, the translocation of the narrative from a novel to a televisual text is important, but not the focus here. Added to this, I deliberately move toward a “general narrative analysis” (Cobley 28), which has the advantage of focusing onmechanisms which may be integral to linguistically or visually-based genres without becoming embroiled in parochial questions to do with the ‘effectiveness’ of given modes, or the relative ‘value’ of different genres. This also allows narrative analysis to track the development of a specified process as well as its embodiment in a range of generic and technological forms. (Cobley 28)It should be also be noted from the outset that I am not suggesting that fragmented narrative constructions and representations were never imagined or explored prior to this new media age. Quite the contrary if we think of Modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf (Lodwick; Haggland). Rather, it is to claim that this abstraction is emerging in the mainstream entertainment media in greater contest with the dominant and more historically entrenched version of ‘time as a construct’ that is characterised through Realist narratology as linear and flowing only one way. As I will explore below, the reasons for this are largely related to shifts in everyday media consumption brought about by digital culture. There are two reasons why I specifically utilise Netflix’s series The Haunting of Hill House as a fulcrum from which to lever arguments about new media and the contemporary experience of time. First, as a web series, it embodies some of the pertinent conventions of the digital media landscape, both diegetically and also through practices of production and consumption by way of new time-shifting paradigms (see Leaver). I focus on the former in this article, but the latter is fruitful ground for critical consideration. For example, Netflix itself, as a platform, has somewhat destabilised normative temporal routines, such as in the case of ‘binge-watching’ where audiences ‘lose’ time similarly to gamblers in the casino space. Second, the fact that there are two iterations of the same story—one a novel and one a televisual text—provide us with a comparative benchmark from which to make further assertions about the changing nature of media and time from the mid-century to a post-millennium digital mediascape. Though it should be noted, my discussion will focus on the nature and quality of the contemporary framework, and I use the 1959 novel as a frame of reference only rather than examining its rich tapestry in its own right (for critique on the novel itself, see Wilson; see Roberts).Media and the Production of Time-SenseThere is a remarkable canon of literature detailing the relationship between media and the production of time, which can help us place this discussion in a theoretical framework. I am limited by space, but I will engage with some of the most pertinent material to set out a conceptual map. Markedly, from here, I refer to the Western experience of time as a “time-sense” following E.P. Thompson’s work (80). Following Thompson’s language, I use the term “time-sense” to refer to “our inward notation of time”, characterised by the rhythms of our “technological conditioning” systems, whether those be the forces of labour, media, or otherwise (80). Through the textual analysis of Hill House to follow, I will offer ways in which the technological conditioning of the new media system both constructs and shapes time-sense in terms related to a constellation of moments, or, to use a metaphor from the Netflix series itself, like “confetti” or “snow” (“Silence Lay Steadily”).However, in discussing the production of time-sense through new media mechanisms, note that time-sense is not an abstraction but is still linked to our understandings of the literal nature of time-space. For example, Alvin Toffler explains that, in its most simple construction, “Time can be conceived as the intervals during which events occur” (21). However, we must be reminded that events must first occur within the paradigm of experience. That is to say that matters of ‘duration’ cannot be unhinged from the experiential or phenomenological accounts of those durations, or in Toffler’s words, in an echo of Thompson, “Man’s [sic] perception of time is closely linked with his internal rhythms” (71). In the 1970s, Toffler commented upon the radical expansion of global systems of communications that produces the “twin forces of acceleration and transience”, which “alter the texture of existence, hammering our lives and psyches into new and unfamiliar shapes” (18). This simultaneous ‘speeding up’ (which he calls acceleration) and sense of ‘skipping’ (which he calls transience) manifest in a range of modern experiences which disrupt temporal contingencies. Nearly two decades after Toffler, David Harvey commented upon the Postmodern’s “total acceptance of ephemerality, fragmentation, discontinuity, and the chaotic” (44). Only a decade ago, Terry Smith emphasised that time-sense had become even more characterised by the “insistent presentness of multiple, often incompatible temporalities” (196). Netflix had not even launched in Australia and New Zealand until 2015, as well as a host of other time-shifting media technologies which have emerged in the past five years. As a result, it behooves us to revaluate time-sense with this emergent field of production.That being said, entertainment media have always impressed itself upon our understanding of temporal flows. Since the dawn of cinema in the late 19th century, entertainment media have been pivotal in constructing, manifesting, and illustrating time-sense. This has largely (but not exclusively) been in relation to the changing nature of narratology and the ways that narrative produces a sense of temporality. Helen Powell points out that the very earliest cinema, such as the Lumière Brothers’ short films screened in Paris, did not embed narrative, rather, “the Lumières’ actualities captured life as it happened with all its contingencies” (2). It is really only with the emergence of classical mainstream Hollywood that narrative became central, and with it new representations of “temporal flow” (2). Powell tells us that “the classical Hollywood narrative embodies a specific representation of temporal flow, rational and linear in its construction” reflecting “the standardised view of time introduced by the onset of industrialisation” (Powell 2). Of course, as media production and trends change, so does narrative structure. By the late 20th century, new approaches to narrative structure manifest in tropes such as ‘the puzzle film,’ as an example, which “play with audiences” expectations of conventional roles and storytelling through the use of the unreliable narrator and the fracturing of linearity. In doing so, they open up wider questions of belief, truth and reliability” (Powell 4). Puzzle films which might be familiar to the reader are Memento (2001) and Run Lola Run (1999), each playing with the relationship between time and memory, and thus experiences of contemporaneity. The issue of narrative in the construction of temporal flow is therefore critically linked to the ways that mediatic production of narrative, in various ways, reorganises time-sense more broadly. To examine this more closely, I now turn to Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House.Narratology and Temporal FlowNetflix’s revision of The Haunting of Hill House reveals critical insights into the ways in which media manifest the nature and quality of time-sense. Of course, the main difference between the 1959 novel and the Netflix web series is the change of the textual format from a print text to a televisual text distributed on an Internet streaming platform. This change performs what Marie-Laure Ryan calls “transfictionality across media” (385). There are several models through which transfictionality might occur and thus transmogrify textual and narratival parametres of a text. In the case of The Haunting of Hill House, the Netflix series follows the “displacement” model, which means it “constructs essentially different versions of the protoworld, redesigning its structure and reinventing its story” (Doležel 206). For example, in the 2018 television remake, the protoworld from the original novel retains integrity in that it conveys the story of a group of people who are brought to a mansion called Hill House. In both versions of the protoworld, the discombobulating effects of the mansion work upon the group dynamics until a final break down reveals the supernatural nature of the house. However, in ‘displacing’ the original narrative for adaptation to the web series, the nature of the group is radically reshaped (from a research contingent to a nuclear family unit) and the events follow radically different temporal contingencies.More specifically, the original 1959 novel utilises third-person limited narration and follows a conventional linear temporal flow through which events occur in chronological order. This style of storytelling is often thought about in metaphorical terms by way of ‘rivers’ or ‘streams,’ that is, flowing one-way and never repeating the same configuration (very much unlike the televisual text, in which some scenes are repeated to punctuate various time-streams). Sean Cubitt has examined the relationship between this conventional narrative structure and time sensibility, stating thatthe chronological narrative proposes to us a protagonist who always occupies a perpetual present … as a point moving along a line whose dimensions have however already been mapped: the protagonist of the chronological narrative is caught in a story whose beginning and end have already been determined, and which therefore constructs story time as the unfolding of destiny rather than the passage from past certainty into an uncertain future. (4)I would map Cubitt’s characterisation onto the original Hill House novel as representative of a mid-century textual artifact. Although Modernist literature (by way of Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, and so forth) certainly ‘played’ with non-linear or multi-linear narrative structures, in relation to time-sense, Christina Chau reminds us that Modernity, as a general mood, was very much still caught up in the idea that “time that moves in a linear fashion with the future moving through the present and into the past” (26). Additionally, even though flashbacks are utilised in the original novel, they are revealed using the narrative convention of ‘memories’ through the inner dialogue of the central character, thus still occurring in the ‘present’ of the novel’s timescape and still in keeping with a ‘one-way’ trajectory. Most importantly, the original novel follows what I will call one ‘time-stream’, in that events unfold, and are conveyed through, one temporal flow.In the Netflix series, there are obvious (and even cardinal) changes which reorganise the entire cast of characters as well as the narrative structure. In fact, the very process of returning to the original novel in order to produce a televisual remake says something about the nature of time-sense in itself, which is further sophisticated by the recognition of Netflix as a ‘streaming service’. That is, Netflix encapsulates this notion of ‘rivers-on-demand’ which overlap with each other in the context of the contemporaneous and persistent ‘now’ of digital culture. Marie-Laure Ryan suggests that “the proliferation of rewrites … is easily explained by the sense of pastness that pervades Postmodern culture and by the fixation of contemporary thought with the textual nature of reality” (386). While the Netflix series remains loyal to the mood and basic premise (i.e., that there is a haunted house in which characters endure strange happenings and enter into psycho-drama), the series instead uses fractured narrative convention through which three time-streams are simultaneously at work (although one time-stream is embedded in another and therefore its significance is ‘hidden’ to the viewer until the final episode), which we will examine now.The Time-Streams of Hill HouseIn the Netflix series, the central time-stream is, at first, ostensibly located in the characters’ ‘present’. I will call this time-stream A. (As a note to the reader here, there are spoilers for those who have not watched the Netflix series.) The viewer assumes they are, from the very first scene, following the ‘present’ time-stream in which the characters are adults. This is the time-stream in which the series opens, however, only for the first minute of viewing. After around one minute of viewing time, we already enter into a second time-stream. Even though both the original novel and the TV series begin with the same dialogue, the original novel continues to follow one time-stream, while the TV series begins to play with contemporaneous action by manifesting a second time-stream (following a series of events from the characters past) running in parallel action to the first time-stream. This narrative revisioning resonates with Toffler’s estimation of shifting nature of time-sense in the later twentieth century, in which he cites thatindeed, not only do contemporary events radiate instantaneously—now we can be said to be feeling the impact of all past events in a new way. For the past is doubling back on us. We are caught in what might be called a ‘time skip’. (16)In its ‘displacement’ model, the Hill House televisual remake points to this ongoing fascination with, and re-actualisation of, the exaggerated temporal discrepancies in the experience of contemporary everyday life. The Netflix Hill House series constructs a dimensional timescape in which the timeline ‘skips’ back and forth (not only for the viewer but also the characters), and certain spaces (such as the Red Room) are only permeable to some characters at certain times.If we think about Toffler’s words here—a doubling back, or, a time-skip—we might be pulled toward ever more recent incarnations of this effect. In Helen Powell’s investigation of the relationship between narrative and time-sense, she insists that “new media’s temporalities offer up the potential to challenge the chronological mode of temporal experience” (152). Sean Cubitt proposes that with the intensification of new media “we enter a certain, as yet inchoate, mode of time. For all the boasts of instantaneity, our actual relations with one another are mediated and as such subject to delays: slow downloads, periodic crashes, cache clearances and software uploads” (10). Resultingly, we have myriad temporal contingencies running at any one time—some slow, frustrating, mundane, in ‘real-time’ and others rapid to the point of instantaneous, or even able to pull the past into the present (through the endless trove of archived media on the web) and again into other mediatic dimensions such as virtual reality. To wit, Powell writes that “narrative, in mirroring these new temporal relations must embody fragmentation, discontinuity and incomplete resolution” (153). Fragmentation, discontinuity, and incompleteness are appropriate ways to think through the Hill House’s narrative revision and the ways in which it manifests some of these time-sensibilities.The notion of a ‘time-skip’ is an appropriate way to describe the transitions between the three temporal flows occurring simultaneously in the Hill House televisual remake. Before being comfortably seated in any one time-stream, the viewer is translocated into a second time-stream that runs parallel to it (almost suggesting a kind of parallel dimension). So, we begin with the characters as adults and then almost immediately, we are also watching them as children with the rapid emergence of this second time-stream. This ‘second time-stream’ conveys the events of ‘the past’ in which the central characters are children, so I will call this time-stream B. While time-stream B conveys the scenes in which the characters are children, the scenes are not necessarily in chronological order.The third time-stream is the spectral-stream, or time-stream C. However, the viewer is not fully aware that there is a totally separate time stream at play (the audience is made to think that this time-stream is the product of mere ghost-sightings). This is until the final episode, which completes the narrative ‘puzzle’. That is, the third time-stream conveys the events which are occurring simultaneously in both of the two other time-streams. In a sense, time-stream C, the spectral stream, is used to collapse the ontological boundaries of the former two time-streams. Throughout the early episodes, this time-stream C weaves in and out of time-streams A and B, like an intrusive time-stream (intruding upon the two others until it manifests on its own in the final episode). Time-stream C is used to create a 'puzzle' for the viewer in that the viewer does not fully understand its total significance until the puzzle is completed in the final episode. This convention, too, says something about the nature of time-sense as it shifts and mutates with mediatic production. This echoes back to Powell’s discussion of the ‘puzzle’ trend, which, as I note earlier, plays with “audiences’ expectations of conventional roles and storytelling through the use of the unreliable narrator and the fracturing of linearity” which serves to “open up wider questions of belief, truth and reliability” (4). Similarly, the skipping between three time-streams to build the Hill House puzzle manifests the ever-complicating relationships of time-management experiences in everyday life, in which pasts, presents, and futures impinge upon one another and interfere with each other.Critically, in terms of plot, time-stream B (in which the characters are little children) opens with the character Nell as a small child of 5 or 6 years of age. She appears to have woken up from a nightmare about The Bent Neck Lady. This vision traumatises Nell, and she is duly comforted in this scene by the characters of the eldest son and the father. This provides crucial exposition for the viewer: We are told that these ‘visitations’ from The Bent Neck Lady are a recurring trauma for the child-Nell character. It is important to note that, while these scenes may be mistaken for simple memory flashbacks, it becomes clearer throughout the series that this time-stream is not tied to any one character’s memory but is a separate storyline, though critical to the functioning of the other two. Moreover, the Bent Neck Lady recurs as both (apparent) nightmares and waking visions throughout the course of Nell’s life. It is in Episode Five that we realise why.The reason why The Bent Neck Lady always appears to Nell is that she is Nell. We learn this at the end of Episode Five when the storyline finally conveys how Nell dies in the House, which is by hanging from a noose tied to the mezzanine in the Hill House foyer. As Nell drops from the mezzanine attached to this noose, her neck snaps—she is The Bent Neck Lady. However, Nell does not just drop to the end of the noose. She continues to drop five more times back into the other two time streams. Each time Nell drops, she drops into a different moment in time (and each time the neck snapping is emphasised). The first drop she appears to herself in a basem*nt. The second drop she appears to herself on the road outside the car while she is with her brother. The third is during (what we have been told) is a kind of sleep paralysis. The fourth and fifth drops she appears to herself as the small child on two separate occasions—both of which we witness with her in the first episode. So not only is Nell journeying through time, the audience is too. The viewer follows Nell’s journey through her ‘time-skip’. The result of the staggered but now conjoined time-streams is that we come to realise that Nell is, in fact, haunting herself—and the audience now understands they have followed this throughout not as a ghost-sighting but as a ‘future’ time-stream impinging on another.In the final episode of season one, the siblings are confronted by Ghost-Nell in the Red Room. This is important because it is in this Red Room through which all time-streams coalesce. The Red Room exists dimensionally, cutting across disparate spaces and times—it is the spatial representation of the spectral time-stream C. It is in this final episode, and in this spectral dimension, that all the three time-streams collapse upon each other and complete the narrative ‘puzzle’ for the viewer. The temporal flow of the spectral dimension, time-stream C, interrupts and interferes with the temporal flow of the former two—for both the characters in the text and viewing audience.The collapse of time-streams is produced through a strategic dialogic structure. When Ghost-Nell appears to the siblings in the Red Room, her first line of dialogue is a non-sequitur. Luke emerges from his near-death experience and points to Nell, to which Nell replies: “I feel a little clearer just now. We have. All of us have” ("Silence Lay Steadily"). Nell’s dialogue continues but, eventually, she returns to the same statement, almost like she is running through a cyclic piece of text. She states again, “We have. All of us have.” However, this time around, the phrase is pre-punctuated by Shirley’s claim that she feels as though she had been in the Red Room before. Nell’s dialogue and the dialogue of the other characters suddenly align in synchronicity. The audience now understands that Nell’s very first statement, “We have. All of us have” is actually a response to the statement that Shirley had not yet made. This narrative convention emphasises the ‘confetti-like’ nature of the construction of time here. Confetti is, after all, sheets of paper that have been cut into pieces, thrown into the air, and then fallen out of place. Similarly, the narrative makes sense as a whole but feels cut into pieces and realigned, if only momentarily. When Nell then loops back through the same dialogue, it finally appears in synch and thus makes sense. This signifies that the time-streams are now merged.The Ghost of Nell has travelled through (and in and out of) each separate time-stream. As a result, Ghost-Nell understands the nature of the Red Room—it manifests a slippage of timespace that each of the siblings had entered during their stay at the Hill House mansion. It is with this realisation that Ghost-Nell explains:Everything’s been out of order. Time, I mean. I thought for so long that time was like a line, that ... our moments were laid out like dominoes, and that they ... fell, one into another and on it went, just days tipping, one into the next, into the next, in a long line between the beginning ... and the end.But I was wrong. It’s not like that at all. Our moments fall around us like rain. Or... snow. Or confetti. (“Silence Lay Steadily”)This brings me to the titular concern: The emerging abstraction of time as a mode of layering and fracturing, a mode performed through this analogy of ‘confetti’ or ‘snow’. The Netflix Hill House revision rearranges time constructs so that any one moment of time may be accessed, much like scrolling back and forth (and in and out) of social media feeds, Internet forums, virtual reality programs and so forth. Each moment, like a flake of ‘snow’ or ‘confetti’ litters the timespace matrix, making an infinite tapestry that exists dimensionally. In the Hill House narrative, all moments exist simultaneously and accessing each moment at any point in the time-stream is merely a process of perception.ConclusionNetflix is optimised as a ‘streaming platform’ which has all but ushered in the era of ‘time-shifting’ predicated on geospatial politics (see Leaver). The current media landscape offers instantaneity, contemporaneity, as well as, arbitrary boundedness on the basis of geopolitics, which Tama Leaver refers to as the “tyranny of digital distance”. Therefore, it is fitting that Netflix’s revision of the Hill House narrative is preoccupied with time as well as spectrality. Above, I have explored just some of the ways that the televisual remake plays with notions of time through a diegetic analysis.However, we should take note that even in its production and consumption, this series, to quote Graham Meikle and Sherman Young, is embedded within “the current phase of television [that] suggests contested continuities” (67). Powell problematises the time-sense of this media apparatus further by reminding us that “there are three layers of temporality contained within any film image: the time of registration (production); the time of narration (storytelling); and the time of its consumption (viewing)” (3-4). Each of these aspects produces what Althusser and Balibar have called a “peculiar time”, that is, “different levels of the whole as developing ‘in the same historical time’ … relatively autonomous and hence relatively independent, even in its dependence, of the ‘times’ of the other levels” (99). When we think of the layers upon layers of different time ‘signatures’ which converge in Hill House as a textual artifact—in its production, consumption, distribution, and diegesis—the nature of contemporary time reveals itself as complex but also fleeting—hard to hold onto—much like snow or confetti.ReferencesAlthusser, Louis, and Étienne Balibar. Reading Capital. London: NLB, 1970.Cobley, Paul. Narrative. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2013.Cubitt, S. “Spreadsheets, Sitemaps and Search Engines.” New Screen Media: Cinema/Art/Narrative. Eds. Martin Rieser and Andrea Zapp. London: BFI, 2002. 3-13.Derrida, Jacques, and Bernard Stiegler. Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews. Massachusetts: Polity Press, 2002.Doležel, Lubomir. Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999.Hägglund, Martin. Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2012.Hartley, Lodwick. “Of Time and Mrs. Woolf.” The Sewanee Review 47.2 (1939): 235-241.Harvey, David. Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.Jackson, Shirley. The Haunting of Hill House. New York: Viking, 1959.Laurie-Ryan Marie. “Transfictionality across Media.” Theorizing Narrativity. Eds. John Pier, García Landa, and José Angel. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008. 385-418.Leaver, Tama. “Watching Battlestar Galactica in Australia and the Tyranny of Digital Distance.” Media International Australia 126 (2008): 145-154.Meikle, George, and Sherman Young. “Beyond Broadcasting? TV For the Twenty-First Century.” Media International Australia 126 (2008): 67-70.Powell, Helen. Stop the Clocks! Time and Narrative in Cinema. London: I.B. Tauris, 2012.Roberts, Brittany. “Helping Eleanor Come Home: A Reassessment of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.” The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 16 (2017): 67-93.Smith, Terry. What Is Contemporary Art? Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009.The Haunting of Hill House. Mike Flanagan. Amblin Entertainment, 2018.Thompson, E.P. “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” Past and Present 38.1 (1967): 56-97.Toffler, Alvin. Future Shock. New York: Bantam Books, 1971.Wilson, Michael T. “‘Absolute Reality’ and the Role of the Ineffable in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.” Journal of Popular Culture 48.1 (2015): 114-123.

Abstract:

Introduction In December 2010, Nespresso, the world’s leading brand of premium-portioned coffee, opened a flagship “boutique” in Sydney’s Pitt Street Mall. This was Nespresso’s fifth boutique opening of 2010, after Brussels, Miami, Soho, and Munich. The Sydney debut coincided with the mall’s upmarket redevelopment, which explains Nespresso’s arrival in the city: strategic geographic expansion is key to the brand’s growth. Rather than panoramic ubiquity, a retail option favoured by brands like McDonalds, KFC and Starbucks, Nespresso opts for iconic, prestigious locations. This strategy has been highly successful: since 2000 Nespresso has recorded year-on-year per annum growth of 30 per cent. This has been achieved, moreover, despite a global financial downturn and an international coffee market replete with brand variety. In turn, Nespresso marks an evolution in the coffee market over the last decade. The Nespresso Story Founded in 1986, Nespresso is the fasting growing brand in the Nestlé Group. Its headquarters are in Lausanne, Switzerland, with over 7,000 employees worldwide. In 2012, Nespresso had 270 boutiques in 50 countries. The brand’s growth strategy involves three main components: premium coffee capsules, “mated” with specially designed machines, and accompanied by exceptional customer service through the Nespresso Club. Each component requires some explanation. Nespresso offers 16 varieties of Grand Crus coffee: 7 espresso blends, 3 pure origin espressos, 3 lungos (for larger cups), and 3 decaffeinated coffees. Each 5.5 grams of portioned coffee is cased in a hermetically sealed aluminium capsule, or pod, designed to preserve the complex, volatile aromas (between 800 and 900 per pod), and prevent oxidation. These capsules are designed to be used exclusively with Nespresso-branded machines, which are equipped with a patented high-pressure extraction system designed for optimum release of the coffee. These machines, of which there are 28 models, are developed with 6 machine partners, and Antoine Cahen, from Ateliers du Nord in Lausanne, designs most of them. For its consumers, members of the Nespresso Club, the capsules and machines guarantee perfect espresso coffee every time, within seconds and with minimum effort—what Nespresso calls the “ultimate coffee experience.” The Nespresso Club promotes this experience as an everyday luxury, whereby café-quality coffee can be enjoyed in the privacy and comfort of Club members’ homes. This domestic focus is a relatively recent turn in its history. Nestlé patented some of its pod technology in 1976; the compatible machines, initially made in Switzerland by Turmix, were developed a decade later. Nespresso S. A. was set up as a subsidiary unit within the Nestlé Group with a view to target the office and fine restaurant sector. It was first test-marketed in Japan in 1986, and rolled out the same year in Switzerland, France and Italy. However, by 1988, low sales prompted Nespresso’s newly appointed CEO, Jean-Paul Gillard, to rethink the brand’s focus. Gillard subsequently repositioned Nespresso’s target market away from the commercial sector towards high-income households and individuals, and introduced a mail-order distribution system; these elements became the hallmarks of the Nespresso Club (Markides 55). The Nespresso Club was designed to give members who had purchased Nespresso machines 24-hour customer service, by mail, phone, fax, and email. By the end of 1997 there were some 250,000 Club members worldwide. The boom in domestic, user-friendly espresso machines from the early 1990s helped Nespresso’s growth in this period. The cumulative efforts by the main manufacturers—Krups, Bosch, Braun, Saeco and DeLonghi—lowered the machines’ average price to around US $100 (Purpura, “Espresso” 88; Purpura, “New” 116). This paralleled consumers’ growing sophistication, as they became increasingly familiar with café-quality espresso, cappuccino and latté—for reasons to be detailed below. Nespresso was primed to exploit this cultural shift in the market and forge a charismatic point of difference: an aspirational, luxury option within an increasingly accessible and familiar field. Between 2006 and 2008, Nespresso sales more than doubled, prompting a second production factory to supplement the original plant in Avenches (Simonian). In 2008, Nespresso grew 20 times faster than the global coffee market (Reguly B1). As Nespresso sales exceeded $1.3 billion AU in 2009, with 4.8 billion capsules shipped out annually and 5 million Club members worldwide, it became Nestlé’s fastest growing division (Canning 28). According to Nespresso’s Oceania market director, Renaud Tinel, the brand now represents 8 per cent of the total coffee market; of Nespresso specifically, he reports that 10,000 cups (using one capsule per cup) were consumed worldwide each minute in 2009, and that increased to 12,300 cups per minute in 2010 (O’Brien 16). Given such growth in such a brief period, the atypical dynamic between the boutique, the Club and the Nespresso brand warrants closer consideration. Nespresso opened its first boutique in Paris in 2000, on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. It was a symbolic choice and signalled the brand’s preference for glamorous precincts in cosmopolitan cities. This has become the design template for all Nespresso boutiques, what the company calls “brand embassies” in its press releases. More like art gallery-style emporiums than retail spaces, these boutiques perform three main functions: they showcase Nespresso coffees, machines and accessories (all elegantly displayed); they enable Club members to stock up on capsules; and they offer excellent customer service, which invariably equates to detailed production information. The brand’s revenue model reflects the boutique’s role in the broader business strategy: 50 per cent of Nespresso’s business is generated online, 30 per cent through the boutiques, and 20 per cent through call centres. Whatever floor space these boutiques dedicate to coffee consumption is—compared to the emphasis on exhibition and ambience—minimal and marginal. In turn, this tightly monitored, self-focused model inverts the conventional function of most commercial coffee sites. For several hundred years, the café has fostered a convivial atmosphere, served consumers’ social inclinations, and overwhelmingly encouraged diverse, eclectic clientele. The Nespresso boutique is the antithesis to this, and instead actively limits interaction: the Club “community” does not meet as a community, and is united only in atomised allegiance to the Nespresso brand. In this regard, Nespresso stands in stark contrast to another coffee brand that has been highly successful in recent years—Starbucks. Starbucks famously recreates the aesthetics, rhetoric and atmosphere of the café as a “third place”—a term popularised by urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg to describe non-work, non-domestic spaces where patrons converge for respite or recreation. These liminal spaces (cafés, parks, hair salons, book stores and such locations) might be private, commercial sites, yet they provide opportunities for chance encounters, even therapeutic interactions. In this way, they aid sociability and civic life (Kleinman 193). Long before the term “third place” was coined, coffee houses were deemed exemplars of egalitarian social space. As Rudolf P. Gaudio notes, the early coffee houses of Western Europe, in Oxford and London in the mid-1600s, “were characterized as places where commoners and aristocrats could meet and socialize without regard to rank” (670). From this sanguine perspective, they both informed and animated the modern public sphere. That is, and following Habermas, as a place where a mixed cohort of individuals could meet and discuss matters of public importance, and where politics intersected society, the eighteenth-century British coffee house both typified and strengthened the public sphere (Karababa and Ger 746). Moreover, and even from their early Ottoman origins (Karababa and Ger), there has been an historical correlation between the coffee house and the cosmopolitan, with the latter at least partly defined in terms of demographic breadth (Luckins). Ironically, and insofar as Nespresso appeals to coffee-literate consumers, the brand owes much to Starbucks. In the two decades preceding Nespresso’s arrival, Starbucks played a significant role in refining coffee literacy around the world, gauging mass-market trends, and stirring consumer consciousness. For Nespresso, this constituted major preparatory phenomena, as its strategy (and success) since the early 2000s presupposed the coffee market that Starbucks had helped to create. According to Nespresso’s chief executive Richard Giradot, central to Nespresso’s expansion is a focus on particular cities and their coffee culture (Canning 28). In turn, it pays to take stock of how such cities developed a coffee culture amenable to Nespresso—and therein lays the brand’s debt to Starbucks. Until the last few years, and before celebrity ambassador George Clooney was enlisted in 2005, Nespresso’s marketing was driven primarily by Club members’ recommendations. At the same time, though, Nespresso insisted that Club members were coffee connoisseurs, whose knowledge and enjoyment of coffee exceeded conventional coffee offerings. In 2000, Henk Kwakman, one of Nestlé’s Coffee Specialists, explained the need for portioned coffee in terms of guaranteed perfection, one that demanding consumers would expect. “In general”, he reasoned, “people who really like espresso coffee are very much more quality driven. When you consider such an intense taste experience, the quality is very important. If the espresso is slightly off quality, the connoisseur notices this immediately” (quoted in Butler 50). What matters here is how this corps of connoisseurs grew to a scale big enough to sustain and strengthen the Nespresso system, in the absence of a robust marketing or educative drive by Nespresso (until very recently). Put simply, the brand’s ascent was aided by Starbucks, specifically by the latter’s success in changing the mainstream coffee market during the 1990s. In establishing such a strong transnational presence, Starbucks challenged smaller, competing brands to define themselves with more clarity and conviction. Indeed, working with data that identified just 200 freestanding coffee houses in the US prior to 1990 compared to 14,000 in 2003, Kjeldgaard and Ostberg go so far as to state that: “Put bluntly, in the US there was no local coffee consumptionscape prior to Starbucks” (Kjeldgaard and Ostberg 176). Starbucks effectively redefined the coffee world for mainstream consumers in ways that were directly beneficial for Nespresso. Starbucks: Coffee as Ambience, Experience, and Cultural Capital While visitors to Nespresso boutiques can sample the coffee, with highly trained baristas and staff on site to explain the Nespresso system, in the main there are few concessions to the conventional café experience. Primarily, these boutiques function as material spaces for existing Club members to stock up on capsules, and therefore they complement the Nespresso system with a suitably streamlined space: efficient, stylish and conspicuously upmarket. Outside at least one Sydney boutique for instance (Bondi Junction, in the fashionable eastern suburbs), visitors enter through a club-style cordon, something usually associated with exclusive bars or hotels. This demarcates the boutique from neighbouring coffee chains, and signals Nespresso’s claim to more privileged patrons. This strategy though, the cultivation of a particular customer through aesthetic design and subtle flattery, is not unique. For decades, Starbucks also contrived a “special” coffee experience. Moreover, while the Starbucks model strikes a very different sensorial chord to that of Nespresso (in terms of décor, target consumer and so on) it effectively groomed and prepped everyday coffee drinkers to a level of relative self-sufficiency and expertise—and therein is the link between Starbucks’s mass-marketed approach and Nespresso’s timely arrival. Starbucks opened its first store in 1971, in Seattle. Three partners founded it: Jerry Baldwin and Zev Siegl, both teachers, and Gordon Bowker, a writer. In 1982, as they opened their sixth Seattle store, they were joined by Howard Schultz. Schultz’s trip to Italy the following year led to an entrepreneurial epiphany to which he now attributes Starbucks’s success. Inspired by how cafés in Italy, particularly the espresso bars in Milan, were vibrant social hubs, Schultz returned to the US with a newfound sensitivity to ambience and attitude. In 1987, Schultz bought Starbucks outright and stated his business philosophy thus: “We aren’t in the coffee business, serving people. We are in the people business, serving coffee” (quoted in Ruzich 432). This was articulated most clearly in how Schultz structured Starbucks as the ultimate “third place”, a welcoming amalgam of aromas, music, furniture, textures, literature and free WiFi. This transformed the café experience twofold. First, sensory overload masked the dull hom*ogeny of a global chain with an air of warm, comforting domesticity—an inviting, everyday “home away from home.” To this end, in 1994, Schultz enlisted interior design “mastermind” Wright Massey; with his team of 45 designers, Massey created the chain’s decor blueprint, an “oasis for contemplation” (quoted in Scerri 60). At the same time though, and second, Starbucks promoted a revisionist, airbrushed version of how the coffee was produced. Patrons could see and smell the freshly roasted beans, and read about their places of origin in the free pamphlets. In this way, Starbucks merged the exotic and the cosmopolitan. The global supply chain underwent an image makeover, helped by a “new” vocabulary that familiarised its coffee drinkers with the diversity and complexity of coffee, and such terms as aroma, acidity, body and flavour. This strategy had a decisive impact on the coffee market, first in the US and then elsewhere: Starbucks oversaw a significant expansion in coffee consumption, both quantitatively and qualitatively. In the decades following the Second World War, coffee consumption in the US reached a plateau. Moreover, as Steven Topik points out, the rise of this type of coffee connoisseurship actually coincided with declining per capita consumption of coffee in the US—so the social status attributed to specialised knowledge of coffee “saved” the market: “Coffee’s rise as a sign of distinction and connoisseurship meant its appeal was no longer just its photoactive role as a stimulant nor the democratic sociability of the coffee shop” (Topik 100). Starbucks’s singular triumph was to not only convert non-coffee drinkers, but also train them to a level of relative sophistication. The average “cup o’ Joe” thus gave way to the latte, cappuccino, macchiato and more, and a world of coffee hitherto beyond (perhaps above) the average American consumer became both regular and routine. By 2003, Starbucks’s revenue was US $4.1 billion, and by 2012 there were almost 20,000 stores in 58 countries. As an idealised “third place,” Starbucks functioned as a welcoming haven that flattened out and muted the realities of global trade. The variety of beans on offer (Arabica, Latin American, speciality single origin and so on) bespoke a generous and bountiful modernity; while brochures schooled patrons in the nuances of terroir, an appreciation for origin and distinctiveness that encoded cultural capital. This positioned Starbucks within a happy narrative of the coffee economy, and drew patrons into this story by flattering their consumer choices. Against the generic sameness of supermarket options, Starbucks promised distinction, in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense of the term, and diversity in its coffee offerings. For Greg Dickinson, the Starbucks experience—the scent of the beans, the sound of the grinders, the taste of the coffees—negated the abstractions of postmodern, global trade: by sensory seduction, patrons connected with something real, authentic and material. At the same time, Starbucks professed commitment to the “triple bottom line” (Savitz), the corporate mantra that has morphed into virtual orthodoxy over the last fifteen years. This was hardly surprising; companies that trade in food staples typically grown in developing regions (coffee, tea, sugar, and coffee) felt the “political-aesthetic problematization of food” (Sassatelli and Davolio). This saw increasingly cognisant consumers trying to reconcile the pleasures of consumption with environmental and human responsibilities. The “triple bottom line” approach, which ostensibly promotes best business practice for people, profits and the planet, was folded into Starbucks’s marketing. The company heavily promoted its range of civic engagement, such as donations to nurses’ associations, literacy programs, clean water programs, and fair dealings with its coffee growers in developing societies (Simon). This bode well for its target market. As Constance M. Ruch has argued, Starbucks sought the burgeoning and lucrative “bobo” class, a term Ruch borrows from David Brooks. A portmanteau of “bourgeois bohemians,” “bobo” describes the educated elite that seeks the ambience and experience of a counter-cultural aesthetic, but without the political commitment. Until the last few years, it seemed Starbucks had successfully grafted this cultural zeitgeist onto its “third place.” Ironically, the scale and scope of the brand’s success has meant that Starbucks’s claim to an ethical agenda draws frequent and often fierce attack. As a global behemoth, Starbucks evolved into an iconic symbol of advanced consumer culture. For those critical of how such brands overwhelm smaller, more local competition, the brand is now synonymous for insidious, unstoppable retail spread. This in turn renders Starbucks vulnerable to protests that, despite its gestures towards sustainability (human and environmental), and by virtue of its size, ubiquity and ultimately conservative philosophy, it has lost whatever cachet or charm it supposedly once had. As Bryant Simon argues, in co-opting the language of ethical practice within an ultimately corporatist context, Starbucks only ever appealed to a modest form of altruism; not just in terms of the funds committed to worthy causes, but also to move thorny issues to “the most non-contentious middle-ground,” lest conservative customers felt alienated (Simon 162). Yet, having flagged itself as an ethical brand, Starbucks became an even bigger target for anti-corporatist sentiment, and the charge that, as a multinational giant, it remained complicit in (and one of the biggest benefactors of) a starkly inequitable and asymmetric global trade. It remains a major presence in the world coffee market, and arguably the most famous of the coffee chains. Over the last decade though, the speed and intensity with which Nespresso has grown, coupled with its atypical approach to consumer engagement, suggests that, in terms of brand equity, it now offers a more compelling point of difference than Starbucks. Brand “Me” Insofar as the Nespresso system depends on a consumer market versed in the intricacies of quality coffee, Starbucks can be at least partly credited for nurturing a more refined palate amongst everyday coffee drinkers. Yet while Starbucks courted the “average” consumer in its quest for market control, saturating the suburban landscape with thousands of virtually indistinguishable stores, Nespresso marks a very different sensibility. Put simply, Nespresso inverts the logic of a coffee house as a “third place,” and patrons are drawn not to socialise and relax but to pursue their own highly individualised interests. The difference with Starbucks could not be starker. One visitor to the Bloomingdale boutique (in New York’s fashionable Soho district) described it as having “the feel of Switzerland rather than Seattle. Instead of velvet sofas and comfy music, it has hard surfaces, bright colours and European hostesses” (Gapper 9). By creating a system that narrows the gap between production and consumption, to the point where Nespresso boutiques advertise the coffee brand but do not promote on-site coffee drinking, the boutiques are blithely indifferent to the historical, romanticised image of the coffee house as a meeting place. The result is a coffee experience that exploits the sophistication and vanity of aspirational consumers, but ignores the socialising scaffold by which coffee houses historically and perhaps naively made some claim to community building. If anything, Nespresso restricts patrons’ contemplative field: they consider only their relationships to the brand. In turn, Nespresso offers the ultimate expression of contemporary consumer capitalism, a hyper-individual experience for a hyper-modern age. By developing a global brand that is both luxurious and niche, Nespresso became “the Louis Vuitton of coffee” (Betts 14). Where Starbucks pursued retail ubiquity, Nespresso targets affluent, upmarket cities. As chief executive Richard Giradot put it, with no hint of embarrassment or apology: “If you take China, for example, we are not speaking about China, we are speaking about Shanghai, Hong Kong, Beijing because you will not sell our concept in the middle of nowhere in China” (quoted in Canning 28). For this reason, while Europe accounts for 90 per cent of Nespresso sales (Betts 15), its forays into the Americas, Asia and Australasia invariably spotlights cities that are already iconic or emerging economic hubs. The first boutique in Latin America, for instance, was opened in Jardins, a wealthy suburb in Sao Paulo, Brazil. In Nespresso, Nestlé has popularised a coffee experience neatly suited to contemporary consumer trends: Club members inhabit a branded world as hermetically sealed as the aluminium pods they purchase and consume. Besides the Club’s phone, fax and online distribution channels, pods can only be bought at the boutiques, which minimise even the potential for serendipitous mingling. The baristas are there primarily for product demonstrations, whilst highly trained staff recite the machines’ strengths (be they in design or utility), or information about the actual coffees. For Club members, the boutique service is merely the human extension of Nespresso’s online presence, whereby product information becomes increasingly tailored to increasingly individualised tastes. In the boutique, this emphasis on the individual is sold in terms of elegance, expedience and privilege. Nespresso boasts that over 70 per cent of its workforce is “customer facing,” sharing their passion and knowledge with Club members. Having already received and processed the product information (through the website, boutique staff, and promotional brochures), Club members need not do anything more than purchase their pods. In some of the more recently opened boutiques, such as in Paris-Madeleine, there is even an Exclusive Room where only Club members may enter—curious tourists (or potential members) are kept out. Club members though can select their preferred Grands Crus and checkout automatically, thanks to RFID (radio frequency identification) technology inserted in the capsule sleeves. So, where Starbucks exudes an inclusive, hearth-like hospitality, the Nespresso Club appears more like a pampered clique, albeit a growing one. As described in the Financial Times, “combine the reception desk of a designer hotel with an expensive fashion display and you get some idea what a Nespresso ‘coffee boutique’ is like” (Wiggins and Simonian 10). Conclusion Instead of sociability, Nespresso puts a premium on exclusivity and the knowledge gained through that exclusive experience. The more Club members know about the coffee, the faster and more individualised (and “therefore” better) the transaction they have with the Nespresso brand. This in turn confirms Zygmunt Bauman’s contention that, in a consumer society, being free to choose requires competence: “Freedom to choose does not mean that all choices are right—there are good and bad choices, better and worse choices. The kind of choice eventually made is the evidence of competence or its lack” (Bauman 43-44). Consumption here becomes an endless process of self-fashioning through commodities; a process Eva Illouz considers “all the more strenuous when the market recruits the consumer through the sysiphian exercise of his/her freedom to choose who he/she is” (Illouz 392). In a status-based setting, the more finely graded the differences between commodities (various places of origin, blends, intensities, and so on), the harder the consumer works to stay ahead—which means to be sufficiently informed. Consumers are locked in a game of constant reassurance, to show upward mobility to both themselves and society. For all that, and like Starbucks, Nespresso shows some signs of corporate social responsibility. In 2009, the company announced its “Ecolaboration” initiative, a series of eco-friendly targets for 2013. By then, Nespresso aims to: source 80 per cent of its coffee through Sustainable Quality Programs and Rainforest Alliance Certified farms; triple its capacity to recycle used capsules to 75 per cent; and reduce the overall carbon footprint required to produce each cup of Nespresso by 20 per cent (Nespresso). This information is conveyed through the brand’s website, press releases and brochures. However, since such endeavours are now de rigueur for many brands, it does not register as particularly innovative, progressive or challenging: it is an unexceptional (even expected) part of contemporary mainstream marketing. Indeed, the use of actor George Clooney as Nespresso’s brand ambassador since 2005 shows shrewd appraisal of consumers’ political and cultural sensibilities. As a celebrity who splits his time between Hollywood and Lake Como in Italy, Clooney embodies the glamorous, cosmopolitan lifestyle that Nespresso signifies. However, as an actor famous for backing political and humanitarian causes (having raised awareness for crises in Darfur and Haiti, and backing calls for the legalisation of same-sex marriage), Clooney’s meanings extend beyond cinema: as a celebrity, he is multi-coded. Through its association with Clooney, and his fusion of star power and worldly sophistication, the brand is imbued with semantic latitude. Still, in the television commercials in which Clooney appears for Nespresso, his role as the Hollywood heartthrob invariably overshadows that of the political campaigner. These commercials actually pivot on Clooney’s romantic appeal, an appeal which is ironically upstaged in the commercials by something even more seductive: Nespresso coffee. References Bauman, Zygmunt. “Collateral Casualties of Consumerism.” Journal of Consumer Culture 7.1 (2007): 25–56. Betts, Paul. “Nestlé Refines its Arsenal in the Luxury Coffee War.” Financial Times 28 Apr. (2010): 14. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984. Butler, Reg. “The Nespresso Route to a Perfect Espresso.” Tea & Coffee Trade Journal 172.4 (2000): 50. Canning, Simon. “Nespresso Taps a Cultural Thirst.” The Australian 26 Oct. (2009): 28. Dickinson, Greg. “Joe’s Rhetoric: Finding Authenticity at Starbucks.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 32.4 (2002): 5–27. Gapper, John. “Lessons from Nestlé’s Coffee Break.” Financial Times 3 Jan. (2008): 9. Gaudio, Rudolf P. “Coffeetalk: StarbucksTM and the Commercialization of Casual Conversation.” Language in Society 32.5 (2003): 659–91. Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1962. Illouz, Eva. “Emotions, Imagination and Consumption: A New Research Agenda.” Journal of Consumer Culture 9 (2009): 377–413. Karababa, EmInegül, and GüIIz Ger. “Early Modern Ottoman Coffehouse Culture and the Formation of the Consumer Subject." Journal of Consumer Research 37.5 (2011): 737–60 Kjeldgaard, Dannie, and Jacob Ostberg. “Coffee Grounds and the Global Cup: Global Consumer Culture in Scandinavia”. Consumption, Markets and Culture 10.2 (2007): 175–87. Kleinman, Sharon S. “Café Culture in France and the United States: A Comparative Ethnographic Study of the Use of Mobile Information and Communication Technologies.” Atlantic Journal of Communication 14.4 (2006): 191–210. Luckins, Tanja. “Flavoursome Scraps of Conversation: Talking and Hearing the Cosmopolitan City, 1900s–1960s.” History Australia 7.2 (2010): 31.1–31.16. Markides, Constantinos C. “A Dynamic View of Strategy.” Sloan Management Review 40.3 (1999): 55. Nespresso. “Ecolaboration Initiative Directs Nespresso to Sustainable Success.” Nespresso Media Centre 2009. 13 Dec. 2011. ‹http://www.nespresso.com›. O’Brien, Mary. “A Shot at the Big Time.” The Age 21 Jun. (2011): 16. Oldenburg, Ray. The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You Through the Day. New York: Paragon House, 1989. Purpura, Linda. “New Espresso Machines to Tempt the Palate.” The Weekly Home Furnishings Newspaper 3 May (1993): 116. Purpura, Linda. “Espresso: Grace under Pressure.” The Weekly Home Furnishings Newspaper 16 Dec. (1991): 88. Reguly, Eric. “No Ordinary Joe: Nestlé Pulls off Caffeine Coup.” The Globe and Mail 6 Jul. (2009): B1. Ruzich, Constance M. “For the Love of Joe: The Language of Starbucks.” The Journal of Popular Culture 41.3 (2008): 428–42. Sassatelli, Roberta, and Federica Davolio. “Consumption, Pleasure and Politics: Slow Food and the Politico-aesthetic Problematization of Food.” Journal of Consumer Culture 10.2 (2010): 202–32. Savitz, Andrew W. The Triple Bottom Line: How Today’s Best-run Companies are Achieving Economic, Social, and Environmental Success—And How You Can Too. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006. Scerri, Andrew. “Triple Bottom-line Capitalism and the ‘Third Place’.” Arena Journal 20 (2002/03): 57–65. Simon, Bryant. “Not Going to Starbucks: Boycotts and the Out-sourcing of Politics in the Branded World.” Journal of Consumer Culture 11.2 (2011): 145–67. Simonian, Haig. “Nestlé Doubles Nespresso Output.” FT.Com 10 Jun. (2009). 2 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0dcc4e44-55ea-11de-ab7e-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1tgMPBgtV›. Topik, Steven. “Coffee as a Social Drug.” Cultural Critique 71 (2009): 81–106. Wiggins, Jenny, and Haig Simonian. “How to Serve a Bespoke Cup of Coffee.” Financial Times 3 Apr. (2007): 10.

Abstract:

In 1996, the iconoclastic economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote a manifesto, The Good Society, that elaborated his vision for what societal excellence and goodness should amount to. Though nearly 96, Galbraith was still a rabble-rouser, and he castigated the powers that be in the United States for propping up a “democracy of the fortunate” (8). To Galbraith, those who engaged in electoral politics, win or lose on any specific issue, tended to have all the social and economic advantages, while the less well off were deliberately marginalised by ‘the system.’ He lamented that “money, voice and political activism are now extensively controlled by the affluent, very affluent, and business interests" (140), making of the political sphere an "unequal contest" (8).To make democracy American style more inclusive, Galbraith called for “a coalition of the concerned and the compassionate and those now outside the political system” (143), so that all citizens had optimal prospects for enjoying “personal liberty, basic well-being, social and ethnic equality, the opportunity for a rewarding life" (4). Have inroads been made, in the nearly 15 years since first publication of The Good Society, in making come true Galbraith’s version of a good society? If not, how might such a coalition be achieved? What would it look like? Who among Americans would constitute the concerned, compassionate outsiders that would make such a coalition authentically ‘Galbraithian’? A Coalition on the MoveWhat about MoveOn.org? A progressive public advocacy group founded in 1998, MoveOn.org, according to Lelia Green in The Internet, is “an important indicator of the potential for bringing together communities of like-minded individuals” (139). Green singles out MoveOn.org as particularly pivotal in galvanising support for Barack Obama’s presidency (139). The New York Times describes MoveOn.org as “a bottom-up organization that has inserted itself into the political process in ways large and small” (Janofsky and Lee). Indeed, it represents “the next evolutionary change in American politics, a move away from one-way tools of influence like television commercials and talk radio to interactive dialogue, offering everyday people a voice in a process that once seemed beyond their reach.” MoveOn.org has expertly utilised the Internet to mobilise its members “to sign online petitions, organize street demonstrations and donate money to run political advertisem*nts”. Green considers MoveOn.org one of today’s standout “coalitions of interests and political agendas”, “extraordinary” in its ability to “use websites and email lists to build communities around a shared passion” (139). In 2008, its 4.2 million members were at the vortex of a “dynamic that tipped the balance in favour of a more radical agenda with the election of President Barack Obama in 2008” (139). Galbraith, for one, would certainly agree with MoveOn.org’s politics, and likely would claim that their radical agenda is a compassionate and encompassing one that effectively addresses the concerns of everyday citizens. Yet the fact is that millions of disaffected Americans are not liberals, and so are not in sync with MoveOn.org’s interests and agendas, such as its firm insistence that a ‘public option’ is the best way to bring about meaningful health care reform, and its demand that all U.S. troops be immediately withdrawn from Iraq and Afghanistan. Tea Anyone?Another sort of coalition filled the void created by MoveOn.org. Enter the Tea Party. A movement that has been every bit as effective in its way in inspiring once-jaded ordinary citizens to coalesce around a set of interests and agendas – albeit, at least in principal if not necessarily in actual practice, of a professed libertarian strain – the Tea Party got underway in the waning days of the second presidential term of George W. Bush. It started out as a one-issue protest group voicing umbrage over the proposed economic stimulus plan, which it considered an unconstitutional subsidy. After Barack Obama became president, the Tea Party burgeoned into a much more influential movement that now professes to be a grassroots citizens’ watchdog for all unconstitutional activities (or what it deems to be such) on the part of the federal government. A New York Times article notes that many of its members are victims of the economic downturn; they “had lost their jobs, or perhaps watched their homes plummet in value, and they found common cause in the Tea Party’s fight for lower taxes and smaller government” (Zernike). Its members are akin to the millions of middle class Americans who lost their livelihoods during the Great Depression of the 1930s, an unparalleled economic downturn that eventually “mobilized many middle-class people who had fallen on hard times” to join forces in order to have an effective political voice. But those during the Great Depression who were aroused to political consciousness “tended to push for more government involvement”; in contrast, the Tea Party is a coalition that “vehemently wants less”. While Galbraith depicted the Republican Party of his time as “avowedly on the side of the fortunate” (141), the majority of today’s Tea Party members align themselves with the Republican Party, yet they are by no means principally made up of "the fortunate." Erick Erickson, a prominent Tea Party spokesman and a television commentator for the CNN news channel, blogs on Redstate.com that the Tea Party “has gotten a lot of people off the sidelines and into the political arena...” Erickson further contends that the Tea Party has “brought together a lot of likeminded citizens who thought they were alone in the world. They realized that not only were they not alone, but there were millions of others just as concerned.” Galbraithian Coalitions?Do MoveOn.org and Tea Party constitute Galbraithian-type coalitions, each in its own right? Both have inspired millions of once-disenchanted common citizens to come together around common political concerns and become a force to be reckoned with in electoral politics. As such, each has served as an effective counterweight against the money, voice and political activism of the very affluent. While Galbraith would probably have as much disdain for the Tea Party as he would have praise for MoveOn.org, the fact is that both groups have seen to it that an increasing number of regular Americans whose concerns had been ignored in the political arena now have to be reckoned with. But this is by no means where their commonality ends. Above and beyond the fact that both are comprised of millions who had been political outsiders, each has a decided anti-establishmentarian strain, along with a professed sense of alienation from and disdain for "politics as usual" and an impassioned belief in the right to self-government (though they differ on what this right amounts to). Moreover, both consider themselves grassroots-driven, and harbor anathema for professional lobbying organisations, which both regularly criticize for their undue political influence. Even though the two groups usually differ to the nth degree when it comes to those solutions they believe would effectively remedy the most pressing public problems in the U.S., they nonetheless share the conviction that one must initially focus one’s efforts at the local level if one is eventually to have the greatest impact on political decision-making on a national scale. The two groups came of age during the Internet revolution – indeed, it would have been impossible for their like-minded members to have found one another and coalesced so quickly and in such great numbers without the Internet – and they utilise the Internet as the principal tool for spurring concerted activism at the local level among their members. One can consider their shared approach Deweyan, in that Dewey maintained that genuinely democratic community, “in its deepest and richest sense, must always remain a matter of face-to-face intercourse” (367). Yet the two groups’ legion differences prevent them from engaging in meaningful face-to-face exchanges with one another. While the prospect of cultivating linkages between Tea Party and MoveOn.org are remote for the foreseeable future, it might nonetheless be seen as a promising development that some rank and file Tea Party acolytes do at least recognise that they must not identify solely with the Republican Party, lest they discourage potential recruits from rallying around their cause. For instance, one warns fellow members on the Redstate.com blog to be wary of casting their lot with Republicans, “because it would drive away the Democrats and Independents”. He actually uses Galbraith’s coinage in describing the Tea Party: “This movement is a coalition of the concerned, not a Republican outreach program.” Indeed, contrary to popular belief, the Tea Party is not, as a whole, on the conservative fringe (though it does often seem that those members who are given the most attention by the mainstream media are the fringe element, particularly the breakaway Tea Party Express). A Gallup Poll reveals that fully 17 percent of all Americans of voting age identify themselves as affiliated with the Tea Party; and while a majority have Republican leanings, fully 45 percent of all Tea Party members claimed they were either Democrats (17 percent) or independents (28 percent). To Tea Party leader Erick Erickson, the paramount challenge today for the Tea Party is for it to transform itself into a greater umbrella coalition, since the “issues and advocacy within the tea party movement are issues that resonate with the majority of Americans.” After all, he asserts, the Tea Party’s is “a very American cause — the first amendment right to protest, petition, and speak up.” While an expansion of its coalition does not in any way make it incumbent for the Tea Party to find common cause with MoveOn.org, can the claim nonetheless be legitimately made – utilising Erickson’s own criteria – that MoveOn.org’s is equally a very American cause? Christopher Hayes points out in an essay in The Nation that most of MoveOn.org’s members, as with the Tea Party’s, are “not inclined to protest,” but their “rising unease with the direction of the country has led to a new political consciousness.” Hayes could just as well be speaking of the Tea Party when he describes MoveOn.org’s members as made up mostly of “citizens angered, upset and disappointed with their government but [who were] unsure how to channel those sentiments.” For such citizens, MoveOn.org “provides simple, discrete actions: sign this petition, donate money to run this ad, show up at this vigil.” This is convincing evidence that MoveOn.org’s is also “a very American cause”, by the very benchmarks set forth by Erickson. A ‘Higher Coalition’?But is this in any way akin to a demonstrable sign that these unlikeliest of political bedfellows might be inspired at some future point to see themselves as part of a ‘higher coalition’ — one of the unlikeminded, that celebrates difference? Might a critical mass in both movements ever deem it a boon to coalesce around the cause of democratic pluralism? As things stand, neither side embraces such pluralism. Rather, one other attribute they share pervasively is dogmatism: both are convinced that their respective political sensibilities are beyond reproach. As a consequence, over the shorter term, neither group is likely to shed its brand of dogmatism and supplant it with an openness or receptivity to new, much less opposing, points of view. So, for instance, even as the Tea Party seeks to expand its fold, it is no more inclined to change its ideology-based stances on the issues than is MoveOn.org. For the time being, each group not only is entrenched in its own collective political mindset, but each coalesces around a demonstrated antipathy towards alternative approaches to public problem-solving. Is there any remotely plausible scenario by which the members of MoveOn.org and Tea Party might eventually come not just to tolerate their differences but to extol them? One other key Galbraithian element that those comprising an ideal coalition in a democracy must possess is compassion. For members of any coalition to cultivate compassion, they must first, or concomitantly, inculcate empathy, which is typically considered either a precursor to compassion or, along with understanding, a vital component of it. Henning Melber, Executive Director of the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation, and Reinhard Kössler maintain that “(w)hile empathy does not automatically translate into solidarity (nor into ethical behaviour), it can serve as a compass” for doing so, and can lead to a Galbraithian “coalition of the concerned and aware”(37). Such empathy is “a prerequisite for the ability to listen to one another and for permissiveness and openness towards ‘otherness’, and further, can only be born out of a sense of shared suffering” (37). To the authors, it isn’t just that “(s)uffering in its variety of forms requires empathy and solidarity by all,” but that it necessarily “transcends a politically correct ideology” (37). Millions in both the Tea Party and MoveOn.org long suffered from being a mere afterthought to the political establishment, both of them impacted by policies that they are convinced exacerbated rather than ameliorated their woes. But they have shown few if any indications of a willingness to transcend a politically correct ideology. For this to come about, it would, as Melber and Kössler maintain, require “hard, sustained, and imaginative work” (33). How might this come to pass? Greg Anderson, in The Athenian Experiment: Building an Imagined Political Community in Ancient Attica, 508-490 B.C., points to ancient Athens as a paradigmatic example of a society that undertook the hard imaginative work needed to develop the types of mediated connections that over time created a sense of shared belonging to a democratic community. “The process of transformation” in Attica, he argues, is “best understood as a bold exercise in social engineering, an experiment designed to bring together the diverse and far-flung inhabitants of an entire region and forge them into a single, self-governing political community of like-minded individuals” (5). While those males of sufficient socioeconomic distinction who were privileged enough to be citizens in the West’s first experiment in democracy were indeed like-minded, prising a self-governing political community, they were not single-minded; rather, those in the twelve dispersed tribes throughout Attica who coalesced to form a self-governing community apparently thrived on the free exchange and consideration of a wide range of ideas. They held that greater insights emerged only when a variety of views were subjected to scrutiny in the public sphere. Paul Woodruff notes in First Democracy that each Athenian was “given a share of the ability to be citizens, and that ability is understood both as a pair of virtues and as a kind of citizen wisdom.” Governing in this way was based on the shared view that “it is a natural part of being human to know enough to help govern your community” (149). Neither Tea Party nor MoveOn.org followers at present have this shared view on any semblance of a broad scale; rather, each betrays the sensibility that each ‘knows better’. As a consequence, any efforts at expanding their respective folds clearly do not include making overtures (or even extending olive branches) to one another. Even so, as impossibly optimistic as it might seem under current circ*mstances, I believe eventually they might come to see themselves as part of a greater or higher coalition – one serving the overriding cause of democracy itself – over the much longer term. But for this to become a reality, each group will first have to suffer some more. One other commonality they demonstrate is the power of grassroots activism – and the decided limitations. My hunch is that just as MoveOn.org’s progressives came to feel betrayed when Obama abandoned the liberal agenda of his presidential campaign to engage in political compromise and accommodation, Tea Party activists will come to find that their own expectations for political change will be equally stymied. In the 2010 elections, the Tea Party was a kingmaker in electoral politics, giving Republicans a decisive majority in Congress in the 2010 elections. But I suspect that those candidates the Tea Party supported will eventually resort to the practice of “politics as usual,” largely departing from the Tea Party agenda, in order to accomplish anything in Washington or become irrelevant in the existing system – a system long dominated by two political parties interested above and beyond all else in perpetuating their shared stranglehold on political power, and each equally beholden to corporate America for the contributions to their coffers that enable them to sustain this. If this scenario plays out, then at least some Tea Party activists might plausibly arrive at the unsettling conclusion that their suffering in the political arena is remarkably similar to that experienced by MoveOn.org’s cadre of concerned citizens who catapulted Obama into the office in the land, only to have most of their principal concerns neglected or dismissed, lost in the seamy world of back-room political deal-making. There is another possible scenario: What if either MoveOn.org or Tea Party becomes such an overwhelming force in politics that the other is attenuated, its members relegated once again to the fringe? If this occurred, the public sphere in the United States would be missing a vital dimension that has been part of its makeup since its founding days. For as Joseph Ellis, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, points out: the achievement of the revolutionary generation was a collective enterprise that succeeded because of the diversity of personalities and ideologies present in the mix. Their interactions and juxtapositions generated a dynamic form of balance and equilibrium, not because any of them was perfect or infallible, but because their mutual imperfections and fallibilities, as well as their eccentricities and excesses, checked each other… . (17) At the United States’s beginnings, the ties that bound those who revolted against Britain were forged despite their unbridgeable chasms of ideology; their “differing postures toward the twin goals of freedom and equality” were “not resolved so much as built into the fabric of our national identity” (16). Even or especially as irreconcilable differences prompted early Americans to continue waging a battle of ideas in the political trenches, Thomas Jefferson, for one, believed they were all (or nearly all) “constitutionally and conscientiously democrats” (185). Extrapolating from this, one can posit that MoveOn.org and Tea Party, regardless of whether they choose to acknowledge it, are in tandem a modern-day manifestation of the original American coalition. If they could be inspired to see that each is an important player in furthering the democratic experiment as singularly practiced in the U.S., they just might come to care more for one another. Out of such caring, they might realise that neither has a monopoly on political wisdom, and as a result coalesce around the cause of promoting a less hostile body politic. AcknowledgementsThe author is grateful to the two blind peer reviewers for their most helpful suggestions. ReferencesAnderson, Greg. The Athenian Experiment: Building an Imagined Political Community in Ancient Attica, 508-490 B.C. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2003. Dewey, John. In J. Boydston (Ed.) John Dewey, Volume 2: 1925-1927. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University, 1984. Ellis, Joseph. Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation. New York, NY: Vintage. 2002. Erickson, Erick. “Tea Party Movement 2.0: Moving beyond Protesting to Fighting in Primaries, Ballot Boxes, and Becoming More Effective Activists.” 14 April 2010. 28 Sep. 2010 ‹http://www.redstate.com/erick/2010/04/14/tea-party-movement-20/>.Galbraith, John Kenneth. The Good Society: The Humane Agenda. New York: Mariner Books, 1997. Green, Lelia. The Internet: An Introduction to New Media. Oxford: Berg, 2010.Hayes, Christopher. “MoveOn.org Is Not as Radical as Conservatives Think." The Nation. 16 July 2008. 28 Sep. 2010 ‹http://www.thenation.com/article/moveonorg-not-radical-conservatives-think>. Janofsky, Michael, Jennifer B. Lee. “Net Group Tries to Click Democrats to Power”. New York Times, 18 Nov 2003. 1 Oct. 2010 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/18/us/net-group-tries-to-click- democrats-to-power.html?scp=1&sq=%22bottom-up%20organization%22&st=cse>. Jefferson, Thomas. In M. Peterson, ed. The Political Writings of Thomas Jefferson. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1993. Kossler, Reinhart, and Hening Melber. “International Civil Society and the Challenge for Global Solidarity.” Development Dialogue 49 (Oct. 2007): 29-39. Malcolm, Andrew. “Myth-Busting Polls: Tea Party Members Are Average Americans, 41% Are Democrats, Independents.” Los Angeles Times, 5 April 2010 ‹http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2010/04/tea-party-obama.html>.MoveOn.org. n.d. 27 Sep. 2010 ‹http://moveon.org>. Tea Party. n.d. 1 Oct. 2010 ‹http://teaparty.freedomworks.org>.Tea Party Express. n.d. 1 Oct. 2010 ‹http://www.teapartyexpress.org>. Woodruff, Paul. First Democracy: The Challenge of an Ancient Idea. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Zernike, Kate. “With No Jobs, Plenty of Time for Tea Party.” New York Times, 27 Mar. 2010. 29 Sep. 2010 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/us/politics/28teaparty.html?scp=1&sq=%22watched%20their%20homes%20plummet%20in%20value%22&st=cse>.

Abstract:

IntroductionThe death of Chris Cornell in the spring of 2017 shook me. As the lead singer of Soundgarden and a pioneer of early 1990s grunge music, his voice revealed an unbridled pain and joy backed up by the raw, guitar-driven rock emanating from the Seattle, Washington music scene. I remember thinking, there’s only one left, referring to Eddie Vedder, lead singer for Pearl Jam, and lone survivor of the four seminal grunge bands that rose to fame in the early 1990s whose lead singers passed away much too soon. Alice in Chains singer Layne Staley died in 2002 at the age of 35, and Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain’s death in 1994 had resonated around the globe. I thought about when Cornell and Staley said goodbye to their friend Andy Wood, lead singer of Mother Love Bone, after he overdosed on heroine in 1990. Wood’s untimely death at the age of 24, only days before his band’s debut album release, shook the close-knit Seattle music scene and remained a source of angst and inspiration for a genre of music that shaped youth culture of the 1990s.When grunge first exploded on the pop culture scene, I was a college student flailing around in pursuit of an English degree I had less passion for than I did for music. I grew up listening to The Beatles and Prince; Led Zeppelin and Miles Davis; David Bowie and Willie Nelson, along with a litany of other artists and musicians crafting the kind of meaningful music I responded to. I didn’t just listen to music, I devoured stories about the musicians, their often hedonistic lifestyles; their processes and epiphanies. The music spoke to my being in the world more than the promise of any college degree. I ran with friends who shared this love of music, often turning me on to new bands or suggesting some obscure song from the past to track down. I picked up my first guitar when John Lennon died on the eve of my eleventh birthday and have played for the past 37 years. I rely on music to relocate my sense of self. Rhythm and melody play out like characters in my life, colluding to make me feel something apart from the mundane, moving me from within. So, when I took notice of grunge music in the fall of 1991, it was love at first listen. As a pop cultural phenomenon, grunge ruptured the music and fashion industries caught off guard by its sudden commercial appeal while the media struggled to galvanize its relevance. As a subculture, grunge rallied around a set of attitudes and values that set the movement apart from mainstream (Latysheva). The grunge sound drew from the nihilism of punk and the head banging gospel of heavy metal, tinged with the swagger of 1970s FM rock running counter to the sleek production of pop radio and hair metal bands. Grunge artists wrote emotionally-laden songs that spoke to a particular generation of youth who identified with lyrics about isolation, anger, and death. Grunge set off new fashion trends in favor of dressing down and sporting the latest in second-hand, thrift store apparel, ripping away the Reagan-era starched white-collared working-class aesthetic of the 1980’s corporate culture. Like their punk forbearers who railed against the status quo and the trappings of success incurred through the mass appeal of their art, Kurt Cobain, Eddie Vedder, and the rest of the grunge cohort often wrestled with the momentum of their success. Fortunes rained down and the media ordained them rock stars.This auto-ethnography revisits some of the cultural impacts of grunge during its rise to cultural relevance and includes my own reflexive interpretation positioned as a fan of grunge music. I use a particular auto-ethnographic orientation called “interpretive-humanistic autoethnography” (Manning and Adams 192) where, along with archival research (i.e. media articles and journal articles), I will use my own reflexive voice to interpret and describe my personal experiences as a fan of grunge music during its peak of popularity from 1991 up to the death of Cobain in 1994. It is a methodology that works to bridge the personal and popular where “the individual story leaves traces of at least one path through a shifting, transforming, and disappearing cultural landscape” (Neumann 183). Grunge RootsThere are many conflicting stories as to when the word “grunge” was first used to describe the sound of a particular style of alternative music seeping from the dank basem*nts and shoddy rehearsal spaces in towns like Olympia, Aberdeen, and Seattle. Lester Bangs, the preeminent cultural writer and critic of all things punk, pop, and rock in the 1970s was said to have used the word at one time (Yarm), and several musicians lay claim to their use of the word in the 1980s. But it was a small Seattle record label founded in 1988 called Sub Pop Records that first included grunge in their marketing materials to describe “the grittiness of the music and the energy” (Yarm 195).This particular sound grew out of the Pacific Northwest blue-collar environment of logging towns, coastal fisheries, and airplane manufacturing. Seattle’s alternative music scene unfolded as a community of musicians responding to the tucked away isolation of their musty surroundings, apart from the outside world, free to submerge themselves in their own cultural milieu of rock music, rain, and youthful rebellion.Where Seattle stood as a major metropolitan city soaked in rainclouds for much of the year, I was soaking up the desert sun in a rural college town when grunge first leapt into the mainstream. Cattle ranches and cotton fields spread across the open plains of West Texas, painted with pickup trucks, starched Wrangler Jeans, and cowboy hats. This was not my world. I’d arrived the year prior from Houston, Texas, an urban sprawl of four million people, but I found the wide-open landscape a welcome change from the concrete jungle of the big city. Along with cowboy boots and western shirts came country music, and lots of it. Garth Brooks, Reba McEntire, George Straight; some of the voices that captured the lifestyle of my small rural town, twangy guitars and fiddles blaring on local radio. While popular country artists recorded for behemoth record labels like Warner Brothers and Sony, the tiny Sub Pop Records championed the grunge sound coming out of the Seattle music scene. Sub Pop became a playground for those who cared about their music and little else. The label cultivated an early following through their Sub Pop Singles Club, mailing seven-inch records to subscribers on a monthly basis promoting new releases from up-and-coming bands. Sub Pop’s stark, black and white logo showed up on records sleeves, posters, and t-shirts, reflecting a no-nonsense DIY-attitude rooted in in the production of loud guitars and heavy drums.Like the bands it represented, Sub Pop did not take itself too seriously when one of their best-selling t-shirts simply read “Loser” embracing the slacker mood of newly minted Generation X’ers born between 1961 and 1981. A July 1990 Time Magazine article described this twenty-something demographic as having “few heroes, no anthems, no style to call their own” suggesting they “possess only a hazy sense of their own identity” (Gross & Scott). As a member of this generation, I purchased and wore my “Loser” t-shirt with pride, especially in ironic response to the local cowboy way of life. I didn’t hold anything personal against the Wrangler wearing Garth Brooks fan but as a twenty-one-year-old reluctant college student, I wanted to rage with contempt for the status quo of my environment with an ambivalent snarl.Grunge in the MainstreamIn 1991, the Seattle sound exploded onto the international music scene with the release of four seminal grunge-era albums over a six-month period. The first arrived in April, Temple of the Dog, a tribute album of sorts to the late Andy Wood, led by his close friend, Soundgarden singer/songwriter, Chris Cornell. In August, Pearl Jam released their debut album, Ten, with its “surprising and refreshing, melodic restraint” (Fricke). The following month, Nirvana’s Nevermind landed in stores. Now on a major record label, DGC Records, the band had arrived “at the crossroads—scrappy garageland warriors setting their sights on a land of giants” (Robbins). October saw the release of Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger as “a runaway train ride of stammering guitar and psycho-jungle telegraph rhythms” (Fricke). These four albums sent grunge culture into the ether with a wall of sound that would upend the music charts and galvanize a depressed concert ticket market.In fall of 1991, grunge landed like a hammer when I witnessed Nirvana’s video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on MTV for the first time. Sonically, the song rang like an anthem for the Gen Xers with its jangly four-chord opening guitar riff signaling the arrival of a youth-oriented call to arms, “here we are now, entertain us” (Nirvana). It was the visual power of seeing a skinny white kid with stringy hair wearing baggy jeans, a striped T-shirt and tennis shoes belting out choruses with a ferociousness typically reserved for black-clad heavy metal headbangers. Cobain’s sound and look didn’t match up. I felt discombobulated, turned sideways, as if vertigo had taken hold and I couldn’t right myself. Stopped in the middle of my tracks on that day, frozen in front of the TV, the subculture of grunge music slammed into my world while I was on my way to the fridge.Suddenly, grunge was everywhere, As Soundgarden, Nirvana, and Pearl Jam albums and performances infiltrated radio, television, and concert halls, there was no shortage of media coverage. From 1992 through 1994, grunge bands were mentioned or featured on the cover of Rolling Stone 33 times (Hillburn). That same year, The New York Times ran the article “Grunge: A Success Story” featuring a short history of the Seattle sound, along with a “lexicon of grunge speak” (Marin), a joke perpetrated by a former 25-year-old Sub Pop employee, Megan Jasper, who never imagined her list of made-up vocabulary given to a New York Times reporter would grace the front page of the style section (Yarm). In their rush to keep up with pervasiveness of grunge culture, even The New York Times fell prey to Gen Xer’s comical cynicism.The circle of friends I ran with were split down the middle between Nirvana and Pearl Jam, a preference for one over the other, as the two bands and their respective front men garnered much of the media attention. Nirvana seemed to appeal to people’s sense of authenticity, perhaps more relatable in their aloofness to mainstream popularity, backed up with Cobain’s simple-yet-brilliant song arrangements and revealing lyrics. Lawrence Grossberg suggests that music fans recognise the difference between authentic and hom*ogenised rock, interpreting and aligning these differences with rock and roll’s association with “resistance, refusal, alienation, marginality, and so on” (62). I tended to gravitate toward Nirvana’s sound, mostly for technical reasons. Nevermind sparkled with aggressive guitar tones while capturing the power and fragility of Cobain’s voice. For many critics, the brilliance of Pearl Jam’s first album suffered from too much echo and reverb muddling the overall production value, but twenty years later they would remix and re-release Ten, correcting these production issues.Grunge FashionAs the music carved out a huge section of the charts, the grunge look was appropriated on fashion runways. When Cobain appeared on MTV wearing a ragged olive green cardigan he’d created a style simply by rummaging through his closet. Vedder and Cornell sported army boots, cargo shorts, and flannel shirts, suitable attire for the overcast climate of the Pacific Northwest, but their everyday garb turned into a fashion trend for Gen Xers that was then milked by designers. In 1992, the editor of Details magazine, James Truman, called grunge “un fashion” (Marin) as stepping out in second-hand clothes ran “counter to the shellacked, flashy aesthetic of 1980s” (Nnadi) for those who preferred “the waif-like look of put-on poverty” (Brady). But it was MTV’s relentless airing of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden videos that sent Gen Xers flocking to malls and thrift-stores in search grunge-like apparel. I purchased a pair of giant, heavyweight Red Wing boots that looked like small cars on my feet, making it difficult to walk, but at least I was prepared for any terrain in all types of weather. The flannel came next; I still wear flannos. Despite its association with dark, murky musical themes, grunge kept me warm and dry.Much of grunge’s appeal to the masses was that it was not gender-specific; men and women dressed to appear unimpressed, sharing a taste for shapeless garments and muted colors without reference to stereotypical masculine or feminine styles. Cobain “allowed his own sexuality to be called into question by often wearing dresses and/or makeup on stage, in film clips, and on photo shoots, and wrote explicitly feminist songs, such as ‘Sappy’ or ‘Been a Son’” (Strong 403). I remember watching Pearl Jam’s 1992 performance on MTV Unplugged, seeing Eddie Vedder scrawl the words “Pro Choice” in black marker on his arm in support of women’s rights while his lyrics in songs like “Daughter”, “Better Man”, and “Why Go” reflected an equitable, humanistic if somewhat tragic perspective. Females and males moshed alongside one another, sharing the same spaces while experiencing and voicing their own response to grunge’s aggressive sound. Unlike the hypersexualised hair-metal bands of the 1980s whose aesthetic motifs often portrayed women as conquests or as powerless décor, the message of grunge rock avoided gender exploitation. As the ‘90s unfolded, underground feminist punk bands of the riot grrrl movement like Bikini Kill, L7, and Babes in Toyland expressed female empowerment with raging vocals and buzz-saw guitars that paved the way for Hole, Sleater-Kinney and other successful female-fronted grunge-era bands. The Decline of GrungeIn 1994, Kurt Cobain appeared on the cover of Newsweek magazine in memoriam after committing suicide in the greenhouse of his Seattle home. Mass media quickly spread the news of his passing internationally. Two days after his death, 7,000 fans gathered at Seattle Center to listen to a taped recording of Courtney Love, Cobain’s wife, a rock star in her own right, reading the suicide note he left behind.A few days after Cobain’s suicide, I found myself rolling down the highway with a carload of friends, one of my favorite Nirvana tunes, “Come As You Are” fighting through static. I fiddled with the radio to clear up the signal. The conversation turned to Cobain as we cobbled together the details of his death. I remember the chatter quieting down, Cobain’s voice fading as we gazed out the window at the empty terrain passing. In that reflective moment, I felt like I had experienced an intense, emotional relationship that came to an abrupt end. This “illusion of intimacy” (Horton and Wohl 217) between myself and Cobain elevated the loss I felt with his passing even though I had no intimate, personal ties to him. I counted this person as a friend (Giles 284) because I so closely identified with his words and music. I could not help but feel sad, even angry that he’d decided to end his life.Fueled by depression and a heroin addiction, Cobain’s death signaled an end to grunge’s collective appeal while shining a spotlight on one of the more dangerous aspects of its ethos. A 1992 Rolling Stone article mentioned that several of Seattle’s now-famous international musicians used heroin and “The feeling around town is, the drug is a disaster waiting to happen” (Azzerad). In 2002, eight years to the day of Cobain’s death, Layne Staley, lead singer of Alice In Chains, another seminal grunge outfit, was found dead of a suspected heroin overdose (Wiederhorn). When Cornell took his own life in 2017 after a long battle with depression, The Washington Post said, “The story of grunge is also one of death” (Andrews). The article included a Tweet from a grieving fan that read “The voices I grew up with: Andy Wood, Layne Staley, Chris Cornell, Kurt Cobain…only Eddie Vedder is left. Let that sink in” (@ThatEricAlper).ConclusionThe grunge movement of the early 1990s emerged out of musical friendships content to be on their own, on the outside, reflecting a sense of isolation and alienation in the music they made. As Cornell said, “We’ve always been fairly reclusive and damaged” (Foege). I felt much the same way in those days, sequestered in the desert, planting my grunge flag in the middle of country music territory, doing what I could to resist the status quo. Cobain, Cornell, Staley, and Vedder wrote about their own anxieties in a way that felt intimate and relatable, forging a bond with their fan base. Christopher Perricone suggests, “the relationship of an artist and audience is a collaborative one, a love relationship in the sense, a friendship” (200). In this way, grunge would become a shared memory among friends who rode the wave of this cultural phenomenon all the way through to its tragic consequences. But the music has survived. Along with my flannel shirts and Red Wing boots.References@ThatEricAlper (Eric Alper). “The voices I grew up with: Andy Wood, Layne Staley, Chris Cornell, Kurt Cobain…only Eddie Vedder is left. Let that sink in.” Twitter, 18 May 2017, 02:41. 15 Sep. 2018 <https://twitter.com/ThatEricAlper/status/865140400704675840?ref_src>.Andrews, Travis M. “After Chris Cornell’s Death: ‘Only Eddie Vedder Is Left. Let That Sink In.’” The Washington Post, 19 May 2017. 29 Aug. 2018 <https://www.washingtonpost.com/newsmorning-mix/wp/2017/05/19/after-chris-cornells-death-only-eddie-vedder-is-left-let-that-sink-in>.Azzerad, Michael. “Grunge City: The Seattle Scene.” Rolling Stone, 16 Apr. 1992. 20 Aug. 2018 <https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/grunge-city-the-seattle-scene-250071/>.Brady, Diane. “Kids, Clothes and Conformity: Teens Fashion and Their Back-to-School Looks.” Maclean’s, 6 Sep. 1993. Brodeur, Nicole. “Chris Cornell: Soundgarden’s Dark Knight of the Grunge-Music Scene.” Seattle Times, 18 May 2017. 20 Aug. 2018 <https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/music/chris-cornell-soundgardens-dark-knight-of-the-grunge-music-scene/>.Ellis, Carolyn, and Arthur P. Bochner. “Autoethnography, Personal Narrative, Reflexivity: Researcher as Subject.” Handbook of Qualitative Research. 2nd ed. Eds. Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2000. 733-768.Foege, Alec. “Chris Cornell: The Rolling Stone Interview.” Rolling Stone, 28 Dec. 1994. 12 Sep. 2018 <https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/chris-cornell-the-rolling-stone-interview-79108/>.Fricke, David. “Ten.” Rolling Stone, 12 Dec. 1991. 18 Sep. 2018 <https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/ten-251421/>.Giles, David. “Parasocial Interactions: A Review of the Literature and a Model for Future Research.” Media Psychology 4 (2002): 279-305.Giles, Jeff. “The Poet of Alientation.” Newsweek, 17 Apr. 1994, 4 Sep. 2018 <https://www.newsweek.com/poet-alienation-187124>.Gross, D.M., and S. Scott. Proceding with Caution. Time, 16 July 1990. 3 Sep. 2018 <http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,155010,00.html>.Grossberg, Lawrence. “Is There a Fan in the House? The Affective Sensibility of Fandom. The Adoring Audience” Fan Culture and Popular Media. Ed. Lisa A. Lewis. New York, NY: Routledge, 1992. 50-65.Hillburn, Robert. “The Rise and Fall of Grunge.” Los Angeles Times, 21 May 1998. 20 Aug. 2018 <http://articles.latimes.com/1998/may/31/entertainment/ca-54992>.Horton, Donald, and R. Richard Wohl. “Mass Communication and Para-Social Interactions: Observations on Intimacy at a Distance.” Psychiatry: Interpersonal and Biological Process 19 (1956): 215-229.Latysheva, T.V. “The Essential Nature and Types of the Youth Subculture Phenomenon.” Russian Education and Society 53 (2011): 73–88.Manning, Jimmie, and Tony Adams. “Popular Culture Studies and Autoethnography: An Essay on Method.” The Popular Culture Studies Journal 3.1-2 (2015): 187-222.Marin, Rick. “Grunge: A Success Story.” New York Times, 15 Nov. 1992. 12 Sep. 2018 <https://www.nytimes.com/1992/11/15/style/grunge-a-success-story.html>.Neumann, Mark. “Collecting Ourselves at the End of the Century.” Composing Ethnography: Alternative Forms of Qualitative Writing. Eds. Carolyn Ellis and Arthur P. Bochner. London: Alta Mira Press, 1996. 172-198.Nirvana. "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Nevermind, Geffen, 1991.Nnadi, Chioma. “Why Kurt Cobain Was One of the Most Influential Style Icons of Our Times.” Vogue, 8 Apr. 2014. 15 Aug. 2018 <https://www.vogue.com/article/kurt-cobain-legacy-of-grunge-in-fashion>.Perricone, Christopher. “Artist and Audience.” The Journal of Value Inquiry 24 (2012). 12 Sep. 2018 <https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/BF00149433.pdf>.Robbins, Ira. “Ten.” Rolling Stone, 12 Dec. 1991. 15 Aug. 2018 <https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/ten-25142>.Strong, Catherine. “Grunge, Riott Grrl and the Forgetting of Women in Popular Culture.” The Journal of Popular Culture 44.2 (2011): 398-416. Wiederhorn, Jon. “Remembering Layne Staley: The Other Great Seattle Musician to Die on April 5.” MTV, 4 June 2004. 23 Sep. 2018 <http://www.mtv.com/news/1486206/remembering-layne-staley-the-other-great-seattle-musician-to-die-on-april-5/>.Yarm, Mark. Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge. Three Rivers Press, 2011.

Abstract:

IntroductionIn this article, I discuss the potential of sound to construct fictional spaces and build relations between bodies using two performance installations as case studies. The first is Invisible Flock’s 105+dB, a site-specific sound work which transports crowd recordings of a soccer match to alternative geographical locations. The second is Atelier Bildraum’s Bildraum, an installation performance using live photography, architectural models, and ambient sound. By writing through these two works, I question how sound builds relations between bodies and across space as well as questioning the role of site within sound installation works. The potential for sound to create shared space and foster relationships between bodies, objects, and the surrounding environment is evident in recent contemporary art exhibitions. For MOMA’s Soundings: A Contemporary Score, curator Barbara London, sought to create a series of “tuned environments” rather than use headphones, emphasising the potential of sound works to envelop the gallery goer. Similarly, Sam Belinafante’s Listening, aimed to capture a sense of how sound can influence attention by choreographing the visitors’ experience towards the artworks. By using motorised technology to stagger each installation, gallery goers were led by their ears. Both London’s and Belinafante’s curatorial approaches highlight the current awareness and interest in aural space and its influence on bodies, an area I aim to contribute to with this article.Audio-based performance works consisting of narration or instructions received through headphones feature as a dominant trend within the field of theatre and performance studies. Well-known examples from the past decade include: Janet Cardiff’s The Missing Case Study B; Graeme Miller’s Linked; and Lavinia Greenlaw’s Audio Obscura. The use of sound in these works offers several possibilities: the layering of fiction onto site, the intensification, or contradiction of existing atmospheres and, in most cases, the direction of audience attention. Misha Myers uses the term ‘percipient’ to articulate this mode of engagement that relies on the active attendance of the participant to their surroundings. She states that it is the participant “whose active, embodied and sensorial engagement alters and determines [an artistic] process and its outcomes” (172-23). Indeed, audio-based works provide invaluable ways of considering how the body of the audience member might be engaged, raising important issues in relation to sound, embodiment and presence. Yet the question remains, outside of individual acoustic environments, how does sound build physical relations between bodies and across space? Within sound studies the World Soundscape Project, founded in the 1970s by R. Murray Schafer, documents the acoustic properties of cities, nature, technology and work. Collaborations between sound engineers and musicians indicated the musicality inherent in the world encouraging attunement to the acoustic characteristics of our environment. Gernot Böhme indicates the importance of personal and emotional impressions of space, experienced as atmosphere. Atmosphere, rather than being an accumulation of individual acoustic characteristics, is a total experience. In relation to sound, sensitivity to this mode of engagement is understood as a need to shift from hearing in “an instrumental sense—hearing something—into a way of taking part in the world” (221). Böhme highlights the importance of the less tangible, emotional consistency of our surrounding environment. Brandon Labelle further indicates the social potential of sound by foregrounding the emotional and psychological charges which support “event-architecture, participatory productions, and related performative aspects of space” (Acoustic Spatiality 2) these, Labelle claims enable sound to catalyse both the material world and our imaginations. Sound as felt experience and the emotional construction of space form the key focus here. Within architectural discourse, both Juhani Pallasmaa and Peter Zumthor point to atmospheric nuances and flows of energy which can cause events to furnish the more rigid physical constructs we exist between, influencing spatial quality. However, it is sensorial experience Jean-Paul Thibaud claims, including attention to light, sound, smell and texture that informs much of how we situate ourselves, contributing to the way we imaginatively construct the world we inhabit, even if only of temporary duration. To expand on this, Thibaud locates the sensorial appreciation of site between “the lived experience of people as well as the built environment of the place” (Three Dynamics 37) hinting at the presence of energetic flows. Such insights into how relations are built between bodies and objects inform the approach taken in this article, as I focus on sensorial modes of engagement to write through my own experience as listener-spectator. George Home-Cook uses the term listener-spectator to describe “an ongoing, intersensorial bodily engagement with the affordances of the theatrical environment” (147) and a mode of attending that privileges phenomenal engagement. Here, I occupy the position of the listener-spectator to attend to two installations, Invisible Flock’s 105+dB and Atelier Bildraum’s Bildraum. The first is a large-scale sound installation produced for Hull UK city of culture, 2017. The piece uses audio recordings from 16 shotgun microphones positioned at the periphery of Hull City’s soccer pitch during a match on 28 November 2016. The piece relocates the recordings in public space, replaying a twenty-minute edited version through 36 speakers. The second, Bildraum, is an installation performance consisting of photographer Charlotte Bouckaert, architect Steve Salembier with sound by Duncan Speakman. The piece, with a running time of 40-minutes uses architectural models, live photography, sound and lighting to explore narrative, memory, and space. In writing through these two case studies, I aim to emphasise sensorial engagement. To do so I recognise, as Salomé Voegelin does, the limits of critical discourse to account for relations built through sound. Voegelin indicates the rift critical discourse creates between what is described and its description. In her own writing, Voegelin attempts to counteract this by using the subjective “I” to foreground the experience of a sound work as a writer-listener. Similarly, here I foreground my position as a listener-spectator and aim to evidence the criticality within the work by writing through my experience of attending thereby bringing out mood, texture, atmosphere to foreground how relations are built across space and between bodies.105+dB Invisible Flock January 2017, I arrive in Hull for Invisible Flock’s 105+dB programmed as part of Made in Hull, a series of cultural activities happening across the city. The piece takes place in Zebedee’s Yard, a pedestrianised area located between Princes Dock Street and Whitefriargate in the grounds of the former Trinity House School. From several streets, I can already hear a crowd. Sound, porous in its very nature, flows through the city expanding beyond its immediate geography bringing the notion of a fictional event into being. I look in pub windows to see which teams are playing, yet the visual clues defy what my ears tell me. Listening, as Labelle suggests is relational, it brings us into proximity with nearby occurrences, bodies and objects. Sound and in turn listening, by both an intended and unsuspecting public, lures bodies into proximity aurally bound by the promise of an event. The use of sound, combined with the physical sensation implied by the surrounding architecture serves to construct us as a group of attendees to a soccer match. This is evident as I continue my approach, passing through an archway with cobbled stones underfoot. The narrow entrance rapidly fills up with bodies and objects; push chairs, wheelchairs, umbrellas, and thick winter coats bringing us into close physical contact with one another. Individuals are reduced to a sea of heads bobbing towards the bright stadium lights now visible in the distance. The title 105+dB, refers to the volume at which the sound of an individual voice is lost amongst a crowd, accordingly my experience of being at the site of the piece further echoes this theme. The physical structure of the archway combined with the volume of bodies contributes to what Pallasmaa describes as “atmospheric perception” (231), a mode of attending to experience that engages all the senses as well as time, memory and imagination. Sound here contributes to the atmosphere provoking a shift in my listening. The importance of the listener-spectator experience is underscored by the absence of architectural structures habitually found in stadiums. The piece is staged using the bare minimum: four metal scaffolding structures on each side of the Yard support stadium lights and a high-visibility clad figure patrols the periphery. These trappings serve to evoke an essence of the original site of the recordings, the rest is furnished by the audio track played through 36 speakers situated at intervals around the space as well as the movement of other bodies. As Böhme notes: “Space is genuinely experienced by being in it, through physical presence” (179) similarly, here, it is necessary to be in the space, aurally immersed in sound and in physical proximity to other bodies moving across the Yard. Image 1: The piece is staged using the bare minimum, the rest is furnished by the audio track and movement of bodies. Image courtesy of the artists.The absence of visual clues draws attention to the importance of presence and mood, as Böhme claims: “By feeling our own presence, we feel the space in which we are present” (179). Listening-spectators actively contribute to the event-architecture as physical sensations build and are tangibly felt amongst those present, influenced by the dramaturgical structure of the audio recording. Sounds of jeering, applause and the referees’ whistle combine with occasional chants such as “come on city, come on city” marking a shared rhythm. Specific moments, such as the sound of a leather ball hitting a foot creates a sense of expectation amongst the crowd, and disappointed “ohhs” make a near-miss audibly palpable. Yet, more important than a singular sound event is the sustained sensation of being in a situation, a distinction Pallasmaa makes, foregrounding the “ephemeral and dynamic experiential fields” (235) offered by music, an argument I wish to consider in relation to this sound installation.The detail of the recording makes it possible to imagine, and almost accurately chart, the movement of the ball around the pitch. A “yeah” erupts, making it acoustically evident that a goal is scored as the sound of elation erupts through the speakers. In turn, this sensation much like Thibaud’s concept of intercorporeality, spreads amongst the bodies of the listening-spectators who fist bump, smile, clap, jeer and jump about sharing and occupying Zebedee’s Yard with physical manifestations of triumph. Through sound comes an invitation to be both physically and emotionally in the space, indicating the potential to understand, as Pallasmaa suggests, how “spaces and true architectural experiences are verbs” (231). By physically engaging with the peaks and troughs of the game, a temporary community of sorts forms. After twenty minutes, the main lights dim creating an amber glow in the space, sound is reduced to shuffling noises as the stadium fills up, or empties out (it is impossible to tell). Accordingly, Zebedee’s Yard also begins to empty. It is unclear if I am listening to the sounds in the space around me, or those on the recording as they overlap. People turn to leave, or stand and shuffle evidencing an attitude of receptiveness towards their surrounding environment and underscoring what Thibaud describes as “tuned ambiance” where a resemblance emerges “between what is felt and what is produced” (Three Dynamics 44). The piece, by replaying the crowd sounds of a soccer match across the space of Zebedee’s Yard, stages atmospheric perception. In the absence of further architectural structures, it is the sound of the crowd in the stadium and in turn an attention to our hearing and physical presence that constitutes the event. Bildraum Atelier BildraumAugust 2016, I am in Edinburgh to see Bildraum. The German word “bildraum” roughly translates as image room, and specifically relates to the part of the camera where the image is constructed. Bouckaert takes high definition images live onstage that project immediately onto the screen at the back of the space. The audience see the architectural model, the taking of the photograph, the projected image and hear both pre-recorded ambient sounds by Speakman, and live music played by Salembier generating the sensation that they are inhabiting a bildraum. Here I explore how both sound and image projection can encourage the listener-spectator to construct multiple narratives of possible events and engage their spatial imagination. Image 2: The audience see the architectural model, the taking of the photograph, the projected image and hear both live and pre-recorded sounds. Image courtesy of the artists.In Bildraum, the combination of elements (photographic, acoustic, architectural) serve to create provocative scenes which (quite literally) build multiple spaces for potential narratives. As Bouckaert asserts, “when we speak with people after the performance, they all have a different story”. The piece always begins with a scale model of the actual space. It then evolves to show other spaces such as a ‘social’ scene located in a restaurant, a ‘relaxation’ scene featuring sun loungers, an oversize palm tree and a pool as well as a ‘domestic’ scene with a staircase to another room. The use of architectural models makes the spaces presented appear as hom*ogenous, neutral containers yet layers of sound including footsteps, people chatting, doors opening and closing, objects dropping, and an eerie soundscape serve to expand and incite the construction of imaginative possibilities. In relation to spatial imagination, Pallasmaa discusses the novel and our ability, when reading, to build all the settings of the story, as though they already existed in pre-formed realities. These imagined scenes are not experienced in two dimensions, as pictures, but in three dimensions and include both atmosphere and a sense of spatiality (239). Here, the clean, slick lines of the rooms, devoid of colour and personal clutter become personalised, yet also troubled through the sounds and shadows which appear in the photographs, adding ambiance and serving to highlight the pluralisation of space. As the piece progresses, these neat lines suffer disruption giving insight into the relations between bodies and across space. As Martin Heidegger notes, space and our occupation of space are not mutually exclusive but intertwined. Pallasmaa further reminds us that when we enter a space, space enters us and the experience is a reciprocal exchange and fusion of both subject and object (232).One image shows a table with several chairs neatly arranged around the outside. The distance between the chairs and the table is sufficient to imagine the presence of several bodies. The first image, though visually devoid of any living presence is layered with chattering sounds suggesting the presence of bodies. In the following image, the chairs have shifted position and there is a light haze, I envisage familiar social scenes where conversations with friends last long into the night. In the next image, one chair appears on top of the table, another lies tilted on the floor with raucous noise to accompany the image. Despite the absence of bodies, the minimal audio-visual provocations activate my spatial imagination and serve to suggest a correlation between physical behaviour and ambiance in everyday settings. As discussed in the previous paragraph, this highlights how space is far from a disinterested, or separate container for physical relations, rather, it underscores how social energy, sound and mood can build a dynamic presence within the built environment, one that is not in isolation but indeed in dialogue with surrounding structures. In a further scene, the seemingly fixed, stable nature of the models undergoes a sudden influx of materials as a barrage of tiny polystyrene balls appears. The image, combined with the sound suggests a large-scale disaster, or freak weather incident. The ambiguity created by the combination of sound and image indicates a hidden mobility beneath what is seen. Sound here does not announce the presence of an object, or indicate the taking place of a specific event, instead it acts as an invitation, as Voegelin notes, “not to confirm and preserve actuality but to explore possibilities” (Sonic 13). The use of sound which accompanies the image helps to underscore an exchange between the material and immaterial elements occurring within everyday life, leaving a gap for the listener-spectator to build their own narrative whilst also indicating further on goings in the depth of the visual. Image 3: The minimal audio-visual provocations serve to activate my spatial imagination. Image courtesy of the artists.The piece advances at a slow pace as each model is adjusted while lighting and objects are arranged. The previous image lingers on the projector screen, animated by the sound track which uses simple but evocative chords. This lulls me into an attentive, almost meditative state as I tune into and construct my own memories prompted by the spaces shown. The pace and rhythm that this establishes in Summerhall’s Old Lab creates a productive imaginative space. Böhme argues that atmosphere is a combination of both subjective and objective perceptions of space (16). Here, stimulated by the shifting arrangements Bouckaert and Salembier propose, I create short-lived geographies charting my lived experience and memories across a plurality of possible environments. As listener-spectator I am individually implicated as the producer of a series of invisible maps. The invitation to engage with the process of the work over 40-minutes as the building and dismantling of models and objects takes place draws attention to the sensorial flows and what Voegelin denotes as a “semantic materiality” (Sonic 53), one that might penetrate our sensibility and accompany us beyond the immediate timeframe of the work itself. The timeframe and rhythm of the piece encourages me, as listener-spectator to focus on the ambient sound track, not just as sound, but to consider the material realities of the here and now, to attend to vibrational milieus which operate beyond the surface of the visible. In doing so, I become aware of constructed actualities and of sound as a medium to get me beyond what is merely presented. ConclusionThe dynamic experiential potential of sound installations discussed from the perspective of a listener-spectator indicate how emotion is a key composite of spatial construction. Beyond the closed acoustic environments of audio-based performance works, aural space, physical proximity, and the importance of ambiance are foregrounded. Such intangible, ephemeral experiences can benefit from a writing practice that attends to these aesthetic concerns. By writing through both case studies from the position of listener-spectator, my lived experience of each work, manifested through attention to sensorial experience, have indicated how relations are built between bodies and across space. In Invisible Flock´s 105+dB sound featured as a social material binding listener-spectators to each other and catalysing a fictional relation to space. Here, sound formed temporal communities bringing bodies into contact to share in constructing and further shaping the parameters of a fictional event.In Atelier Bildraum’s Bildraum the construction of architectural models combined with ambient and live sound indicated a depth of engagement to the visual, one not confined to how things might appear on the surface. The seemingly given, stable nature of familiar environments can be questioned hinting at the presence of further layers within the vibrational or atmospheric properties operating across space that might bring new or alternative realities to the forefront.In both, the correlation between the environment and emotional impressions of bodies that occupy it emerged as key in underscoring and engaging in a dialogue between ambiance and lived experience.ReferencesBildraum, Atelier. Bildraum. Old Lab, Summer Hall, Edinburgh. 18 Aug. 2016.Böhme, Gernot, and Jean-Paul Thibaud (eds.). The Aesthetics of Atmospheres. New York: Routledge, 2017.Cardiff, Janet. The Missing Case Study B. Art Angel, 1999.Home-Cook, George. Theatre and Aural Attention. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.Greenlaw, Lavinia. Audio Obscura. 2011.Bouckaert, Charlotte, and Steve Salembier. Bildraum. Brussels. 8 Oct. 2014. 18 Jan. 2017 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eueeAaIuMo0>.Daemen, Merel. “Steve Salembier & Charlotte Bouckaert.” 1 Jul. 2015. 18 Jan. 2017 <http://thissurroundingusall.com/post/122886489993/steve-salembier-charlotte-bouckaert-an-architect>. Haydon, Andrew. “Bildraum – Summerhall, Edinburgh.” Postcards from the Gods 20 Aug. 2016. 18 Jan. 2017 <http://postcardsgods.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/bildraum-summerhall-edinburgh.html>. Heidegger, Martin. “Building, Dwelling, Thinking.” Basic Writings. Ed. David Farrell Krell. Oxford: Routledge, 1978. 239-57.Hutchins, Roy. 27 Aug. 2016. 18 Jan. 2017 <http://fringereview.co.uk/review/edinburgh-fringe/2016/bildraum/>.Invisible Flock. 105+dB. Zebedee’s Yard, Made in Hull. Hull. 7 Jan. 2017. Labelle, Brandon. “Acoustic Spatiality.” SIC – Journal of Literature, Culture and Literary Translation (2012). 18 Jan. 2017 <http://hrcak.srce.hr/file/127338>.———. “Other Acoustics” OASE: Immersed - Sound & Architecture 78 (2009): 14-24.———. “Sharing Architecture: Space, Time and the Aesthetics of Pressure.” Journal of Visual Culture 10.2 (2011): 177-89.Miller, Graeme. Linked. 2003.Myers, Misha. “Situations for Living: Performing Emplacement.” Research in Drama Education 13.2 (2008): 171-80.Pallasmaa, Juhani. “Space, Place and Atmosphere. Emotion and Peripheral Perception in Architectural Experience.” Lebenswelt 4.1 (2014): 230-45.Schafer, R. Murray. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Vermont: Destiny Books, 1994.Schevers, Bas. Bildraum (trailer) by Charlotte Bouckaert and Steve Salembier. Dec. 2014. 18 Jan. 2017 <https://vimeo.com/126676951>.Taylor, N. “Made in Hull Artists: Invisible Flock.” 6 Jan. 2017. 9 Jan. 2017 <https://www.hull2017.co.uk/discover/article/made-hull-artists-invisible-flock/>. Thibaud, Jean-Paul. “The Three Dynamics of Urban Ambiances.” Sites of Sound: of Architecture and the Ear Vol. II. Eds. B. Labelle and C. Martinho. Berlin: Errant Bodies P, 2011. 45-53.———. “Urban Ambiances as Common Ground?” 4.1 (2014): 282-95.Voegelin, Salomé. Listening to Sound and Silence: Toward a Philosophy of Sound Art. New York: Continuum, 2010.———. Sonic Possible Worlds. London: Bloomsbury, 2014.Zumthor, Peter. Thinking Architecture. Basel: Birkhäuser, 1998.———. Atmosphere: Architectural Environments – Surrounding Objects. Basel: Birkhäuser, 2006.

Abstract:

IntroductionIn his seminal article, “Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism” (1977), Dallas Smythe suggested that audiences are the commodity form of advertiser-supported communications, as their time is sold to advertisers. Audience measurement firms establish the audience size for a programme by calculating how many people are “tuned in” to a particular offering, and then provide their estimates to advertisers and break down their figures on the basis of demographic characteristics (these characteristics include age, gender, and income level). These ratings have long been the currency of the television industry. Essentially, Smythe points out that advertisers purchase, “the services of audiences with predictable specifications who will pay attention in predictable numbers and at particular times to particular means of communication” (4). Ien Ang has proposed that audience measurement produces an “objectified category of others” that can be governed and abstracted from the “messiness of everyday life” (8, 132). Indeed, Ang sees ratings to be a means of controlling the audience by creating a truth about them that suits the industry’s needs for an exchangeable commodity.In the United States, Nielsen ratings dictate the terms for the buying and selling of television advertising. Over the years, Nielsen has adjusted the measurement methodology to satisfy the demands of various stakeholders: audience measurement companies, advertisers, programme producers, and network executives, among others. Recently, however, social media (particularly Twitter) has threatened Nielsen’s preeminence. Writing in Wired magazine in 2013, Tom Vanderbilt went so far as to declare that the Nielsen Family—the “25,000 households whose TV habits collectively provide a statistical snapshot of a nation’s viewing behavior” (n.p.)—was now dead. He proposed that a show’s “tweetability” had become more important than its Nielsen rating.Nielsen, for its part, has tried to keep up with the changing television landscape and the demands of the television industry. In 2012 they partnered with McKinsey & Company to create the social media consulting company NM Incite, and acquired social TV startup SocialGuide. The following year the company introduced Nielsen Twitter TV Ratings (NTTR) as a supplement to its traditional ratings offering. This step is in line with the shifting industry interest from measuring audience exposure to programming to measuring audience engagement with programming (Jenkins; and Napoli).With NTTR, Nielsen has made, we suggest here, a fairly unimaginative and restricted addition to existing metrics in that it limits its measurements to tweet volume and tweet impressions. In this paper we explore other ways Twitter might be used to create insights that would be useful for audience research. Richard Rogers has raised the question of whether and when standard methods should be applied to the study of a new medium (162). We respond by proposing that, in the case of NTTR, traditional methods should not be applied to Twitter.We begin by briefly discussing the emergence of social media metrics and some of the problems involved in employing these metrics in current audience research. We then investigate how Twitter invites new forms of inquiry, drawing a picture of relationships among television programmes based on viewer tweets. In this re-imagining of audience research, following the Digital Methods tradition, we treat Twitter as a “postdemographic machine” (Rogers) that profiles user tastes, interests, favourite things, and so forth (rather than demographics such as age, income, educational level, and ethnicity).Nielsen and the Introduction of NTTRNielsen collects data about television viewing through diaries kept by members of a relatively small audience sample and meters that are connected to television sets. They provide ratings for programmes according to a system where one Nielsen rating point equals one per cent of all US households with television sets tuned into that programme. Two trends now strain this traditional form of the “exposure metrics” used in the buying and selling of primetime advertising: audience fragmentation and audience autonomy (Napoli). These terms refer, respectively, to the explosion of channels and platforms, first via cable television and later the Internet, on which viewers can watch television programming, and to viewers’ increased control over what television programmes they watch and when they watch them, thanks to technologies such as remote control, DVR, and now the Internet. These trends have eroded audience size for broadcast television and have made traditional metrics, which measure a sample of the audience, increasingly less representative of the viewing population as a whole. Responding to the changing television landscape, Nielsen introduced its “C3 rating” in 2009. This rating measures commercials watched both during first-run broadcasts and on DVR playback within three days (Nielsen Company, “C3 TV Ratings”). In this new landscape, producers and advertisers have begun to think that a small, yet engaged, group of viewers might be more valuable than a larger, more superficial audience (Jenkins 63). They have become increasingly interested in viewers’ engagement with particular programmes. Since around 2009, social TV as a television strategy—to stimulate people to watch television at its scheduled broadcast time and to deepen their engagement with programmes using the real-time features of social media—has gained prominence (van Es). Social TV efforts protect the existing business model for television.The Internet, and its communication structures, are becoming a valuable companion to television, not only because social media reinvigorates first-run viewing, but also because it provides data about viewing activity (Lee and Andrejevic). Social TV’s popularity made the introduction of NTTR unsurprising. Moreover, the particular partnership with Twitter, as opposed to other social platforms, makes sense, because Twitter is—at least for now—the biggest player in the social TV space. Its current ascendency may be due to the particular public openness of the platform, which unlike Facebook allows even non-account holders access to Twitter streams, and its users’ propensity to share their responses to TV on Twitter in real time (Proulx and Shepatin 13).NTTR measures the total number of tweets that refer to a specific television episode, the number of times these tweets were viewed (“impressions”), “unique authors” (accounts that tweeted at least once about a specific episode), and “unique audience” (the number of individual accounts that received at least one “impression” of the tweets about a specific episode [Nielsen Company, “Weekly Top Ten”]). Since May 2014, Nielsen also includes a demographic breakdown in NTTR, specifying the age and gender of those who tweet and view tweets (related to programming from 250 US TV networks). Through a partnership with GfK, a leading market research institute in Europe, Nielsen has since introduced Twitter TV ratings in Germany, Austria, and The Netherlands.In the United States, other companies besides Nielsen generate social TV analytics. Philip Napoli has compared the leading three social TV analytics providers: BlueFin Labs, Trenddr.tv, and General Sentiment. Twitter has recently acquired the first two of these firms as part of its efforts to solidify its position in the social TV landscape. These social TV analytics providers, Napoli claims, and we would add NTTR to the list, are methodologically distinct from traditional ratings in three ways. First, they track everyone who is tweeting about a programme rather than using a “representative” sample. Second, people do not receive incentives to participate in the research, or even get to opt in or out of it. Third, social analytics can focus on not only the “volume” but also the “valence” of an online conversation: it can assign, for instance, a quantitative score between 1 and 10 to reflect either positive or negative contributions on social media (Napoli 11).Among the reviewed providers, Napoli found two main methodological disparities: the platforms they draw data from and the time windows used (10-15). He contends that by measuring different factors they offer different interpretations of “engagement” and give conflicting representations of the audience as a commodity. Social media metrics are not going to work as long as there is disagreement over how to measure and value television’s viewers.Social media metrics have been met with considerable criticism. Like traditional metrics, they track a particular demographic rather than a random sample of people, and so are not broadly representative. Nancy Baym points out how social media metrics in audience research are affected by factors such as “skew,” a by-product of the fact that platforms actively shape the communication that takes place on them. Trending topics on Twitter may, for instance, boost the number of tweets about a programme. She also identifies the problem of deception: bots can tweet about topics and accounts can purchase certain forms of engagement (Baym n.p.).Most important here, perhaps, is what Baym calls “ambiguous meaning”: actions on social media are “uncoupled from contexts of action and application” (Dean in Baym n.p.). In the case of Twitter, for instance, it is not readily evident why people tweet, or why they retweet or favourite certain tweets; one can learn why people do so only through methods such as interviews.The discussion of these limitations highlights the need for a certain sensibility when encountering social media metrics. The limitations themselves, however, do not mean that Twitter is ineffectual for audience research. Tweets can help generate insights and raise new questions about television viewing. Between Counting Viewers and Counting TweetsTo explore the relationship between traditional ratings and NTTR, we collected tweets about television programmes in The Netherlands during the first four weeks of September 2014. This project was conducted, on behalf of BuzzCapture, by a group of research assistants of the Utrecht Data School (Leila Essanoussi, Friso Leder, David de Wied, and Koen Mooij) under our instruction. Specifically, we extracted tweets from 1 September up to, and including, 29 September 2014. We included one extra day since programmes aired on Sunday 28 might still have been discussed around midnight. Initially, we collected tweets on the basis of the official and popular hashtags relating to the 30 most-watched television programmes (rated by the national association for audience research, Stichting KijkOnderzoek, SKO); we then added two programmes not included in this list that were frequently mentioned on Twitter. We collected tweets referring to these 32 programmes as well as profile information of the related Twitter accounts. After removing marketing and spam accounts, we had a sample of 135,882 tweets posted by 39,792 unique tweeters.Figure 1: Number of Viewers versus Average Number of TweetsWe then compared the number of viewers to the average number of tweets referring to the 32 television programmes in a scatterplot (see Figure 1). We took the average number of tweets as our reference point to correct for the fact that the frequency of broadcasting differed among the programmes. Figure 1 shows that some programmes attract a large audience but generate few tweets, and vice versa. For example, Het Journaal, with three million viewers, generates an average of 160 tweets per broadcast, while Pauw, with fewer than 750,000 viewers, generates on average nearly 1,000 tweets.This sort of disparity suggests that what is “successful” in terms of the number of tweets may not be “successful” in terms of the number of viewers. There are several possible explanations for the variation in Twitter activity: a political talk show like Pauw consists of highly controversial content, making it more likely to “spark” tweets and retweets, while the eight o’clock news airs less polarising points of view. Moreover, reality shows like The Voice of Holland not only stir up conflict and invite enthusiastic judgements (Bratich) but also actively encourage their audience to interact through social media.Our sample, moreover, suggests that viewing television and tweeting about programming constitute two distinct phenomena. However, there remains a lot of speculation about what can be inferred from a tweet and tweet impressions, and thus what price tag to attach to these sorts of activities. Twitter numbers are now used either as a point of differentiation from traditional methods (such as, to sell programmes by claiming that they are successful, despite their low ratings), or when a programme’s audience is too small to be registered by traditional methods (Napoli). In what follows, we explore how tweets can be used to study viewing patterns, and briefly consider the advantages of doing so.Looking at Affiliations among TV Programmes through Tweets In his book Digital Methods (2013), Richard Rogers points out how social networking sites allow for new methods to study social networks. Information supplied to social media platforms can be used to explore “post-demographics,” meaning that they can be used to profile users’ tastes, interests, and favourite items, and the co-occurrences of the expressions of these preferences (154). Although this approach is common on various platforms (for example, in Amazon recommendations) and in online marketing practices (as in those that establish affiliations among the brands people tweet about), it has not commonly been used to research audiences. Looking at affiliations can, we suggest here, help create new knowledge about audiences.Figure 2: The Overlap in Tweeters among 32 Programmes in the NetherlandsUsing the same dataset of tweets used for the scatterplot, we tracked the viewing patterns of tweeters, analysing the sequence in which they used programme hashtags. We found that 8,958 people tweeted about more than one programme. The data revealed very interesting results when we calculated the relative overlap among programmes, charting the number of interrelating tweeters with respect to the absolute number of tweeters who referred to the two respective programmes. We imported the 32 nodes (the programmes) and the relative relations to Gephi in order to generate an association network, using the force-directed layout algorithm ForceAtlas2. The resulting network helps illuminate which programmes attract the same tweeters (see Figure 2). Our decision to rectify for the bias of highly social programmes has serious consequences and its validity is open to discussion. We did so to help expose taste relations (rather than reflect popularity).The association network demonstrates that TV shows of the same genre attract similar Twitter audiences: Dubbeltje op Zijn Kant and Uitstel van Executie are both reality shows about personal financial struggles, Studio Sport and Studio Voetbal are sport programmes, Hart van Nederland and RTL Boulevard are tabloid news shows, and Spoorloos and Familiedinner are programmes that centre on family issues. Aside from the strong overlap between programmes of the same genre, the visualisation also shows a concentration of programmes from public broadcasters—on the left-hand side of the figure—and those on commercial television—seen on the right. These connections suggest that people that watch commercial television tend to focus their viewing to commercial television (and the same is true for public television). The Voice of Holland, which seems to have a weak overlap in tweeters with multiple programmes, presents an intriguing case. This observation invites further consideration of its audience composition (which traditional ratings might help with).These are just some quick reflections made possible by using different methods to study Twitter. Although the input from an association network does not provide neat numbers that can serve as a “commodity,” it could help inform the programme schedules of television networks (they could adjust air times to better fit audience preferences, for example, by scheduling two TV shows with similar Twitter audiences in back-to-back time slots). Such insights could assist advertisers better understand consumer behaviour and viewing habits and thus maximise the effectiveness of their commercials. Television producers could also explore on-air and online collaborations between programmes. ConclusionIn this paper we have discussed the limitations of both traditional metrics and newer social media metrics. We explored how tweets can be used to generate insights into viewing patterns, briefly considering how such findings could benefit various parties. We have shown that the counting of tweets addresses the tweetability of a show but seems unrelated to the show’s number of viewers. We speculate, also, that programmes that spark polarised debate or motivate users to engage through social media are receiving many more mentions on Twitter than other sorts of programming. There is much space for TV programmers to build new relationships with their viewers.We have offered some criticism on the decision of NTTR to apply old methods to a new medium, and proposed that audience research on social media should—as the digital methods dictum goes—“follow the medium.” That is, such research should make use of the features of the medium (links, tags, timestamps, and the like) that invite new forms of inquiry. Finally, we have shown that a digital methods approach, although it will not necessarily provide conclusive answers, raises relevant questions that can elicit additional research.ReferencesAng, Ien. Desperately Seeking the Audience. London: Routledge, 1991.Baym, Nancy. “Data Not Seen: The Uses and Shortcomings of Social Media Metrics.” First Monday 18.10 (2013). 23 Sep. 2015 ‹http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4873/3752›.Bratich, Jack. “Affective Convergence in Reality Television: A Case Study in Divergence.” Flow TV: Television in the Age of Media Convergence. Ed. M. Kackman, M. Binfield, M. Payne, A. Perlman, and B. Sebok. New York: Routledge, 2011. 55–74.Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture. New York: New York UP, 2006.Lee, Hye Jin, and Mark Andrejevic. “Second-Screen Theory: From the Democratic Surround to the Digital Enclosure.” Connected Viewing: Selling, Streaming, & Sharing Media in the Digital Era. Eds. Jennifer Holt and Kevin Sanson. New York: Routledge, 2014. 40–61.Napoli, Philip M. “The Institutionally Effective Audience in Flux: Social Media and the Reassessment of the Audience Commodity.” SSRN Electronic Journal (2013). 23 Sep. 2015 ‹http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID2260925_code548166.pdf?abstractid=2260925&mirid=3›.Proulx, Mike, and Stacey Shepatin. Social TV: How Marketers Can Reach and Engage Audiences by Connecting Television to the Web, Social Media, and Mobile. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2012. Rogers, Richard. Digital Methods. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. SKO. “Kijkcijfers.” Home—Kijkonderzoek. n.d. 23 Sep. 2015 ‹https://kijkonderzoek.nl/kijkcijfers›.Smythe, Dallas W. “Communications: Blind Spot of Western Marxism.” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 1.3 (1977): 1–27.The Nielsen Company. “C3 TV Ratings Show Impact of DVR Ad Viewing.” What People Watch, Listen to and Buy. Oct. 2009. 23 Sep. 2015 ‹http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2009/c3-tv-ratings-show-impact-of-dvr-ad-viewing.html›.———. "Weekly Top Ten." Nielsen Social. n.d. 23 Sep. 2015 ‹http://www.nielsensocial.com/nielsentwittertvratings/weekly/›.Vanderbilt, Tom. "The New Rules of the Hyper-Social, Data-Driven, Actor-Friendly, Super-Seductive Platinum Age of Television." Wired, Mar. 2013. 23 Sep. 2015 ‹http://www.wired.com/2013/03/nielsen-family-is-dead/›.Van Es, Karin. “The Perks and Perils of Social TV: On the Participation Dilemma in NBC’s The Voice.” Television & New Media (forthcoming).